After Grand Canyon fire, forest experts say managed burns still needed
- A wildfire destroyed a historic lodge at the Grand Canyon's North Rim and some political leaders want to know if the fire was mismanaged.
- One fire expert said officials should approach policy changes carefully because controlled burns are still critical to forest health.
- An environmentalist who works on Grand Canyon issues said fires are often managed successfully and can help prevent bigger blazes.
A wildfire’s destruction of the beloved Grand Canyon Lodge and extended closure of the national park’s North Rim have fast turned the government’s handling of the lightning-ignited blaze into a political issue with potential implications for federal wildfire policy.
Fire experts and forest health advocates say they fear the calamity surrounding the Dragon Bravo Fire could set back decades of progress on managing natural and prescribed fires to restore forests suffering from a century of excessive fire suppression. That’s what happened when officials became fire-wary after a 2000 wildfire in New Mexico that the National Park Service ignited for fuel-reduction purposes only to watch it go on a costly rampage into the city of Los Alamos.
“I hope this doesn’t lead to a similar kind of reaction,” said Stephen Pyne, an environmental historian and wildfire expert who worked 15 years on a Grand Canyon fire crew on the North Rim from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The pine forests around the Canyon need fire to thin fuels built up over many decades of all-out suppression that thwarted low-intensity fire’s natural healing powers, the Arizona State University emeritus professor said.
“We need to do what we need to do,” he said, “and we need to do it well.”
Whether the National Park Service conducted its managed fire well is now a matter that Arizona politicians intend to investigate. The agency for days treated the July 4 lightning ignition as a controlled burn, the sort that could do some ecological good. An unusual series of northwest wind gusts on July 11 drove the fire onto the developed Canyon peninsula and destroyed the 1934 Grand Canyon Lodge and associated buildings, according to the fire incident team.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for a federal investigation. She noted that the calamity will not only harm “one of Arizona’s most cherished landmarks,” but also businesses catering to visitors. Besides the lodge, the fire torched the park’s water treatment plant, releasing dangerous chlorine gas. The North Rim, the more remote and lesser-visited of the park’s developed areas, will be closed for the rest of the season.
“An incident of this magnitude demands intense oversight and scrutiny into the federal government’s emergency response,” Hobbs said in a statement. “They must first take aggressive action to end the wildfire and prevent further damage. But Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park. While the flame was started with a lightning strike, the federal government chose to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer."
Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, followed with a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum demanding an investigation. They noted that the North Rim “has had weeks of extreme heat warnings, and is coming off of an extremely dry winter.” They also referred to the 2006 Warm Fire, another example of a managed burn that got out of control in the area, burning 59,000 acres, though no structures.
“We cannot allow these decisions to damage thousands of acres in northern Arizona, risk the health and safety of residents, and destroy landmarks like the historic Grand Canyon Lodge,” the senators wrote.
One fire shouldn't overshadow other successes, advocate says
An environmentalist who has tracked the region’s forest health issues for years said managing natural fire is the most cost-effective way to reduce fuels and return balance to the land, and that the park has been a leader in doing it effectively.
“While there’s much to learn from this tragedy, a single incident like this shouldn’t overshadow or upend what’s been a decades-long success story,” said Taylor McKinnon, Southwest director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Retreating to a blanket policy of fire suppression would only add to the tragedy. It’s a de facto policy for the hottest possible fires, where the only large fires that burn are those too hot to stop.”
McKinnon knows about the special place that the North Rim, and the lodge in particular, hold for Arizonans and visitors. He said it’s the place where he proposed to his wife. It’s also special to Pyne, who both met and married his wife there when he was a firefighter and she worked in a cafeteria.
The lodge was a gathering place, Pyne said, where his crews would occasionally eat and drink, then “go down and watch the lightning storms over the Canyon and anticipate the fires we would work.”
He is not ready to pass judgment on the Park Service so soon. It’s unclear exactly how they managed the fire during its controlled stage, he said, whether they tried to steer it to the most desirable places or just watched and waited.
The latter is usually a mistake, he said. The smart approach is to build fire lines to push the flames away from areas in need of protection, and ignite other areas to pull them toward desired areas that end in natural fire breaks.
“This is allowed,” he said. “It’s a critical strategy for surviving the future on our public lands.
“The amount of burning is increasing” with climate change, Pyne said. “In some ways it needs to increase. We need to have a lot more good fire. We need to contain the bad fires.”
Mixed messages from Trump on wildfire
A National Park Service spokesperson provided The Arizona Republic with a statement saying the agency had actively worked the fire from the start: "Firefighters had constructed containment lines and were prepared to conduct a defensive firing operation before conditions rapidly changed." The Southwest Area Complex Management Team 4, the interagency team now coordinating a full suppression effort with hundreds of firefighters, also reported on the Inciweb fire information site that the Park Service sought to guide the fire early on.
“The fire was initially managed with a confine and contain strategy, which included multiple containment features to protect structures, facilities and infrastructure,” the incident team reported. “Firefighters had constructed containment lines and were prepared to conduct a defensive firing operation before conditions rapidly changed.”
National wildfire policy has changed significantly over the past century. After the “Big Burn” of Idaho and Montana in 1910, federal fire officials treated all fires as an enemy and instituted a “10 a.m.” rule seeking to snuff them out within a morning of spotting them.
As it became clear that excluding fire was ecologically unnatural and could actually prime forests for more devastating future blazes, agencies gradually embraced more fire when they were able. Sometimes this led to political firestorms, such as when fires raced through much of Yellowstone National Park in 1988, or when the New Mexico fire that Pyne mentioned destroyed hundreds of homes and threatened a stockpile of radioactive materials at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Unnaturally dense ponderosa pines in northern Arizona fueled two megafires, in 2002 and 2011, that combined to burn more than 1 million acres. To reduce fuels, the U.S. Forest Service began a massive thinning program known as the Four Forests Restoration Initiative, which was meant to mechanically thin trees but to date has recorded its greatest successes in managed and prescribed fire.
The Trump administration has sent mixed messages about fire policy during the president's second term. Early on, Trump reportedly favored a full-suppression method, something that put experts, including Pyne, in the mind of what they consider the counterproductive 10 a.m. rule. But last month, Trump issued an executive order on wildfire that orders his Environmental Protection Agency to “consider modifying or rescinding, as consistent with applicable law, Federal rules or policies that impede the use of appropriate, preventative prescribed fires.”
The order also called on federal agencies to consolidate their firefighting capabilities for efficiency, and to deploy technology including artificial intelligence to better fight fires. The Federation of American Scientists applauded the call for technology, but noted that it may be difficult to implement when the administration is slashing its science capabilities. In a news release, the group said cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and U.S. Geological Survey are especially troubling, given those agencies’ capabilities with critical climate date and forecasting tools.
Pyne said it’s unfortunate that managed fires only make news when they get out of control and destroy large tracts or someplace special to people. He pointed to two controlled burns near Payson and Pine, Arizona, that achieved their desired effects without fanfare earlier this year.
The Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group that advocates on issues in and around the park, made the same point in an emailed statement.
“When fires are managed successfully, we almost never hear about it,” Trust Executive Director Ethan Aumack said. “I’ve seen fire managers at Grand Canyon and elsewhere manage beneficial fires skillfully and successfully many, many times. We owe them a debt of gratitude for that work."
Still, he said he understands and supports the call for an inquiry. “There should be an apolitical, independent assessment of the fire so that everyone can better understand the circumstances of the fire and how we could work to avoid the kind of losses we’ve already seen in the future,” he said.
Pyne likewise welcomed an investigation. He just hopes it won’t lead to an “all-suppression” fire management regime.
“All-suppression fails,” he said.
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at brandon.loomis@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
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