Rim Fire, Recovery, Progress

By Guy McCarthy, The Union Democrat

In the two years since the Rim Fire broke out deep in a canyon in Tuolumne County, new flowers, shrubs and trees have sprouted in 400 square miles of mountain watershed burned by what became the largest blaze in the recorded history of the Sierra Nevada range.

Woodpeckers, squirrels, deer and other wildlife have returned to some parts of the massive burn, which stretches from the narrow creek bottoms of the Clavey River and the North Fork, Middle Fork, and South Fork Tuolumne River, to ridge after ridge, from Jawbone to Buck Meadows to Yosemite National Park.

Other areas still look like moonscape, scorched or clear-cut to stumps and bare earth, deserted and devoid of life.

Property owners, including ranchers with private holdings that predate the creation of the Forest Service, are still rebuilding.  More than 7,000 acres in the Rim Fire burn in the Stanislaus National Forest have been logged, while thousands of black, dead trees remain.  Debates on how to move forward continue.

Earlier this year, the Rim Fire and its continuing impacts prompted state authorities to select Tuolumne County as California’s sole representative in a national disaster resiliency competition with up to $1 billion at stake.

Who was impacted?

Tens of thousands of nervous Mother Lode residents watched the Rim Fire grow at an explosive rate and continue to burn over the course of two months.  More than 5,000 firefighters fought the blaze.   Families lost homes and outbuildings.

The Forest Service says the Rim Fire burned 257,314 acres, destroyed 11 houses, and 98 outbuildings, leveled several residential camps, caused 10 injuries, and cost $127.3 million to fight.

Near a section of the Stanislaus National Forest known to ranchers as the Jawbone allotment, Stuart Crook and his family are still working to rebuild what’s left of Meyers Ranch, a 500-acre property held by his relatives since 1969.

The Rim Fire tore through the ranch, destroyed a cabin dating to 1886, killed 100 cows and filling in a valuable water source.

“It was an old-time irrigation ditch, open ditch that we had to take of but when the fire came through, it just ruined it,” Crook said.

“All the erosion came and washed it out and the trees, they’d fall over in the stump holes,” Crook said.  “So we had to pipe it – 14,000 feet of pipe we had to put in at high expense to get water to our private property.”

The water will irrigate Lumsden Meadow, above the old cabin that burned, Crook said.

Near a corral, where the wood loading chute burned, Crook showed where his brother Steve Crook has logged out a section of burned trees.  They cleared the land to reforest, and they have yellow pine, cedar and sequoia seedlings taking root.

The Crooks have also put up four miles of fence.  Replacing the old cabin is taking time.

On Wednesday, Matt Divine, Divine Construction of Sonora, brought a load of steel rebar and wood planks to the cabin work site, where excavation has begun for the foundation.  The new building will be 704 square feet, same as the old one.

The Jawbone allotment dates back to 1964, Crook said.  Other allotments go back further.  Homesteaders, ranchers and miners were coming into these mountains decades before the Stanislaus National Forest was created in 1905.

The Crooks and other ranchers wanted to bring cattle up into the Rim Fire burn last year, but the Forest Service didn’t allow it.  This week, Crook point to cows moving along Granite Creek, near Forest Road 3NO1.

“Cows are managing the forest by eating this brush up, but it’s getting way ahead of them, Crook said.  They wouldn’t lete us come up here last year.  The longer they keep the cattle out, the more brush grows up.”

Who started the Rim Fire?

Nearly a year after the blaze broke out, Forest Service investigators said a bowhunter from Columbia name Keith Matthew Emerald, now 33, confessed to accidentally starting the fire while he cooked beans and burned trash at a campsite in a steep drainage near the Clavey River.

Emerald was indicted Aug. 7, 2014, on four counts, including violating a fire restriction order and making false statements.  The chares carried a maximum sentence of 11 years and more than $500,000 in fines.  He pleaded not guilty.

In March this year, Emerald’s defense attorneys said his alleged confession was coerced.

On May 1, federal prosecutors announced they were dropping all charges in part because two key witnesses died in February and March  A friend of Emerald, Tanden Olsen, 34 , of Sonora, died in February 16 days after a workplace accident.  Jerold “Jerry” Bonner, 72, an Alta Helitack Base pilot stationed outside Los Gatos, was found dead of a heart attack inside his barracks.

Emerald could not be located for comment.  Federal defenders who represented Emerald did not return phone messages.  There was no answer this week at the door of a two-story home in Columbia identified as Emerald’s residence by a US Forest Service special agent in a September 2013 search warrant.

What level of threat remains?

One of the easiest ways to understand potential for another massive wildfire is to remember that more than 80 percent of the 898,099-acre Stanislaus National Forest did not burn in the 2013 Rim Fire.

The forest covers 1,403 square miles in Alpine, Calaveras, Tuolumne and Mariposa Counties.  Unburned portions of the Stanislaus National Forest remain just as overcrowded and drought-stricken as portions that burned in 2013.

Another indicator of the threat is that drought-stress and infestation are killing thousands of trees, especially in the Groveland area, where CAL FIRE forester for the Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit estimates 30 percent of the trees are dead or dying.

Weather-related variables watched by fire agencies are equal now to what they were two years ago, Rebecca Garcia of the Stanislaus National Forest told the Tuolumne County Board of Supervisors earlier this week.

How did the Rim Fire get so big?

     Rob Laeng, fire management officer for the Stanislaus National Forest is the acting fire chief for the forest.  During the Rim Fire, he was deputy fire chief for the forest.

“The amount of instability in the air, what it did was allow that column to go up to the tens of thousands of feet,” Laeng said.  “It was drawing in oxygen feeding the fire, adding more fuel to it.  It was like a boulder rolling down the hill.  Once gravity started pulling it, the fire just took off.

“The extended drought, the instability of the air mass, the burn indexes, extreme temperatures, low relative humidities, all aligned with where the fire was on the hill and how much room it had to grow and go uphill and inaccessibility of the terrain,” Laeng said.

It was challenge deciding where to safely assign fire crews on the ground, Laeng said.  Less than two months earlier, on June 30, 2013, the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona blew up, overran and killed 19 hotshots with the City of Prescott.  It was the worst loss of firefighter lives in a wildland blaze since 1933.  Several of the hotshots killed were California natives, and funerals were held in communities across Southern California.

In addition, fire command staff on the Rim Fire were aware of at least two firefighter fatalities in the same area as the Rim Fire, in 2003 and 1987.  Stone markers in remembrance of them are at the Rim of the World vista, which the 2013 Rim Fire is named for.  Forest Service research also shows two firefighters died in a 1949 blaze on Jawbone Ridge, near the 2013 Rim Fire point of origin.

The Forest Service faced intense criticism for its initial response to the Rim Fire from some residents and a Cal Fire tanker pilot who made retardant drops on Aug. 17, when the blaze was first reported and grew to more than 150 acres.

Some said the early response to the Rim Fire was too passive.  Some questioned why Forest Service tanker planes were diverted to Southern California as the fire grew in size.

Jim Dunn a CAL FIRE tanker pilot  who retired in November 2013 after 24 years in firefighting, said he made retardant drops on the Rim Fire on Aug. 17 for a couple of hours.  Dunn said another tanker pilot based out of Columbia was dispatched, then put on hold as well.

On the third day of the fire, Dunn said he and other pilots made two or three drops before they got put on hold again.

Initial actions report

The Forest Service, aware of the criticism and rumors about how the blaze started, began generating a report detailing its initial actions on the Rim Fire while it was still burning.  The initial actions report was finalized in November 2013.

The report says a lead pilot returning to base from an initial attack assignment on another fire discovered the Rim Fire at 3:25 pm. Aug. 17, 2013.  It was the third fire of the day for Stanislaus National Forest firefighter.  Earlier that day, the Bridge Fire and Boyd Fire had already drawn multiple local resources, including the Stanislaus Hotshot Crew.

A pilot in Helicopter 106, arriving about 4 p.m. flew into Clavey River Canyon near the fire’s origin to look for safe locations to unload crews in the canyon bottom.

The pilot assessed it was not safe to land crews in the canyon due to fire, winds, and topography.  BY 4:30 p.m., four engines, one dozer, two helicopters, two air tankers, and an air attack and lead plane were on the scene.

Factors that convinced fire commander it was too dangerous to send hand crews onto slopes above Clavey River on Aug. 17 included very slow difficult foot travel, the absence of safety zones and escape routes, and rapid fire spread.

That afternoon, five air tankers conducted 31 missions, dropping 32,021 gallons of retardant.

The summary says Stanislaus National Forest fire managers and personnel acted rapidly and added more ground and aviation firefighting resources.

“The initial strategy for containing the fire north of the Tuolumne River was invalidated on August 19 when prolific spotting caused large fire spread on the slopes above and to the south of the Tuolumne River,” the report summary states.

What has been done?

Federal foresters closed portions of the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park during the Rim Fire Burned Area Emergency Response teams of foresters, botanists, biologists, and other scientists began assessing some areas before the fire was declared contained in October 2013.

Closed areas were expanded and kept closed for more than one year.  A closure order for the Groveland and Mi-Wok ranger districts in the Stanislaus National Forest was lifted in November 2014.

Groups that include representatives for multiple interests, including residents, ranchers, loggers, and multiple agencies, such as Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions and the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment, began pressuring the Forest Service for decisive action.

AN immediate concern was how to deal with all the dead and live timber.  Environmental groups from outside Tuolumne County filed lawsuits in September 2014 to prevent logging arguing that cutting down fire-damaged trees threatens spotted owls.

Multiple Rim Fire recovery stakeholders, including Tuolumne County counsel, the American Forest Resource Council and Sierra Pacific Industries, allied with the Forest Service to oppose the legal action.

In May this year, a decision by U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth District judges filed in San Francisco stalled the legal action.  The plaintiffs – the Center for Biological Diversity, the Earth Island Institute and the California Chaparral Institute – can take their appeal higher if they want to.”

The Forest Service has approval to log more than 17,300 acres of the burn inside the Stanislaus National Forest boundaries, according to Barbara Drake, director of the forest’s Rim Fire recovery team.

Logging in the forest’s Rim Fire burn area is expected to continue through Oct. 31, 2016.

Multiple workshops have been held to date on the Forest Service’s reforestation plan.

In June, Stanislaus National Forest staff said the plan’s primary goals include returning a mixed conifer forest to 30,065 acres, restoring old forest for wildlife habitat and connectivity, reducing hazardous fuels for future fire resiliency, and eradicating noxious weeds.

The most recent workshop, in early July, was a step in a process the forest Service must work through with individuals, groups and other members of the public, as well as interested parties known as stakeholders, before the federal agency can move forward with reforestation plan specifics.

Why is the Rim Fire so controversial?

Forest management may be the single most contentious issue in the Mother Lode over the past half-century.  Tensions between residents, ranchers, loggers, hunters, motorsports enthusiasts, environmentalists, and the Forest Service existed decades before the Rim Fire broke out.

Those tensions flare each time there’s a fire.  Finger-pointing is common, but scientists and foresters agree that a century of fire suppression has resulted in overcrowded mountain forests up and down the Sierra Nevada range.

One of the local multi-agency groups, Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions formed in 2010 to bring voices representing diverse interests together to find common ground on public safety concerns and strategies for the drought-stricken Central Sierra Nevada.

To prevent the next catastrophic megafire, some Forest Service researchers, local loggers and environmentalists last month said they agree on the best way forward:  thin overgrown forests with selective logging and more frequent prescribed burns.

“We need to scale up on all treatments,” Eric Knapp, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said in late July.  “We are doing 100-acre projects, mechanical thinning and prescribed burns, and we need to ramp it up to 1,000-acre, 10,000-acre projects.”

Knapp and Yosemite-Stanislaus Solutions members Mike Albrecht of Sierra Resource Management in Sonora, John Buckley of Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte and Tuolumne County District 2 Supervisor Randy Hanvelt, want more support from other elected leaders, lawmakers, and residents.

Nancy Longmore of CAL FIRE’s Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit urges residents to remember:  there is still plenty of fire fuel in the massive burn area.

“Many people believe that we now have a wonderful fire break east of Sonora, and north of Groveland, and so there’s less need to do their defensible space,” Longmore said earlier this week.  “That’s just not true.  There is a huge amount of flammable vegetation in the burn area.  Millions of dead trees remain, which, in a a few years, will be falling like jackstraws tangled in with the brush that is already several feet high in places.”