The Fire We Dodged, Almost

This is a picture taken from my back yard on June 1, 2011.   We are looking at a plume of heat and smoke from the approaching Wallow Fire.  At this point the fire was about 2 miles away.  We know now that the fire started when a pair of campers left their camp and their fire, to hike into the forest.  That camp fire eventually burned over a half million acres of forest, destroying 32 homes, four businesses, and 36 other buildings.  The blaze cost more than $79 million to extinguish.

Alpine was evacuated for about three weeks.  During that time the Alpine Fire Department worked night and day and with the help of some municipal fire crews from other parts of the country managed to deal with the burning embers that continued to threaten homes.  Without that effort the loss of homes would have been over a hundred.

During much of the evacuation time Alpine was without electricity.  That meant that refrigerators and freezers stopped working and residents were not able to get back to empty them.  Residents returned to refrigerators and freezers full of rotting and stinking food and meat.  The food was discarded but there is no way to remove the stink from the appliances.  So a resident could easily loose several hundred dollars worth of food and be faced with replacing appliances with prices easily ranging from $500 for a stand alone freezer to $1200 and up for refrigerators.  Add to that the loss of income during the evacuation, and the cost of living away from home for  three weeks.

Environmentalists have worked hard to pass legislation to keep loggers out of the forest and to limit travel in the forest.  Part of the motivation being to protect endangered species, like the spotted owl.  In the end about half of the spotted owl nesting sites were destroyed by the fire.  Had the forest been thinned by logging much of the fuel that made this fire almost impossible to control might have been removed.  That in itself may not have prevented the fire, but it certainly would have made it easier to contain.  It's about time for bringing common sense to forest management, and to protecting endangered species and their habitat
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