Rash of '94 forest fires blamed, in part, on blaze policies of past

The inferno of wildfires that charred thousands of acres in Arizona and other Western states last year was partly the legacy of long-ago good intentions.

And that legacy could help fuel another devastating fire season this year, federal officials warned this week.

``Six or seven decades ago we started a fire-suppression policy, with the idea that fire was bad,'' said Chuck Scott, interagency fire management officer for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service in Tucson.

``We did such a good job of suppressing fires over the years that it didn't allow fires to clean up dead materials and undergrowth in natural ways,'' Scott said. ``So we've had this unnatural accumulation of fuels on wild lands that would have normally been burned up.

``These are the fuels that contributed to some of the big, devastating fires we saw last year. Last year was one of the worst years we've ever had in terms of fires on public lands, and it looks like this year could be a repeat of 1994.''

Tom Danton, who serves as a fire information officer for Saguaro National Park, said federal statistics on wild-lands fires reflect the decades of fire-suppression policies - and the resulting abundance of flammable vegetation.

``Last year, we had 77,000 wild-lands fires in the United States,'' Danton said. ``That's a 9 percent increase over the year before . . . and it's part of a steady increase in recent years.

``We spent $868 million fighting fires in 1994,'' he said. ``There were 25,000 professional firefighters at work and 34 fire-related fatalities'' - including 14 firefighters burned to death in Colorado and others killed in helicopter crashes.

A spokesman for the 1.7 million-acre Coronado National Forest, which includes the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson and other ranges in southeastern Arizona, said 179 fires burned on the forest last year.

Those fires blackened 56,343 acres, according to forest records.

Danton said a fire that burned last June and July in the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson consumed about 10,000 acres of Saguaro National Park and an adjacent 5,000 acres.

That fire and other huge blazes in the West might not have grown so large if smaller fires had been allowed to ``clean out'' some of the vegetation over the decades, Danton said.

``At the turn of the century, most forests were still fairly open areas with some extremely large but well-spaced trees and some small ground cover bushes,'' he said. ``These bottom areas of bushes and grasses would burn off every few years when lightning started fires. There are even references by settlers saying that Indians periodically burned the areas off to make it easier to find game.''

Danton said the fire-suppression policies that began in the early part of the 20th century changed the nature of forests by preserving dense stands of trees and thick underbrush.

``Now, when a fire starts, it has all the ladders it needs to go from the floor of the forest to the tops of trees with ease,'' he said. ``This makes for those `towering inferno' fires that are very spectacular and very dangerous to firefighters and property.''

Scott and Danton said land-management agencies have revised fire-suppression policies over the last 20 years to permit some fires to burn if they're not threatening buildings.

So-called prescribed burns, or intentionally set fires, also are used to thin dense undergrowth in some forest areas, Scott noted.

Scott said the intensity of this year's spring and summer fire season will depend not only on fuels accumulated over decades but also on recent growth and weather conditions.

``It's going to be a potentially high-risk season,'' he said. ``In the low country, we had above-normal rains and that produced lots of fast-burning fuels such as flowers and grasses.

``In the high country, we got a little snow, but not much, and we've had a lot of drying. So it appears that fire danger in the high country could be quite high, too.''

Scott noted one factor that could reduce the risk: abundant rainfall in late April and May.


IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BURN

Here are some tips from federal fire-management officers on preventing human-caused fires:

* Obey all posted rules for using fire in camping and picnic areas.

* Clear a spacious fire ring when building a campfire and make sure the fire is completely out before leaving the area.

* Dispose of used charcoal briquettes only in designated charcoal containers - not on the ground or in trash cans.

* Extinguish smoking materials in ash trays instead of throwing them out of car windows or onto the ground.

* Cut weeds near houses that are adjacent to open areas or public lands.

* Report fires immediately by dialing 911.

Chart by The Arizona Daily Star

Southwest-area fires