Thank you for the information update. I know that the situation will be investigated & any missteps will be dealt with accordingly. Living in the Black Hills near Rushmore makes the situation all the more concerning, as we constantly live with the possibility of fire - whether a prescribed burn or nature's own doing.
Best wishes & the very best of luck in bringing this situation under control as quickly as is possible.

Not acceptable!

Anonymous--

Pardon me, but what exactly isn't acceptable?

If NPS doesn't burn, the meadow becomes shrubs, but also the chaparral - forest transition builds up more fuel (downhill and upwind from Foresta!), and a bigger fire happens someday soon, most likely during hotter, drier, less favorable conditions. When that fire burns through El Portal and Foresta, it would be nearly impossible to protect the structures. Given the fuel, a burn in December or January simply wouldn't have killed the dormant shrubs nor reduced the fuel load: wet fuel in January won't burn without lots of napalm (or possibly permaganate).

Fire is unpredictable (a slight wind change, or more variation in fuel moisture that was found when the crews tested leaf and duff moisture before setting the fire), and some fraction of controlled burns will always get away. But, by picking the time and place for the burn, the fire management folks had a pretty good backup plan. Even though the fire escaped, it hasn't burned a single structure. I suspect the fire was started on the El Portal / Foresta side and burned away (north & west), again reducing the consequences if it did jump the lines. If you look at a map, Foresta doesn't have many exit routes, so it needs to be evacuated even when there is little chance the fire will burn through it. The closures are all for smoke: 1 way with pilot cars isn't about dodging flames, its about avoiding head-on collisions due to low visibility, and keeping visitors out of the way of the 26 fire crews and 82 engines moving around to fight the fire.

There have been cases of unacceptable prescription and unacceptable firefighting tactics, but so far I don't think anything about the Big Meadow fire is unacceptable at all.

Excuse me, but unacceptable is the correct response. After your explanations and those of the NPS, the simple fact remains that the NPS themselves believe serious errors were made. It is correct to ask questions, not say that is the way the world works, things are unpredictable, and oh well, I'm sure they are doing their best. It is unacceptable because to let it be acceptable is to allow the NPS to do the same thing all over again...in other words light the same prescribed burn, under the same conditions, in the future. Obviously that didn't work out so well huh? The guess of experts I know is that conditions were not what they expected, however they went ahead since lots of pre work had been done, and felt they could slip it by. But they didn't. Absolutely questions should and will be asked and answered.

Didn't burn a single structure? So it's OK? How about the forest areas that will take two generations to recover?

Having worked for 30 years with governmental agencies I know that without questions and accountability...and the improvements that ensue, history can very easily be repeated as the bureaucratic machinery moves forward.

Tim--

We both agree that something didn't work exactly as planned. Investigation and accountability are necessary, so that we learn more about fire behavior and have better understanding next time. If there was negligence, then folks should be punished or fired; if it was a reasonable judgment call, I hope no one becomes a scapegoat. I assert that a prescribed burn escaping containment is not in and of itself evidence of negligence. Questions and accountability are necessary for government bureaucracies, but also for corporations, medicine, engineering, and any situation where we can learn and improve judgment and decision making.

We disagree about the effect of this fire in this area. "A forest area that will take two generations to recover" isn't how I understand the ecology of these shrublands and forests. They aren't stable "climax" forests, with canopy trees, saplings, and seedlings of the same species regenerating forever until fire comes along and destroys the forest. Look at the aerial photos on google maps: most of the area is chaparral on slopes, with coniferous trees only on the wetter north facing slopes and draws, and grassy meadows in the bottoms of some valleys, such as Big Meadow (if you toggle between the satellite {zoomed in to photo} and terrain views in google maps around Foresta you can see the pattern).

These forests and shrublands (chaparral) are fire dependent; they must burn periodically; they will burn one way or the other. Even if it takes 2 or 3 human generations for a complete cycle from burn to big trees, then 1/2 to 1/3 of the overall area needs to burn in our generation, or else much more will burn in our kids' generation (even if climate change isn't drying this area). The ecosystem (or habitat) should be a mosaic of patches of various sizes and ages since last burn and intensities of last burn. That's something we won't accomplish with prescribed burns (among other reasons, no one will ever write a prescription for a burn as big as the current Big Meadow fire, the larger end of the patch size distribution), but prescribed burns are now necessary to keep the landscape from becoming a single large patch, where plants and animals can't disperse between patches of different status, and where the whole system will burn at once when it burns.

In this case, most of the chaparral shrubs will resprout, be green next spring, and in 5-10 years look about the same as last year. They've evolved in fire prone areas, and only the above ground parts are killed by fire: the root crown resprouts unless the fire was extremely hot and the following winter drier than average. [Many other plants can't compete with the Ceanothus and other shrubs, and remain as dormant seeds until a fire, then germinate cued by chemicals in the smoke & ash and grow & flower for a couple of years. Even some trees are fire dependent: keeping seeds safe in cones until the heat of a fire melts the cone, letting the seeds germinate only after a fire when there are more nutrients available and less competition for light at the height of seedlings, and thus the seedlings have a chance to survive and grow into trees.] I'd be willing to bet you a beer that the stands of pine trees weren't completely destroyed by this fire: what I read implied that there were patches of crown fire that killed trees and patches or strands of ground fire or no burn at all where the trees survived. Yes, 40 or 50 years from now our kids might be able to see signs of where the crown fires were, but they'd have to be much better than I am to be able to distinguish patches without trees because the soil is too thin or the moisture is too low from places where there are no trees because of the fire. Even 10 or 20 years from now, unless you can perfectly align 2 photographs, you may be hard pressed to distinguish photographs from last year (with scattered fire scars from fires in previous decades) from photographs from 2019, with scattered fire scars from the Big meadow fire.

So yes, given that the area needs to burn, and the burn wasn't a massive stand replacement fire on too large of a scale (e.g., Yellowstone 1988), I think this fire is ok, even if it is 50 times larger and cost a few million more than intended (much of that cost will be recouped by not fighting or setting fires in that area over the next decade or 2).

More philosophically, from my perspective on the ecological and fire cycle side, if controlled burns are limited to even narrower conditions where 100% will stay within the intended area, only a fraction of the area that most needs to burn can be prescription burned: those conditions are too infrequent. The rest will burn whenever, likely under less favorable conditions. Further, those 100% predictable burns often will be the wrong intensity in the wrong season to do much good ecologically or to mimic pre-European settlement (or, pre-Native American) fire regimes, or even to prevent large, hot, uncontrolled, catastrophic fires. Should we stop open heart surgery or chemotherapy because not 100% of the treatments are successful, or limit them to the mild cases where those treatments are sure to be successful? Is it unacceptable (on more than a personal level: I lost a friend to brain cancer and my dad to pancreatic cancer) if the best treatment (that most likely to work) is given, but the patient dies anyway? Or, if the patient dies of the chemotherapy or on the operating table? Should we automatically punish the doctor for the failed outcome? I prefer the current system of using best judgment to have the best possible chance of success, investigating the outcome (good or bad) to learn more, and accountability if there was negligence, but not suing or punishing the doctor just because the surgery didn't work. I feel the same way about fire management: complex situations require addressing and accepting risk and probabilities, not demands for supernatural perfection. [Doctors and fire managers with low batting averages should be replaced, but not based on single, non-negligent outcomes.]

Instead of demanding complete perfection in the control, I favor good prescriptions that also are failsafe, where even if the fire escapes no structures or sensitive areas are likely to be burned. [I don't know if that was part of this particular prescription; if not, they got lucky, and one lesson to be learned is the need to make such considerations of the loss if fire escapes part of all future prescriptions.]

Tomp,

I come at this from a scientific and resource conservation viewpoint, but also am mindful of the danger of bureaucratic decision making.

I fully agree that fire can and often is critical in myriad ways, and do have an understanding of forest biomes and the dynamics of fire as a beneficial agent, and while I also agree that in the long run fire is a suitable and natural agent to insure a healthly forest, I do think we can be too forgiving in the case of bureaucratic mismanagement, if in fact that is what occured here.

Agreed, I don't want a scapegoat if there was no negligence in this case. However, the very fact of ordering a burn of this sort in the 4th year of severe drought, in extremely dangerous fire conditions, and with a low margin for error indicates that if there was not a personal act of negligence by someone on the ground, then there very well could be negligence in the process that moved this forward.

Granted your argument about fires like this being necessary to restore pre European contact forest conditions may be a valid one, however the point must be made that this fire takes place in a very altered natural environment, in which pre-contact conditions are no longer a reasonable objective. There have been too many human caused impacts, from global warming, to road building in the park and development outside, to air pollution impacts, and the list goes on, for us to operate as if this were an undisturbed forest ecosystem needing burns like this one to return to a natural state. Having said that, I hope I can buy you a beer and the forest looks good and healthy again in 50 years.

My guess however is human impacts already being recorded will alter that recovery substantially. Namely that an altered climate regime predicted in the Sierra (and already here by many measures) of lower than normal snowpack, warmer winter and summer conditions, higher snowlevels and less soil moisture retention into the summer due to these conditions will lead to an unpredictable forest recovery, slower growth, an altered succession cycle, and unpredictable results.

No supernatural prediction is being required or expected here of our NPS fire managers. And I don't think perfection is a requirement or a possibility that anyone really demands. Just an understanding that we must have as you say a failsafe (some that appears to have not been part of planning) in case of unpredictability and error, real accountability, and an understanding that to allow fires to burn inside areas like Yosemite is much more complicated an issue than simply managing a healthly forest as in pre contact days. Those days are gone and our understanding of how forests behave post fire , especially temperate forests like those in the Sierra, is certainly incomplete given the accelerating impacts of climate change and other human caused factors.

tomp and Tim, I have to tell you that I've learned more about the mechanics and uses of prescribed fire burn from your discussion than in a year's worth of classes. I'm just a neophyte compared to you but I'm curious about something. I'm sure the planners kept the drought conditions in mind; how much of a factor would it have been in their planning? That they did it under these conditions says to me that they thought it to be an acceptable risk.

P.S. my captcha for this is: "1-inch foamy". Spooky.

Bat-

The prescriptions I'm familiar with require some direct measurement of leaf moisture and soil/duff/woody debris moisture right before the fire is set as well as air humidity, local weather forecasts, etc., and not quite so immediate data on fuel loads (LandFire plus some empirical field data). If the soil/duff is too moist, the fire will be hard to keep going, if it is too dry the fire may be too hard to control & too hot. If the vegetation has too much moisture, it might singe and not kill or top-kill (depending on the vegetation type and goal of the burn), too dry and it might torch.

Also, at least in NPS fire management is it's own self-contained unit, with only broad guidance about goals from the NPS planning folks. The folks writing the prescriptions aren't just desk jockeys with scientific training and rudimentary GIS skills: they're the same people in the field running the crews measuring the conditions and setting the fires, and fighting the fires when necessary. You pretty much have to have your red card (active wildland firefighter ratings) for those positions, although former red card holders may qualify.

The latest perimeter map for Big Meadow is at:
http://inciweb.org/incident/maps/large/1869/0/