FIRE! Part 1 Devestation by Fire BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

by Heather Smith Thomas

Devastating wildfires began early again this year, covering the West with smoke and destroying millions of acres of forests and grasslands, along with ranchers’ livestock and livelihoods—and wiping out entire towns.

Numbers and statistics don’t begin to tell the story of human heartbreak, however. The people who have lost their homes (many have lost everything except their lives), the ranchers who have watched in frustration and grief as their livestock die in the flames—with nothing they can do to save them—can’t find the words to fully express the depth of tragedy. But their stories pull at our hearts.

RANCHERS

Billie and Wally Roney graze their cattle on private and federal land in northern California, where Wally is the fifth generation of his family to run cattle on the rolling grasslands near the tiny town of Vina—in the foothills beneath Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta. Currently the Dixie fire is raging through their area, engulfing much of their grazing land and their neighbors’ ranches. They hope their nearly 100-year-old cabin and private timber might be spared.

Billie is devastated by what is happening to their land and cattle, but her concern extends to friends and neighbors in the area. When asked about the fire (as she was recuperating from surgery on August 18), she said, “I am so worried about my dear friends whose herd could again be in peril; not to mention their home ranch which may be destroyed by this fire. Only two weeks ago, they managed to pull off a near impossible feat of gathering their cattle and shipping them out from land that is now laid barren to the fire. Now this?”

After moving their own cattle out of harm’s way from the original Dixie Fire to a safe location, a new fire on Morgan Summit grew to merge with the Dixie and has now burned where those cattle had been just a few days earlier. The winds have whipped this new area of fire and it now has the potential to threaten a larger region.

Billie was also trying to provide moral support to others who are going through hell because of this fire. “I spent a long time on the phone tonight listening to a forester friend who is on the brink of losing it. I didn’t know how to help, but knew I had to try. It is heart-wrenching trying to pull someone from the edge. I can’t count how many places [ranches] I am keeping track of the fire for, and then ranch life happens… SO much went wrong today, and Wally finally found the courage to tell me that our cattle that are still up there might not have made it, and there was another fire in our meadow at Clover. I feel broken – but I also feel God’s grace.”

She said that the Dixie Fire has now expanded well up into Lassen National Park and is heading toward Mineral, an historic old community that once had a small sawmill and now is headquarters for the Park. The Dixie fire started July 13, just north of the Cresta Dam, which is not far from where the 2018 Camp Fire northeast of Paradise claimed the lives of more than 80 people.

The Dixie fire had already leveled more than a dozen houses and other structures in mid-July when it combined with the Fly Fire and roared through the tiny community of Indian Falls in late July. More than 100 homes in the Indian Falls and surrounding areas were destroyed. Then on August 4, the fire nearly obliterated the town of Greenville.

People are frustrated by devastation that could have been prevented. “It is interesting that the Forest Service and Park Service’s ‘Let it Burn’ policy was first protested as a result of the 1998 Huffer Fire,” Billie said. “After over a week of letting one lightning-struck snag burn, that fire eventually burned 2,200 acres and cost $2.2 million to extinguish,” Billie said.

“Wally and I went back to Washington, DC in the late 1980s to deliver a message to the undersecretary of Agriculture at the time – when environmentalists were shutting down logging as we knew it. Wally told them that their practices would result in catastrophic wildfire unless they changed course. Of course they didn’t, and here we are.”

LEARNING HOW TO PREDICT & PLAN

Now the fires have been threatening their ranch and cattle. “After going through the angst of following two fires last year in an attempt to help Wally get our cattle out of harm’s way, I learned how to use various resources to try to anticipate the fire’s behavior as much as possible. It didn’t take long to realize that waiting for agency and news reports, orders, (let alone a wall of flames or another ‘firenado’) would leave us behind the eight ball when trying to move our cattle,” Billie said.

In the effort to use the incredible fire cameras (http://beta.alertwildfire.org/) to triangulate the proximity of the fires, online scanners, wildfire forums consisting mostly of fire professionals with up-to-the-minute intel (forums.wildfireintel.org) plus fire maps and wind maps galore, she eventually found a dedicated and selfless fire mapper. “Zeke Lunder’s detailed work (https://the-lookout.org/2021/08/19/dixie-fire-8-19-2021/) allowed me and others to better understand what might happen (and when) by distilling the huge avalanche of material and his intimate knowledge of the landscape,” she said.

“There are many selfless people out there working on the fires, and they are all heroes to me. These heroes include our Farm Advisor Tracy Schohr who made sure ranchers could get through closed roads to save their livestock in at least four counties, and the brilliant minds who made use of technology to track fire in almost real time. Also, the men and women in our small communities who help each other 24/7 and especially my husband who literally rode through that fire for weeks (mostly alone) every day to get out as many of our ‘girls’ as he could when the winds changed and put the cattle at risk.”

One of their friends spent a couple days helping Wally move cattle. “He attempted to chronicle a lot of it, and wanted to add context and he did a great job of doing that. Wally sent him home after two days, however, not wanting to put him at risk. We love him, but Wally spent too much time trying to track him when he needed to focus on the cattle,” Billie said.

FIRE BY THE NUMBERS

These frantic efforts to save livestock, pastures and homes are now commonplace in many regions as fires burn out of control. As of August 23, 2021, a total of 6,685 fires had been recorded in California, burning 1,570,151 acres (more than 2,300 square miles) acres across the state. At least 1,998 buildings had been destroyed, and at least seven firefighters and two civilians were injured battling the fires.

In January 2021 alone, 297 fires burned 1,171 acres on nonfederal land according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which was almost triple the number of fires and more than 20 times the acreage of the five-year average for January. The 2021 fires were exacerbated by unseasonably strong Santa Ana winds, and some of them burned in the same areas as previous fires like the CZU Lightning Complex.

In terms of total number of fires, the 2021 season has so far outpaced the 2020 season, which itself was the largest season in California’s recorded history. As of July 11, 2021 more than three times as many acres had burned, compared to the previous year through that date, with drought, extreme heat, and reduced snowpack contributing to the severity of the fires. California also faces increased risk of post-wildfire landslides, due to loss of vegetation to hold the soil when the

next rains come.

As of August 18th, 2021, the state was facing what some people were calling unprecedented fire conditions, as multiple fires including the Dixie Fire, McFarland Fire, Caldor Fire, and multiple other fires raged on. The Dixie fire had become the largest among more than 100 large wildfires burning in more than a dozen states in the West— engulfing tinder-dry vegetation seared by drought and hot weather.

The U.S. Forest Service stated that it was operating in crisis mode, deploying firefighters and maxing out its support system. The roughly 21,000 federal firefighters working on the ground at that time was more than double the number of firefighters sent out to contain forest fires at that time a year ago, according to a deputy forester for the agency’s Pacific Southwest region.

More than 6,000 firefighters were battling the Dixie Fire, which had ravaged nearly 845 square miles at that time (now more than 940 square miles, and threatening more towns, including Susanville and Janesville) and sending smoke across the entire country—reaching as far away as the East Coast. Thousands of homes are still under threat in many communities that are surrounded by forests or brush, and tens of thousands of people are still under evacuation orders.

These severe fire conditions were similar across much of the west. In Montana there were 25 large fire incidents by mid-August. The Northern Rockies region is currently one of the top priority regions in the nation for wildfire issues. Since January 1, Montana fires had collectively burned about 792,000 acres by mid-August.

The largest fire in Montana at that time was the Richard Spring Fire southeast of Billings; it had burned about 170,000 acres, with only 65 percent containment. The top priority fire in Montana in mid-August was the West Lolo Complex-Thorne Fire, at 32,121 acres and 15 percent containment.

A recent wildfire in north-central Montana is the Pine Grove Fire burning on the Fort Belknap Reservation. It was discovered on Monday, August 16, and by the next evening, it had burned about 17,325 acres and was only 7 percent contained. Several small communities near some of the fires were evacuated and more than 50 residences burned.

Idaho, Washington and Oregon were also battling large numbers of fires, and other western states had multiple large fires. As of August 19 there were 99 large fires actively burning across the West, in what seems to be becoming a year-long fire season in several states. ▫

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