Old Methods Pushed for Fighting Forest Blazes : ‘Summer of Flames’ Sparks Fire Control Review

The time when forest fires sighted from remote lookout posts were fought by crews of commandeered loggers is over, but there are still people who believe some of the old ways were better.

Ideas about fire control are under review in the aftermath of the West’s “summer of flames,” which began when a fierce lightning storm swept through the mountains of Northern California and southern Oregon on Aug. 30, 1987, setting off thousands of blazes.

By the time the last was declared controlled in mid-November, 855,000 acres of national forest had burned in California and Oregon.

Old Methods Favored

Lee Morford, 80, who retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 1970 after 41 years of fire duty, said it was a loss that could have been greatly reduced if some of the old methods had been in place, including a stronger initial attack force.

Morford said people who watched the relentless destruction in the Klamath National Forest, where 260,000 acres went up in flames, worried that not enough was being done to save the forest.

So he and two other retired Klamath National Forest fire control officers got together to present their ideas to the Forest Service.

Morford, Bill Cadola, 56, of Yreka, and Glenn Robinson, 62, of Klamath River have among them 120 years of experience in the firefighting business. Morford first started battling fires as a McCloud Logging Co. employee in 1924.

Methods have changed a lot since then.

Today, radar is used to track lightning strikes, infrared pictures shot from aircraft plot the spread of a fire and flame-spewing helicopters burn out fire lines.

Morford said modern technology has its place in firefighting but it is still the people on the ground who are ultimately responsible for bringing a fire under submission.

‘A Shovel and an Ax’

“I went to fires when I was first working for the Forest Service all by myself,” he said. “And I controlled fires all by myself. All I had was a shovel and an ax. That’s what it takes.”

Early detection and speed of attack are two of the things Morford contends are failing in the modern system.

He said there were 22 lookouts in the Klamath National Forest when he was working and now there are nine. Initial attack forces--the men and women available for immediate response to a fire--have been cut by almost half, he said, and most of those are tanker engine crews who cannot reach a fire if it is very far from a road.

Cadola, who fought his first fire when he was 15, said a “staggering number” of fire positions have been lost in the past decade.

“The direction is downhill,” he said.

The men said there is too much lag time involved in importing reinforcements from outside the region.

“As soon as the storm hits, you have to start bringing those lightning fires under control,” Robinson said. “You’re only playing with about 12 hours. The next day your fire is long gone.”

The Forest Service agrees that some substantial changes have been made over the years in the area of detection and initial attack but reduction in personnel has been done with an eye toward efficiency.

High Cost Cited

Richard Adams, fire manager at the Forest Service’s Region 5 headquarters in San Francisco, said the addition of people and equipment will reduce the destruction but at too high a price. A point comes, he said, where the cost of having equipment and personnel available to fight the fires outweighs the cost of the additional timber resources being saved.

In the end, it is up to Congress to decide on what personnel level is appropriate for fighting forest fires. The California region of the Forest Service is financed at 80% of what studies show is needed for the most efficient level of firefighting resources, Adams said.

“If Congress choses to fund us at something less than what we think is the most cost-efficient level, then I think it’s our job to do the very best we can with what they give us to work with,” he said. “Some years you win, and some years you don’t.”

Adams, who met with Morford in San Francisco, said the suggestions of the retired Forest Service men have been included in the reams of material being gathered by the agency.

“They do have a lot of good points, and we’re going to consider the things they said,” Adams said.

He added, however, that despite some urging from residents of the fire areas, the Forest Service will not go back to hiring people off the streets to fight fires.

“Some of their ideas, although they sound good, were done away with a long time ago because it got us into trouble with killing a lot of firefighters,” he said.

Today’s firefighters must pass a rigorous physical test and complete 32 hours of basic firefighting training before they are allowed on the lines.