In Arizona’s high desert, chaparral and forested landscapes, wildland firefighters are practicing their skills and preparing for fire season. Near Cherry and elsewhere around the Quad Cities area, the sound of chainsaws can be heard as Hot Shots cut trees, clear brush and stack debris that could fuel a wildfire.
Meanwhile, forest ecologists are reminding all those who live in and near Arizona’s wildlands to make their property fire safe.
“One of the problems that I’ve seen around Prescott and in other areas, too, is that people often will start out in a big way about being fire wise,” said Wally Covington, Ph.D., Regents’ professor of forest ecology at Northern Arizona University and director of the Ecological Restoration Institute. “But then a few years pass and there are no fires in the area. Then five years pass and then by 10 years, the house is in the middle of a big fuel matrix again that would be a fire threat. So this is one of those things you have to stay on top of. You can’t just do it once and you’re done.”
Covington says the fuel moisture in Arizona’s forests is moderate right now, wet enough to prevent a wildfire from spreading. But, he added, “We’ve been this way before when we’ve had very big fires.”
Those big fires – 100,000 acres or more – are sometimes called “mega fires.” These are defined as intense, unnatural firestorms that burn everything from the soil on up into the treetops, killing old growth trees, destroying wildlife habitat and eroding watersheds.
Covington has devoted his career to studying forest health and raising awareness about the unhealthy condition of southwestern forests largely caused by the exclusion of fire. In the 1980s, he and fire officials from the state and the Forest Service studied the fuel accumulation across Arizona, especially Northern Arizona.
“As we looked at those, I could clearly see five major areas where large fires could occur. Now at that time, we’d had no fires in excess of 100,000 acres. Big fires back then were 4,000-acre, 5,000-acre fires, but as we looked at fuel accumulation, what I saw was the potential for five mega fires.”
Since then, Arizona has experienced three fires in those five areas determined to be at risk: the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire near Show Low that burned nearly half a million acres; the 2011 Wallow fire near Alpine, which was the state’s largest fire at more than half a million acres; and the 2014 Slide fire in Oak Creek Canyon that burned more than 21,000 acres and threatened the Flagstaff area. Covington says forest restoration treatments put in place some 12 years earlier by the Coconino National Forest kept the Slide Fire from burning into Flagstaff.
“We still have several major fire alleys. One is the whole Prescott complex of pine mixed with oak and chaparral,” said Covington. “So that’s a major complex that is yet to have a mega fire.”
Another area at risk for wildfire, he says, is the Payson area and up toward Winslow.
To prevent these kinds of fires, forest managers are strategically treating areas by thinning excess trees and burning forest debris to break up the landscape and build in defensible space where firefighters can be effective. Covington remains hopeful that large-scale ecological restoration efforts will do more than simply reduce fuel hazards and return much of Arizona’s forests to a more natural, sustainable condition. However, major forest health projects will take time.
“At the local scale, where people are living, the idea is to keep fuels away from your back door,” he said. “We’ve got very good programs throughout Arizona to do that, to thin out and remove fuels from around homes, to be sure that your woodpiles are not close to the house, that your gutters are cleaned out and that you build with fire-wise materials.”
Arizona’s fire season typically occurs between May 15 and June 30. To learn more about how to reduce your home’s risk for wildfire damage visit http://www.firewise.org/. QCBN
By Bonnie Stevens
Quad Cities Business News
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