Fire crews remain busy on several western Montana wildfires

Dillon Kato in the Missoulian: Although the weather in the area has been cooler in recent days and brought more moisture to western Montana and Idaho, fire crews are still working on several blazes in the region.

The Thompson River Complex, burning six miles northeast of Thompson Falls, held steady at 1,635 acres on Saturday. Cooler, wetter weather over the past few days helped the firefighting effort. By Saturday, 519 firefighters and their equipment were working on the fire, as well as seven helicopters and four air tankers as needed.

The lightning-caused fires are listed at 20 percent contained overall, with the Koo Koo Sint fire at 55 percent contained and the Marmot fire perimeter at 30 percent. The complex also includes the Spruce fire, and the Sleepy Gulch fire, which was discovered on Aug. 12.

Area and road closures are still in place for the fire, including the Koo Koo Sint Trail 445 and the access road to the trailhead. Big Spruce Creek Trail 1102, Sundance Ridge Trail 433 and the West Fork Thompson River Road 603 are also closed. A flight restriction is also in effect for the area surrounding the fire.

The West Alder fire saw no growth and remained at 82 acres. Rain helped with containment efforts, with 54 firefighters currently working on the fire, burning one mile southwest of Bitterroot Flat Campground west of Rock Creek, about 20 miles south of Interstate 90. No structures or property are currently threatened by the fire....

Policymakers, fire scientists explore wildland-urban interface issues in Montana

Martin Kidston in the Missoulian (Montana):  While the scars left by the Lolo Creek Complex fire have gone from black to white in recent weeks, the memories left by the summer conflagration are still fresh. On Wednesday, with the fire’s charge through the wildland-urban interface serving as a conversational backdrop, a group of policymakers and fire scientists met at the University of Montana to explore ways of making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Does the state need to regulate private land owners who live in the wildland-urban interface? Should insurance companies be brought to the table? Should climate change become part of the larger conversation on forest health? “Fire is something that affects us all,” said James Burchfield, dean of the College of Forestry and Conservation. “How is it that we’re going to collectively deal with that?“

Sen. Cliff Larsen, D-Missoula, said a bill passed during the last legislative session drastically changed the way the state funds the suppression of wildland fires. The discussions that surrounded that bill, coupled with the Lolo Creek fire, prompted Larsen and the college to form a working group to find solutions to what most agreed is a growing problem. “I’m curious to see what we can do from a policy standpoint to address this,” Larsen said.

Shaping that policy could prove politically uncomfortable for both parties. To be effective, members of the working group suggested that the conversation must explore private property rights, climate change and allowing increased harvesting of forest products.

“We need to explore creative solutions in the West and how we deal with private property rights in the wildland urban interface,” said Rep. Ellie Hill, D-Missoula. “If we want to make innovative change, we have to start now and we need broad-based solutions.“ Regulating private property within the wildland-urban interface could be similar to regulations governing private land within the 100-year floodplain, some suggested....

Swiftcurrent Fire Lookout, Glacier National Park, Montana. National Park Service photo

Bugs, fire, politics threaten western Montana forests

Rob Chaney in the Missoulian (Montana): Three things will combine to radically transform Montana forests in the next 50 years: bugs, fire and politics.

Mountain pine beetles have killed millions of acres of lodgepole pine trees. Those dead stands, combined with a progressively drier climate, will likely burn in wilder, more intense fashion. The biological aftermath should bring a wider mix of tree species, open areas and wildlife habitat, according to new computer models.

How humans tinker with that progression remains a wildcard. During this month's Society for Conservation Biology research symposium at the University of Montana, several scientists demonstrated a technique called landscape simulation modeling. They've built software that juggles invasive weeds, weather patterns, logging plans, road removal and a lot of other factors to see how a forest will change over time.

"We see more of a natural sequence of events that could result in a more normal habitat distribution," Michael Hillis of Missoula's Ecosystem Research Group said of his model for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. "But the forest will look much different."

The "B-bar-D" forest covers 3.4 million acres of southwest Montana, bigger than Glacier and Yellowstone national parks combined. Hillis said most of its spruce and Douglas fir stands were logged a century ago for the state's mining industry. The resulting lodgepole stands grew up and matured at the same time, producing what Hillis called the "forest demographics of a rest home" at the perfect age for a beetle epidemic.

Many of those dead trees will then fuel forest fires. While the research is mixed whether a beetle-killed stand burns more dangerously than a green canopy, Hillis said the certain result is more fire scars on the landscape. Those scars in turn will eventually hobble later fires with a matrix of burned and unburned patches. Burned areas may return as new lodgepole stands, which regenerate best after a fire. But the unburned zones could see a return of fir, spruce and other tree species that get a chance to grow without the lodgepoles' choking shade....

Looking across forest to mountains and clouds, "In Glacier National Park," Montana., 1933 - 1942. By Ansel Adams, when he was a National Park Service employee

A compact couldn't be worse than the Corps

An editorial in the Bismarck Tribune (North Dakota): The degree to which the Missouri River has been mismanaged became clear when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would only reduce the elevation of Lake Sakakawea behind Garrison Dam to 1,837 feet by March 1, 2012. That elevation, slightly below March of this year, means the odds of flooding again next spring remain strong.

Circumstances on the nearly 2,400-mile river -- saturated banks, levees and flood plains, dams near capacity, continued high releases into the fall, ongoing wet weather -- give the corps little choice. Record snow pack, rain events and corps decisions over the years combined to set up this disaster, and now we are nearly out of options in preparing for 2012.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple wants to dump the corps management of the river and replace it with a compact of Missouri River states. Presently, the corps finds itself bound by a congressional act, restrained by Congress, locked in by a master operating manual, pressured by special interests and second-guessed by everyone. Shifting to a compact would be complicated, but not impossible. Once in place, it could be more responsive to the changes by eliminating one or more layers of absentee (Washington) river management.

"It's hard to imagine that it can be worse than it is today. Any compact would establish clearly the priorities of uses," Dalrymple said this week. He's right on that account...

An aerial view of the Garrison Dam in North Dakota, US Army Corps of Engineers photo

Flooding hits Montana tribe hard

John Pape in Disaster News Network: A host of faith-based disaster relief organizations are providing assistance to Montana’s Crow Indian Nation after floodwaters from the Little Bighorn River and other streams swamped homes and other buildings in the tribe’s reservation south of Billings. Todd Chambers, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Billings, said the flooding was triggered by a combination of a heavier-than-normal spring snowmelt and torrential rainfall.

“With streams already full from the (snowmelt) runoff, and the ground saturated, the heavy rainfall sent streams and rivers quickly out of their banks,” Chambers said. “There was simply no where else for the water to go.”

Crow tribal officials quickly sent search teams into remote parts of the sprawling but sparsely-settled 3.2 million-acre reservation that is home to fewer than 7,000 tribal members. Crow leaders scrambled to account for those who stayed behind and delivered food to more than 100 people surrounded by floodwaters in the Pryor area.

“There are families and elders (that were) isolated and stranded in their homes," tribal spokesman Donald Spotted Tail said. “There was no way for them to access basic human needs such as food and water.”

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer mobilized more than 50 members of the National Guard to man checkpoints and assist with rescue operations in the Crow nation. Additionally, tribal leaders quickly moved emergency supplies to the community of Lodge Grass, which was also cut off by flooding and where residents had been running low on food, water and fuel. While some tribal members remained in their homes, others were evacuated to Red Cross shelters in Billings….

NASA topological image of the Little Bighorn River

Rethinking who pays costs of fighting fires to protect homes in woods

Rob Chaney in the Missoulian (Montana): The best way to save lives and property from forest fires might be to have the U.S. Forest Service stop fighting them. It's not that the federal government's firefighters do a bad job, according to Headwaters Economics director Ray Rasker. In fact, they're too good, and that encourages people to build homes that cost lots of tax dollars to defend.

"Now when you look at a map of new subdivisions, you don't have to pay for the firefighting cost," Rasker said. It's paid by the federal taxpayer. "If you cut the firefighting budget, the federal government would pass the costs to the county level where land-use decisions are being made. Then there would be political cover for county commissioners to express the need to redesign subdivisions or move houses and identify dangerous places."

Rasker was in Missoula on Tuesday as part of the University of Montana's Conservation and Climate Change lecture series. The Montana Legislature hired Headwaters Economics, based in Bozeman, to study firefighting costs after the state had to hold a special session in 2008 to cover unexpectedly high wildfire-suppression costs.

Rasker said he was not an expert on climate change, but saw enough evidence from past climate records to justify some urgency about the future. The study found that firefighting costs doubled in years when the average temperature was just one degree warmer.

"The Montana study tells us it cost $28 million a year to defend homes from wildfires," Rasker said. "If you don't do anything about land-use planning, by 2025 that cost could go to $40 million in today's dollars. With a 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in summer temperatures, the cost would jump to $84 million. On the issue of wildland-urban interface, we're just barely seeing how expensive it could be."…

Lolo Pass, MT, August 18, 2003 -- A firefighter from Bridger Fire Inc. out of Bozeman, Montana works on putting out spot fires that errupted on the Hopeful 2 fire near the Lolo Pass in Montana. Photo by Andrea Booher/FEMA

Snowpack in Western US lower than average, believe it or not

Lorna Thackeray in the Billings Gazettte (Montana): Unless mountain snowpack starts picking up, streams across Montana could be running low next summer. Calculations by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service released Thursday indicate that at the rate snowpack is building now, stream flows will average just 71 percent of normal through the irrigation and recreation season.

Roy Kaiser, water supply specialist at NRCS, said Western Montana could have streamflows averaging 73 percent of normal, while Eastern Montana’s are forecast to average 67 percent of normal. NRCS issues monthly stream flow forecasts the first week of each month from January through July. It attempts to estimate what streamflows will be for the period from April 1 to July 31 based on water content of snow that has accumulated in mountains that feed Montana’s river basins. The forecasts assume that precipitation will be near normal through July.

This year’s January forecast is far lower than the forecast issued at the same time last year. Kaiser advised water managers to “pay particular attention to their local area and plan for possible low streamflows in the event that mountain precipitation continues to be poor.”

Snowy as it seems in the valleys, the mountains are falling behind. Low temperatures produce drier snow and lower water content in the pack. Statewide, the water content of snow is 76 percent of average and 87 percent of last year….

A snow fed river flowing from the Iceberg Lake, In the Many Glaciers region, Glacier National Park, Montana, shot by Wing-Chi Poon, Wikmedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License