Yosemite Controlled Burning Sparks Debate

Plan to clear forested areas of flammable material for the park's safety raises disagreement about how much is too much.

By Michael Dolyle
The Fresno Bee - June 19, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Yosemite National Park officials want to beef up their fire defenses, in a move likely to divide park loyalists.
The national park will more aggressively clear out potential fuel that has grown around homes, businesses and administrative buildings, under the new plan. In more remote areas, managed burns will be used more extensively.

"Any time a plan is more than 10 years old, it's time to revise it," Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said. "Conditions change."

The proposal formally made public Tuesday marks the first big revision in Yosemite's fire management plan since 1990. It has been in the works since at least 1999 but comes at a particularly sensitive time, as the massive Hayman fire still burns across four counties in Colorado.

The Yosemite plan calls for trimming trees, clearing brush and in other ways removing fuel from 1,095 acres each year in the most sensitive areas near buildings. This aggressive fuel reduction will take place during the next six to eight years.

Until now, Yosemite officials have been clearing out only about 25 acres each year around such populated sites as El Portal, Wawona and Foresta.

"While over the last decade the park has reduced hazardous levels of fuels near developed areas, the goal of providing an open defensible forest in and around every community may not ever be met at the current rate of work," the park service noted in the Federal Register.

Yosemite officials also want to start using logging machines with vivid names such as "skidder," "grappler" and "feller-buncher," that cut and stack trees. In other cases, the proposal notes that "vegetation is crushed under tracks or shredded by flail cutters, and left on-site."

Park officials do not use these so-called "aggressive reduction techniques," and they come with some controversy.

"Yosemite very much needs a forest plan, one that has the key goal of returning [controlled] fire to the landscape," said Jay Watson, California director for the Wilderness Society, "but the plan that's been developed is overly aggressive."

Watson said some of the mechanical devices being considered for Yosemite may be more appropriate in national forests. The Yosemite plan, though, is also one of the first big park fire plans to be produced in the wake of a muscular National Fire Plan completed for all federal agencies last year.

"More aggressive fire management is the name of the day," said John McCamman, chief of staff for Rep. George Radanovich, R-Mariposa.

Park officials considered but rejected an even more ambitious plan, which would have cleared out the fuel on 1,533 acres each year. Officials likewise rejected a go-slow approach that would have cleared 766 acres each year.

The Yosemite plan permits logging of trees up to 31.5 inches in diameter, but park officials took pains to note that such large trees would be removed only on "less than one-half of 1%" of the park.

"This is new to the park service, and it isn't the way we've done things before," Gediman said.

Similarly, Yosemite officials want to manage larger prescribed and controlled burns than are currently overseen, while not going as far as the most aggressive scenarios.

The plan is available on the Internet at www.nps.gov/yose/planning/fire/, and it is replete with highly illustrative details.

For instance, Yosemite analysts say they use 9,683 gallons of fuel each year in fire management activities. They propose using 147,462 gallons of fuel each year, in a move estimated to have "adverse, long-term and major" consequences for energy use but positive impacts for firefighting.

Park officials hope to complete the fire plan this year, following public hearings inside the park and in neighboring communities such as Mariposa and Sonora.