Hooked on the Outdoors, June 2003
Aside from starting a fire last summer, Terry Barton stirred the ashes of a long burning issue
When Colorado went up in flames on June 8, 2002, a forest service employee named Terry Lynn Barton was first on the scene. She’d been patrolling for illegal campfires when, she said, she smelled smoke and saw a wildfire spreading through the forest. Barton fought valiantly to put out the flames, but the fire blew up, racing from tree to exploding tree to become the biggest and most destructive wildfire in Colorado history.
That was the story, that is, until a group of Forest Service fire investigators visited the “point of origin,” a campfire ring from which the fire escaped, and noticed some incongruous details. First, a flat arrowhead-shaped rock appeared to have been propped up to funnel flames outside the ring. Then there was the wind. It was blowing away from the spot where Barton said she smelled smoke. There were other issues, too: no coals inside the campfire, no evidence of collected firewood, last year’s grass standing in the ring.
On June 15, a week after the fire began, investigators brought Barton back to the campfire ring. After insisting she wasn’t an “arsonist,” she burst into tears and confessed that she had impulsively decided to burn a letter she had received from her husband after he informed her he would not give her a divorce. She said she lit the letter with one match, waited until the flames were out, then returned to her truck and drove away. As she was leaving, she saw that the fire had escaped the ring.
But there were problems with that story, too: the lack of recognizable paper ash in the fire-ring; how the rocks in the ring were arranged; three matches — not one — found at the point-of-origin and, coincidentally, three matches missing from the matchbook she gave investigators. Then there was Barton’s estranged husband, who alleged that he never sent such a letter. There was even a motive: she had recently asked to attend wildfire investigation school. Perhaps she was hoping to ride the hero wave to a promotion?
As the fire torched out of control, destroying 137,000 acres and 133 homes, the citizens of Colorado began the process of demonizing Terry Barton. At her bail hearing, the prosecuting attorney asked the judge to refuse bail. He did so not because he worried that this woman would torch another forest, but because some locals had threatened, in the words of one Forest Service employee, to “string her up and lynch her.”
There are dozens of ways to start a fire: lightning, errant campfires, overheated mufflers, cigarettes tossed by the side of the road. In last summer’s drought conditions, any of these ignition sources could have sparked a fire of similar size and intensity.
“The forests we have are ready to burn,” says Colorado State Forester Jim Hubbard, “and we’re going to continue to have extreme fire behavior regardless of ignition source.”
There are plenty of culprits responsible for the conflagrations of recent years. The worst drought in recorded history has made a tinderbox of the nation’s forests. Population growth and sprawl has meant more houses at the edges of the forests. The current recession may account for more “employment fires” set by out-of-work firefighters. Environmentalists argue that indiscriminate logging has removed fire-resistant large timber and left fire-prone vegetation behind. Their industry opponents claim that environmental opposition to logging has allowed the forests to become clogged with trees.
The one thing that almost everybody agrees upon is that the larger crime perpetrated on America’s forests was 100 years of fire suppression. Until the Forest Service got into the fire-fighting business, fires blazed through timber stands on a regular basis, often burning the small fuels at low temperatures while leaving the big trees intact. Without these frequent fires, forests have grown clogged with dense bushes and closely spaced trees. As a consequence, flames can spread more quickly from the under-canopy into the tops of the larger trees, and fires now burn bigger, hotter and faster, leaving behind a torched landscape that is far less resilient. Essentially, Smokey the Bear has created a monster-the Forest Service’s well-intentioned “every fire out by 10 a.m.” policy has brought on an ecological disaster.
Most everybody also agrees that the $2.9 billion Congress approved in 2000 to help the Forest Service battle wildfires did little to prevent the record fires of 2002. The money appropriated for the National Fire Plan was supposed to fund preventive measures such as forest thinning and clearing around endangered structures. But almost all of the money has ended up going to fighting the fires that have raged through the drought-stricken nation.
The problem, say critics of the Forest Service, is that Congress reimburses the agency for all fire-fighting costs, no matter how much they exceed budgeted amounts. This “blank check” has meant that there is no incentive to limit costs in fighting fires. More fires mean more money and equipment for the Forest Service, and firefighters are compensated not for how quickly they control fires, but for how long they work.
“In Russia, you get paid a bonus if you put a fire out fast,” says Randall O’Toole of the Thoreau Institute, a libertarian environmental organization that argues for reform of the Forest Service. “Here, the longer it takes to put out a fire the more you get paid.”
Fueled by the “blank check,” fire budgets since the early 1990s have exploded from a few hundred million dollars per year to billions. This trend may soon be reversed, however: Congress slashed the fire-fighting budget by more than half for 2003′s fire season. While the cuts may force the Forest Service to be more stingy with its fire-fighting funds, it may also mean that when fires inevitably burn, money targeted for prevention and rehabilitation will once again be redirected to fighting fires.
There are as many proposed solutions to the wildfire problem as there are explanations for its provenance. The first is simply to monitor public use of the forests during bad fire seasons. Campfire bans, such as the one that Terry Barton was supposed to be enforcing, are commonplace during difficult droughts. In New Mexico last summer, local authorities decided to shut down forest access almost entirely-visitors to state and federal forests during peak fire season were met with roadblocks and orange police tape.
Tourism and recreation interests weren’t pleased, but there were no catastrophic fires in New Mexico after the forests closed. According to Richard Reitz, Fire Prevention Officer for the Forest Service’s southwestern region, fire starts dropped from 48 human-caused fires a day before the closures to between 13 and 18 per day after.
“We can close the forest and have one season’s worth of tourism problems,” says Reitz, “or we can leave it open and have it burn down and have 100 years worth of tourism problems.”
As the fire season of 2002 came to a close, the Bush administration proposed a long-term fix. In August, President Bush held a press conference at the site of an Oregon wildfire and unveiled the administration’s “Healthy Forests Initiative,” calling for an expedited process to remove accumulated forest fuels while limiting environmental appeals to certain thinning projects.
The problem is, nobody seems to agree on exactly what “fuel removal” entails. Prescribed burns, the most natural and cost-effective way to restore forests to their natural condition, are often too risky, so land managers resort to “thinning from below,” the manual or mechanical removal of underbrush.
But which fuels need to be thinned? Pro-timber interests argue that commercially valuable large trees should be harvested along with the smaller vegetation to reduce the risk of fires and make the process more economical. Environmentalists believe that only smaller vegetation should be removed and that large, fire-resistant trees and snags must be left standing. The scientific consensus is that forests adapted to frequent, light fires see less severe fire behavior if regular thinning occurs. Ponderosa Pine forests are one example. In the Hayman fire, a study showed that thinned areas weathered the fire far better than those left alone. There is much less agreement, however, about forests that are subject to less frequent fire regimes, such as Redwood or Douglas Fir stands. And even in forests suited to thinning, there is some question as to whether treatment is effective on a less than impossibly large scale.
Some of those weighing in on the wildfire issue argue that the best solution is simply to do nothing: Let the fires burn in the forest, and protect structures at the edges of the forest by clearing vegetation and replacing flammable roofing materials. “Forest fires are a natural process,” says the Thoreau Institute’s O’Toole. “Let them burn.”
But how will Americans feel when the first homes are lost because a fire was allowed to burn and blew up into a subdivision? “Realistically,” says Paul Krisanits, a law enforcement officer in Colorado’s Roosevelt National Forest district, “how can you tell people, ‘No, we’re not putting the fire out.’?”
When it came time for the state of Colorado to sentence its most notorious arsonist, neighbors came out in droves to suggest an appropriate punishment. One resident suggested Barton be sentenced to 220 years, the age of one of the trees lost on his property. Another requested Barton be barred from living in the state. Hamstrung by judicial guidelines, the judge sentenced her to the maximum 12 years in prison and has indicated that he may also require that she pay up to $30 million in restitution.
But no amount of jail time can restore what was lost in the Hayman fire. Besides $32 million in property damage and six deaths attributed to the blaze, the damage to the forest is inestimable. Where the fire burned most severely, everything is now black — charred snags and seared soil rendered barren by temperatures that may have exceeded 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. In places where the fire burned slightly less hot, the soil has developed a hydrophobic crust that prevents water from penetrating to the roots below. And where the fire burned cooler, a mosaic of vegetation will begin to grow, native grass in some places, invasive thistle in others. Even in those spots, however, there won’t be a “forest” for another century.
Nobody knows how to prevent the destruction that we saw in the Hayman Fire. The interested parties have seized upon today’s panacea of fuels reduction to further their own agendas. “The Forest Service,” says O’Toole, “uses it to get a bigger budget. Commodity interests use it to cast blame on environmentalists for stopping timber sales. Environmentalists use it to cast blame on timber cutters.” Every policy adopted in the name of healthy forests — fire suppression yesterday, thinning today — may result in an outcome as ttroubling as the problem it was meant to fix. Ultimately, what Terry Barton taught us on that fateful day when her fire escaped the campfire ring is that choices made in the name of forest management can be every bit as important as the decision to light the match.
