Reply #7: I don't have an article for you, but I did have two forest fires in my [View All]

[Feanorcurufinwe]

neighborhood this summer, one of which forced an evacuation. After I week I insisted on being let back in, and there were a couple more weeks before they got control of it.

I live in the Lolo national forest; the day the fires started, there were lightning storms - more than 50 fires started in Lolo NF at once. So first off, if your Bush-supporting friend is religious you can remind him that God starts most forest fires, not environmentalists or loggers. Well one fire was about 6 miles away, to the south, and was a little worrisome, several other fires were quite a bit farther away to the West . The first fire got pretty bad and started moving in this direction... then they discovered another one burning that was pretty close to some houses even closer. After about a week the cops came around and issued and evacuation 'warning' - be prepared to get out on 8 hours notice. Things didnt really change much for almost a week, and then I noticed an awesome and terrifying thing. To the northwest, a massive column of smoke. Words can't describe it. So massive and powerful that it formed it's own cyclone. This picture was taken from about 25 miles away. But I was just 3 miles away from the 'blowup'. What happened was those fires to the west I wasn't worried about burned together and jumped the fire line, the wind blew it right up a drainage, and 8000 acres burned in 4 hours. That fire burned through sections that were virgin, clearcut, thinned , whatever -- no difference. When nature (or God, if you are so inclined) gets going there is little we can do to affect it. Suddenly that fire was just 3 miles away (as the crow flies), and within a half mile of structures.

The section to the immediate west of me (a section is 640 acres, one of the squares of the checkerboard of logging you'll see in the west), is heavily logged -- not totally clearcut however. But was that a comfort to me? Not at all. There is an incredible amount of dead wood left behind by the logging company. Not just slash -- along the road they stacked logs that they never hauled out -- I'm talking a pile of logs 2 miles long 60 feet wide and 20 feet high. Kind of like a fuse.
I was evacuated for awhile. Actually I came back early. It was like being in a war zone. The national guard patroling, helicopters overhead constantly... smoke, of course. Well we were lucky in my neighborhood, no homes lost.



And 'Healthy Forests' -- includes NO MONEY for wildfire thinning projects near woodland communities.