Taming Our Forests

THE FIRE FIGHTERS

When a fire has been finally corralled, mopped up, and stamped out—when the floods have come and the rains descended and there is no smallest drift of smoke from the burned area—then the man who has led the campaign against it makes a sort of clinical report of what happened. It goes through the hands of his superior officers and finally arrives at the file in Washington. As these records proceed on their way, little comments are dropped upon their margins in red ink or blue pencil, and various degrees of praise or blame are meted out. This man might have got his men together quicker. Why did not this crew do more back firing? Where was the tractor that should have furrowed up the smoother sections of that fire line? Few reports escape this searching criticism, for to human happiness and human prosperity, the seconds between the finding of a fire and the reporting of it are as vital as the time between the strike of a rattlesnake and the injection of the serum to counteract it. But sometimes a report comes through with the simple comment of the man highest up—"Good job."

That official comment "Good job!" is earned quite as much by the organization that the Forest Service has put back of the work as by the man who had charge of the fire. The fight is an end product; on what does it rest?

Fire fighters go in.

The forest ranger to whom the telephone report of a fire comes has before him the records of the amount of moisture in the litter on the forest floor. He has the latest reports on weather, including probable direction of the winds and the possibility of rain. He has maps of the locality showing every kind of road and information as to whether it is passable for motors, and a fire engine, whether it is a trail that might be followed by a horse, or just a path through the forest over which men must carry their own equipment. He knows where the canyons are that will act like chimneys under a forced draft; he knows where the fire may be expected to back slowly downhill and where it is likely to ramble over uneven ground. He knows where the streams and ponds are and whether there is water enough in them to supply the pumps.

His fire truck is ready, within a minute, to shoot out of the firehouse doors. After the fire engine go the truckloads of men, the camp equipment, food, first-aid tent, and extra tools. The cook is almost as important as the foreman. There must be lots of food and gallons and gallons of strong coffee. The food for 25 fire fighters to last 4 days will weigh 700 pounds packed, that is, 5 pounds of food per man per day, and in addition to this, tobacco.

Fire camp—The cook.

If the ranger reaches the fire while it covers not more than a quarter of an acre—what is called a class A fire—he can see all around it and determine at exactly which spot there is the most material for it to spread on—a pile of slash, a growth of dry fern or fireweed, a steep ravine to act like a chimney—and attack it there. Then he can encircle the rest of it with a tight fire line that will hold it down.

A class B fire may cover as much as 10 acres. In a forest you cannot see all 10 acres at once. The ranger must travel around it to make his plans. If it still is a ground fire, and if he can hold it down, prevent its spreading into the treetops out of reach, where the wind can catch it and spread it—he can probably keep it in class B. He must attack it with speed—must throw a line across the way it is trying to go.

But if it has got into class C—if it has spread over more than 10 acres—then he must plan a campaign which may include seige, slow tracking and pursuit from the rear, an attempt to turn it toward some impassable barrier, a plan for which he must command his men as autocratically as the captain of a ship. And also like the captain of a ship, he must be able to rescue them in emergencies.

Only men "strong of their hands"—the first requirement for English soldiers 800 years ago—are good fire fighters; only men well shod so that their feet will not be blistered when they work on hot ground, no boys so young that they have not got their full strength, no men so old that they have lost theirs; and always men with "intestinal fortitude"—an elegant Forest Service equivalent for a very plain word.

It is not a pleasant job these men have. The minimum of work is 12 hours a day of the most strenuous sort, cutting down trees, digging fire lines down to mineral soil, grubbing out the underbrush, sometimes in an atmosphere of terrific heat, always of smoke, and frequently of danger. There will be no bath. They will sleep on thin beds spread on the ground. It is not as though the men were sure of these 12 hours of sleep. In any emergency the gang that is resting is roused and sent to the lines again. It is a question of just how long human doggedness can hold out, for a fire fighter must stand up to a fire, as he would to a human enemy, get it down and hold it down when he is gasping with heat and choking with smoke.

C. C. C. boys fighting forest fire.

To save the forests from fire, we must tame them. The domesticated forest will be a group of tall, straight-trunked trees, standing close together and holding their crowns high above a clean, moist forest floor. It will be traversed by roads and trails and paths along which men can move easily to watch and protect it. It will be held in a web of telephone wires anchoring it to lookout towers and ranger stations and centers of supplies and men. When danger from winds and drought is afoot, extra guards will be sent carrying what is far more important in the forest than guns—portable short-wave radio sets, of which the Forest Service has more than a thousand—so that danger can be reported from localities remote even from telephone lines. Everything will be organized for speed to catch a fire as near the moment it starts as possible.

But when we have trained ourselves in caution, and made our forests as nearly fireproof as possible, and established a system of fire fighting with all that experience, character, and science can give it, will there still be forest fires? Unfortunately, yes!

Until we know how to direct Jove's thunderbolts to the open sea, or bare mountain tops, or sand-covered deserts, there will be between 4,000 and 5,000 forest fires started by lightning every year. But they need not burn the 180,110 million board feet of timber which they take now. There is no reason why we should go without the houses, and railroad ties, and turpentine, and shoe soles, and fence posts, and rolling pins, and newspapers, and movie films, and boats that these 180,110 million board feet of lumber would give us; for a really civilized forest—a forest well-broken to the needs of man—will be pretty poor tinder.

Lightning starts a fire, Washington.