Rural System's E-Book

Rural System? Just Dreaming …
 A For-Profit Conglomerate for Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management

by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007

Chapter 28. The Fire Force

Dreaming: Rusting fast; that's all it is. … I should have studied the pictures more carefully… the smoke makes me cry… I'm sure I was frostbitten… it was so good. Burn like I tell you to burn! Wild fire in a wild land … All is chemistry and physics … except for policy and funding and cast witches' brooms… and sleeping guards… and arsonists. He could not think ahead. He just could not realize the future result of a present action. His brain was that way, malnourished, poisoned in the poor family that had lost everything to the Brushy Fork fire… Brushy, Brushy, brushy… Just dreaming…
Ancient fire continues to threaten modern people. Wild fires rage, influenced by climate change. Residential development in forested areas increases. The losses and costs are very great. Reducing air pollution has been added to the fire control task along with saving lives of citizens and fire fighters. The Fire Force was created (hypothetically).There is still good work ahead.





Forest fires are commonplace and widespread. Lightning starts many, but people start others accidentally and, still hard to believe, there are cowardly and evil people that seem to gain satisfactions from the type of revenge that comes from "burning out" someone's home, range, or forest. There are "crazes," but there are also a group of people who set fires because they are unemployed and it is widely known that fire fighting crews are paid fairly well. Fighting fire changes the local unemployment rolls. The work, while it is very hard briefly, it is usually boring, and the food supplied to fighters is usually good and the team work, so rare today, feels good. The fires can be viewed as threats to life, health, and welfare. Other views are available such as those about ecosystem functions, monetary loss, and community collapse. Wildfire control is essential. Fire prevention is needed, but little is done now because there are mixed pressures and misunderstandings between (1) prescribed fires to cheaply achieve desired conditions and (2) unprescribed or wildfires that can be unimaginable destructive in a modern land with citizens starving for sophisticated management for the future.

There's new knowledge about wildland fire. Fire is now seen as natural and needed for certain types of plant and animal communities to survive. Some plant seeds germinate only after they are heated or opened by fire. Certain plant species becoming extinct locally is certain, unless there is fire. Fuel build-up resulting from fire prevention has resulted in changed conditions, and hotter, more destructive fires than ever are now occurring in nature in some places. In well-analyzed areas, fires of particular types need to be prescribed. The phrase "controlled burns" is no longer used because real control is hard to assure. Controlling fire is like catching butterflies. "Prescribed fire" is the politically-correct phrase. Fire can be a powerful tool, in fact the only tool available, to meet certain wildland needs. It may be the only force in nature that meets certain natural system requirements (those systems having evolved with lightning fires). In other cases, it is the only one that can be used cost effectively to achieve the changes needed over broad areas. Each fire, no matter how it starts, needs to be assessed in terms of its progress and effects on land conditions, management objectives, treatment potentials, resource values, costs, and potential damage. Such knowledge is usually not available. Such knowledge is almost impossible to gain within the short periods needed to make decisions before one or more of the dimensions just listed above change.

Beside that, fire is difficult to discuss, for it seems to be a natural human enemy and we are psychologically fixed to hate it or be awed by it. It may be a powerful human tool and, used properly, the only way to achieve creatively desired future rural conditions. Coordinating local federal, county, city, and state activities, using research results, and controlling costs, including those of longtern recovery … all are badly needed.

To control its destructive forces, effective fire fighting is needed. To prevent and suppress human-caused fires, effective behavioral change is needed. To use fire, knowledgeable experts need to prescribe it accurately in time and space. All in this list needs to be done cost-effectively and skillfully within the changing laws and mores of this society.

It cannot be done by unstable agencies or by inexperienced people or without a growing knowledge base. Major budget cuts in recent years have reduced the ranks of experienced staff within fire-fighting forces. The National Forest is cooperative but responsible for fires on its acreages. The US Forest Service workforce dropped by 21 percent from 1991 to 1998. It was one of numerous federal agencies caught up in budget cuts and downsizing. That meant fewer employees were available as trained volunteers for firefighting duties. Over time, the US Forest Service work force has started to gray. By 2000, 57 percent of employees were 45 or older. That has put a large number of employees within range of retirement, particularly those eligible for firefighter retirement at age 50. Knowledge will not grow at the rates needed.

The new rural lands, often intermixed with human settlement, have now created across the US such complex problems that they now require stable, sophisticated private computer-supported decision-making. By new efforts at creating expert systems and by developing a select, well-trained team of specialists with modern tools and technology, many of the newly organized needs can be met. The specialists will be found integrating the knowledge of forest and rangeland fires so hard-won by past researchers and fire-fighters and recasting problems in terms of system health and long term profits. The Fire Force was created and may become recognized as the best fire-fighting solution available. It was an expression of how wildfire will be prevented or controlled for maximum long-term net benefits to people. It reduced the deaths, property damage, fire fighting costs, and frustrations that occur when people lose control. Adaptive mechanisms were proposed for keeping the Force vital and responsive to changing conditions and knowledge about fire and its role in achieving the objectives of Rural System.

The Fire Force was conceived as being a diverse fire prevention, control, management, and use group for the Rural System Tracts and other ownerships throughout the region. Its objectives are:

  1. To reduce to a standard estimated financial loss (current rates; 50-year horizon) from fires of all types
  2. To reduce to zero annual personal injuries and loss of life from fires
  3. To reduce costs of prevention and suppression of fires
  4. To reduce to a minimum-standard the number of reported fires requiring official suppression response
  5. To develop an ecosystem response simulation model and fire behavior prediction model for the region.
  6. To develop skillful prescriptive fire applications

Intensive use of GIS and GPS will enhance our new work and provide an opportunity for world-class demonstrations of practical GIS use. Novel use of high-powered back-pack blowers and drip torches at fire edges (augmented with power-saw crews) provide rapid attack advantages in computer-selected zones.

Special Forces retirees (many of whom cannot find employment that matches well their attitudes, experience, and creative abilities) are likely to be recruited for this work. A select team with the experience of these forces will allow a fire-fighting force with daily education ("learning the plays"), team building, and a high calling to be successful where others have failed. The Fire Force will not only provide a sophisticated fire fighting crew for the land, but will create a fire system, that

The elements of the work of the Force include:
  1. Using fire as a management tool.
  2. Adding fire management systems to Trevey documents.
  3. Making decisions about each fire, natural or prescribed; treating each as a unique entity. Forests are not classified as natural, wild, controlled, or prescribed. Each is unique.
  4. Using fires to achieve objectives of the area.
  5. Suppressing fires that result in new losses in the overall land use effectiveness scores.
  6. Allowing fires to burn if they are likely to increase land value indices.
  7. Suppressing fires that threaten life, cultural resources, physical facilities, success in endangered species management or that are likely to incur high future suppression costs.
  8. Suppressing lightning-caused or "natural fires" in wilderness or natural areas when soil moisture and conditions will not develop the high-intensity fires needed to cause stand replacement or the low-intensity fires capable of removing fuel loads.
  9. Developing grazed firebreaks.
  10. Integrating existing federal and state fire condition and performance software.
  11. Developing computer aids for the field force.
  12. Working with insurance agencies to improve corporate profits and improve citizen rates. This includes fire prevention, building codes, inspections, education, incentives, and other strategies.
  13. Demonstrating at local shows and events the attacks of simulated wild fires. The crew trains regularly, works on trails, and engages in physical-conditioning sports that promote the region. Select Novosports are demonstrated along with action projects of the Security and Safety Force.
  14. Using a vast literature on fires and fire fighting developed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. We propose to conduct a planned series of consultations with recently retired members of the BLM, U.S. Forest Service and will capture some of the knowledge of that depressed group of people.
  15. Responding to agency reductions in force that have produced a need for experienced staff.
  16. Improving building materials, grounds maintenance, paint, structure shape and surfaces, all tested and developed to affect fire occurrence, magnitude, and losses.
  17. Employing a specialized system of firebreaks.
  18. Designing and maintaining structures to reduce fire hazards and fire spread at the edge of home sites.
  19. Mapping past fires.
  20. Creating predictive models of fire spread. Developing models (with GIS base).
  21. Experimenting with developing fire-lines (e.g., using high-performance leaf blowers) and superior equipment systems.
  22. Emphasizing prescribed burns. These burns will be well planned, legal, and will be done on contract but also with education and demonstration. These can be exciting, memorable events and key moments of learning. They can be tied to succession, wildlife relations, and watershed management, some with TV news reporting.
  23. Working with arsonists, giving attention to work forces and unemployment and strategies used to intercept or prevent such action. Threats, displays of force, and drama involving what happens to arsonists may be considered. Period (annual) displays of equipment and action-packed work will be made at schools and county meetings.
  24. Emphasizing air quality (all aspects), especially smoke management in prescribed burning. Comprehensive ecosystem response to fire over time will be part of the studies. We seek knowledge of fire so it can be used with surgical precision to achieve computer-aided decided conditions over time (50 years …with extensions to 150 years). All are related to needs in other units, e.g., wild fauna, forestry, watersheds, and recreation.
  25. Working with the courts to develop a "community service" function. (Working with convicted people in meaningful activity, especially related to fires, may provide new experiences and positive effects for them.)
  26. Making displays or events for tourists (education, attraction, trail work, fire breaks, the "experience factor," etc.).
  27. Responding to information about terrorist threats.
  28. Selling county-specific analyses of fire history, potentials, and current fire threats.

This Fire Force is, in part, a "hot shot" fire-fighting group (such groups already exist in the West) but much more. They train daily and are not only physically fit but also are involved in all of the realms of fire -- prevention, control, prescriptions, post-fire restoration, effects analyses, ecology, modeling, behavioral change, arson, air pollution, smoke control, and climatic relations. The group meets the profound requirements of Rural System - to understand the past of the land and to re-shape it for meeting the future needs for sustained bounded profits. It may later provide fire-fighting service, moving rapidly to anywhere within a region to meet needs at large or critical fires.

They provide an educational and demonstration crew for people who come from other states and nations to learn of a total fire system and to gain continuing involvement and membership (education, service, staff training, demonstrations, research findings, computer software, arson work, sources and select equipment supply, consultation, internet service, and others). The educational and service functions fill the previously unmet problems of "seasonal work" for superior fire fighters. Within Rural System there are unlimited needs for meaningful physical work by some of the staff (e.g., trail building and maintenance, patrols, surveys and inventories, equipment development, experimental burns, etc.).

Fire Force profits and its continuance are found in:

Egging et al. (1980) said that fire is a factor often overlooked in planning for managing wildland resources. "It can be either devastating to or supportive of a planned management strategy." They claimed that fire considerations should be woven throughout the entire wildland system, including how they may influence the future system. The Fire Force is proposed as an effective means to assist in shaping that future and being creatively responsible to the future system.

The Fire Force (to my knowledge), did not exist in 2007. Based on my experience in the military, in fire fighting in Oregon, Idaho, and Virginia, in land management, in ecological research, and in computer applications, it is needed and it can be created. It can "harvest" the investments of equipment developers, programmers, and scientists over the past 75 years. Over an area the expected size of the county, prescribed fire is needed to shape the area and achieve certain objectives consistently for 200 years. Also, effective fire control is needed. Maintaining a superior, elite "waiting crew" is expensive and difficult. In the system proposed, that crew is learning, training, staying physically "ready," assisting in other operations of the greater enterprise, and educating groups - all at "break-even" or at profit. (Insurance and protection values seem incalculable.)

Fire Maps

The geographic information system beckons use by the Fire Force. Making Fire Maps is easy, reasonable, and if anyone ever needed a map for anything, it ought to be for projecting future fires and how to fight them. We can go to the State Forester to get information on past fires. It won't be easy. Cooperation will be limited, data will be in a half-dozen forms, exact locations will be questionable, and areas will be estimated (and inflated fighting costs can be gained or reduced if success in preventing fires is trying to be proven.) The fires at the borders of the counties are all questionable, and their and size, shape, who fought them, and who paid for their control are all problems that dwarf the issue of where the fire started - if ever known. The county is the potential area being addressed, temporarily, tentatively, and … in the next instant … we need to define it as the county-and-all-surrounding counties. This is the concept of the general system's "context." We operate as if we work with a closed system, but that is tentative (and suggested by the box around the system, but we know that in the next moment we must go smaller … then larger, but for now we have to discuss the relevant system.

As we "worry" the problem, like a cat with a mouse, we yearn for data, use it if available, remain skeptical, and not waste much time "yearning," for we know the limitations and we are awed by our knowledge of how much it will cost to get the data, clean it, up and put it into a useful form, conduct analyses, and hold meetings to summarize the analyses. If someone gives us data, we'll take it, but we'll not go and get it. Time's up! Millions of dollars already spent on fire "data" are our legacy. There are few know likely big payoffs. The future can be better. We decide to create fire maps, and then plot on them fires as they occur and build a functional, trustworthy data base.

We know from the references that others have created and worked with fire maps. We build with their ideas. We use the following individual maps to build an alpha unit map (described in Chapter 12):

Given weights assigned (by experts) for the probable importance of each of the above in augmenting (1) the number and (2) the acreage of wildfires, two major wildlfire maps can be created. The number is not as important in ecological or economic terms as the acreage. This will be improved over time so that the full consequences of each alpha unit that is burned will be analyzed and summarized. The particular location of a burn determines whether it can be beneficial, neutral, or even result in devastation for 100 years. Rechel (1992) suggested such maps might be useful in "understanding the difficulties of managing growth in the wildland-urban interface." Maybe. We think the maps will help us station fire fighting crews, allocate funds to prevention, estimate fire-line costs and time in different areas, conduct programs discouraging people from building in high-risk areas, and promote reasonable tax policies that penalize people who increase social costs by ignoring the described risks and building or conducting business in unsuitable areas. We'll use the map to assign priorities for attack. It will be responsible to let some areas burn, others where fire will be suppressed with vigor and high costs. We'll provide emergency exit maps for homeowners along with prevention messages. We advocate zoning (if it continues, for we have an alternative in using alpha units to achieve citizen-expressed objectives) to discourage extensive low-density housing developments. Signs may be used to mark very high-risk fire areas and smoking, camping, etc. may be prevented or attempts made to restrict them.

I expect fairly high development costs for equipment and staff and personal and property insurance may be high. It seems likely that reduced insurance costs can be negotiated based on the work of and availability of a fire prevention and fire fighting force. Income from advertising, TV action, direct work and projects (above) seem to bring the costs into a break-even zone. Distribution of the employees throughout the system and little downtime seem to be financially advantageous. Estimated startup costs are high but the Force will be making reasonable returns (high returns are not expected for any particular Group of the conglomerate) at the end of 6 years. The Force will be doing good work for the right reasons.

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