Posted 3:37 am Monday, October 20, 2008
Is Texas a Tinder Box Ready to Ignite?
By STEVE KNIGHT
Staff Writer
MOUNT PLEASANT -- It is one of life's great ironies. For year's Americans have bought into one of the most well-known public service announcements, the urging of Smokey Bear to help prevent forest fires.
Staff Writer
MOUNT PLEASANT -- It is one of life's great ironies. For year's Americans have bought into one of the most well-known public service announcements, the urging of Smokey Bear to help prevent forest fires.
It is that mantra, some fear, which may have made Texas a timber box waiting to ignite.
Fire, and its use under control as a wildlife management tool and fire prevention tool, was the focus of a public hearing Thursday at the Mount Pleasant Civic Center. The hearing was held by the Texas House's Committee on Culture, Recreation and Tourism chaired by state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran of Kerrville and included state Reps. Mark Homer of Paris and Larry Phillips of Sherman.
"We are having a revolution in land ownership and use," said Mort Kothmann, a professor of Range Management Science with the Texas AgriLife Extension Service and a Mason County landowner. "In the past we fire-proofed the landscape in Texas with cattle and by removing the trees. We are growing fuel now like we have never seen before."
Kothmann said the amount of fuel, ranging from understory vegetation and pine needles in East Texas to grasses in other portions of the state, is increasing at a rate the state has never seen before.
"We are way behind in Texas. We need to be pro-active. We are reactive buying more equipment," Kothmann said.
Like other speakers at the hearing, some representing state agencies while others were private landowners or from the timber industry, Kothmann said the state needs to do more to encourage the use of prescribed burning.
Fred Carrington of Lufkin, a former Texas Forest Service employee, said the use of prescribed burns to reduce potential fuel would save the state millions of dollars now being spent annually to fight wildfires, as well as reduce the potential for property loss.
"We can't continue paying the cost of fighting wildfires. It is astronomical," said Carrington, suggesting that the Texas Forest Service needed to get back in the business of assistance and equipment for landowners to conduct prescribed burns.
"A wildfire is not going to be as hard to put out on land that has been burned as it is on lands not burned," he said.
Although the hearing was called from a wildlife perspective, the concern over wildfires transcends into public safety. The Texas Forest Service reported about a million acres went up in smoke in almost 1,400 wildfires in Texas during the 2008 wildfire season. Those fires caused an estimated $5.7 million in damage.
According to TFS, the million acres burn represents 37 percent of the total nation acreage and 81 percent in the southern region lost to fire during the year.
During the 2005-06 drought in Texas, TFS reported a total of 29,141 fires burned across 2.2 million acres. During that period 17 lives were lost and more than 700 homes were burned. The total loss during that period was estimated at more than $628 million.
Prescribed burns are low burning fires ignited under exact conditions to achieve desired goals. They have long been promoted by agricultural and wildlife managers to provide more forage and improve range conditions. They are also used to remove fuel to lessen the chance of wildfire.
Despite legislature in 1999 designed to encourage prescribed burns, private landowners today find themselves handcuffed by county burn bans and a lack of state-certified prescribed-burn managers. Required to $1 million of liability insurance, there have only been 16 people certified by the Texas Department of Agriculture. With insurance options disappearing and those remaining climbing in cost, the number of burn managers is expected to decrease instead of grow in the future.
In East Texas, prescribed burns were common into the 1980s on the more than 12 million acres of forest land for both wildlife and forest management. They were replaced by herbicides in the 1980s because of the concern of liability from fire.
Red River County landowner Stan Graff pushed for the Mount Pleasant hearing. Graff's interest in burning is to open forest lands to assist with the eastern turkey restoration program in East Texas.
Graff is in the process of forming a landowner cooperative to support management of the birds, but in talking with others, he discovered small tract owners who would like to burn, but are afraid of the liability and put off by the cost.
"Everyone believes prescribed burns are important, but no one does it because of the fear of liability," Graff said.
He said landowners also give up on the idea of using fire because of the lack of a coordinated effort by state agencies in providing information on the topic.
"There is confusion because we have so many chiefs trying to administer burning that don't understand it," Graff said.
Most of those at the hearing expressed concern about county-mandated burn bans that fall at the peak of the burning season in Texas. While they understand the need to control unregulated burning, they cite the need for a mechanism that would allow burns by people who are trained.
The problem, said Mike McMurray, a member of the Texas Prescribed Burning Board, is that county officials are concerned about the liability they may face from allow a burn during a ban.
McMurray added that while livestock and wildlife managers are often prevented from burning during burn bans, exceptions are provided for things such as pipeline, transmission line and road construction. He said only one prescribed burn got loose this year, but it didn't cause significant damage.
Ironically, one of the biggest users of prescribed burns in the state is the U.S. Forest Service, the agency that created Smokey the Bear. Both the Forest Service and U.S. Park Service reviewed and upgraded their prescribed burn policy for fuel control and as a wildlife management tool follow a massive fire at Yellowstone National Park in 1988.
"Where we have seen our greatest success (with Eastern wild turkey restoration) has been where burning is part of the management philosophy," said Dale Bounds, former Texas chapter president for the National Wild Turkey Federation. "Where you see that best is on the U.S. Forest Service property."
The Forest Service also sent $70,000 to Texas to underwrite the cost of prescribed burns on private property around national forests. That money was used to burn about 7,500 acres.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is also an active prescribed burner on its wildlife management areas and state parks using staff to conduct the burns. Department biologists also commonly recommend the practice to landowners, but are able to do little more in the way of assistance.
"We understand the quandary that landowners are in. Agencies say you need to burn, you need to burn, but there are situations that prevent it. The landowner gets discouraged and gives up," said Nathan Garner, TPWD Wildlife Division regional director from Tyler.
The ability to burn is a property rights issue, said Kirby Brown, executive vice president for the Texas Wildlife Association, an organization representing landowners throughout the state.
"A prescribed fire is different from a wildlife fire," Brown noted. "It creates a natural ecological process that creates a unique impact that can't be replicated with herbicides."
Proposals recommended to the House committee to open the door to more prescribed burning ranged from allowing certified burn managers to conduct burns using the landowners' liability insurance to training landowners and allowing them to burn their own property or on neighboring properties that are part of a burning cooperative. The number of burn cooperatives is currently growing statewide.
There was also a call for legislative tort reform to offer protection to landowners who do a proscribed burn and possibly for county commissioners who approve burns during burn ban periods.
Creating a statewide position for someone to oversee prescribed burning and a need for education to inform the public on the importance of using fire to prevent fires and to aid wildlife was also suggested.
