On the night of Friday, June 20, a rare spring electrical storm rolled in over most of northern California. Jenny Griffin recalled how beautiful it was to watch the dry lightning dance over the ocean from her home in Caspar, a tiny town on the coast just north of Mendocino. “Then I went to bed and had a blissful night’s sleep.” It was the last good sleep she, and many others, would have for a while. That night and into the morning hours, thousands of lightning strikes hit northern California--some estimates were as high as 6,500--and ignited more than 2,000 fires, including more than 130 in Mendocino County.

Early the next morning, Larry Tunzi, chief of the volunteer fire department for the little town of Comptche, 17 miles inland from Mendocino, was out in his truck scouting for fires in his district. As he drove he could see new ones springing up along the ridges and in the valleys--"a bunch of them." He knew then that his department was in for trouble. It was early in the fire season, when the forests were usually still green and moist, but spring 2008 had been the driest on record in northern California.

Griffin first heard of the fires at 10 a.m., when a forester called to tell her that there was one in the Salmon Creek Forest, on land owned by the Conservation Fund, where she works as a program manager. The Fund, a national nonprofit organization, owns three tracts of formerly industrial timberland in the Mendocino area, almost 40,000 acres in all, which it is trying to restore to healthy forests that can be harvested with a light hand and an eye to long-term sustainability. It had approval from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) for a timber harvest plan on its Salmon Creek property in July. Two others, for its Garcia River and Big River Forests, were approved for later in the year.

It soon became clear that there were many fires in the area, though just how many, and where, was difficult to tell. Griffin called contractors to try to round up firefighting help, then drove to Salmon Creek. There she found Rick Hautala already at work.

Hautala, a licensed timber operator, had been one of the first to get to the fire’s point of origin. “When I came around the corner on the road, flames were shooting 30 feet in the air,” he later said. Cal Fire firefighters were also present when Griffin arrived, but the agenncy soon had to shift most of its people and equipment to other, higher-priority blazes. So many fires were burning throughout the northern part of the state that Cal Fire had begun to refer to many of them as fire complexes. Some of the biggest were in Mendocino, Lake, Monterey, Trinity, and Shasta counties.

Tunzi and Cal Fire, together, determined that the Salmon Creek blaze, which was burning on Navarro Ridge and would become known as the Navarro Fire, was the highest priority for Tunzi’s 22-person volunteer crew--the fire closest and most threatening to Comptche. When Cal Fire pulled out, Tunzi was made incident commander.

Firefighting departments throughout the state help each other out when conditions require it, under a mutual aid system coordinated by Cal Fire. Typically, county and local fire departments are not responsible for wildland fires like the Navarro: those are under Cal Fire’s jurisdiction. Now, however, Cal Fire was forced to do triage. Fires that threatened lives and structures were top priority, so many--such as those in forests near Caspar--were fought primarily by county and local firefighters and contractors hired by landowners. Some in areas far from population centers were left to burn unattended.

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
By 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.

Fragmented Forests
Even though the wildfire series sparked by the June 20 lightning storm was highly unusual, bigger, more intense fires are becoming the norm in California. Fuel loads in the forests are high, fed by years of fire suppression, drought, and insect infestations. Fire seasons are getting longer, and global warming will increase that trend, bringing earlier springs, higher temperatures, and less snowfall in the Sierra.

As a result, the demands on California’s firefighting resources have been spiraling upward in recent years. According to a March 2007 report by the Legislative Analyst, Cal Fire’s fire protection expenditures increased by 83 percent in the decade between 1996-97 and 2006-07, from $475 million to $869 million.

Perhaps the major cause of growing fire hazard, and of the skyrocketing cost of fire suppression throughout the West, is the penetration and fragmentation of forests by humans seeking to own a house or cabin of their own in the wild. While fire has a major role to play in an intact forest ecosystem, once humans--especially urban or suburban ones--are added to the mix, allowing wildfires to burn tends to be excluded as an option.

“People are moving further and further out into the wilderness, and they’re not cattle ranchers” who know how to protect their own property, said William Stewart, a forestry specialist at U.C. Berkeley. “They’re from Orinda; they expect urban-level fire services.” When such houses are threatened and the area has not been evacuated, Stewart said, firefighters “park an engine at each house--and each truck that’s parked in a driveway is not on the fire lines.” And more people mean more fires: most fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface are sparked by human activities.

One of the main reasons the Conservation Fund bought the Salmon River property was to prevent such forest fragmentation. “I believe that had Salmon Creek not gone to the Conservation Fund, it would have been developed out the ridges,” said Darcie Mahoney, a contractor who is head forester for Salmon Creek. “That’s what happened to another nearby property.”

Adapting to Fire
Increasingly, public officials, agency staff, and fire experts around the state are asking: Is the state prepared to protect all of the residents now living in or moving into remote, fire-prone areas? Should it be?

Many experts believe that instead of throwing more and more resources into fighting wildfires, we need to change how we think about them and examine our own role in creating disasters. We need to learn to adapt to fire and allow it to regain its natural place in the landscape.

“We have to start examining how we’ve set the stage for human disaster.” said Jack Cohen, a research physical scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. “Without people, fires are just natural disturbances, not natural disasters.”

One key is for local governments to restrict where and how residents can build homes in rural areas. If a county chooses to allow wildland development, it should be responsible for providing, or at least paying for, services like fire protection, Stewart said. “In California, if people don’t want to finance their own local fire district, the state becomes the fire district. States like Oregon charge people for that.”

A bill introduced this year by Assemblyman Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), AB 2447, would be a big step toward accomplishing that: it would require counties to certify, before approving new subdivisions in the wildland-urban interface, that adequate local fire protection exists--or contract with Cal Fire to provide it. The bill is still being considered in the Senate.

Perhaps most important, residents of rural and fire-prone communities need to be better prepared for the big fires that will inevitably come, and take measures to protect themselves, such as replacing shingle roofs with metal ones and clearing away flammable materials from around their homes. Research by Cohen and others has shown that the principal cause of home loss during wildfires is the flammability of the home and its surroundings rather than the wildfire itself. Most people think that a wall of wildfire comes rolling through the community and destroys the houses, but that’s not what happens, Cohen said. Rather, the wildfire provides the initial ignition, but the houses themselves provide the fuel that spreads it to other houses. It doesn’t need to be that way: “We can readily make changes on and around our houses to make them more resistant to ignition.”

California has stricter building codes for new construction within high-fire-risk zones, but many older wildland communities are still extremely fire-prone. “The Tahoe Basin is littered with houses that will burn,” Varner said--homes with cedar shakes on their roofs, decks littered with pine needles and overhung by branches, wood stacked up against the walls. “We know how to keep houses from burning,” said Stephen Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in fire history. “So why do we still let people build with combustible roofs?”

In Australia, rural homeowners learn how to prepare for fires and are then encouraged to stay and defend their homes, if they are able and willing. Studies have shown that most houses are ignited by wind-blown embers and spot fires that well-trained homeowners can put out on their own.

Historically, ranchers and other rural dwellers in the West defended their own properties from fire, but “we’ve gotten away from that here; now the government does it for you,” said Pyne. He stresses, however, that people must be properly trained and their homes and land prepared.

“We’re always going to have extreme wildfires, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer the same level of destruction,” said Cohen. What we need to do, he said, is let go of our belief that through technology and sheer manpower we can bring every wildfire under control, and focus instead on protecting the things we value within the fire zone. “If we continually view the problem as a wildfire problem--as one of wildfire control and prevention--we’re not going to keep the houses from burning.”

Aftermath
On July 9, I stood with Jenny Griffin and Rick Hautala on a dirt road in the Salmon Creek Forest, looking out across a steep drainage at the Navarro Fire’s point of origin. The vista was oddly wintry, despite the day’s heat: ash made it appear as if a snowfall had blanketed the steep slopes, and the dense smoke still hung in the air.

Here and there we could see wisps of smoke--and sometimes a good-sized billow--where hot spots were still flaring up. Hautala and others were putting them out, as well as digging water-bars (angled trenches) across the new roads bulldozed by the fire crews, to divert rainfall, and seeding and putting down straw on slopes to control erosion.

Considering the magnitude of the blazes statewide, Mendocino residents were lucky. One volunteer firefighter died of a heart attack, but otherwise no lives were lost and only two structures were destroyed. The Fund was lucky as well: The Indian Fire burned only one acre of its Big River Forest, stopped by a creek, low winds, and Cal Fire firebreaks. The Jack Fire burned 717 acres of its Garcia River Forest, but it was a less damaging low-intensity blaze. The Navarro Fire burned 461 acres of the 4,300-acre Salmon Creek Forest and badly scorched some areas that had been clearcut by the previous landowner. These areas will have to be replanted and closely watched for erosion.

The bulldozers disturbed a lot of ground that must be stabilized before the rains come. “The amount of dirt pushed around on a fire is staggering,” Griffin said. They have already put down several hundred bales of weed-free straw mulch and have started planting seed mix. “We’ve got our work cut out for us in the next few weeks, to figure out what needs to be done, and without doing any additional ecological damage,” Smith had told me.

The fires did not reach any of the areas the Fund plans to harvest this year, though some of the areas that did burn were planned for harvest in 2009, 2011, and 2012. It’s too early to tell how much merchantable timber was lost.

Fighting the three fires cost the Fund more than $400,000, mostly for the equipment, but Cal Fire is expected to reimburse most of that. On July 24, Smith said the financial impact of the fires on the Fund’s budget was “modest.”

One important source of income for the Fund, about equal to what comes in from timber sales, is carbon credits, and as counterintuitive as it may seem, Smith said, the fires probably won’t affect these too much. Most of what burned was needles and understory, while most carbon is stored in the trees’ trunks and roots. A forest’s carbon credits are measured by the amount of carbon it accumulates over and above that which is stored by forests that are managed according to standard forestry rules. The credits can be sold to companies, organizations, and individuals who want to offset the effects of their own carbon emissions. The Garcia Forest was one of the first, and largest, forests to have its carbon credits verified by the California Climate Action Registry, and they have “turned out to be an incredibly important tool for us,” Smith said.

Toward More Resilient Forests
The Conservation Fund’s efforts to restore the logged-over Salmon Creek Forest to health, sustain itself economically by selective logging and carbon credits, and protect endangered species have only begun. Restoration efforts include stabilizing or decommissioning old fire roads, replanting slopes clearcut by previous owners, mapping owl nests, removing invasive plants, and flagging sensitive plants near roads to protect them. The Fund is also conducting water-quality monitoring in its watersheds and will put logs in streams to provide habitat for fish.

When the Fund conducts a harvest, it takes care to minimize ground disturbance, especially on steep slopes. It is hands-on work, in contrast to industrial harvests. Last fall, a group touring the Salmon Creek Forest to observe the practices watched in awe as Rick Hautala took down a redwood tree on a steep slope beside a logging road, wielding his chainsaw with the delicacy of a fine woodworker. He showed the watchers in advance where it would fall, across the road, and dropped it exactly where he said he would, barely touching the surrounding bushes.

The light-handed harvesting and good forest management practices used by the Fund, Redwood Forest Foundation, Pacific Forest Trust, Mendocino Redwood Company, and other sustainable forest managers not only restore the forests to a much healthier state, but will also make them more resilient to wildfires. In areas of its forests that were intensively harvested by past owners, the Fund removes weedy tan oak and thins the conifers that have grown back too densely. This reduces the fuel load and opens the canopy, leaving the best trees to grow bigger: larger trees, with thicker bark, can survive fire much better than small ones. “Our high-value forest didn’t burn” in the recent fires, Smith told me. “That’s more resilient.”

Even more heartening, the spotted owls that live in the Salmon Creek Forest don’t seem to have suffered from the fire--and may even be gaining some benefit from it. “The fire doesn’t appear to have burned any nesting habitat,” said biologist Mike Stephens, who studies owls on the Fund’s land (see Into the Woods with Spotted Owls), “and the owls are using the burned area for hunting.” The fire opened up the canopy, making it easier for the owls to hunt, and has also sent the birds’ primary prey, dusky-footed woodrats, scurrying around looking for new homes. “It’s had the effect, if you will, of kicking over the anthill.” And when the rains come this fall, there will be lots of new growth in the forest, potentially spurring a woodrat population explosion.

The Navarro Fire did some damage to the Salmon Creek Forest--mostly to land that had been clearcut in the past--but it has brought some good, too. Throughout northern California, many of the recent fires will have done the same, clearing out piles of dry underbrush and dead wood, opening up the forest so the remaining trees can thrive, and bringing vibrant new growth. The fires have also given Californians a glimpse of their future, and brought home the need to find new ways of living with fire.