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by Bob Kelleher
May 18, 2000
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RealAudio 3.0 |
Officials in Northeastern Minnesota are bracing for the potential of catastrophic wildfire. Last summer, a powerful storm ripped through the Superior National Forest and the popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Flattened trees are piled in a tinder-dry blanket on nearly 500,000 acres of forest. Recent rains have helped, but when asked about the potential for a conflagration, fire officials say it's just a matter of time. Minnesota Public Radio's Bob Kelleher reports on how residents in Minnesota's arrowhead are preparing.
TWO DOZEN YELLOW-CLAD firefighters are getting their final instructions before setting alight more than 100 acres of slash on the northern side of Gunflint Lake. This is the first prescribed burn of the season along the Gunflint. A year ago, this land was alive with a green cloak of pine and aspen trees. Now it's a mess of bulldozer tracks and dry branches - the leftover from salvage logging which removed tons of tangles from the rock strewn hillside.
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Yellow flames quickly spring into a crackling fire that explodes through the few standing small pine trees - the only survivors of last July's 90-mile-an-hour winds. Burn boss Bill Swope talks about the blow down that's turned much of the region's forest into a dangerous pile of broken wood.
"I don't remember seeing anything, that's this vast of area, this much stuff on the ground," he says. "It's incredible; there's stuff everywhere, and it's just the worse I've ever seen."
The firefighters are being extra cautious, aware of how the Los Alamos fire spread from a similar prescribed fire. They are avoiding large wood piles that could burn for a month if they catch light. The slash burns quickly and easily - a predictor of how intensely this forest could burn when wildfire breaks out.
"All you need is the right day to get an ignition start," Swope says. "If you get the right wind, and temperatures and relative humidity, it's going to go."
And when it goes, it will be big. The blow-down cuts for 35 miles through the heart of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, an area that can draw 5,000 campers on a summer day.
Paul Tine is the Superior National Forest's fire expert. He's seen many blow-downs but never one this extensive. "It's hard to describe what it's like to be standing in the middle of this stuff," he says. "In some cases it might be over your head; stacked up over your head another four or five feet. Something on the order of 70 tons per acre, out there laying on the ground, that's available to burn, or will become available to burn as it dries over time."
This fire would be like nothing seen here in 100 years. Experts warn about plume-dominated fire - fire with so much fuel that it builds a column of heat and smoke high into the atmosphere, and drops burning embers miles away. That's the kind of fire that roared through Yellowstone Park in 1988. Tine says Plume fires create their own blast of wind, and can roll in every direction regardless of weather.
"With a wind-driven fire, you know where the fire is going. But, with plume-dominated fire, when you get these downdrafts, there's really no place on that fire that's safe for a firefighter to be."
Emergency officials are preparing for the inevitable. Large aircraft have been positioned at regional airfields, to hit fire with water and chemicals; hoping they can maybe control it before it becomes unstoppable. Tine says the fire-fight would be from the air. "You don't even dare put people into that situation," he says. "You can't get into an area without cutting your way into it."
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State and county officials are making plans for mass evacuations. They're trying to figure out how to warn and move thousands of people along very few roads. Radio signals barely penetrate the wilderness, and cellphones are useless. Canoe-campers can be several days from civilization and completely out of touch. That worries Cook County Sheriff David Wirt. "We have to go door to door," he says. "We have to go campsite to campsite, and that's simply too time consuming in an evacuation situation."
New radio transmitters might be in place this fall, to beam emergency warnings into the region.
Meanwhile, resorts and homeowners along the Gunflint Trail are installing elaborate water sprinklers, preparing to tap into the region's lakes and streams to soak acres of property. The trail's fire department assistant chief, George Carlson, demonstrates the sprinklers just installed at the Rockwood Lodge. Five pumps and more than 60 sprinkler heads drench the resort's 15 buildings.
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"We're not going to stop this fire. We're not going to keep it from happening. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tremendous burn across Northern Minnesota."
- Sen. Rod Grams | |
The sprinklers lower temperatures, raise humidity and saturate property; alleviating the main threats to buildings from wildfire. "The two reasons why structures burn from wildfire is because the roofs ignite, or the windows break, and burning embers blow into the building," says Carlson.
The rural fire department has purchased portable sprinklers they can turn loose on a fire line, or use to protect buildings.
But the effort takes money. The federal and state governments have committed millions of dollars for storm cleanup and fire preparation. But the Superior National Forest will need millions more to maintain preparedness for several years.
Minnesota, U.S. Senator Rod Grams is trying to guide another $9 million through the Senate to help clear downed trees and repair storm damage. "We're not going to stop this fire," Grams admits. "We're not going to keep it from happening. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tremendous burn across Northern Minnesota. I think the thing we've got to worry about is what preventions we can put in place to minimize the damage that can occur from this."
It would take unusually wet weather to hold back the fire risk. But the weather's been dry, with little snowfall for the past two winters. Spring rains have cut the risk, temporarily, but summer heat will soon return, and with it the chance of major fire in Northern Minnesota.
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