Reducing Wildfire Risk and Protecting Our Drinking Water in a Changing Climate

the full blog post is below

Posted by Tom Tidwell, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and Mike Connor, Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, on July 19, 2013 at 12:00 PM

Cross-posted from the White House Council of Environmental Quality blog:

Americans are all too familiar with the devastation catastrophic wildland fires can wreak on the landscape. Fire takes lives, destroys homes, impacts wildlife, and devastates millions of acres of valuable forests and grasslands every year. But what is lesser known is that these fires also severely damage watersheds—the very lands that provide clean and abundant drinking water for millions of Americans every day.

To address this problem, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell this week announced an historic agreement between the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation to focus on proactively restoring forest lands around important watersheds and preventing costly, destructive wildfires in these areas.

The partnership is included in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan as a means to reduce wildfire risk, protect critical infrastructure, and lessen the impacts of climate change, which include higher risks of large and destructive wildfires. The damage caused to rivers, dams, and irrigation systems after a wildfire can be tremendous. Clearing out the sediment and ash left behind is costing the nation millions of dollars every year, and the impacts of climate change are expected to continue to intensify.  Climate change also exacerbates dry conditions, which can slow the natural recovery time after a wildfire.

Through this Western Watershed Enhancement Partnership, our two federal agencies will begin working with water users on both the local government and private sector level to restore healthy forested watersheds across the West. In cooperation with regional Colorado government agencies, our first effort in this partnership will start in the Upper Colorado Headwaters and Big Thompson watersheds. Our goal is to ensure these important watersheds are kept reliable and clean for the hundreds of thousands of people who depend on them for drinking water, farming and electricity.

Heavy rains after a wildfire caused this heavy sediment deposit (Photo Credit: R. H. Meade, U.S. Geological Survey)

On a national level, our partnership will work to restore forest and watershed health and conduct planning for post-wildfire actions and responses. We will strive to protect municipal and agricultural water supplies and water delivery systems from future threats and we invite cities, towns, and rural communities to partner with us.

As land managing agencies, we share an interest in the long-term sustainability of our Nation’s water supplies. These waters are the life blood for American agriculture, the source of drinking water for millions of Americans, and a key component of healthy local economies. By working cooperatively across agency lines, we can keep our forested and grassland watersheds safe for the millions of Americans and wildlife that depend on these clean and abundant water sources.

Tom Tidwell is the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

Mike Connor is the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.

- See more at: http://blogs.usda.gov/2013/07/19/reducing-wildfire-risk-and-protecting-our-drinking-water-in-a-changing-climate/#sthash.fUwI4vrs.dpuf

The misplaced war against Western wildfires

The link in this post is one of the best commentaries I've read about forest fires.  A great read will include some wonderful quotes (and it does).  Take the time to read the whole post.

"The paradox of fire stems from its role as the great shape-shifter of natural processes. The reason is simple: Fire is not a creature or a substance or a geophysical event like a hurricane or an earthquake. It is a biochemical reaction. It synthesizes its surroundings. It takes its character from its context."

"A fire that burns into a community is a disaster, but if we see fire only as a disaster, then we will follow the example of many wildland fire agencies that are adopting urban, all-hazard models in place of traditional land management. This leaves them fighting the fires that break out, rather than managing the settings that sustain those fires."
By:  Stephen J. Pyne, a professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

Read more:The misplaced war against Western wildfires - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_23644084/misplaced-war-against-western-wildfires#ixzz2Z81pMtRC
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Young men and fire

written by Jon Talton is a journalist and author living in Seattle, where he is the economics columnist for the Seattle Times.

Young men and fire

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened... — Norman Maclean 

Smokejumpers and other wildfire-fighters call them "shake and bakes," the portable shelters they carry. These cocoons of foil and fiberglas offer the firefighters at best a 50-percent chance and are deployed as a last resort, as when the wind shifts and the living devil of fire traps and turns on them. The hope is that the fire will pass over quickly. Otherwise, "the only thing your shake and bake will do is allow you to have an open-casket funeral,” one crew supervisor told Wired. Such dark humor is a necessary component of dangerous, sometimes deadly jobs. The Prescott Fire Department's Granite Mountain Hotshots team reportedly deployed its shake-and-bakes Sunday in a conflagration at Yarnell, amid triple-digit temperatures and high winds.Nineteen died. As I write, the fire is at zero containment.

This is the deadliest event for wildfire-fighters in modern history. Deadlier than Colorado's South Canyon fire in 1994 on Storm King Mountain. Deadlier than the 1949 Mann Gulch blaze in Montana, which inspired Norman Maclean's classic study, Young Men and Fire. a book both elegiac and forensically definitive.

Here is what I don't want: Cheap sentimentalizing and cynical religiosity from politicians who are otherwise hostile to public employees, adequate government budgets and sensible land-use policies. The ones who use public pensions and unions as evil hand-puppets to distract citizens from the screwing they are getting from the plutocrats. The tax cutters and climate-change "deniers." Please spare me your sudden compassion for public servants and first responders. Spare me your flags and "USA! USA!" and endless evocation of "heroes" if this is mere denial and lazy thinking. Look: I get the shock and grief. I used to be a first responder myself, cross-trained to deploy with forestry fire teams, and more than once was nearly killed (in the city). I know those men are with the Lord and all their tears have been dried, and I pray that their families are given comfort and grace. But I am not going to endlessly tweet this or post it on Facebook. We owe them more. Read on if you agree. This will not be a popular column. It is a necessary one.

for the whole blog posting, go to this link 

http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2013/07/young-men-and-fire.html