Monday, July 30, 2018

Billings Gazette BLM prescribed burns helped land and minimized fire impact.

Eastern Montana rancher says BLM prescribed burns helped improve land, minimize wildfire's impact

Lodgepole unburned forest
BLM fuels specialist Paul Pauley talks about the thick forest in an unmanaged area during tour of the Lodgepole Complex fire recovery.
Northwest of Sand Springs where rancher Kenny Rich makes his living, the log cabin built from hand-felled trees and insulated with sod by his ancestors still stands more than 100 years after the homesteaders arrived in Garfield County.
In a landscape where fire is an inevitability, part of the family ranch's survival story on their slice of the Missouri River Breaks includes an adversarial relationship with wildfires based on the knowledge of how fast things can go wrong when fire touches timber and grass.
“Ranching in this country’s a bit of a gamble,” Rich said of fire danger in the region. 
The temporary fire suppression gains in protection of property and well-being are undeniable, but around 20 years ago Rich began to wonder about the long-term effects on his land as a result of fighting all those fires.
Acres of overly thick stands of ponderosa pine had gone unchecked due to wildfire suppression, choking out the chance for grass to grow and smothering valuable land with pine needles and canopy shade. 
"When it gets like this," Rich said, gesturing towards a thick grouping of pines, "that's when I realized back quite awhile ago that we had to start doing something. It's pretty much stagnant."
The decision wasn't an easy one, Rich said, but on Easter Sunday in 2000, he and the Miles City Bureau of Land Management's Fuel Treatment Office partnered on a 3,600-acre burn across his land and government land, one of the first major burns by the BLM's Miles City office in cooperation with an Eastern Montana rancher.

A devastating prairie fire

What may have seemed like a risk nearly 20 years ago appears to have paid off in the wake of the Lodgepole Complex fire, which last year burned across 270,723 acres of land in Garfield and Petroleum counties, destroying structures, killing cattle, damaging fence lines and temporarily depriving ranchers of the grassland and hay crucial to their livelihoods.
All of Rich's land could have burned. Both the Bridge Coulee and Barker fires — two of the four that merged to form the complex — made runs on his property. At one point fire was within 100 yards of his home.
Rich said he thinks he slept just seven hours over seven days while trying to protect his land. 
Standing on his porch in early July with a fire intensity map laid out on a wooden table, Rich pointed to what he believes to be one of the difference-makers in the effort — thousands of acres of fire-treated land where in some cases the fire extinguished itself with barely a hand lifted or found itself stymied by small two-track cattle trails.
Elsewhere, the fire jumped 80-foot bulldozer lines. 
"It didn't seem to matter what you did," Rich's wife, Linda, said. "The fire just did what it wanted to do."
If it weren’t for the protection his fire-treated acreage provided, Rich suspects that the Lodgepole Complex could’ve jumped Highway 200 east of Sand Springs and wound up at least tens of thousands of acres larger than it did.
Paul Pauley, fuels management specialist for the BLM's Miles City office, said he didn't want to minimize the immediate and damaging impacts major wildfires can have on local producers but wants the public to know wildfires are critical to the ecosystem and are unavoidable in Missouri River Breaks Country.
“This country is set up to burn. We know it will happen," Pauley said.
Research has shown the ponderosa pines covering parts of the Missouri River Breaks Country need to burn every seven to 15 years to stay healthy, Pauley said. 
Prescribed burn treatments helped remove fire fuels that can lead to a wildfire behavior called “crowning,” which occurs when flames climb to the canopy level of trees.
Crowning can produce 100 foot flame lengths and allow embers to “spot,” or travel on the wind ahead of fires and above containment lines.
In extreme cases like the Lodgepole Complex, it's possible for embers to spot a mile or more ahead of a fire. 
"When you're talking over 100 foot flame lengths, that's so hot and so aggressive that you can't do anything with fire engines or hand crews or hand tools," Pauley said. "With a sustained crown fire there's very little you can do from a suppression point of view."
With un-managed lower ponderosa pine branches, thick needle cover on the ground and low-hanging species like juniper present, fires are more easily able to fuel their upward climb and begin crowning.
Part of what exacerbated the behavior of the Lodgepole Complex fire was how dense the fuels were in the area. 
"This country between here and the Musselshell River, in my lifetime it has brushed up so much it's unreal. And I knew it was coming," Rich said of the big blaze. "You just don't know when for sure."
Prescribed fires on ponderosa pines simulate what Pauley described as a natural “pruning” process by which the trees shed lower branches. This leads to needle growth concentrated toward the top of the tree, giving the pines a paintbrush-like figure.
A healthy, mature ponderosa pine can have a trunk diameter at breast height of 10 inches or more.  In areas where wildfire has been suppressed, ponderosa pine trunk measurements might be half that, making the trees unattractive for logging. 
Still, they demand groundwater and moisture, which limits grass growth and alters the landscape by drying up small streams and creeks, Pauley said.
Fire suppression in parts of the Missouri Breaks has allowed a high density of ponderosa pines. In parts of the Missouri River Breaks Country there are up to 1,200 ponderosa pines an acre. Pauley said ideally there should be 10 to 15 mature ponderosa pines over the same sized area.
Without prior fire treatments, it’s possible Rich would’ve been left after the complex with almost no grass at all, he said. Instead, the rancher said he was able to continue to graze some cattle after the fire and was recently baling hay for the first time in years.
"A lot of people don't like burning up a little bit of grass, but on the other hand, it is unreal the production you get a year after a prescribed burn," Rich said. 

Working together

For some ranchers prescribed burns are a deviation from tried and true methods. Back when he was working with BLM on the first burn, Rich said his father was still alive and was initially skeptical but came around after seeing the results. For other ranchers in different circumstances, sacrificing grass temporarily isn't feasible in an industry where natural events outside human control can rapidly alter profit margins.
Landowners that cooperate with BLM on prescribed burns are expected to put up an "in kind" match of labor on private roads to help facilitate the burn, Pauley said.
BLM finds landowner burn partnerships desirable in part because of increased cost efficiency and environmental impact, Pauley said. Pieces of BLM land and private land in Rich’s part of Montana are often interspersed like the squares on a checkerboard.
But when it comes to prescribed fires, they may seem more like squares on a chess board.
Planning begins two to three years before a burn and includes wildlife habitat assessments, soil testing, vegetation monitoring, cultural surveys and other studies of the land in order to inform a prescribed burn plan and set goals. 
Prescribed fires are controllable to a certain point. Partnerships with land owners gives BLM the ability to treat larger tracts of land, creating more widespread consistency in land conditions. If BLM can’t reach an agreement, efforts at tightly containing the fires can be counterproductive to their intended purpose.
Fire lines cut by bulldozers and other heavy machinery are disruptive to the land and can create conditions for weeds and invasive species to take root. If the area is too difficult for a limited prescribed fire, “mastication” becomes the next best option. “Mastication,” in BLM-speak, refers to the removing fire fuels with machinery and tools. 
Pauley estimates that mastication can cost around $300 an acre, prescribed fire treatments can cost less than $100 an acre, and wildland firefighting can reach well above $1,000 an acre in costs. But prescribed fires aren’t a silver bullet for every rancher and every situation, Pauley said.
The planning is extensive, the operation is intensive, and there is a range of outcomes.

Flames, then renewal

Just as there was little sleep during the Lodgepole Complex last summer, sleep was also in limited supply up to Easter Sunday 2000, when Rich and the Bureau of Land Management finally put into action the burn plan they’d devised during months of planning.
"You think about it a little bit," Rich said of the days leading up to the burn. 
A prescribed burn can include 30 to 40 firefighters with hand torches and tools, brush rigs and water pumpers, and a helicopter dropping nitrogen-infused incendiaries resembling ping pong balls. 
In the years since then, Rich and BLM have continued to conduct prescribed burns on the land in a partnership they believe to be mutually beneficial by reducing land management and firefighting costs and improving habitat and grazing land. The burns are an ongoing project, and more are planned for either 2019 or 2020, Pauley said.Rich said part of his original intention was to increase his grass to improve the quality of his cattle, and leave himself with more options to feed them, which he said has worked out.
"I like to have some grass in the bank. That's the way I am, because that's the only thing I've got on this ranch. I don't farm," he said.
One of the added benefits is how the land has begun to transform and return to a form he's only heard about in family stories and seen in old photographs. Gesturing past the hills, Rich said he’s seen a spring start flowing where he’d only heard his grandfather tell of one flowing in decades past. Chokecherry bushes Rich remembers from his youth are beginning to take hold on hillsides and fallen ponderosa pines could begin to create habitat suitable for elk, which have been scarce for a long time. Woodpeckers come in droves to pound on charred snags and turkeys have been known to group on land after a burn.

Referring to another area treated with fire in 2015, Rich laughed as he talked about how a beaver showed up within a week after the spring started running.
"First beaver I've seen on this creek in 50 years," he said.  “I wish I was 25 years old, so I could tell 50 years from now what it will look like."

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