Tree Homage and Fire Suppression

Kathleen Sayce, October 12, 2017

Much of the Pacific Northwest coast is in the Coastal Temperate Rainforest Biome, a mouthful of words that carefully describe our climate and native vegetation. 

Western Red Cedar, Long Island Cedar Grove, a
lovely subject for tree homage. 

Coastal—on the Pacific Ocean, a climate dominated by onshore winds and rain. 

Temperate—a mild climate of cool wet winters and warm dry summers. Those summers have been getting hotter lately, and more often, not a good sign of what is to come, but generally, this is a great place to live. Not too cold in winter, not too hot in summer. 

Rainforest—a complex forest, so wet that they have a layered structure of big tall trees with epiphytes (plants that grow on plants), understory trees, tall shrubs, low shrubs and ground-covering plants. So much rain that growth is good year after year, in some of the highest site classes of North America, site class being forester-speak for good tree growing conditions. Tillamook County, Oregon, north to Grays Harbor County, Washington, is right in the middle of old deep soils, ample rain, mild summers, and high site classes for timber. 

Biome—the life forms of a region. In this place, multi-species coniferous forests with hardwoods as minor understory trees. 

In the midst of all this growth, then there’s the flip side:  dry summers, when the onshore winds alternate with easterlies, when the air and then the soil dry down to tinder, when all that lush growth shows its other face as fuel ready to burn. Major wildfires are uncommon in our area, but when they come along, they can go big very quickly.  Historically, fires in the dunes kept the pines and other woody plants down and the land in prairie, a mix of grasses, sedges and wildfires. As a culture, we pay homage to trees and we suppress fires. It’s a volatile mix.

The Tillamook Burn, 1933, was a spectacular series of fires that started slowly in the Oregon Coast Range, and built up into massive firestorms, burning 350 thousand acres in a few weeks. For a modern retelling, read http://www.oregonlive.com/history/2017/09/how_bad_can_a_fire_get_in_oreg.html.

In 2014, one fall night, we came over the dune to the bayside, and looked across the water to a fire in the WIllapa Hills. I know our forests and dunes are vulnerable to wildfire, and that small fire, which burned only a few acres, got me thinking harder about fire resistance in forests. I’d toured forests in the 1970s where fires were set to burn the underbrush out and make the forests healthier and fire resistant—a point of view and management approach that has been part of my own lexicon ever since. 

Then in 2017, there were fires in the Columbia Gorge, started by teenagers tossing lighted fireworks, growing into a firestorm that leaped the Columbia River. A week or so later, Karina Blake wrote about forest protection and blame in Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/09/furious_oregonians_should_save_some_forest_fire_blame_for_themselves.html

Morning sun over Willapa Bay in mid summer:  The hills are buried in ash and particulates, the sun is a red dot. Winds from the east.

There is a controversy going on in Gearhart, Oregon over tree preservation versus fire safety right now.  In 2017 we also had weeks of poor air quality on the coast from wildfires in British Columbia, Montana, and eastern Washington and Oregon. Weeks when the sun rose blood-red and the skies were yellow and orange, and the air tasted of ash. 

How prairies become forests:  pines appear, fires (or mowing) does not follow along, and in a few years, all trees, no prairie.

Then came the fires early fall 2017, and multiple in northern California’s wine counties, or “Sonapamendonoma”, my husband (who is from San Mateo), calls them. Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino Counties are north of San Francisco Bay, in the California Coast Range, covered with oaks, grasslands, homes, farms, and now devastated by wildfire. Years of drought, a wet winter and lush spring of growth, another dry summer, red flag atmospheric conditions (very dry soil and air, strong dry hot winds), and Bam! Another area is burned. 

Which brings me to the concept of better living with trees and fire. Here are some things that aggravate fires:  dense, even age forests; wet springs and dry summers; carelessness with fireworks; homes in the middle of dense forests; tree homage as a culture that makes fuel reduction difficult. 

Tree homage? Yes. We love trees. I love trees. But around human settlements, trees can be dangerous. In high winds, they break and rip from the ground, and fall over on other objects. Like homes.  We removed five very large trees from our property a few years ago. All were over one hundred feet tall, one was rotten inside, and split into sections when the main trunk came down, and every one of them could hit at least two buildings. Storms were nerve-wracking:  which tree might come down and hit which building this time? I loved those trees, the neighborhood eagles perched in them, but they were too big for safety. 

Commercial tree plantations are basically monocultures of even-aged, single species trees. Often a single clone, planted to thousands of acres. Dense, with standing dead trees among the living. Fire hazard waiting to burn, just a matter of when.

A shore pine thicket with seedling spruces nearby, in the dunes.

On the ocean side of the sand spit where I live, there are young dense shore pine monocultures for more than twenty miles, with very few firebreaks. Shore pine adapts to fire; it has cones that open only when burned. It grows in dense forests, which if they burn down, release seeds for the next dense pine forest. The only way to live safely with shore pine is to remove, thin and limb so that canopies don’t touch, limbs are well above six feet above ground, and to keep out the seedlings that follow. Pines grow in uplands and wetlands alike, and it’s not legal to thin or limb wetland trees, according to state and federal regulations. In our area, you can take upland trees out, limb wetland buffer trees (but not thin), and wetlands must be left as is. 

That late summer fire in red flag weather conditions?—there’s no water in the coastal wetlands then, and fires burn right through them. The best you can do (legally) is to keep woody plants out of the two hundred feet of land closest to your home. 

Harvest brodiaea flowering a coastal prairie as the dry season begins.

It’s a start on fire resistance, but if we want communities to thrive with fire, we have to do better.  Think about a bit less tree homage and a bit more fire suppression for community safety. Think woodland savannah instead of dense forest, and wider buffers of low vegetation between trees and homes. It’s time to bring back the coastal prairies.