Earth & Sky

The following person was interviewed for today’s program. Our thanks to:

Bob Brobst
Environmental Protection Agency
Environmental Engineer

Author’s notes:

The Hayman Fire is named for the “Hayman” mine site near Tappan Gulch, at the fire’s origin. It started about 8 miles northwest of Lake George, CO on June 8, 2002.

Interview with Robert Brobst:

BB: BAER – Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation Teams are put together by the Forest Service after every fire of a certain size – 2500 acres, and other criteria. Hayman is an example of that. And Hayman was a fire that happened in Colorado last summer. And it happened to be one of the largest in Colorado. As a matter of fact it was the largest since the 1850s, when we actually started recording [fire] history. There are two parts to a fire. There’s the basic fire that everybody sees on the TV, and that everybody reacts to on the TV, and the suppression that happens for that fire. ^^^ The second thing that happens is the aftermath – the sudden rainfalls, the flooding, the mass movement of soil, etc…, of of the burned areas – that’s the job where BAER comes in and tries to minimize. ^^^

BR: Generally, BAERs are formed at about 60% containment. Now containment means that the fire’s contained that it’s not going to burn outside of a certain boundary. Controlled means that it’s out. So generally BAERs are formed someplace near the 60%-70% containment timeframe. And one of the reasons for that is, the Forest Service rule that the BAER assessments report, which happens seven days after containment. So seven days following containment, the BAER report has to be done and ready to go. And for example, with the Hayman, the fire started June 8. And we were already activated about the 16th of June. So we were there while the fire was still active.

BR: BAER is uniquely Forest Service. The Department of Interior has a whole separate system, they call them Emergency Soil Rehabilitation themes. But they basically have the same goals and the same principles.

BR: What’s unique about these BAER teams is they are a group of scientists that get together. So they are a group of soil chemists, soil physicists, water quality people, engineers, specialists in invasive species, in flooding, etc.. So they’re a group of specialists getting together to come forward with the proposed controls that will minimize the aftermath. That’s what’s so exciting about this – that they have that much ability to come together, and that all of these disciplines are able to come up with one report, and make one recommendation.

BR: When the BAER teams are formed, there’s two parts of a BAER team. One part is assessment, which means we go out there and evaluate how severely the fire had burned, and the burn severity, and what effects that had on the soil, and other properties, or values at risk, as we call them, in the fire area. The second “team,” is the implementation team. And the implementation team is those individuals that take the recommendations of the assessment team and actually put them in to place, actually do the work. So what the assessment teams tries to go in and evaluate immediately, they look at life and property first, they look at water quality, soil productivity, they look at those areas, in an attempt to assess what damage was done, and from that damage we can turn around and make recommendations for treatments. For example, on the Hayman fire, the Hayman fire burned roughly 137,000 acres. And roughly half of that was high to moderate severity. What that means is that the soil has been damaged to the point where it has become water repellant. It won’t sustain life, and therefore it is a danger to water quality. The two are interrelated. And one of the goals is to maintain the soil in place – how do we protect the soil. And simplistically there are two ways. One – you can break that water-repellant layer so that water will infiltrate, therefore you minimize runoff. Or two, you can put storage above the surface, so the work that Greg Butters was doing with the hydromulch, or in some cases we actually put down straw mulch to increase the storage capacity of a rain event on the surface. So we look at all of those things. And what we actually did was – we used GIS to great ability. We used satellite photos, and we interpret those photos to give us a bas map for burn severity. And severity is a function of the intensity of the fire, the time the fire stayed there, the types of soil, the types of vegetation, etc… Burn severity is a very specific term, it may not equal intensity. Intensity is how hot a fire is. Severity is how hot it is, how long it’s there, what the vegetation is, etc… sot there’s a lot of that goes into determining severity. So we used GIS, and we used interpretations from those GIS, and made predictions to a base map. But then, as with any satellite imagery, we had to go out and ground truth it. So while the fire was still going, we were out there within the fire boundary taking soil measurements, making observations, trying to ground truth what had been done on a satellite image.

BR: It’s fairly simplistic measurement. What we do is that we pour water on the soil, we wait a unit of time, 10 seconds or 20 seconds or 40 seconds, and we determine the severity of water repellency that happens because of that fire. The water repellency is actually caused by the extreme heat and it volatilizes the organic matter, and when it’s volatile, it can move up or down. And it’s moving downward where it gets cool, recondenses, reforms. You end up with an area that is water repellant. Now, why is that important. Well, we took a forest that had a given run off, and we turned that into an asphalt parking lot – is the analogy – where now there is nothing to slow the water, nothing to stop the water, and the water can’t go into the ground. So runoff can be 3-4-5-10 times what it was prior to the fire. And severe flooding can happen. And that can cause further life and property damage that happens after a fire. So go out there and we do a very simple measurement. We go out and take, for example, a 100 foot chain, and we go along the chain, and at periodic intervals, we monitor for water repellency by putting a drop of water on the surface. Now the researchers, Greg Butters, uses a slightly different technique, and he and I have been discussing that technique, where he uses different concentrations of isopropyl alcohol and water. We’re looking at the same thing, and we’re using time as our variable, he is using the (surface) tension that’s formed by the alcohol as his variable. The other thing – water is generally available to the fire fighters, and therefore to the BAER team and we take our little bottle of water out there and pour it on the ground.

BR: Just to give you one example, a fire that happened in this same areas six years before, the Buffalo Creek Fire, actually caused several million dollars worth of damage and two deaths, because of the flood that happened immediately after the fire. And so the goal of the BAER team is to go in there and minimize those effects. So we turn around and look at slopes, burn severity, etc… And try to do treatments on the ground that will minimize any of the severe run off or flooding that would happen. Our predicted success on this effort was 80%. And we’ve had a few flood events, but we haven’t had any loss of life or any severe property damage.

BR: Yeah they are, and they’re affected in two ways. Some birds, the three-toed woodpecker, this is actually its habitat, immediately after the fire. The insects move in, and the three-toed woodpecker has a feast. Whereas in dense forests, the three-toed woodpecker is very rare. Most adult animals can escape a fire. For the young, it’s a different story. And many times for fish it’s a different story. But, the older animals tend to move on and can stay ahead of the fire.

BR: On the Hayman fire, I was involved in both. In the assessment, I worked on the water quality section, and we did modeling of events on small watersheds within that Hayman fire are based on data we had from an adjoining area that had burned about 6 years before. And so we were trying to mimic would what happen to be able to justify being able to spend the money and making the effort to treat a given watershed. That was my particular job within that assessment team. There were also people who looked at the threatened and endangered species. And on this particular fire, there is a threatened and endangered butterfly, and the fire destroyed a significant part of its habitat. Now will that come back – meaning that habitat – we don’t know. We’re going to have to wait and see what happens. As a matter of fact, that’s one of the monitoring events that are happening for this endangered species.

BR: Well if you can imagine, there’s the fire. There are homes and buildings destroyed during that fire. Well there are also a number of homes and buildings that are not destroyed during the fire. But, the burned area comes very close to those homes. And so there are life and property issues with respect to flooding which comes off of Forest Service land.

BR: The life and property threatened from the aftermath of the fire can be some severe flooding, or a slope can fail, and they can end up with the whole hill side inside their living room. So the goal is to try and stabilize those hillsides, stabilize those areas, so we minimize any of those effects. And again, this is done in a very short period of time. So regardless of the size of the fire, 2500 acres, 5000 acres, or 130,000 acres – the report is completed within seven days of containment. And we actually completed it a couple of days following containment.

BR: What happens in the assessment, we end up with a set of specifications – you’ll treat this area with this treatment, and we believe it’ll cost this much. All of that information then moves up the chain in the Forest Service, and then USDA to decide, are we going to pay for this or not, what are the risks there, etc…. because everybody there is in dire budget straits. Once that’s decided – and this is decided very quickly – to go ahead and start the implementation, we were back on the job, roughly 10 days later to implement. And the implementation began fairly simply. We had ground operations, we had air operations, and it runs very similarly to what a fire situation does. We had a camp set up where we had incident command running it, and in that, we had a series of basic officers, and down to the people who do the work. So, what we did was, we physically – what I had said earlier, where we talk about two simplistic ways of increasing the water holding capacity of the soil, where we physically break it, or we cover the soil. We did that. A couple of the treatments that we did were as simple as hand raking. Some of the water repellant layers are very shallow and very weak – meaning a rake can break them. And when we did that with people, we usually did that with low slopes, so 0-20% slopes, because as we get higher on the slopes, it’s more difficult and more dangerous for people. So we kept them on the fairly shallow slopes. When we used the air operations, so the aerial hydromulching, or the hydromulching that we did from vehicles, or the dry mulching, meaning we dropped straw onto the ground – we generally saved the tops of the ridges for that – the tops of the hills for that. We obviously didn’t treat rock, because that wasn’t going to do any good. But we treated areas on the tops of the ridges, etc…, with straw, with hydromulch, in an effort to, if we can slow it down at the tops of the ridges where the water starts to run, we have less of an impact on the shallower slopes – the steeper the slope the faster it’s going to stop moving.

BR: When we did this, the hand raking, we also ran ATV’s with small arrows behind them, and could cover large areas with that. We had crews of upwards of 200, 300, and 400 people doing it. We downsized eventually as we got rid of the handwork and got into the air operations to a lot less people. On these BAER teams for implementation, we end up with a series of people who have to make the decisions. And underneath them are a bunch of people that we call resource advisors, people who will come in and take specialties underneath that. So, at any one time, we have sawyers out there clearing hazard trees for people, we have 10 or 15 crews on the ground doing hand-raking or ATV’s going on, or potentially air-operations going on. We also have engineering going on, because obviously you have to keep the roads in open order and working. And also, in this particular fire, we had a series of other people who had very special duties, some of them dealing with the homeowners who lost homes or who had homes that were in danger. We also had research coordinators trying to control access, because once something like this happens, researchers come from everywhere, trying to get in collect information. And, for their safety, we needed to control that end. Mind you, all these words are coming from somebody who was doing research out there too.

BR: Probably its magnitude, its size. I’m used to fires that I’ve worked on before that are 4000, 10,000, 15,000 acres, and this one was simply 10 times that size. And problems don’t just get 10 times bigger – they also get much more difficult and varied as time goes on. If you’re trying to coordinate things, you have you’ve got so many other individuals to coordinate with, and still trying to get these projects in place, and to monitor these projects, to make sure that they work or they don’t work. That too is one of the goals. Now to switch gears a little bit, there is some research that is going on in the Hayman that is looking at runoff from those areas, and runoff from treatments. So they were looking at watersheds that were say, 10 acres – remember, the fire was 137,000 acres – and they were looking at changes within those regions. One of the unique studies we had going on was a forest runoff study that was set-up in a small watershed, and lo and behold, it burned, and ruined the research that this guy was doing for his forest runoff study. But it turn of ruining it, it created an opportunity to look at runoff immediately after a fire, knowing exactly what it was before the fire. And we can then monitor by hand. So, out of much of the bad, came good, with understanding of this. ^^^ One of the things that has never ceased to amaze me is plant life comes back, animal life comes back. Within weeks of the fire, you could go out there and see certain areas that were not severely burned, were beginning to come back with vegetation, and the animals were moving in. The three-toed woodpeckers were having their feast of insects, there was a lot of life going on in something that somebody would say would be dead. ^^^

BR: It’s been open. It was closed during our activity, with respect to the implementation, but has remained open since then – roughly October 2002, we opened it up and it’s been open since. With only intermittent closings for certain reasons, flooding, additional treatments, or something like that.

BR: Well, remember we had forested watersheds in the area. We had Ponderosa pine, we had duff and litter on the surface that was perhaps a foot thick in places or more, and in severely burned areas, none of that’s there anymore. There’s none of the storage in the trees. ^^^ You know how you can stand under a tree during a light rainstorm and not get wet, the leaves store the water up above, same thing happens in a forest, where it’s storing some of the water up above. You have the duff or pine needles in organic matter on the surface of the soil from all the needles that have been falling. You’re storing water there. So the water the runs in the watersheds in a forested area is much different as soon as we remove all of those needles, all of the vegetation, all of that organic matter. Now all we have is bare soil and ash. And when that happens, there is nothing to slow the water. So, simplistically again, most every drop that falls will be runoff, rather than soak in or be stored to be made available to the plants to live, because all of the storage material has been destroyed. How’s that for a confusing circle. ^^^^

BB: Sure, and it’s promoting it for a couple of reasons. One, you’re removing those storages that we had talked about in the top of the tree, and in the duff, and in the litter that lays on the ground in these forests. ^^^ Not only in that removal, you’re also making that soil, because of the severity of the burn, water repellant. And when you make it water repellant, the analogy is that you’ve now got a parking lot. So basically, every drop that falls is going to run off. And again, that’s a simplistic approach, and that makes it a uniform treatment. Mind you, these burn severities are not uniform across the fire. There are a whole lot of microenvironments that happen. There are a whole lot of areas that actually are hotter more than others. I’ve seen areas out there where metal, and I believe it was aluminum or some other metal, ran liquid, 50-75 feet. So, i that particular are, that had to be one heck of a fire for a very long time to get the metal that hot, to run just like lava. You’d pour it like milk and it’d run across the surface. ^^^

BB: ^^^ which brings up an interesting question I guess. What does recovery mean? If recovery means going back to trees that were 600 years old, than the answer is kind of obvious. It’ll be 600 years or more. If it means recovering, meaning, will it now become a meadow and will life come back in there, and will animals come back in there and start utilizing it, and the water quality improve, etc…, we’re talking a few years. We’re talking 4 or 5 or 6 years, 7 years – we’re not talking a very long time. Even today, we’re one year out from the fire, a little more than one year out from the fire, there are lots and lots of vegetation that have com up, aside from the vegetation that we planted, a lot of the wild seed has germinated, and vegetation is already coming back. It’s nowhere near what it was, and there’s no where near the storage on the surface, but it’s getting there. And, where do I have those years with confidence? First off, the older ones, we actually have extensive studies in that area on ages of many of the trees that were in there. And this is what we call a stand replacing fire. So many of those 600-year trees were killed. On the other hand, how long will it take for the vegetation to recover, we look at a fire less than 3 miles away that happened 7 years before, that is now arguably an open mountain meadow. And it depends on your definition of what coming back to restoring, or coming back to what it was, means to you.

BR: No, BAER is a very short-term fix. It’s one to three years, and we’re out of there. What happens after that is what they call restoration. We have what’s called a restoration team that comes in after that. And Hayman has a restoration team. And primarily that restoration team is interested in planting seeds, and getting things back to normal – whatever the new definition of normal is.

BR: No, I’m spending time with my family, trying to make up for what happened last year. Mind you, when these guys work, the firefighters, the BAER team guys, it’s 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 14 on, 1 off, 7 on, 2 off. So, it’s a fairly rigorous schedule. And that can basically go on for a very long time. In the case of Hayman, basically, it went on, I was in and out of dealing with that fire since the middle of June, and I wasn’t really done until the end of September.

ES: How dangerous is it for the workers there?

BR: All the workers are card-carrying firefighters. They’re very aware of what the dangers are, and those kinds of things. One of the unique things of BAER vs. firefighting was that, we’re interior to the fire. We’re in the “black,” as to say. And where there used to be a sign that warned you of a hole ahead or something like that, the sign’s not there anymore. So one of the good things about having implementation teams be local is that most of these guys know this forest. And we try to minimize danger. We preach safety all the time. We have safety briefings, we have people out looking at safety. You’re competing against a couple of things, because you’re working these people long hours for many days. And you’re got all of those complicating factors that keep you going too. The group of people involved are very dedicated, they’re very dedicated to the environment. They’re also very dedicated to their sciences. And, that’s what’s so exciting to me in all of this. The whole time I was there it was very exhausting. I mean, I’ve never gotten to the point where I was emotionally exhausted, physically exhausted, mentally exhausted, as far as I did on this one. After that many months, you end up wanting to take some time off and rest. At the same time you want to get back and make sure that things are working – and seeing how your projects are working. Most of us have gone back down there dozens of times to see if an individual thing worked there or not for us. Because a lot of these things end up being innovative ideas, because every piece of environment us unique. They may be very similar in nature, but they may end up being very different in specifics.

BB: I think this was a unique event, a unique operation that brought together scientists from many, many disciplines. And I think that was the most exciting part of this, working with all the different scientists, all the different views. And working in a practical sense, so going away from the academic and research area and actually having to apply science, was probably one of the most exciting parts of this.

Relevant Web Links:

Rebounding from the burn)

The Story Of Colorado’s Worst Wildfire)

Hayman cost: $237.8 million)