Fire Danger: Extreme

Whether severe or mild, Nevada’s fire seasons require the work of a firefighting army to manage.

By CHARLIE JOHNSTON | November/December 2012

A January story in Carson City’s Nevada Appeal recounts the Washoe Drive Fire as seen through the eyes of a seasoned firefighter.

“In my 25 years of fighting structure and wildland fires, this is the worst fire I’ve come across,” Ben Rupert says in the piece by Teri Vance. “Because of the wind it was shooting in different directions. The wind was swirling, too. Just when you thought it was going one way, it would come at you from a different direction.”

Vance goes on to write that Rupert’s crew was the first to arrive at the fire and was met by a blaze unlike any Rupert had ever seen. “The smoke was so dark; you couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of you.” Rupert’s comments and the story conclude with a lament of the severely dry winter conditions that exacerbated the January blaze: “It’s like having a fire start in the middle of August.”

A press release sent to Nevada Magazine in mid-August stated that “during the past week in Nevada, lightning has produced 186 fires and burned about 252,000 acres.” The release goes on to include comments from Governor Brian Sandoval. “I am closely monitoring developments on all of the fires and working closely with our lead agencies to make certain all of our available resources have been deployed,” he says. “I would ask for the help of all residents and tourists alike…everyone must remain as vigilant as possible to ensure they do not inadvertently contribute to the problem through activities that could ignite a fire.”

As large and devastating as some of the 2012 fire season’s blazes have been, as frightening as first-hand accounts like Rupert’s are, and as much media attention as the fire season has garnered, it’s hard to believe that it’s not far from Nevada’s norm. Paul Petersen, Deputy State Fire Management Officer for the Bureau of Land Management, says that the nearly 1,000-fire count as of September is close to average, and that the total acreage burned this year is roughly only a third higher than usual—and remarkably less than the particularly damaging fire seasons of 2005, 2006, and 2007.

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“FIRE IS A YEAR-ROUND EVENT”

There is no denying that Nevada is a dry and wildfire-prone state. In the characteristically arid Great Basin and Inner Mountain West region, the Silver State stands out as a particularly parched place. The 2012 fire season saw record summertime heat, well-below-average precipitation, dismal snowpack in the mountains, and an abundance of tinder-dry fuel contribute to nearly 1,000 fires that had already charred roughly 650,000 acres by mid-September.

Actually, the term “fire season” is something of a misnomer. According to Petersen and Rich Harvey, Deputy State Forester for the Nevada Division of Forestry, the 2012 fire season was, for all intents and purposes, a continuation of a 2011 fire season that carried on well past the typical fire danger peak of late summer. “Fire is a year-round event,” Harvey says. “Fire seasons are getting longer, and fires are getting bigger.”

Such an assertion is given credence by current events, such as the pair of uncommonly devastating blazes that stunned southwest Reno and nearby Washoe and Pleasant Valleys last fall and winter. Both the November 2011 Caughlin Fire and January 2012 Washoe Drive Fire were fueled by extremely dry conditions and pushed by winds nearing 80 mph, and both occurred during months that generally see relatively low fire danger in the region. Combined, the two fires burned more than 5,000 acres, damaged or completely destroyed 74 homes and structures, caused in excess of $20 million in property damage, cost state and federal firefighting agencies nearly $3 million to suppress, and took two lives. Photo: Dini Esplin

While the Caughlin and Washoe Drive Fires’ unusual timing and proximity to the state’s second-largest metropolitan area resulted in widespread panic and brought the blazes enormous attention, their sizes pale in comparison to other wildfires that have afflicted the state this year. The Holloway Fire, for example, burned more than 460,000 acres in northwestern Nevada and southeastern Oregon between August 5 and 21; that’s a piece of land roughly the same size as Douglas County.

Despite the severity and size of recent blazes such as the Caughlin, Holloway, and Washoe Drive Fires, when compared to some fire seasons just in the last decade, 2012 hasn’t even been all that bad. The Western Great Basin Coordination Center is the interagency focal point for coordinating resource mobilization for wildland fires in the Great Basin—basically, it’s where all of Nevada’s firefighting agencies come together to share information and efforts. According to the center, 1.7 million acres of the Silver State—an area about 20 times larger than the City of Las Vegas—went up in flames in 2005. About 1.3 million acres burned in 2006, and 2007 saw just shy of 900,000 acres burn.

As immense as all this devastation sounds, it would be a lot worse if not for the focused and concerted firefighting efforts of local, state, and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and Nevada Division of Forestry. “Firefighters are the only people on earth that are trying to actually stop natural disasters,” Petersen says. “And we love doing it.”

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NEVADA’S FIRE LEGACY

From long using it as an ally and a tool to the never-ending struggle against it as an adversary, fire has been intertwined in human history longer than human history has been recorded. Fire has played a substantial—and often devastating—role in Nevada’s history, too. Towns that sprang up overnight during the state’s early gold and silver booms were cramped jumbles of mostly wood buildings that were almost always heated with wood-burning stoves and fireplaces and lit by oil lanterns. It comes as little surprise that many such towns were frequently afflicted with fire.

An October 1875 fire destroyed two thirds of Virginia City along with the city’s fledgling fire department, which lost all of its equipment and most of its firehouses. While the city rebuilt thanks to the mineral wealth of the still-productive Comstock Lode, it never fully recovered. Genoanevada.org, the tourism website for one of Nevada’s oldest and most storied towns, mentions a fire that occurred in June 1910 as “the most significant event in the history of Genoa.” The blaze destroyed many of the town’s businesses and the courthouse and is considered the catalyst for Genoa losing the county seat six years later after failing to fully recover from the damages. Verdi, a few miles west of Reno on the Truckee River, has been plagued by more than 20 substantial blazes in its 150-year history, including a 1926 fire that effectively crippled the town and brought an end to its days as an active railroad stop.

Outside of its history of tinderbox boomtowns, Nevada’s open land is highly prone to fire as well. A wide variety of fuel sources, from fast-burning grasses and shrubs in the valleys to forested mountainsides, combine to make fires in the state especially unpredictable and dangerous, according to Harvey. “Cheatgrass and other invasive species make it even worse,” he says. “Cheatgrass is uniquely adapted to be a really good fuel.” Harvey says that the abundance and dryness of those fuel sources are good indicators of the potential severity of a given fire season. Petersen adds that frequently high winds and fast-burning fuel types mean that Nevada fires are especially inclined to rapid spreading and “phenomenal” growth.

As unlikely as it sounds, Nevada’s predisposition to large and dangerous fires has actually resulted in some good, too. According to Petersen, a massive fire that originated near Beowawe in Eureka County in the 1960s and eventually spread north to the Idaho border (about 100 miles in a straight line) changed the way that firefighting agencies around the country approached battling wildland fires. As Petersen tells the story, there wasn’t much coordination between national agencies when the Beowawe fire struck, and procuring the resources and manpower to fight it as it crossed the border into Idaho proved problematic.

As a result, nationwide coordination was established and, today, firefighting agencies around the country share information and resources readily and with unparalleled efficiency. That coordination means Nevada fire engine crews often fight fires as far away as Louisiana, and crews from Maine were able to give a helping hand at the Holloway Fire in Nevada and Oregon in August, according to Petersen. So efficient is the nationwide coordination system, in fact, that Petersen says a fire crew from across the country could be mobilized within 30 minutes of an initial request.

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LIKE FIGHTING A WAR

Harvey was the incident commander at last summer’s Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado, a blaze that raged out of control for more than two weeks, drew forces from all around the country (including Nevada), and destroyed hundreds of homes in Colorado Springs. While Harvey is reluctant to draw parallels between fires and wars because he has never fought a war himself, the brass at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs weren’t so hesitant to make such comparisons when lauding the efforts of Harvey and the other firefighters who saved their city and base.

Comparing the efforts involved in fighting fires to those of fighting wars is an increasingly common and apt refrain. The enemy is surely different, but many of the strategies share common ground: containing a fire by preemptively destroying fuel in its path is akin to cutting off an enemy’s line of supply. Building a containment line around the perimeter of a fire to work it back on itself and stamp out hotspots is the firefighting equivalent of flanking an opposing force, and understanding and using topography and geographical features is as vital to firefighters as to soldiers. Beyond these and other literal tactical parallels, the two share logistical similarities as well.

Effective and prompt containment of a fire requires more than engine and hand crews battling flames. Like a military operation, firefighters on the ground (the total number of which can vary from a couple hundred to several thousand depending on the size and severity of a given fire) are just one part of an operation that includes 10 to 50 incident command staff who will probably not so much as see flames while fighting a fire. “A lot of logistics and coordination go into building a fire camp [incident command center],” Petersen says. “Basically we build a small city in 24 hours. This city has all the functions of a normal city: food, sanitation, supplies, fuel, news…it serves as a firefighter’s home away from home until the incident is complete and disappears as quickly as it was born after the fire is controlled.”

Rich Machado is a Bureau of Land Management Seasonal Engine Operator with three seasons of experience; he points to concise and accurate radio communication between firefighters on the ground, firefighting aircraft, and incident command radio operators as a key component to safely and successfully extinguishing a fire. Photo: Ryan Jerz

Petersen agrees that such communication is vital, not only for effectiveness and safety, but also because firefighting—especially when it involves aircraft—is very expensive. “The BLM has spent $41 million fighting fires so far in 2012,” Petersen says in a September interview. “We’ll spend $60-80 million fighting fires in an average year.” He walks through a few simple calculations to show just how quickly the costs add up.

The aforementioned Holloway Fire in August took about 600 incident command staff and firefighters 12 days to contain. Six hundred people working 16-hour shifts for 12 days comes to 115,200 hours. At $27.80 an hour (the hourly mean wage for a firefighter in Nevada as of May 2011 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), the bill just for compensating employees comes to more than $3.2 million, which doesn’t even account for the enormous amount of overtime accrued. Start adding all the other associated costs—fuel, equipment, supplies, an aircraft or two at $10,000-$40,000 a day, $8,000-$16,000 an hour, and up to $15,000 a drop—and the costs skyrocket. And that’s just one fire. Petersen sums up the logistical challenges of firefighting well: “It’s a million little hurdles to get to one final goal.”

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“FIRE IS NOT JUST FLAMES”

While the most visible part of what firefighters and firefighting agencies do is to put out fires, Harvey aptly points out that, “Fire is not just flames.” In addition to charring large swaths of land and threatening the safety of Nevadans and their property, wildfires adversely affect air and water quality, destroy crucial habitat of endangered and at-risk wildlife such as sage grouse, and interrupt commerce by causing highway and interstate closures. Putting them out quickly can help to minimize these impacts, but Harvey and Petersen agree that firefighting agencies are most interested in having fewer fires to fight. “The best way to deal with fire is to not have it,” Harvey says.

An increasingly large focus of the BLM, the Nevada Division of Forestry, and firefighting agencies around the nation is to build what Harvey calls a comprehensive protection program focused on preventing fires with community education and planning, intelligent management of fuels, and maintenance of forests and rangeland. “About a third of fires in Nevada this year were human caused,” Petersen says.

While Harvey points out that the number of fires started by people in Nevada is vastly less than states where upwards of 80 percent of fires are traced to human negligence or, worse, intent, both agree that there is ample room for improvement. “We’re seeing far more human-caused fires than we used to,” Petersen says. He says that various restrictions based on fire danger in regions of the state help to decrease the instance of human-culprit fires, but they are hard to enforce and it is up to individuals to make intelligent choices. “We’re seeing a lot of fires caused by stupid human tricks,” he says, specifically mentioning the use of exploding targets in sport shooting and operating off-road vehicles in places with restrictions against them. Photo: Kippy Spilker

Organizations such as Living With Fire, an interagency collaboration aimed at offering all Nevadans tools and resources to educate themselves about methods of mitigating fire risks, play an important role in reducing the dangers posed and damage caused by fires. Harvey is a big advocate of pre-planning and creating and maintaining defensible space. Defensible space, whether it’s building homes with fire-resistant materials, proper management of vegetation surrounding buildings, or fuel breaks to separate developed land from the range helps prevent wildfires from damaging property and makes it easier for fire crews to do their jobs safely and promptly. “Fire prevention is a quality-of-life issue,” Harvey says. “The better we are at managing wildland fires in Nevada, the better Nevada is for everyone.”