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Let It Burn?
For the forest, fire can be beneficial. Sequoias, Bishop pines, and other plants need fire to regenerate. When burning at low intensity, fire often clears out underbrush and unhealthy trees, reducing the potential for destructive high-intensity fires, while opening the canopy so the remaining trees can thrive.

“I hear a lot of people--ecologists, fire managers--saying that these [June 20] fires are doing a lot of good,” said J. Morgan Varner III, an assistant professor of wildland fire management at Humboldt State University. “A lot of them are in places where they would have done prescribed burning, anyway, so this is just saving the cost and bureaucracy involved in that. In the long run they’ll be great for plant and animal diversity.”

As the beneficial effects of fire have come to be more widely appreciated, the West’s long-standing policy of suppressing all wildfires has given way to one that includes prescribed burns and even allows some wildfires on public lands to burn themselves out. Prescribed burns are done under strictly controlled conditions, however, when the weather and air quality are favorable. Otherwise, the smoke can spread far and wide, Varner said. “It’s an acute health risk.”

“One of the biggest problems with letting wildfires burn is that you can’t control for weather conditions,” he added. Even prescribed burns have sometimes gone out of control when the weather suddenly changed. Not surprisingly, therefore, local fire departments and area residents are often unwilling to take a chance on letting wildfires burn. Cal Fire, responsible for protecting privately owned wildlands, never allows fires to burn out on their own if it has resources available to fight them.

No Help to Send
June 24, four days after the electrical storm, three good-sized fires were burning on or threatening to burn forests owned by the Conservation Fund, which had mobilized staff and contractors but was still hoping for more help from Cal Fire. That evening, Griffin talked to a representative who spelled it out for her: there was no help to send. “‘If I was a private landowner,’” she recalled the Cal Fire spokesperson telling her, “‘I would be out mustering all the resources I could find.’ I was really alarmed.”

But muster resources they did: at the height of the effort, the Fund had as many as 53 contractors on the firelines, including hand crews and foresters, as well as several staff. Equipment contractors operated eight bulldozers and seven water tankers, and a helicopter was on standby for four days, unable to fly due to smoke and fog. They joined crews from the Mendocino Redwood Company, which owns most of the land on which the Navarro Fire was burning and had hired professional firefighters and equipment from both in and out of state. Altogether, Mendocino Redwood had about 170 people, including employees and longtime contractors, fighting fires on its lands. Together with Tunzi’s Comptche crew and other local fire departments, the private landowners fought to create a defensible perimeter around the Navarro Fire.

On June 26, with the fires going strong, a Cal Fire spokesperson in Mendocino told me: “We have requested more resources, but have no idea when we might get them. All the resources available are being used throughout California.”

Fortunately, a second electrical storm predicted for the weekend of June 28 did not materialize and--unusually for that time of year--there was little wind. When the Comptche crew was pulled off the Navarro Fire, after 11 days, they were mostly doing mop-up, putting out hot spots. Fires continued to rage in several areas around the state, most notably near Big Sur and the town of Paradise in Butte County.

On June 28, President Bush declared a state of emergency in California. At the peak of the fires, more than 25,000 personnel--including firefighters from across the United States, Canada, Australia, Greece, New Zealand, and Samoa--would be called in. In Downieville at the end of July, the flag flew at half mast in honor of two fire fighters from Washington State who perished, one in Trinity County, one near Yosemite. By the time they were brought under control, the blazes had burned more than one million acres.

It was still only the beginning of the fire season.

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