Environmental Essay
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Fire Policy and Fire Research in the U.S. Forest Service Author(s): Stephen J. Pyne Source: Journal of Forest History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 64-77 Published by: and Forest History Society American Society for Environmental History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004547 Accessed: 15-08-2015 07:02 UTC
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AIND F1RE RSEARICH0 IN THE U.*S. FOREST SERVICE
by Stephen J. Pyne
ire protection was long considered the indis- pensable element of successful forestry in the United States. But those intent on technology
transfer from Europe discovered that they had few precedents. Coert duBois, district forester in Califor- nia, wrote in 1914: "American foresters have found that they have a unique fire problem, and that they can get little help in solving it from European foresters. . . . We must work it out for ourselves."' Earle H. Clapp, chief of research and for several years acting chief of the Forest Service, observed in 1933 that even "forest fire research apparently originated in the United States, undoubtedly as the direct result of a forest-fire situa-
This article is condensed from a larger manuscript by the author, The Culfture of Fire: A History of Wildland an1d Rural Fire in the United States, which is soon to be published by Princeton University Press. The research was supported by a cooperative agreement (13-970) with the History Office, U. S. Forest Service, and a fellowship to the National Humanities Center.
The primary documents for an administrative history are in Record Group 95, Records of the U. S. Forest Service, Division of Fire Control (1909-1941), National Archives, Washington, D.C. After 1941 (for administrative history) and after 1948 (for research), agency records are stored at the Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. Published literature dealing with the subject of wildland fire in some form includes Harold K. Steen, The U. S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); A. A. Brown and Kenneth P. Davis, Forest Fire: Control and Use, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973); Ralph R. Widner, ed., Forests and Forestry in the American States: A Reference Anthology (Washington: National Association of State Foresters, 1968); Samuel T. Dana, Forest and Range Policy: Its Detvelopmzent in the United States (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1956); and Stewart H. Holbrook, Burning an Empire: The Story of American Forest Fires (New York: Mac- millan, 1943).
'Coert duBois, Systematic Fire Protection in the Cali- fornia Forests (Washington: U. S. Forest Service, 1914), p. 3.
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convercted tanker plane drvop wate mixed with chemicls in an effort o suppress a Caliornia wildfire..fter WorldUWar the echniztionof irecontrol followed the example (and surpluses) of a mechanized military. FHS Collection
FI RE POLI CY AN D R ESEARCH 65
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tion which is more serious than in almost any other country.""
Nothing so differentiated American and European forestry practices than did fire. When Bambi was origi- nally published, for example, the setting was an Aus- trian preserve and the primary threat to wildlife was poachers. But when Walt Disney Studios decided to animate the story for American audiences, they in- serted a great holocaust; it was as unimaginable for an American forest story not to have a fire in it as it was for a European version to include one. But what was for the animators an artistic decision was for American foresters a brutally practical one: their success, foresters determined, would be decided on their ability to tame American fire. The establishment of a fire-protection system for wildlands, including determination of suitable policy and invention of a science of wildland fire, was not only the great chal- lenge of American forestry, but one of its outstanding innovations.
FIRE PRACTICES,-.::: Fire practices, or the use of free-burning fire, include
the ways in which natural and anthropogenic fires may be withheld or applied; the effects may be equally pro- nounced. The point of reference, however, rests not with a natural standard but with cultural standards: what is a wildfire to one society may be a controlled burn to another. Peoples have accordingly modified natural fire and the various biological adaptations to it for their own purposes from at least the days of Homo erectus. Ever since then, mankind has remained a fire creature-the chief source of ignition in the world, the primary vector for carrying fire to biotas (even those where natural fire might be rare), and the greatest modifier of the fire environment, chiefly its fuels.
Broadcast fire is widely used by hunting, herding, and foraging economies.3 The American Indian was no exception. Various tribes distributed fire broadly for fire hunting, for habitat maintenance, for warfare, and as part of a regime of slash-and-burn agriculture. They burned to promote the production and to facilitate the harvesting of grasses, like the sunflower; of berries, like the blueberry: and of nuts, like the acorn or mesquite bean. Fire was used to drive off mistletoe and insect infestations, and, in the interior of Alaska and along the coastal plains, to eliminate noxious insects. Camp-
2Earle H. Clapp, "Research in the United States Forest Service, A Study in Objectives," in A National Plan for American Forestrv, Senate Doc. No. 12, 73d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, 1933), p. 672. This document is gen- erally known as the Copeland Report.
3See, for example, Omer C. Stewart, "Fire as the First Great Force Employed by Man," in William L. Thomas, Jr., ed., MIan's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 115-29.
FHS Collectiorn
fires and signal fires were rarely extinguished, many escaping into the surrounding landscape. Tribes burned nearly all areas that were naturally drained, leaving many "barrens" or savannahs or, where forests per- sisted, relatively open woods free of underbrush. Early explorers and settlers widely reported such grassy "deserts," culminating in the "Great American Des- ert" of the central plains.
American frontiersmen adopted many Indian fire practices, such as fire hunting, slash-and-burn agricul- ture, and firing for pasturage. Where reclamation be- came more settled, fire codes regulated these uses, integrating them into an agricultural cycle, and volun- teer crews supressed unwanted fires that threatened farm or field. Where land clearing on a prodigious scale occurred with massive disturbances of fuels, major conflagrations could result, as in the Lake States in the late nineteenth century. But the consensus held that such holocausts were only a temporary phenomenon of settlement: with time wildlands would be reclaimed as arable land, and forest fires would disappear. Control of wildland fire was considered impossible in a tech- nical sense, indefensible in economic terms, and unde- sirable on environmental grounds. Local juries prose- cuted only the most flagrant abuses, reluctant to reduce accessibility to fire-an often essential tool for the maintenance of frontier economies.' .
THE COUNTERRECLAMATION ;
The industrial revolution changed this economy, however, and one of the most visible points of conflict was over proper fire practices. Industrial forestry, in particular, found the existing range of fire practices in the United States entirely unsuitable and had to create a new set of practices-much of it based on the sup- pression of fire from these other, traditional sources. The entire fire problem of the United States, as Bern- hard E. Fernow sourly put it, was one of bad habits and loose morals. What gave foresters an important
IFor a summary of attitudes and practices, see Franklin B. Hough, Report Upon Forestry, Volume 3 (Washington: GPO, 1882).
,Andrew D. Rodgers III, Bernhard Eduard Fernow: A Story of North American Forestry (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 167.
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say in the determination of this policy, however, was the counterreclamation. Set in motion by industriali- zation, the counterreclamation encompassed a move- ment in which land was reserved from settlement and in which once-arable land reverted to wild or forested land. In either case it was recognized that frontier fire practices-which sought generally to convert forested land to other uses-were not suited for industrial for- estry or for the reservation of forested land for its "influences," primarily watershed.
But equally, the traditional means of rural fire con- trol were not applicable either. Instead it was necessary to develop new sources of manpower, new equipment, new techniques, and new means of enforcement; to "settle" often extensive lands in the name of fire pro- tection, complete with roads, trails, and communication networks; and to invent a science of wildland fire. Foresters would have to create policies to decide which fires to suppress and which, perhaps, to promote. They would have to replace centuries of accumulated folk knowledge about fire with scientific data. The mani- festation of these needs came in 1885 and 1886, when New York created its Adirondack Forest Preserve, Ontario established a system of fire patrols for the provincial forests, and the U.S. Army took over the administration of Yellowstone National Park, in good part to bring fire control. On corporate and state lands, private and state fire-protection organizations were established. But the key lands in question were the vast forest reserves carved by presidential proclamation out of the public domain in the West. The Transfer Act of 1905 gave these lands to the U.S. Forest Service, and modern fire protection as a national enterprise
dates from this event.6 The Forest Service assumed a central institutional and intellectual role in fire pro- grams at all levels of national life-institutionally, by its control of the national forest system and by its promotion of cooperative fire-control programs with the states and industry; intellectually, by introducing the standards of professional European forestry into the debate about fire policy.
The magnitude of that charge did not become ap- parent until 1910. In August the Forest Service con- fronted two literal trials by fire: the "light buming" controversy in Califomia, and a summer holocaust that burned some 5 million acres throughout the West, 3 million in the Northern Rockies alone. The first challenged the intellectual credibility of Service policy, and the second its technical capability. The fire policies and research programs of the Forest Service can subse- quently be dated by four problem-fire types of inform- ing significance: the frontier fire (1910-1930), the backcountry fire (1931-1949), the mass fire (1950- 1970), and the wilderness fire (1971-present). For each problem fire the Forest Service adopted a particular policy, based on a unique strategic concept and com- plete with a distinctive choice of tactics and an appro- priate research program. (See Table.) Viewed from a different perspective, these phases can be seen not merely as reactions to certain problem fires but as
6The agency was established in 1881 as the Division of Forestry. It was known as the Bureau of Forestry from 1901 until 1905, shortly after passage of the Transfer Act of February 1.
WILDLAND FIRE PROTECTION: The U.S. Forest Service Experience
FIRE CONTROL
DATE PROBLEM FIRE POLICY Strategic Tactical RESEARCH Concept Emphasis RSAC
1910-1930 Frontier fire Economic Systematic Administration fire protection
Fire as forestry Economics, planning, and statistics of fire
1931-1949 Backcountry fire 10 A.M. Policy Hour control Manpower
1950-1970 Mass fire 10 A.M. Policy Conflagration Mechanization Fire as physics control Laboratory
Field experimentation
1971-present Wilderness fire Fire by Fuel modifi- Prescribed Fire as biology prescription cation (broadcast) Natural laboratories
fire Simulation experiments
FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 67
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means to exploit certain surpluses that became avail- able at the same time. For the first period, there was a "surplus" of land (from the Transfer Act) and of money (from the Emergency Fire Control Fund); for the second, a wealth of manpower (the Civilian Con- servation Corps); for the third, an abundance of equip- ment (war surplus); and for the fourth, an overabun- dance of information (largely ecological).
FRONTIER FIRE::* The term frontier fire includes the fire practices com-
mon to the largely agricultural frontier economy that had developed in the United States. Against its laissez- faire use of fire, the Forest Service proposed "system- atic" fire protection, dedicated to fire suppression and reliant on sound planning and administration. The 1910 fires in the Northern Rockies were the cata- lyst: they traumatized the young Forest Service, con- tributed in no small way to the passage of the Weeks Act of 1911, and gave a peculiar character to Service fire policy. Forestry had made fire control the founda- tion of professional management and promised that the national forest system could provide it; the pres- ence or absence of conflagrations became public tests on these premises. The fires, too, were the first chal- lenge faced by Henry S. Graves as chief forester, and they were an indelible reference point in the memory of two future chiefs-William B. Greeley and Ferdi- nand A. Silcox, district and assistant district foresters, respectively, at the time.
But while the 1910 fires were the casus belli, they were not really the enemy. That was reserved for light burning, the source of a smoldering debate that flared up for public review during that same summer. Light burning was, in effect, an adaptation of frontier prac- tices for timber management.7 It was promoted most loudly by timber owners in northern California who insisted that periodic, light surface firing would reduce fuels and fire hazards. The practice had long been used in naval stores forests of the South, and proponents appealed for further sympathy by arguing that it was "the Indian way." Foresters, however, regarded the arguments as part of an invidious scheme to discredit their professional expertise and to eviscerate the con- servation movement, which, thanks to Gifford Pinchot, forestry had come to dominate. They replied that light burning sacrificed reproduction for preservation of the status quo, that the technique was more expensive and less effective than systematic fire protection, that it would dilute the forest-protection message presented
7The light-burning controversy produced a large litera- ture at the time. A useful summary is available in C. Ray- mond Clar, California Government and Forestry from Spanish Days until the Creation of the Department of Natural Resources in 1927 (Sacramento: California Di- vision of Forestry, 1959), pp. 210-12, 488-94.
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A ranger and forest guard scan the horizon for fire from Mount Silcox on the Lolo National Forest, Mon- tana, 1909. Before the era of special roads, trails, and lookouts, men on foot and horseback both spotted and fought fires.
U. S. Forest Service photo, courtesy of author
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to the public, that it would play into the hands of herders intent on replacing forests with pasturage, and that it promoted a laissez-faire frontier economy that might pose a political threat to government con- servation and professional forestry. What fire uses the Forest Service allowed were strongly circumscribed by the need to show a difference from light-burning prac- tices; slash, for example, was to be piled carefully and burned, not fired in situ. The very intensity of the light-burning debate may have been critical in shaping the rigor of systematic fire protection; it is surely no accident that the two appeared at the same time and same place.
The two controversies initiated fire research. Nearly all major administrators with the Forest Service pro- duced studies for improving the methods of fire control, and Greeley wrote that "firefighting is a matter of scientific management, just as much as silviculture or range improvement."s In 1910 Frederick Clements published his study of fire and lodgepole pine, perhaps the beginning of fire ecology. But of more concern at the time was the program of research that emerged in California and attacked light burning on two counts: it created, first, a model for systematic fire planning and, second, it promoted studies of fire effects based on light-burning experiments. The first was largely the
SWilliam B. Greeley, "Better Methods of Fire Control," Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters 6 (1911): 165.
A forest guard sights a fire from Deer Spring Tower on the Sitgreaves National Forest, Arizona, 1915.
U. S. Forest Service photo, FHS Collection
work of Coert duBois, district forester for California; and the second, under his general direction, brought Stuart Brevier Show into national prominence. Du- Bois published a model plan in 1911, but his master- piece, Systematic Fire Protection in the California Forests, came three years later. The work was a brilliant piece of systems analysis, probably inspired by the efficiency studies popular among industrial engi- neers at the time. Every component of fire behavior and control was isolated, and each was assigned a numerical value; a horse, for example, could travel at six different gaits. The document simply over- whelmed the rather nebulous propositions of light burning--in truth, less a doctrine than a front for all sorts of landowners convinced that the "protectionist" policy of the Forest Service was suicidal. Show's studies, meanwhile, supplied scientific evidence that light burning was not benign but was in reality a subtle mechanism for forest destruction and soil ero- sion.9 Nonetheless, the period from 1910 to 1920 was, in general, one of experimentation: in addition to light burning, "let burning" (or leaving fires to burn in remote areas, or "loose herding" fires into such regions) was tried.
Research was also charged with establishing suitable objectives for systematic fire protection. This was not an obvious matter, particularly when forest influences like watershed and recreation were considered in addition to timber. The absence of forest fire insurance, moreover, left the Service without an economic stan- dard of the sort employed by urban fire services. And finally, the Forest Fire Emergency Fund Act of 1908 allowed the Service to engage in deficit spending to cover expenditures incurred during fire suppression; Congress would then pass supplemental appropriations.
The first test of the act came, naturally, in 1910. The Forest Service went into debt for more than a million dollars and faced bankruptcy if Congress failed to meet its obligations. The act was sustained, and a system of financing came into being that allowed, dur- ing fire suppression, for virtually unlimited spending. For foresters proud of their training in economics, the situation was both perplexing and disturbing: it was necessary to devise a program that would allow for adequate spending levels prior to suppression and yet limit suppression spending before it could become irresponsible. The result, first proposed in 1916 by Roy Headley, was the "economic" or "least cost plus loss" theory, which stated simply that total costs should be held to a minimum and that the investment should be commensurate with the value of the resources under protection. Useful as a general philosophy, the concept proved almost worthless as a practical guide
"For a synopsis of this early research, see Stuart B. Show and Edward I. Kotok, untitled and unpublished report, ca. 1955, at the library of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, Berkeley, California, pp. 7-22.
FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 69
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;~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Civilian Conservation Corps saw considerable fire line duty and provided a model for the subsequent development of or- ganized fire crews. In this photo corpsmen are being issued equipment for an initial attack on a fire on the Sumter National Forest, South Carolina, 1938.
U. S. Forest Service photo, courtesy of author
because it was subject to endless amendments and recalculations. It failed to appreciate that the national forest system was a political institution, not an eco- nomic one. Wildfires simply did not behave in the way required by the economic theory. Individual fires did not wax and wane in proportion to the amount of resistance offered by suppression forces; they tended to simmer or "blow up" in explosive runs. It was the blow-up fire that caused the greatest damages and accounted for the greatest expenditures. Such fires were often either controlled while small or not at all. Wildfire, in short, did not behave as though it were in rational competition with the Forest Service. Ironically, the economic theory was actually more suitable for controlled burning.
But the theory did confirm the relationship of re- search to administration namely, that administrative policy would propose the ends and research would supply the means. "We accepted that the route of research was from the general laws and relations to the particular," Show wrote, "seeking to refine and measure the arithmetical values. In no sense did we accept the route of the particular to the general."'? The function of research was more to demonstrate than to discover. Alone among the federal conservation bu- reaus, the Forest Service had been given responsi- bilities to both regulate and manage, to produce and
loIbid., p. 7.
to research-an administrative schizophrenia that could lead to serious dilemmas when management and research came into conflict.,'
The period of administrative experimentation ended with the tenure of William Greeley. In 1921 he organ- ized the Mather Field Conference, which assembled in California the best minds of the Forest Service to review and standardize fire policy, lexicon, and tech- niques. In 1923 a special panel created by the Cali- fornia Board of Forestry officially condemned light burning, and Show, with his new collaborator, Edward I. Kotok, summarized the scientific case against the practice. In 1924 Congress passed the Clarke-McNary Act, a great enlargement of the Weeks Act. The Weeks Act had provided for the expansion of the national forest system onto lands not in the public domain and, as an experiment, it created a system of grants-in-aid between the Forest Service and state foresters for the protection of certain forested watersheds from fire. The Clarke-McNary Act and its amendments made cooperative fire protection the foundation of a national program of forest management: it greatly stimulated the creation of state organizations and, as administered by the Forest Service, it spread federal standards in fire protection much further than could ever be achieved
11See Ashley L. Schiff, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the U. S. Forest Service (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
70 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY * APRIL 1981
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by acquisition of land for more national forests. On opposition to lingering frontier fire practices, more- over, industrial forestry and the Forest Service were in general agreement. Show and Kotok meanwhile elaborated the systems methodology of duBois in a series of brilliant studies that left no aspect of fire- control planning unexamined. By the end of the 1920s, the McSweeney-McNary Act made the Forest Service the responsible government agency for forestry re- search, and the Shasta Experimental Fire Forest was established in California as an administrative model of systematic fire protection.
BACKCOUNTRY FIRE. :
The term backcountry fire includes fires occurring on forested lands remote in space or time that is, lands in the undeveloped backcountry of the national forests and lands, such as in the South and Lake States, that had been cut over and for which fire protection was an investment in the future. Systematic fire protection
had developed as a competing program with light burning for high-value "frontcountry" lands. The period beginning around 1930, however, tested the limits, geographic and financial, toward which system- atic fire protection could be pushed. The acquisition of federal and state forests increased dramatically, much of it from abandoned farmland, tax-delinquent land, or from resettlement programs. As a planning goal, the Forest Service looked toward the concept of hour control, a program developed by Show and Kotok that sought control within a certain time period-the time allowed varying by the nature of the fuel and the value of the resource.
The program was made possible by New Deal conser- vation investments, and especially the presence of the Civilian Conservation Corps. This largesse proved both a boon and a bane for the Forest Service, which con- trolled over half the camps. Almost overnight there was created a physical plant for fire control that would otherwise have required decades of normal evolution. For the first time trained civilian crews were available
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With an abundance of manpower, the CCC established a physical plant for fire control-including fuelbreaks, roads, trails, telephone lines, guard stations, and lookouts. These enrollees are building a firebreak on the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California.
U. S. Forest Service photo, courtesy of author
FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 71
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for fire call. A new tactical emphasis on manpower dominated thinking and led in 1939 to two prototypes of the organized fire crew-the forty-man crew and the smokejumpers. More significantly, the amplifica- tion of means at hand pushed the Forest Service into a similar amplification of ends.
In 1935, as "an experiment on a continental scale," the Forest Service adopted the 10 A.M. Policy, which stipulated control by 10 A.M. the morning following the report of a fire, or, failing that, control by 10 A.M. the day following, ad infinitum. After a round of debates not unlike that which had accompanied light burning, the Service brushed aside proposals for "let burning" in the remote low-value lands, and for allowing fires to burn in wilderness areas, and for compromising with lingering frontier fire practices. Savage droughts had led to widespread fires in the early 1930s, and spec- tacles like the Tillamook fire (1933) in Oregon and the Selway fires (1934) in the Northern Rockies had a catalytic effect not unlike that of the 1910 fire.
Fire research amplified its earlier interests. It re- mained immovably ensconced in forestry. Heavily dependent on statistical analysis, in turn based on thousands of fire reports, some researchers like Lloyd Hornby elaborated the hour-control program of Show and Kotok and extended it into new regions. Others, like Harry T. Gisborne, worked out a rating index for predicting fire danger. Still others continued to scruti- nize the economic objectives for fire protection. Horn- by's work became the basis for a national planning effort undertaken in 1937, and Gisborne's successful invention of a fire-danger rating system became the basis, in 1935, for an extension of the system of emer- gency (deficit) spending from suppression to presup- pression. Based on forecast conditions, fire officers could draft out of emergency "accounts" to augment suppression forces in advance of actual fires, this on the grounds that such expenditures would ultimately reduce the usually exorbitant cost of supression.
But research still considered itself an adjunct of administration, and researchers and administrators frequently exchanged roles. The thrust of the research was basically conservative: it sought to keep fire pro- tection firmly within the institutional and intellectual confines of forestry. Its focus continued to be on fire control, rather than on fire itself. It sought to somehow restore the economic foundation for fire-protection ob- jectives. Frequent proposals to study the fundamentals, the "laws of combustion," were dismissed. Fire-be- havior research, it was felt, was a deceptive goal that would lead foresters into a miasma of theoretical sci- ence. Instead it was proposed that fire researchers ought to leave their field plots and statistical compila- tions for the fireline. Two of the outstanding practi- tioners of the era, Hornby and Gisborne, both died in the effort-Hornby in active suppression, and Gis- borne while investigating the cause of unusual fire behavior on the Mann Gulch fire, which in August 1949 had trapped and killed thirteen smokejumpers.
The South, however, was a grand exception. Here fire problems were unique: the vegetation, particularly the luxuriant "rough," offered new challenges; the woodsburning tradition preserved frontier fire prac- tices long past the time they had disappeared else- where; and fire research was not solely in the domain of the Forest Service. By 1931 S. W. Greene showed the value of controlled burning for pasture improve- ment and in the silviculture of the longleaf pine; H. S. Stoddard did the same for wildlife management, particularly the bobwhite quail; Herman H. Chapman of the Yale Forestry School methodically contrasted the differing fire-protection requirements of northern and southern pines; and severe droughts, with stubborn fires, reinforced the long-standing belief that protective burning could support fire-control efforts by reducing fuel accumulations. In short, controlled fire became part of the price of admitting the cutover pineries of the South into industrial forestry.
In 1932 the Forest Service allowed state cooperators to control burn and still qualify for the Clarke-McNary program, and in 1943 the practice was extended to the national forests. In the meantime it effectively cen- sored results of studies at its own Southern Forest Experiment Station, which showed evidence that con- trolled fire might be useful. The Forest Service was worried that such revelations might compromise its fight against laissez-faire woodsburning. Most admin- istrators, moreover, saw no distinction between the southern situation and light burning in California. By this time professional foresters in general regarded the light-burning proposals with the condescension that mathematicians reserved for circle-squarers and physi- cists for perpetual-motion mechanics. Even after con- trolled (or prescribed) burning became acceptable in the South, it was considered an oddity, a unique exception that (like the longleaf pine for which fire was ardently advocated) probably was not generally applicable outside the region. When the Forest Service established a separate Division of Forest Fire Research in late 1948, the objective was fundamentally restora- tive: the division would eliminate duplication among regional research stations and would return research to its traditional goals, conducted by forester-engineers and forester-economists. But already a new problem fire was emerging that promised to redirect the goals of fire protection, to promote new methodologies for fire research, and to realign the institutional basis for national fire management.
MASS FIRE
The firebombings of World War II convinced ob- servers that the next war would be a fire war. When in 1949 the Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb, the quintessential incendiary weapon, it became neces- sary to better understand the physics of firestorms. On the behavior and control of mass fire, there was an unprecedented fusion of interests among the Forest
72 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY * APRIL 1981
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Controlled burning in southern pines offered silvicultural and other advantages, but the Forest Service was slow to accept the practice. The woods worker stands guard at the fire line of a prescribed burn in southern Mississippi.
FHS Collection
Service, the Office of Civil Defense, the military, and urban fire services. Fire control became a part of national defense, and as its policy and research were again reorganized, the Forest Service seemingly en- tered into a cold war on fire. Between 1950 and 1954, under the direction of Civil Defense, the Service as- sumed responsibility for coordinating fire defense for both rural lands and wildlands. The basis for such plans was the Clarke-McNary program, which by 1966 included all fifty states. Rural fire defense became, in turn, the basis for the Rural Community Fire Pro- tection Program authorized in 1972 and funded in 1976. The Forest Service connection with Civil Defense and the military had grown up out of World War II liaisons, culminating perhaps in the preparations made against Japanese fire balloons. Again emerging out of these wartime contacts, the Forest Service was given priority access under the federal excess-equipment program to surplus hardware, largely military, which it could acquire or distribute to its cooperators. The support given fire protection by the emergency con- servation program of the New Deal was, in effect, replaced by a new alliance with the military and Civil Defense. By the mid-1960s the Forest Service enjoyed
virtual hegemony over the wildland and rural fire programs of the United States by virtue of its political liaisons, its control over suppression resources, and its near monopoly of fire research.
The controlling doctrine was the concept of conflagra- tion control. Even more than under the hour-control program, the goal was, through rapid initial attack and various measures for confinement (such as fuel- breaks), to prevent small fires from making the tran- sition to mass fire. Ths military analogy, of course, was to contain brushfire wars before they could lead to a superpower confrontation and holocaust. Conversely, fire control in 1961 developed a version of a rapid-de- ployment force, the interregional fire-suppression crew, which could be dispatched promptly to trouble spots within the national forest system. The Forest Service promoted a program of "containment" through the use of conflagration barriers, like improved fuelbreak sys- tems that could both keep wildfire within its natural preserves and out of high-value lands. For tactical emphasis, manpower was superseded (or comple- mented) by mechanized equipment. Immediately after the war, the Forest Service and military participated in mutual tests on the conversion of bombers and heli-
FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 73
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copters for fire suppression; the experiments were in- conclusive, though army engineers and foresters joined together in the mid-1950s for successful experiments on mass-fire control that involved helicopters. In 1956 both air tankers and helitack became fireline realities. The Forest Service established two equipment-develop- ment centers to explore other means of conversion and to work out special pieces of equipment, such as those attendant to the smokejumper program, that were unique to fire fighting. Calculations on fire effects tended often to be made on the assumption that "hos- tile fire" or enemy fire was responsible. The 10 A.M. Policy remained in effect.
The search for a prescription for mass fire utterly reoriented wildland fire science. A number of multiple- fatality fires gave the Forest Service plenty of cause to learn more about fire behavior for internal reasons, but the interest in mass-fire mechanics by the military and Civil Defense brought funding as well. With urban conflagrations largely a thing of the past, the Forest Service was practically the sole authority on free- burning fires, experiencing dozens annually. Forest Service research came into a commanding role for the study of mass fire in all environments-wildland, rural, and even urban. In 1954 a one-year crash pro- gram called Operation Firestop-a joint exercise in- volving the Forest Service, Civil Defense, the military, and the California Division of Forestry-explored the mysteries of fire behavior and pursued a variety of techniques to control mass fire. The methodology of Operation Firestop was a dramatic break from the statistical approach of Show, and the choice of southern California for field trials was equally appropriate. New suburbs there crowded onto chaparral wildlands, and the hypothetical vision of incendiary attacks seemed frightfully real when fires rushed through the streets of Malibu and Bel Air.
Mass fire moved the Forest Service out of the back- country and into the urban fringe. After the disastrous 1956 fires in California, which led to a congressional investigation, a general reform of fire protection and research was set in motion.12 Three forest fire labs were established-the Southern (Macon, Georgia), Northern (Missoula, Montana), and Western (River- side, California). By the mid-1960s virtually the entire fire-research program of the Service was concentrated in these facilities. In 1958 the Forest Service and Civil Defense requested the National Academy of Sciences- National Research Council to assemble a Committee on Fire Research. The committee would advise Civil
12The fires were the Malibu and Inaja fires, the latter of which killed eleven fire fighters. The investigation was conducted by a special subcommittee of the House Com- mittee on Interior and Insular Affairs and was known in published form as the Engle Committee hearings, Forest Fire Control in Southern California, House Doc. No. 14, 85th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, 1958).
Defense and the Department of Defense on their in- vestments in fire research.13 After international tensions rose in the early 1960s, particularly with the Cuban missile crisis, considerable funding became available for fire-behavior studies. By 1962 Civil Defense was able to hold annual conferences among its fire con- tractors.
Fire as a physical phenomenon, rather than fire as an administrative problem, became the object of inves- tigation. Fire at last left the confines of forestry, but in so doing it also left the traditional means of evalu- ation by foresters. It became a subject for physics, chemistry, meteorology, and new forms of operations research. It developed experimental models-physical and mathematical-for fire spread. It invented new measures for the description of free-burning fire. It un- dertook large-scale experimental tests to better under- stand the essentials of mass-fire synergism, one series coming in the early 1960s and another, Project Flam- beau, in the mid-1960s. Prescribed fire was employed for two ends: for conflagration control, particularly in the construction of fuelbreaks, after mechanical or chemical treatments had desiccated or crushed fuels; and for conflagration initiation. The latter found em- ployment, for example, as a weapon in Vietnam, with much the same technology as in the United States.14 The environmental movement in the United States, however, looked in a rather different direction, and beginning with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, new legislation brought another problem fire to national attention.
WILDERNESS FIRE :'
In 1970-despite several decades of intensive fire research, equipment development, and healthy financ- ing-fire complexes in Washington and California burned more acreage on the national forest system than
13The committee performed a variety of tasks, including publication of an abstract digest, sponsorship of correlation conferences, and development of a proposed national pro- gram of fire research. Nor was all Forest Service fire re- search conducted through funding from Civil Defense or the Department of Defense. Much came from within the Service's own appropriations, and some-like Project Skyfire on lightning research-eventually picked up Na- tional Science Foundation funding. The work on fire funda- mentals, however, proceeded with outside funding, in- cluding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
14See Deborah Shapley, "Technology in Vietnam: Fire Storm Project Fizzles Out," Science 177 (1972): 239-41, and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm, 1976), pp. 58-59. For a comparison with the technology of fuelbreak construction, see Lisle Green, Fuelbreaks and Other Fuel Modification for Wildland Fire Control, USDA Agriculture Handbook No. 499 (Washington: GPO, 1977).
74 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY * APRIL 1981
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Army troops preparing for fire line duty on the Green River Fire, Cleveland National Forest, California, 1948. During World War II important liaisons were established between fire agencies and the military, and many of these arrangements- includ- ing mutual aid for fire suppression-were continued after the war. The concept was a natural, however; federal involvement in fire control had begun many decades earlier with the use of cavalry in Yellowstone National Park.
U. S. Forest Service photo, courtesy of author
in any year since 1910. Like other large fires before them, these catalyzed a broad reorganization, this time centered on the question of natural fires in wilderness areas. The recognition grew that lightning fires in natural areas were part of the native ecology and that, in order to maintain the primitive state of these areas, it was necessary to tolerate such fires or to introduce surrogate, prescribed fires. Wholesale experimentation was conducted from this position to determine how far such beneficial fires could be extended, into how many environments, and for how many objectives of land management at large. The mass-fire experiments, more- over, had concluded that fuel complexes were the greatest determinant in fire intensity, and fuel modifi- cation replaced conflagration control as a ruling con- cept for wildfire control; the preferred tool was pre- scribed (broadcast) fire.
In 1972 the National Science Foundation, through its Forest Biome Project, gave modeling of fire ecology a high priority. Academic interest in fire research at last appeared. Previously, the only institution besides the Forest Service to show much interest in fire re- search was the Tall Timbers Research Station, a private laboratory in Florida whose annual fire-ecology conferences (1962-1976) were the main compendium of knowledge about the biology of fire and virtually
the sole podium for proponents of prescribed fire.'5 Conference findings were supplemented by a rush of symposia on the subject of fire ecology, a survey that examined the effects of fire for nearly all the environ- ments of the world. Following policy reforms in 1968, the National Park Service created an independent research program in fire ecology. The creation of the U. S. Fire Administration in 1974, moreover, took away from the Forest Service some of its Civil Defense connections in favor of fire research by the National Bureau of Standards, and the Senate in 1972 forbade federal research on the military uses of prescribed fire, thus severing another contribution.
Instead of laboratory modeling, "natural labora- tories" of the wilderness system, as E. V. Komarek called them, would be the scene for fire research.'r, But
I5A history of the Tall Timbers Research Station can be found in E. V. Komarek, A Quest for Ecological Under- standing: The Secretary's Review (Tallahassee: Tall Tim- bers Research Station, 1977). The conference proceedings were privately published but widely distributed by the station.
16E. V. Komarek, "Fire, Research, and Education," Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference Proceedings 2 (1963): 181-87.
FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 75
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the fire-behavior studies supplied one critical need of the ecologists: they made fires comparable. The study of fire effects had suffered grievously from this defect; in most investigations the effects were rarely compara- ble because the causes (fire) were rarely comparable. The physical research changed that by introducing measures, such as fire intensity, that could be cor- related with ecological consequences. Conversely, the ecological research suggested that prescribed fire could be a practical and environmentally benign form of fuel management. Wildland fire research had become so extensive, in fact, that it became a source of policy rather than a tool of it.
Policy, too, was changing dramatically. The 1970 fires highlighted a certain political fragmentation of Forest Service hegemony in fire protection. Out of a series of disastrous fires in Alaska in 1957 and in Nevada in 1964, the Bureau of Land Management began an aggressive fire-control program. The need for cooperation led to the Boise Interagency Fire Center, which provided support services during fire emergen- cies; to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, finally chartered in 1976, for cooperation in training, certification, and so forth; and to the National Ad- vanced Resources Technology Center, for interagency training courses in all aspects of fire management. At Forest Service insistence the NWCG included state
representatives. The wave of environmental legislation had, in effect, given the many landholding agencies different charters and different relationships to fire, thus rendering more difficult the adoption of a single program.
In 1971 the Forest Service amended the 10 A.M. Policy. It allowed for natural prescribed burns, light- ning fires that could be left to burn in wilderness areas under designated conditions. But it also promulgated a 10 Acre Policy, specifying as the goal for presuppres- sion planning that all fires should be contained in ten acres regardless of fuel type or resources at risk. The result was a wild surge in emergency presuppression expenditures. a process accelerated by the Forest and Rangelands Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974. To meet its goals the Forest Service sought to reduce the number of fires exceeding ten acres by 2 percent, but this required a 90 percent increase in presuppression expenditures. Presuppression costs had swelled from $6 million in 1965 to $11 million in 1970, then from $25 million in 1973 to $85 million in 1976. Suppression costs increased almost as rapidly. Even by 1967, fully 97 percent of all fire-related expenditures went to emergency presuppression and suppression activities, only a token of which was covered by reg- ular programmed appropriations. Virtually all of Forest Service fire protection (and that of the other federal
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The postwar pattern of fire in suburbs-so vividly and almost annually exhibited in southern California-appeared even in Maine, where nearly a quarter million acres burned under prolonged Indian summer conditions in 1947. The extensive de- struction led to reforms in Maine's fire protection system and also to the first interstate fire compact in 1949.
U. S. Forest Service photo, courtesy of author
76 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY * APRIL 1981
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agencies) was financed by a system of deficit spending. Review by the Office of Management and Budget and the Forest Service resulted in the elimination of the emergency suppression fund and its replacement by the more accountable Fire Management Fund.17 In 1978 the Service scrapped its amended 10 A.M. Policy in favor of an entirely new one, a de facto policy of fire by prescription. Fires were divided into either wildfires, which were to be suppressed, or prescribed (management) fires, which were to be supported. The Service sponsored the ambitious Research, Develop- ment, and Application Program to help translate research into management, and it consolidated state-of- the-art knowledge on the biology of fire with a National Fire Effects Workshop.18
CONCLUSION
In the early years of the century, foresters declared that industrial forestry and the protection of reserved watersheds would be impossible unless surface fires were eliminated. By 1980 they insisted that forestry was impossible without them. The effects of suppres- sion were considered, in many areas, as undesirable as the effects of uncontrolled fire. A new set of fire practices had resulted, one that excluded the lingering fire habits from preindustrial economies and yet incor- porated forms of controlled fire suitable to the land- scape of the counterreclamation and to the cycle of industrial forestry.
Experience had shown the Forest Service that, con- trary to early beliefs, fire control was not a one-time affair, that wildland fire was inexpungible so long as wildlands existed. Ironically, precisely because its fire-protection mission did not wither away, the Service acquired a special source of strength. Fire management had given the Service a charge that, unlike those of many bureaus, would not fade away and that helped make the Service dynamic long after its formative zeal had passed by. The relationship between fire and the Forest Service has been curiously symbiotic: it was forestry, and especially the Forest Service, that brought systematic fire protection to America, but equally it was the need for fire protection on the reserved lands of the public domain that had created the need for foresters. The Forest Service's greatest nemesis had, in many respects, been its best friend. D
I 7See report of the Policy Analysis Staff, "Evaluation of Fire Management Activities on the National Forests" (U. S. Forest Service, 1977). Inexplicably, the fire agencies in the Department of the Interior were allowed to keep their emergency presuppression accounts.
18Published as General Technical Reports by the Wash- ington Office of the Forest Service, the state-of-knowledge reviews deal with fire effects on flora, fauna, fuels, air, water, and soil. They complement the computer-based fire bibliography, FIREBASE, developed some years before by the Forest Service.
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FIRE POLICY AND RESEARCH 77
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- Article Contents
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- Issue Table of Contents
- Journal of Forest History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 63-123
- Front Matter [pp. 63-63]
- Fire Policy and Fire Research in the U.S. Forest Service [pp. 64-77]
- Preservation Efforts at Lake Tahoe 1880 to 1980 [pp. 78-97]
- The Shingle and Lumber Industries in the Great Dismal [pp. 98-107]
- Book Reviews
- Review: untitled [pp. 108-109]
- Review: untitled [pp. 109-110]
- Review: untitled [p. 110]
- Review: untitled [pp. 110-111]
- Review: untitled [pp. 111-113]
- Review: untitled [pp. 113-114]
- Review: untitled [p. 114]
- Review: untitled [pp. 114-115]
- Review: untitled [pp. 115-117]
- Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]
- Review: untitled [p. 118]
- News & Letters [pp. 119-120]
- Biblioscope [pp. 121-122]
- Back Matter [pp. 123-123]