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Trees near telescopes thinned despite enviros

The Nuttall Fire's threat to Mount Graham's telescopes prompted fire crews to clear 1,000 to 1,500 trees around the site and complete in a few days a thinning proposal many environmentalists had vowed to fight prior to the blaze. Fire managers, telescope officials and the Forest Service scientist who drafted the thinning plan said it had to be done - before or during a fire - so flames and heat wouldn't damage the $200 million complex. The Gibson Fire was spreading from treetop to treetop Tuesday evening in a crown fire, but when it reached the area around the telescopes that had been thinned, flames dropped to the ground, said Jack Cohen of the Forest Service's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, one of the nation's leading experts on defending structures from wildfire. Had the trees not been removed, the inferno would have come within 50 feet of the $110 million Large Binocular Telescope and "would very likely have caused at least some external damage," he said. But some activists who fought the telescopes in the 1980s and 1990s believe suppression tactics meant to protect the observatories have done more damage to endangered Mount Graham red squirrels than the wildfire itself. All the thinning around the telescopes was done in federally designated critical habitat for the imperiled rodent. "When these fires are done, they'll be celebrating at the university because they've achie-ved what they hoped for," said Robin Silver of the Center for Biological Diversity, a telescope foe for two decades. "Supreme firefighting efforts to save their telescopes created a protective barrier for them at significant cost for the forest and the squirrel." Asked Thursday if fire managers had the right priorities on Mount Graham, Gov. Janet Napolitano said, "I have no reason to question how they're going about this fire. "The telescope array up there is a multi-hundred-million-dollar complex, probably some of the most significant telescope setups in the world for interplanetary research," she said. "When you have a structure like that, you obviously have to do everything you can to protect it." The telescope complex's 8.6-acre footprint and the surrounding forest has been one of the most-litigated and contentious patches of land in the Southwest. But in the past few days, the top of the Pinalenos has been transformed in a way not seen since 1685, the year of the last stand-replacing wildfire in Southern Arizona's most extensive spruce-fir forest. Before the fire, telescope workers were forbidden from entering the surrounding forest and any felling of trees faced lengthy governmental reviews. The UA did gain clearance over the past two years to clear about 850 trees 100 feet out from the telescopes. The UA then proposed extending that work another 100 feet, asking the Coro-nado National Forest to approve the project with only a limited environmental study. The proposal was still under review when the Nuttall and Gibson fires began, but once flames neared the telescopes, fire managers were able to use their emergency authority to essentially complete the project. "If anything, they've done a little bit more than we would have," said Anna Spitz, special assistant to the director of the UA's Steward Observatory. The UA didn't formally request that firefighters thin the forest, she said, and nearly all the trees removed were already dead from insects. Firefighters also cleared along a Forest Service road near the telescopes, perhaps using bulldozers, and set intentional fires to consume fuel before the main fire did, Spitz said. "If they hadn't done this, the fire would have come over and taken everything out. This way they hoped to save some of the area," Spitz said. The two smaller telescopes may have needed only a 100-foot buffer, but the 13-story Large Binocular Telescope required more clearance, Cohen said. "When you get something sticking up in the air 130 to 150 feet, 200 feet away is not that huge," he said. But critics contend the squirrel would have suffered less damage from the natural fire were it not for the telescopes and efforts to defend them. "They've sterilized an area that's now a 200-foot radius around what was supposed to be their 8.6-acre limitation," Silver said. "Of course they're taking advantage of the situation." "This once again proves the university was wrong when they said the telescopes wouldn't harm the squirrels," added Scotty Johnson of Defenders of Wildlife. After the April 1996 Clark Peak Fire, which charred 6,716 acres and burned within 200 yards of two telescopes, Silver filed public-records requests to determine what damage had been done to squirrels. Years later, documents he received from the Forest Service estimated that 27 squirrels were killed by the fire or through its suppression. A survey this spring estimated the Pinalenos' squirrel population at 284. Deputy incident commander Paul Summerfelt said the trees may have been 200 to 300 years old, and firefighters were advised which to cut by two resource officers from the Coronnado National Forest. He said the intentional fires would be less intense and damaging to squirrel habitat than the wildfire. "It's a Catch-22," said John Koprowski, head of the UA's squirrel-monitoring project. While intentional fires might hurt some individual squirrels, he said, they're likely to benefit the larger population if they stop the blaze from spreading. Red squirrels' lives center on middens, the piles of debris where squirrels cache their pine cones and other food. Although the middens are on the forest floor, they typically survive ground fires because they're cool and moist inside, Koprowski said. Damage to the mountaintop and squirrels may not be known for weeks, but forestry and fire experts said it was clear the Pinalenos were enduring some of their most profound changes in centuries. "It's going to be something very similar to what occurred in 1685," said Henri Grissino-Mayer, a tree-ring researcher at the University of Tennessee who extensively studied Mount Graham while at the UA. Lower-elevation forests of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer trees used to burn once or twice a decade, but the cooler, damper spruce-fir forest's fire cycle is 200 to 300 years, he said. When that forest burns, it's usually a stand-replacing event. "This is a good thing for the mountain, and it's bound to happen," he said. "There are refugia on that mountain where squirrels can escape to, and they've done that in the past."