Young Men and Fire (27 page)

The Northern Forest Fire Laboratory was built in 1960. In fact, the three fire research laboratories of the Forest Service were authorized and built at approximately the same time and, appropriately, in three of the country’s greatest timber-producing regions: the South and East (in Macon, Georgia, 1959), the Northwest (in Missoula, Montana, 1960), and the Southwest (in Riverside, California, 1962). All three laboratories work on problems of national importance, but each also specializes in research problems particular to its region. So the lab serving the South and the East originally was to concentrate on problems pertaining to hardwoods; the lab in Missoula on problems connected with lightning fires and fires in rough terrain; and the lab in California on fires that explode in chaparral and semi-arid country, or, as it was then more elegantly phrased, in a “Mediterranean environment.”

The original aims of the research laboratories in California and Georgia have changed considerably through the years, but the two aims of the laboratory in Missoula remain basically the same—to study lightning fires and fires in rough terrain. These are two problems that Gisborne had made central to the study of fire behavior.

Brackebusch and other old foresters scientifically inclined believe that the death of Gisborne slowed down, at least in the short run, the advance of the science of fire behavior and the arrival of the three Forest Service research centers. In addition, the efforts of some of those in the Forest Service to bury the Mann Gulch fire in a lonely, unattended graveyard in a lonely canyon, and thus to subdue the good effects it might have had, for many years were fairly successful. Even nature seems to have supported the silence. After the burial of the Mann Gulch fire came a succession of what the Forest Service calls “good fire years,” years in which there were fewer than usual fires and fewer fatal fires having to be buried. For a time
the forests themselves seemingly wished that nothing more be said about sad subjects, and the universe, having frightened even itself, seemingly participated in a conspiracy to conceal its own terror.

But sure enough, then came bad years. It may not be a fixed rule but it is certainly a convention of public tragedy that it must repeat itself if it is to make a cry loud enough for something good to come of it. As for tragedy, the universe likes encores to its catastrophes and does not have to be coaxed long to repeat them. The bad fire years were a little less than a decade in coming, the climax being in 1957. To make matters worse, California was hardest hit, and when California suffers, it takes politicians to cure it.

The three labs became a story and a fact, both at the same time, because of a few politicians, two to be exact. In this respect, at least, politicians are like Smokejumpers—no fewer than two drop on a fire, and many bills are cosponsored. So it also seems in drama—two big characters are the basic minimum number. In fact, I once saw a play in which from beginning to end only two characters appeared onstage. Of course, they used the telephone a lot to talk to other characters offstage, but so do politicians.

In 1957, Richard B. Russell was senior senator from Georgia, which he had represented since 1933. Having been a member of the Senate for nearly a quarter of a century, he was one of its most influential members and a member of one of its most influential committees, the Appropriations Committee, which starts money off in the direction it is going to be spent. In fundamental ways government is as simple as determining where money is to be spent, and Georgia is a logging state with a lot of trees that can catch fire.

In 1957, Mike Mansfield had been a member of the Senate for five years after having served as a member of the House of Representatives from the 78th through the 82d Congress. Mansfield went on to become majority leader of the Senate, a position which he made into one of the most influential in the
operation of our government and which he retained until his retirement from the Senate. After his retirement he was appointed ambassador to Japan by President Carter, a post he was later asked to retain by an administration bloodthirsty with Born Again Republicans. Few politicians in modern times have been more respected than the senator from Montana for their knowledge of our national government and for quiet, judicious exercise of power in influencing its direction.

In our state of Montana we would vote for him for anything (in ascending order) from dogcatcher to president of the United States to queen of the Helena Rodeo.

At this point in the story we need to take only a few steps backward in time to see the Mann Gulch connection appearing. Prior to his election to Congress, Mansfield had been a professor of history at the University of Montana, which starts to connect him both ways, to Japan and to Mann Gulch. At the University of Montana the future ambassador to Japan taught Far Eastern history. The connection with Mann Gulch starts appearing distinctly when we recall that the University of Montana is in Missoula, and thus the home town of Senator Mansfield was the headquarters of Region One of the United States Forest Service and the base of the Smokejumpers who were dropped into Mann Gulch.

The direct connection between Senator Mansfield and Mann Gulch must have been coinstantaneous with the fire. Why not? Surely the former boy who worked in the mines of Butte was at least as shaken as the rest of us by what happened to the boys working in Mann Gulch. They were two dangerous places for boys to work.

As to the Mann Gulch connection, the act had been almost as swift as the thought. The last victim to reach Helena before dying was dead by noon of August 6, 1949, and by October 14, little more than two months later, Mike Mansfield had rushed through Congress his amendment to the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act doubling the amount allowed to nondependent parents of children injured or killed while
working for the federal government—from a pitiful two hundred to four hundred dollars. A rider attached to this amendment made it retroactive to include the Mann Gulch dead.

The part of this story that takes us from Mann Gulch to the three forest fire research laboratories ends this way:

1. The first of the three laboratories was built in Macon, Georgia, the senior senator’s home town.

2. The second laboratory was built the next year in Senator Mansfield’s home town. It is only twenty yards from the base of the Smokejumpers who flew to Mann Gulch.

3. The third was built in Riverside, California, the state that had suffered most in the last bad fire year.

So the forest fire research laboratories are where the forests and the politicians were, and it would be hard to kick at that.

M
Y MEETINGS WITH BRACKEBUSCH
took some steam . out of my desire to find the mathematicians immediately. As I talked to him, I began to get some idea of how much more I would have to know in order to explain the Mann Gulch fire in light of the latest advances in fire science. When Laird and I were in the woods, I suppose we thought of ourselves as educated men, if there was ever an occasion to think on such a matter, but I at least knew that my education, starting with what I got from my father, had never included much math, so I began thinking that, before meeting the mathematicians, I had better retire to my cabin at Seeley Lake and do some homework. I had no trouble gathering a small pile of articles written by the two mathematicians or about them. Often it’s a lot easier to find out about important persons than to find them—especially it is not hard to find out where a man came from if his last job was on a project to determine whether an atomic-powered airplane would work. Such an experiment had been conducted near Idaho Falls, Idaho,
on what significantly turned out to be the Lost River. When this experiment got lost or whatever an atomic experiment does when the government doesn’t want it around anymore, some high-powered young scientists were turned loose, and Jack Barrows, who had been one of Gisborne’s favorite students and was now the first director of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, moved fast and brought up five of them, one of whom was Richard C. Rothermel, who even as a student at the University of Washington had worked in aeronautical engineering. It took some seven years, however, for Rothermel to make the switch from making models of atomic-powered planes to making models of forest fires.

It took the young scientists another six or seven years of testing and correcting their new equipment, especially the wind tunnels, before they could be confident of the results of their experiments. One of the constant and crucial questions was whether the equipment really conducted controlled experiments, whether, when it reported changed results, the changes were solely the result of the one fire factor the scientists were studying or also of other factors they had not succeeded in eliminating. Almost as difficult was the problem of getting fire to burn under controlled conditions with enough consistency and continuity to allow the results to be measured accurately. So it was 1968 before Rothermel and his group were sure enough of what they were doing to move into the field of prediction and to assume responsibility for what Barrows had long wanted, an overhaul from top to bottom of the Fire Danger Rating System.

Even then there were problems, including, of course, the problem of gaining the acceptance of the old-timers, to whom forest fires are the ultimate reality and wind tunnels and computers are gadgets. Since old-time woodsmen change even slower than equipment, it took at least another seven years and well into the 1970s before mathematical models of forest fires and their predictions became sought after by agencies and businesses that live off the woods.

Administratively, Rothermel is now leader of the Fire Behavior
Project at the Intermountain Fire Sciences Laboratory (as the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory has been renamed). Scientifically, his story is close to synonymous with the introduction and development of mathematical models of fires in the Forest Service. In 1981, in Washington, D.C., he received one of the highest honors granted by the Department of Agriculture, the Superior Service Honor Award. He was cited for “outstanding creativity in developing fire behavior prediction technology and training programs, enhancing the implementation of the Forest Service’s revised fire policy.” The “revised fire policy” that the developing “fire behavior technology” had made possible was a change from the policy of putting out all wildfires as soon as possible (the goal expressed in the slogan “ten o’clock fires”) to the increasingly prevailing theory, called “fire management,” of letting a selected number of fires burn themselves out. Although this new policy remained unnerving to some woodsmen, it has proved to have much practical value, provided it is wisely used, which has come to mean depending heavily upon the Fire Danger Rating System. A rough estimate of the financial benefit that might come from fighting only some wildfires might be guessed from the fact that in the mid-1970s the Forest Service’s annual expenditure had increased to three hundred million dollars and was still rising. To the economies brought about by the policy of letting some fires burn themselves out should be added a richness of ecological benefits, or the Indians long ago wouldn’t have set so many prairie fires in the autumn to enrich their pastures in the spring. To the value of fire “providing a suitable habitat for wildlife or forage for livestock” can be added the controlling of insect and plant disease. The Forest Service, moreover, has not been the sole beneficiary of letting some fires burn and even setting some. State forests and private timberlands also pay close attention to the Fire Danger Rating System and, of course, so do logging companies, especially in the autumn when they have to burn their piles of slash from the summer.

Frank Albini until 1985 was a physical scientist at the laboratory,
which he joined in 1962 when one of its chief problems was to gain the confidence of the loggers. In addition to being a brilliant scientist, he turned out to have a quiet, persuasive literary style that helped to make him an effective, half-concealed salesman for the extended use of mathematical models in the woods. As a scientist, he has been from his doctoral days at California Institute of Technology a maker of mathematical models, whether for Hughes Aircraft, the Institute for Defense Analysis, or General Research Corporation. As a student, he specialized in plasma physics, and, although that field has highly specified aims and subject matter, it nevertheless reflects in its ultimate goals the Greek etymology of “plasma,” which has to do with form or mold. So a-modeling he has always been.

The term “making a mathematical model” shouldn’t slip by us so often without being stopped to identify itself. “Making a model” for many of us suggests a bright boy using his Erector set to make a model of the Brooklyn Bridge as a structure of girders and then leaving it on the table for his mother to take down. Of course, that’s not completely wrong, except that a mathematical model of a fire is a structure of knowledge and, as Albini says, a “surrogate for reality”; its girders are quantitative generalizations about things that burn in the woods and in open country, therefore quantitative generalizations about different kinds of fuel and the influences on them of such powerful environmental factors as wind, slope, temperature, and humidity.

These girders of scientific knowledge are quantitative products of controlled observations of fire experiments and actual wildfires. The challenge is to pick the right analytical generalizations about things that will burn or contribute to their burning and fit them together in such a way that they will describe a fire that is predictable in its intensity, rate of spread, flame length, and other characteristics. Quantitative models of wildfire, then, have their practical as well as their aesthetic aspects. Making mathematical models of wildfire becomes a double pleasure, and Rothermel and Albini, who derive great
pleasure from building these models, were placed in charge of refining the Fire Danger Rating System—one job is part of the other, and it is a good guess that the practical and aesthetic pleasures are not separate from each other.

Albini helps us in modeling a picture of modeling by pointing out that the “origin of this kind of approach to decision making and design is the ‘preliminary design’ technique used in aircraft manufacture. It is no accident that aeronautical engineers are often found in model-building jobs.” He then adds, “My undergraduate training was in aeronautical engineering.” And, as we remember, Rothermel’s was too.