Letting it burn: Voices across the West say fires could be better managed

Letting it burn: Voices across the West say fires could be better managed

Summertime is “fire” season in the west. It’s an accepted fact.

Many say some fires wouldn’t grow so large, so quickly if the land were properly grazed and if the fires were fought more aggressively.

Washington state is home to a number of active fires. The Kaiser Canyon and Sinlahekin fires are both near Sunny Okanogan Angus, operated by Todd Vejraska and his family.

Lightning caused both fires. One fire started on a wildlife refuge where Vejraska says a lack of grazing has left a dangerous fuel load.

“We’re not logging and grazing like we used to. We have Fish and Wildlife buying up huge tracts of land and not using them. When lands sits and isn’t used for years, the fuel load builds up so high that when we have a fire, it’s like a bomb going off,” he said.

LOCAL CONTROL

Vejraska said local fire departments should have more say in the fire management strategy. The ranchers whose land is being affected know their own places better than anyone, he points out. For example, Vejraska said the federal fire crews called for a dozer several hundred miles away rather than one 20 miles away because of a contract agreement.

He also wants federal fire crews to focus on extinguishing fires. “Fire has become a huge moneymaker for these people. The longer the fire, the more money they make. There is no incentive to put them out,” he said.

Inceweb reports that the Sinlahekin fire covered about 126,807 acres and was 26 percent contained while the Kaiser Canyon fire burned 136,978 acres and was 53 percent contained as of last week.

Vajraska has not lost grazing land but many of his neighbors have lost private and federal grazing land. Cattle have died, but no official numbers have been reported.

FIREFIGHTING IS BIG BUSINESS

Jon Lang spent a decade fighting fires for the U.S. Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management. At times he felt like he was fighting his boss more than he was fighting the flames.

Time and again, Lang and others on the crew were prepared to put out a fire, manage a back-burn or direct the fire to a manageable location. At times, they did just that. At other times, supervisors held them up with hours-long meetings during peak fire-fighting times and had a lackadaisical attitude toward saving forage.

“My goal was always to become a firefighter,” said the Nevada man, who was simultaneously working to build up his cow herd.

Lang’s first year “in fire” was 2008. His second year working, the BLM picked him up and he found himself in the Elko, Nev. He worked his way up through the ranks with experience and knowledge, to the point he was in charge of engines, worked on the hot shot crew, and served as incident commander on more than one fire.

“I spent about 10 years in fire, going all over the west coast — Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho. The furthest east I went was Texas,” he said.

He would be assigned to BLM, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land… if it was federal land and it was on fire, he was probably there.

“A couple years ago, there was a devastating fire in Tuscarora, Nev., it chewed up a lot of grazing land for ranchers,” he recalled, although he was no longer working as a firefighter by then.

Ranchers were angry and frustrated with the incident commander who was unfamiliar with that terrain and fighting fire in that region. “Everything I heard was complete negligence in the handling and management of the fire,” he said. Ranchers strongly considered filing a lawsuit due to what they considered extreme negligence.

“In my eyes, fires should be fought aggressively to be put out. In years past, prior to about 2009, there would be a fire out in the middle of rangeland, there would be roads, you’d box it in, burn it out from the roads if necessary, the fire would be put out, boom, we’d move on. That was widely the practice in the early 2000s.”

PROTECTED SPECIES

“The problem is that the sage grouse ideology came out. Now, we couldn’t drive trucks across land, we couldn’t use foam agents in many instances because it could disrupt the birds or the spotted frogs, so what we had was fires burning and burning.”

“I would have two roads with fire in between, I could get the fire put out and save a bunch of land, but we were told we couldn’t do a back-burn because it’s priority sage grouse habitat. We’re trying to make plans to manage the fire and meanwhile the fires are jumping lines burning 10,000 or 20,000 acres when we could have had it stopped.”

Lang said the fire crews are often prevented from using local water sources like dams or creeks because of the presence of spotted frogs or other endangered species. “So instead of fighting with water nearby, we are driving miles to get water or digging lines.

“Either you put the fire out as quickly as possible or you play these games because of spotted frog, owls or sage hen. In my opinion, in the long run, we now just burned an extra 10,000 acres because we were attempting to dance around sage grouse habitat when we could have knocked the fire down and been done with it.”

In some cases, rules prevented firefighters from using chainsaws while fighting fire in forests — so they had to resort to hand tools.

“They told us there were no mechanical tools allowed. So we were out there with shovels and pulaskis trying to dig a fire line 4 feet deep. It was at that point that I said to myself, ‘this doesn’t make sense.'”

Lang remembered one of the biggest fires he ever worked, the Long Draw fire on the Oregon-Nevada border, which was one of many that was started from a lightning fire that went through the area in 2012. “I was with Nevada BLM and we got sent. I think we were third on the scene. We’re looking at this fire on the side of the mountain. At that time, it was maybe covering five acres. There had been several fires through that night. We’re all sitting there, there is a little maintenance station nearby. I say, ‘we have a helicopter hopefully en route.’ There are three of us talking and making a plan. The winds are picking up. Within 30 minutes, we had a plan.

“Then one of the higher ups contacts us and says, you can’t drive up there, it’s priority sage hen habitat. We say, we’ll use roads to get close and then intervene. The winds are picking up more and we are told that we can’t do that.

“The fire blows up that night and by the next day it was about 25,000 acres. I remember lighting back-burns near the highway trying to stop it. Then it blew over the road and really took off. Needless to say, there were ranchers actively pushing cattle out of harms way and they are seeing us and our hands are tied because we can’t drive out there to fight it. The natural resource experts are saying, ‘no you can’t drive out there, you can’t use foam to fight it.’ We were getting zero resources. By the time resources started coming in, that division supervisor was pulled off and arrested for lighting backfires. The hope is when you light a back fire that it will suck in that original fire. But it blew up in his face and jumped the highway and took off.”

The Long Draw fire burned at least 550,000 acres, becoming the largest fire in recent Oregon history.

“Ranchers were livid. That was all of their grazing land burning up. We would have briefings beginning at 8 in the morning. We wouldn’t go out to the fire until 9 or 10 in the morning. Policies limited fighting fire at night. Air resources were essentially zero. I became a liaison, which is something I’d never done before. I had a connection with ranchers so I could at least talk to them.” But communicating with the ranchers wasn’t pleasant for Lang when he was trying to defend an organization that he was losing faith in.

“A lot of the BLM, they don’t care about grazing land that ranchers need for their cattle. They are very up front about that. They will say, we don’t care about the ranchers or the grass burning. They say they care ab