![]() ![]() Each of those entities, in fact, contributed money every year to a fund used to control forest fires. There was the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), local county forestry departments, and private land owners. Forest Service wasn’t the only organization entrusted with fighting those fires. ![]() Catastrophic wildfires that were inevitable every 15-20 years were now expected to pop up every 4-5 years. Long, hot, dry summers with plenty of lightning strikes were the norm for a planet suffering though climate change. The Big, Bad Chetco Fireįast forward to July 12, 2017. Fire is neither good nor bad it just is.” That statement, though never officially enacted as policy, led to the belief that the Forest Service was going to start letting forest fires burn out of control. In the final years of the 20th century, Jack Ward Thomas, Chief of the Forest Service, declared, “Some fires would be fought others would be allowed to burn. Even with their armies, their aerial support, their billions in taxpayer money to hold back the flames, rangers became increasingly helpless.” Big swaths were unhealthy, in need of a cleansing burn. The woods were full of dry, dying, aging timber and underbrush-fuel. By trying to stop all major wildfires, the Forest Service had only fed the beast. The Forest Service recognized that they had “1910-on-the-brain,” but according to Egan, the “10 o’clock rule would stay in effect for most of the century, until rangers who realized that fires were critical to the health of a forest started to have a voice. Unfortunately, in 1949 a crew of 15 smokejumpers “leapt from a plane into a burning mountainside in Mann Gulch, Montana, and less than two hours later all but three were dead or fatally burned.” The Forest Service, though, was reborn, and it changed its laissez-faire attitude about forest fires.įrom 1910 to 1949, they built hundreds of fire lookout stations, and once a fire was spotted, they adopted the “ten o’clock rule,” in which crews were sent to hot spots immediately, with the instructions that the fire was to be out by 10:00 that night. It was a huge wake-up call for the nation and Congress, and it was enough to convince Teddy Roosevelt to stand against his chosen successor, Taft, and hand the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. Towns were engulfed, 87 firefighters died, and before it was over, there wasn’t a tree standing for a hundred miles. That morning, a huge wind called the Palouser roared in from the Snake River with hurricane force gales and turned the entire area into a raging inferno. In the Coeur d’Alene area of northern Idaho, a small group of rangers had to contend with some unsettling conditions-a long, dry, hot summer, severe lightning strikes, and an outmanned crew that could not keep up with the fires.īy August 20, 1910, 1,000 to 3,000 small fires were burning, and it was about to get worse. The robber barons, of course, had other ideas for the forests (i.e, no stoppin’, just choppin’), and by 1910, when William Howard Taft was president, the Forest Service was vastly underfunded and underserved. Today, the system includes 155 national forests, 20 national grasslands, and 20 research and experimental forests, all covering over 191 million acres of public land. Along with Gifford Pinchot and other visionaries, an effort was made to retain millions of acres of federal forest land for future generations. Forest Service that was created by Teddy Roosevelt and the U.S. This book is about the fire that took place in northern Idaho, Montana and Washington in 1910, which burned over three million acres.”Īnd so I read the book, which was also a history of the U.S. “The Tillamook Fire was nothing,” Tom said. I figured the book was about the Tillamook Fire of 1933 because I’d heard a lot about that Mother of All Fires over the years. Forest Service to handle catastrophic forest fires, Tom went out to his car and returned with a book he was reading, Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were visited by some friends from Portland, Tom and Laura, and when I mentioned that I was writing a story about the Josephine County commissioners and their vote of no-confidence in the ability of the U.S. Originally published in Sneak Preview on March 1, 2018 (Grants Pass and Medford) and April 1 (Ashland) Commissioners hit Forest Service with vote of “no confidence,” but they stand alone
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