Brian Head Fire Currently Largest in the U.S.

[rockgremlin]

Hey look!! It's the asshat that created this mess! Well, on the bright side, he doesn't have any weeds in his yard now. So thank God for that.

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As of Saturday, June 24, it's burned close to 40,000 acres and is only 5% contained.

Any bets as to when it will be completely contained? With no end in sight to the dry windy conditions, I'm predicting full containment at around mid-July.

Projected burned acreage: 190,000

Projected cost: $100,000,000

That weed burning dickhead deserves jail time for this IMO.

[Sombeech]

Is that really the dude? I know it was a guy burning weeds but did somebody really snap a photo of the guy?

[rockgremlin]

I've been reading on other message boards about how we should just forgive the poor guy who started this fire. It was an honest mistake.

Make no mistake...what he did is almost certainly prosecutable as third degree felony arson.

I've heard stories from some of the locals here in Cedar about how there are ranchers who weren't allowed to go up and retrieve their livestock and so their horses were burned alive when their stables were set ablaze by the fire.

"Oops, sorry for killing your horses. It was an honest mistake."

[BruteForce]

The smoke from this fire can be seen and smelled as far south as Las Vegas. Mesquite and the Virgin River Gorge were thick of smoke this morning while I was heading home from Vegas.

The view from I-15:

[rockgremlin]

This morning the smoke had settled into Cedar City so thick that you couldn't see the mountains to the west if you were standing in town. It resembled the Salt Lake valley in the thick of the January inversion.

Another glorious feature is that EVERYTHING smells like a campfire. The smell is everywhere - in your hair, in your clothes, even everything in your house smells like a campfire, all the time. It's tempting to run the laundry machine nonstop to get the smell out, but I'd just have to run everything again once I took it out of the washer cuz the smell is inescapable. It's pretty awful.

[accadacca]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIkoJfc8JjY


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi88FhJnfj4


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p2ykSpdtJc

[accadacca]

"When you turn the forest service over to the bird and bunny lovers and the tree huggers and the rock lickers we turned our history over," said Rep. Mike Noel, R-73.

[accadacca]

https://www.facebook.com/marlin.sharp1/posts/10155513231368923

[rockgremlin]

https://www.facebook.com/marlin.sharp1/posts/10155513231368923

LOL!! Omigosh, I can't believe he would say that out loud to a national audience. I mean, he's got a damn good point, but wow...way to polarize the issue!

Lmao..."where's the friends of Dixie now? Where's the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance now?!"

Drinking lattes in Colorado, probably.

https://suwa.org/about-suwa-2/suwa-board-of-directors/

[BruteForce]

https://www.facebook.com/marlin.sharp1/posts/10155513231368923

And I think he was spot-on with his commentary. "Rock Lickers".. LOL!

[erial]

Why question where SUWA is? Fire didn't start in a wilderness.

[rockgremlin]

Why question where SUWA is? Fire didn't start in a wilderness.

Just pointing out SUWA purports to be so concerned for Southern Utah, but when a fire breaks out in the area that they so vehemently protect they're nowhere to be seen. Especially a fire that many claim has been exacerbated by practices that SUWA fought to enact (no harvesting deadwood).

[middlefork]

MAGA just let it burn

[Iceaxe]

Why question where SUWA is? Fire didn't start in a wilderness.

But the fire is raging uncontrollably because of how our wilderness has been managed the past 30 years, which is why SUWA aka rock lickers (tm) was brought into question.

[uintafly]

Did SUWA take over management of federal lands and I missed it? I certainly don't agree with everything SUWA fights for, but to try to scapegoat them for every mismanagement mistake made over the past 30 years is a bit of a stretch.

[Sombeech]

Logging saves forests.

[rockgremlin]

Logging saves forests.


Fun fact: Contrary to the doomsday scenarios the media loves to portray, more trees/forests exist in the U.S. today than 100 years ago.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/more-trees-than-there-were-100-years-ago-its-true

[stefan]

Fun fact: Contrary to the doomsday scenarios the media loves to portray, more trees/forests exist in the U.S. today than 100 years ago.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/more-trees-than-there-were-100-years-ago-its-true

rock, as you know forests aren't simply about numbers of trees (and replanting with monocultures has severely diminished biodiversity that trees rely on for adaptation).

the report (from 2000) that your article (from 2011) is based on has a lot of interesting information, but a couple points quoted from it





After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600.



The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today.



Recreational use on national forests and other public and private forest lands has increased manyfold.



American society in the 20th century has changed from rural and agrarian to urban and industrialized. This has caused a shift in the mix of uses and values the public seeks from its forests (particularly its pubic forests). Increased demands for recreation and protection of biodiversity are driving forest management. This has caused timber harvest from federal lands to decline by more than 60 percent since 1990.



http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/x4995e.htm

[Iceaxe]

Did SUWA take over management of federal lands and I missed it?

In an indirect way YES, and it's not just SUWA, but all the different rock licker (tm) groups. The environmental groups have gained a strong voice inside our government in recent years that has had a major impact on how our forests and wilderness is managed, some of those management practices are having unintended consequences.

[accadacca]

Rock Lickers... :roflol:

[erial]

But the fire was started by a weed burner not a rock licker, although frankly corn licker will get you there quicker.

[Iceaxe]

But the fire was started by a weed burner not a rock licker, although frankly corn licker will get you there quicker.
Stupidity and a massive fuel source... plenty of blame to go around.

[twotimer]

rock, as you know forests aren't simply about numbers of trees (and replanting with monocultures has severely diminished biodiversity that trees rely on for adaptation).

the report (from 2000) that your article (from 2011) is based on has a lot of interesting information, but a couple points quoted from it




http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/x4995e.htmNice post, Stefan.

Check out John Feilder's Colorado 1870-2000. It's interesting how fewer trees there where just about everywhere back then. A lot more rocks showin'.

We had a big one in Colorado Springs a few years ago. Nice, big houses in this subdivision burned because the canyon to the west was full of deadwood and fuel. It burned big and hot and the debris floated over the ridge and flamed one house after another.

I don't know who owned the land...the state? the county? Private? I think it was state land. That stuff should have been cleared out of there. One way or another.

I think all that stuff is fine in the old growth areas...it's all wet and moldy. Most of those here in Colorado are locked into wilderness. But in drier places it becomes a blast furnace. But they'd have to bulldoze a road to get into these places. Hence part of the problem, eh?

[accadacca]

TOP DEFINITION
Rock-licker
-n-
A person such as rockhound, lapidary, bonehead or mineral collector that licks rocks to bring out the color potential within the rough stone. Wetting a rock shows what the stone might look like once polished. Often a rockhound will become so excited at a rock or gem show that they start madly licking rocks, hoping to discover the hidden beauty beneath the rough, unpolished surface. To the other people visiting a gem show this activity can seem very odd, inappropriate, gross and even obscene.
Example 1:
"WHAT in the world is that freak doing over there!? He keeps picking up rocks from the ground and LICKING them like he thinks they're food! Yuck!"

"oh, yeah.. that's just that crazy rockhound dude named Mark. He's a rock-licker."

Example2:
"Man, that bonehead rock-licker has stinky breath and rotten teeth! I think I'll pass on looking through the bucket of opal he's been pawing for the past hour. "
by Jessa1155 March 16, 2010

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rock%20licker

[Iceaxe]

Sounds like urban dictionary needs an update :-)

[Rob L]

Whatever happened to "controlled burn"? Or am I late to the party?

Rob

[Brian in SLC]

Mismanagement or lack of management?

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/366845/ENVIRONMENTALISTS-OBJECT-TO-DIXIE-FOREST-TIMBER-SALE.html

I believe the court in 2004 denied the review and reverse of the FS decision to allow harvest of salvage timber?

Then it was appealed in 2008? And the court found that the FS didn't comply with the NEPA process?

Its a weird process. Why didn't the forest service just complete the mandated NEPA process? Budget constraints?

Local counties and states should be able to push for this in their areas...?

You can blame the gummint, greenies, whoever...but...if its my backyard, wouldn't and shouldn't I be having a say at a local level with the local FS managers about allowing a salvage harvest of this dead timber? Of course, that costs money too. So, get some federal cash to get this done? Do the NEPA, put it out for bid, and, if you have to, pay someone to pluck that timber.

That Mike Noel feller has sponsored some interesting bills...one of which has the fed's returning land to the state. But, could the state manage this any better? With the benefit of hind site...hard to say (ha ha).

Its kinda crazy.

[accadacca]

Has there been any response from the bird and bunny lovers?

[accadacca]

Things became a bit heated yesterday when a county sheriff and a resident who lost four cabins met at a community meeting.

http://kutv.com/news/local/things-get-heated-at-community-meeting-discussing-brian-head-fire

[Iceaxe]

Commonsense tells me that if you build a house in the middle of a forest you had better expect it to burn down every 100 years or so as forest fires are just part of the natural cycle of things.

[2065toyota]

Commonsense tells me that if you build a house in the middle of a forest you had better expect it to burn down every 100 years or so as forest fires are just part of the natural cycle of things.

Especially when everyone knows what the status of the forest has been.

I do feel for those that lost their homes / cabins, but that is always a chance by being in the forest.

Definitely no single person, party or group should take all the blame. There is plenty to spread around

[Brian in SLC]

Certainly have given thought over the years about having that "cabin in the woods".

Have chatted a bit about the fire with my friend Mike who was evacuated (his pics show up all the time on KSL). He's hoping to get home soon. Fire moved away, rather than toward, his place.

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He posted the above pic this week, saying, this is what the a lot of the forest looks like in his area. He'd know. He's retired and spends a gob of time in the backcountry.

Discussion on his FB page led to a comment about special interests groups. His response: "Agree, but I think with the scale of the beetle kill, I don't think they can completely prevent fires like this. There are just incomprehensible acres of dead trees. There was some cutting going on near where the fire started, but it would have taken decades to make a difference."

Having grown up in Western Montana, hiked in the 1910 burn area (immense doesn't cut it!), read about the Mann Gulch fire (Young Men and Fire by Norman "a river runs through it" MacLean - recommended), saw the start of the 1988 fire season and Yellowstone burn, etc etc...when I look at cabins, second homes, primary homes...I wince. Where's the defensible space? Etc.

Even if you live in the foothills next to land with tall grass...I'd be nervous. And, kids playing with fireworks...ugh.

Bid on and won (underbidding works, apparently) a thinning job for the Forest Service in Montana in my youth. Hard work, didn't pay well...but, we got 'er done. Get them young 'uns out there with the tools to do the job!

There would have to be budget approved, NEPA's completed in a timely manner, and all with some priority. But, there's no will or drive to get this done. Funding cuts for science to study beetles that kill trees, funding cuts for forest management, funding cuts because we wouldn't want to acknowledge that climate change might have an impact... Cuttin' down salvage timber costs money.

Diseased trees benefit no one. Harvest-able timber? Its not worth much as salvage. Full of bugs. Who'd want that?

Hard seeing sick forests.

[Sombeech]

Are the controlled burns a thing of the past?

[windminstrel]

Rock-licker reminded me of this..

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[2065toyota]

They don't have to pay anyone to take away is the issue. There are private companies that will actually pay to go get it. Even the dead wood that is there is salvageable. There is currently a company called Barco out of St. George that was finally able to get a permit and they are thinning some of the forest areas on Cedar Mountain as we speak. Had them or someone else been allowed to get permits long before now the scope of the fire could be reduced. Obviously you can't prevent all forest fires, but in the condition they are in now, they fire can't really even be fought.

[Iceaxe]

FWIW: I always see crews on South Mountain above Draper clearing out the dead wood and creating defendable barriers between the homes and open space. Not saying it will stop homes from burning, but it will at least give fire crews a fighting chance when the next fire starts, and it will start.


I also cringe at the thought of fireworks now, which is funny because as a kid I always had a giant stash of fire crackers, bottle rockets, mortars and roman candles. We actually used to divide up into teams and have bottle rocket wars. We would also do the old west shoot out with roman candles where you stand back to back, take 20 steps, turn and light your roman candle and fire at each other. Ahhh.... the good ol' days.

:flag:

[rockgremlin]

These are pics of some standing timber around an area recently reclaimed by a coal mine near Scofield. The trees have been decimated by beetles, and a logging company is now going in there to harvest out the deadwood. As you can see, over half of the trees are dead. It's no surprise the Brian Head fire spread so quickly.

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[leroymcgee]

Nothing like a good fire to get the blame game going. And Mike Noel is much better at blame, than actually getting anything constructive done.

The facts are that this fire started on private land, grew out of control on private lands and lands managed by the State of Utah. It wasn't til it was out of control and moving fast that it moved onto federal lands. From InciWEb:

The Brian Head Fire began on lands administered by Brian Head Town, Iron County, in cooperation with Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands. It has since burned on to the Dixie National Forest and Color Country District Bureau of Land Management. https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5253/

So, the fire was started by a private individual (some might say lazy moron) on his private land, grew into a raging inferno on private and state-owned and managed lands, and then carried east onto public lands (none of which is federally designated Wilderness by the way, and much of which logged at one time or another over the last 50 years)...and yet it is the feds fault somehow? Or the "rock-lickers" fault, whoever those people (scapegoats) are? I'm confused, but logic isn't exactly Mike Noel's best attribute.

Dry trees burn, whether they are green or silver, tall or short, dense or scattered. Drought and increasingly short shoulder seasons caused by climate change (yes, it's real) are wreaking havoc on our forests. Active forest management is part of the solution, and it is happening. Towns all across Utah and the west have instituted vegetation treatments in the wildland-urban interface to ensure property is protected in the case of the (increasingly inevitable) wildfire. Clear cutting the forest is the other option, but personally I'd take a burnt and regenerating forest over no forest at all, and I think the wildlife would too.

[Brian in SLC]

http://www.sltrib.com/news/5462842-155/mike-noels-inflammatory-screed-on-wildfires

Given the extreme fire risk, Rep. Mike Noel should be careful running around with his pants on fire.

Last week, as flames still threatened seasonal homes near Brian Head (http://www.sltrib.com/home/5461450-155/we-dodged-a-bullet-says-relieved), Noel took the opportunity to dish out some inflammatory rhetoric (http://www.sltrib.com/news/5445768-155/noel-other-s-utah-politicians-blame), blaming the wildfire on environmentalists who he says are determined to stop any kind of logging, even if it means watching the forests burn.

"When we turned the Forest Service over to the bird and bunny lovers and the tree-huggers and the rock-lickers, we turned our history over," Noel said at a news conference.
"We're going to lose our watershed and we're going to lose our soils and we're going to lose our wildlife and were going to lose our scenery — the very things you people wanted to protect," the Kanab Republican said. "It's just plain stupidity."

Those rock-lickers, always causing trouble.

The reality, like a forest ecosystem, is a lot more complicated than Noel leads people to believe.

First, the fire Noel is ranting about actually started on private land inside the town of Brian Head, when a resident torching weeds let it get out of hand. It spread from the private land to the nearby state forest and burned on state forest land for three days before it reached the Dixie National Forest.

Second, the timber sale Noel seems to be talking about appears to be the Tippets Valley sale, which was indeed challenged by the group Friends of Dixie National Forest — a group that now is long-defunct. The thing is, Friends of Dixie lost the lawsuit and yet the trees, for more than two decades, still were never cut down.

Something similar happened in the early 1990s, when a bunch of rock-lickers sued to stop a timber sale in the Sydney Valley. They lost, too, but when the trees were offered, nobody bought them.

Overall, though, trees seem to be getting less love and fewer hugs than Noel would have us believe. According to Forest Service data, there has not been a single appeal of a fuels-reduction project in the Dixie National Forest in three years.

There have been just five projects challenged since 2010, and one of those was challenged by the Garfield County Commission. In every instance, the appeal was either rejected or withdrawn.

Even if the dead, beetle-stricken trees had been cut down, it's hard to know if it would have made much difference.

Mike Kuhns is a forestry professor at Utah State University and said when he first came here in the early 1990s, he remembers looking out over large swaths of dead and dying spruce trees in the area. One of his graduate students studied the stands and found them to all be old trees, susceptible to spruce beetle infestations that ultimately ravaged acres and acres of the forest.

If they had logged the area aggressively before the beetle outbreak, Kuhns said, some younger trees would have grown in and there would have perhaps been less dead fuel, but "it's still likely there would have been a major bark beetle outbreak because of the age of the trees, and there may have been fire."

The fire could have been less devastating in that case, Kuhns said, but the old forest was primed for a major change.

Noel's bombastic blame game also distracts from a real and dire threat to forests in Utah and around the West, and that is the reality of the changing climate.

Across the West, the wildfire season is now six weeks longer than it was just a few decades ago and there has been an increase of more than 50 percent in the number of large fires and a threefold jump in the number of "mega fires" that burn 100,000 acres or more.

That's because the average temperature across the West has climbed by nearly two degrees since the 1970s, meaning the snow melts earlier and forests are left hotter and dryer.

It also has put stress on the trees, leaving them less capable of withstanding the bark beetles that have infested millions of acres of forest land all across the West. The milder winters aren't cold enough any more to kill off the pests.

Decades of aggressive fire suppression have compounded the problem by removing the natural cycle of fire and regrowth from the equation.

We need more active management of our forests to remove excess fuels and increase diversity in the forests — both in the types of trees growing and the age of the trees. To do that, forest officials need to be able to do their jobs, without the fear of litigation. But that also means that there needs to be trust on both sides.

Maybe that trust will grow, like a tree, over time, but it is hard to see that happening when you have people like Mike Noel eager to throw firebombs into the tinder-dry forests for the sake of trying to score partisan political points.
gehrke@sltrib.com
Twitter: @RobertGehrke (http://twitter.com/RobertGehrke)

Editor's Note: This column has been updated to clarify that there have been no appeals of fuel-reduction projects in the Dixie National Forest in three years, and no successful ones in 10 years. The original version did not spell out that the statistics related to the specific forest.

[Iceaxe]

It's been a week.... and "rock licker" is still funny....

[emoji1]

[Brian in SLC]

It's been a week.... and "rock licker" is still funny....

I like it better than tree hugger. I'm more likely to lick a rock than hug a tree...