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May 31, 2008
Permits to Burn: Are they too risky?
Mercury News
In the densely wooded Santa Cruz Mountains, where last week's wildfire torched 4,270 acres and 31 homes, the notion of deliberately burning brush to get rid of it strikes some as an invitation to disaster.
But it happens every winter and spring, with local fire officials signing off on dozens of debris-burning permits and trusting property owners to control the flames.
It may be weeks before fire officials say what sparked the Summit fire, Santa Cruz County's largest in a century. But the possibility that debris burning ignited the blaze - which fire investigators have not ruled out - has left some residents questioning oversight and regulation of the longstanding practice, which ironically aims to cut down on fire risk by clearing away excess fuel.
May 28, 2008
Report Details Effects of Climate Change Across U.S.
Washington Post
Global warming is already affecting the nation's forests, water resources, farmland and wildlife, and will have serious negative consequences over the next 25 to 50 years, according to a report issued yesterday by the federal government.
The scientific assessment by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which was commissioned by the Agriculture Department and carried out by 38 scientists inside and outside the government, provides the most detailed look in nearly eight years at how climate change is reshaping the American landscape. The report, which runs 193 pages and synthesizes a thousand scientific papers, highlights how human-generated carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have already translated into more frequent forest fires, reduced snowpack and increased drought, especially in the West.
May 27, 2008
U.S. Forest Service to fill hundreds of vacancies
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
The U.S. Forest Service wants to fill more than 500 positions in California in its next round of hiring.
Forest Service officials say they will be ready for this year's fire season.
"Absolutely," said spokesman Jason Kirchner.
Earlier this month, Mark Rey, undersecretary of Agriculture, wrote in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, that there were 363 firefighter vacancies in California.
May 25, 2008
ATV rally suspected cause of Manitoba forest fire
Winnipeg Free Press
The reeve for the municipality where the Manitoba's biggest forest fire raged this weekend blames an ATV derby and 600 four-wheelers roaring through the forest as the likely cause of the blaze.
"By noon (Saturday), they knew they had a fire on their hands and they knew they had to shut 'er down," Piney Reeve Marvin Hovorka said Sunday evening. The derby ended abruptly about 1 p.m. - four hours early.
May 23, 2008
Fires in state add urgency to air tankers promised by U.S.
The Press Enterprise
When the smoke cleared from last year's Southern California firestorms, the Bush administration's man in charge of the U.S. Forest Service said the region would receive two state-of-the-art air tankers in time for this year's fire season.
They still haven't come.
May 20, 2008
Rey: Better management lowers costs of firefighting
The Missoulian
In a broad-ranging address Saturday to the Montana Logging Association stretching from the farm bill to the next president, U.S. Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey said better forestry management is helping slow the escalating costs of suppressing wildfires.
He said firefighting accounted for about 14 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget in the 1970s, and accelerated to about 50 percent today.
“We're not going to stop fighting fires,” he said. “But the rate of the increase is slowing because we're fighting fires that were treated with forest-reduction measures.”
May 19, 2008
National system not meeting Cal Fire's needs, director says
The Press-Enterprise
With another fire season bearing down on Southern California, the national system used to order additional firefighters and equipment during a fire siege is not meeting the needs of California, its largest user.
Cal Fire Director Ruben Grijalva said delays in the automated dispatching system known as ROSS made it difficult to know where firefighters and equipment were deployed in October when 23 wildland fires simultaneously blazed across Southern California, including the mountain communities of San Bernardino County.
Local fire bosses, frustrated by frequent hardware glitches and delays in the federal Resource Ordering and Status System, began bypassing ROSS and making direct requests for firefighters and equipment from other agencies, Grijalva said.
It sometimes took up to 12 hours for deployments to get conveyed to fire commanders, and the confusion complicated efforts on the ground, Grijalva said.
May 15, 2008
Plumas forest projects halted
The Sacramento Bee
In a resounding repudiation of the Bush administration's national forest management, a three-judge federal panel has ordered a halt to three major logging projects in the Plumas National Forest.
May 14, 2008
Forest-fire management 'raises carbon emissions'
Nature.com
Quenching forest fires leads to more carbon in the air, says new research carried out in Californian forests. The discovery suggests that forests spared from fire may release more of the greenhouse gas into the air than they absorb.
Decades of suppressing natural fires has increased the number of surviving trees in California's forests. But this growth has been at the expense of larger trees, which are less resilient to drought and other stresses than smaller, younger trees, resulting in a decline in the total amount of carbon stored in these forests.
Oceana jet's errant bomb sparks Florida forest fire
The Virginian-Pilot
An Oceana-based Navy fighter jet is being blamed for setting a large fire Tuesday in a national forest in Florida after a bomb it dropped missed its target.
About 250 acres of woodland and swamp in the Ocala National Forest burned after the F/A-18 Super Hornet dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb that hit a mile from its target.
May 12, 2008
Wildfire-risk panel readies game plan for Riverside County supervisors
The Press-Enterprise
Riverside County should limit home construction in fire corridors and establish incentives for property owners to transfer development rights to more suitable locations, a regional panel is recommending.
The panel of fire experts, planners, law enforcement officials and community representatives will make its recommendations formally to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
The recommendations include buying up land in fire-prone areas for permanent conservation, clustering developments with greenbelt buffers and ensuring homes are built on parcels to allow proper brush clearance. They also call for a more stringent plan review on projects within fire-severity zones.
May 2, 2008
Court says feds don't have to reveal names
San Francisco Chronicle
The federal government doesn't have to reveal the names of employees involved in a bungled operation to a private watchdog group that doesn't trust official investigations of the incident, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
The employees' right to be free of harassment from the news media and the public outweighs any benefit in re-examining an incident that officials have already gone over, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The head of a news media organization criticized the ruling, saying the court took too narrow a view of the government's disclosure obligations under the Freedom of Information Act.
"The court assumes the government can do no wrong and paternalistically assumes the government would know how to fix whatever went wrong," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, which was not involved in the case. "The public is entitled to information from records to hold the government accountable, particularly in its role as an employer."
The case involved a fire in the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho that killed two U.S. Forest Service firefighters, Shane Heath and Jeff Allen, in July 2003.
May 1, 2008
Wyden pushes for quick OK to logging
The Oregonian
Sen. Ron Wyden is asking the U.S. Forest Service to speed approval of logging in areas of eastern Oregon burned by two recent wildfires.
The two salvage logging sales are the subject of a proposed agreement between the timber companies and environmentalists that would log about 38 million board feet of timber in Grant and Harney counties.
"The conservation community, the timber industry and the local elected officials in Eastern Oregon have proposed an agreement that will salvage valuable timber, provide needed product for local lumber mills and aid the ailing economies in a rural area of my state," Wyden, D-Ore., said in a letter Tuesday to Mark Rey, the undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the Department of Agriculture.
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