The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 18

13. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1988, gftr Atlanta Sotmtal AND CONSTTTITION Life of Firefighting Led to 'Let It Burn' Plan But Blaze Management I Was Forgotten Ingredient By Mecca McCarthy SluffWriter CONDON. Mont William R. "Bud" Moore, a native of Florence, Mont, began his U.S. Forest Service career at 16, fighting fires in the Bitterroot Range of the Rockies with a shovel and an eighth-grade education.

He ended it 40 years later in 1974 with an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana. Mr. Moore held a variety of po- sitions with the Forest Service, but he is best remembered for his role in moving firefighting efforts toward managing, rather than controlling, forest fires. That orientation reflects Mr. Moore's philosophy "that fire is just like the wind and rain, something we're going to have to live with forever.

You can't control fire with computers." From his Mission Mountain i 5 I i i -1 ttry I I -1 lt' I j.l" -J for example, told me we were fighting a losing battle in trying to control fires," Mr. Moore said. The 1964 passage of the Wilderness Art, which set aside vast tracts to be "protected and managed so as to preserve their natural conditions," further, convinced Mr. Moore, as well as fire researchers, that the 10 a.m. policy needed revising.

Ecological research led by Bruce M. Kilgore in Sequoia National Park persuaded the Park Service to modify its policy in 1968, allowing lightning-caused fires in high elevations to burn as long as human life, property or historic sites were not threatened. The next year, when Mr. Moore returned to Region 1 as fire control chief, Mr. Kilgore "wanted us to depart from a blind following of the 10 a.m.

policy to support objectives we were trying to achieve on the land," he said. "Nowhere were these objectives more clear than in wilderness." Under Mr. Moore's direction, the White Cap area of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness became a laboratory where forest and fire ecolo-gists analyzed history, weather and topography, and inventoried fuels to predict fire behavior. When lightning ignited a fire in 1973, Mr. Moore gave the order to let it burn with some restrictions.

He endorsed having the Forest Service consider prescribed burning in wilderness to remove unnatural fuel buildups and lessen the likelihood of a catastrophe. Forest Service officials said the option has not been exercised in Region 1. Yellowstone Park officials never have ordered prescribed burning, but Assistant Park Superintendent Ben J. Clary said the option will be considered during the upcoming review of the park's fire management policies. "One demonstration of just how severe the conditions were this year is that even when they hit some of those Yellowstone fires hard, they still couldn't catch them," Mr.

Moore said. "There's a point in time when it gets so dry that everything burns, but I don't know when that is. Maybe we should try to find out" Special William R. 'Bud' Moore, a Park Service firefighter for 40 years, says forest fires are 'something we're going to have to live with home near the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Mr. Moore said, he can envision the political controversy sparked by the Yellowstone fires.

But rather than fuel the situation with added criticisms, Mr. Moore said he prefers to boil his coyote traps, work in the garden and cut cords of winter firewood. "After the fires, real and political, are out I'll go down to Missoula and visit with the regional forester," Mr. Moore said. "I don't know all the details, but I have some concerns." He added that the expected review and refining of national fire management policy is not a new process.

During the first decade of the 1900s, in the infancy of the Forest Service, attempts at controlling forest fires usually consisted of in SisniHcsnt Events In Yellowstone Fires Late June: Twenty lightning-caused fires are burning according to prescription. All park accommodations reported full; spaces in area hotels and campsites remain scarce. July 10: Local newspaper says three fires in the park encompass 1,900 acres. Rain earlier in the week dampened the fires. July 11: Lightning in the northeast part of the park creates the Clover fire, which later merged with the Mist fire to become the park's biggest blaze in history.

July 13-14: A Type 1 fire incident management team, made up of experts from across the country, arrives with 200 firefighters after high winds spread fires; smoke reduces visibility in the park. July 17: Mink Creek fire in Teton Wilderness adjacent to Yellowstone grows from 4,000 acres to 9,200 acres. July 22: Sparks from a chain saw or cigarette create North Fork fire, which burns from Targhee National Forest into Yellowstone the next day. July 23: South entrance to the park closes as 3.000 employees and visitors at Grant Village are evacuated. July 27: Interior Secretary Donald P.

Hodel visits Yellowstone to discuss the situation with park officials. July 29-31: North Fork fire increases from 8,800 acres to 12,700 acres, or about 20 square miles. JULY TOTALS: 120,725 acres about 190 square miles burn in greater Yellowstone. Battling the blazes are an estimated 10,000 'people, representing 80 percent of national firefighting personnel. Aug.

1: Overnight, the Fan fire in northwestern section of the park grows from 10,090 to 16,000 acres. As fire comes within a quarter-mile of Church Universal Triumphant property, church members begin high-speed chanting to "reverse the tide of the fire." Leaders accuse U.S. Park Service officials of being pyro-maniacs. Aug. 5: Fire researchers predict a shortage of fuels will slow the fires.

Aug. 14: Roads to Old Faithful are closed as the advancing North Fork fire, moving an average of a mile a day, increases to 52,960 acres. Aug. 20: "Black Saturday, the Day of the Big Blow." Fanned by 40-mph winds, the North Fork fire increases by 15,500 acres in one day. Military assistance is requested.

Winds of 60 mph to 70 mph are recorded in the park. Grant Village is evacuated; West Yellowstone residents are put on alert as fire advances. In the greater Yellowstone area, fires gain 50,000 acres. Aug. 21: Clover Mist fire advances to within 2 miles of Cooke City, northeast of the park.

Yellowstone's south entrance is closed. Aug. 22: 1,100 soldiers arrive. Aug. 24: The North Fork fire forces evacuation of Canyon, Idaho.

Aug. 27: Overnight, Clover Mist fire grows by 20,000 acres to 182,100 acres. Tourists continue coming to Old Faithful. North Fork fire begins "spotting" across the Madison River. Aug.

31: Clover Mist increases another 39,700 acres, or 62 square miles. AUGUST TOTALS: 730,405 acres, an area nearly as large as Rhode Island, burn in greater Yellowstone; 8,311 people are involved in suppression efforts. Cost so far is $54 million. Sept. 1-3: West Yellowstone residents prepare for evacuation as North Fork fire advances 15,000 acres; Fan fire is contained at 23,325 acres.

Sept. 6: Cooke City and Silver Gate, are evacuated. Sept 7: Old Faithful Village is under the siege of a firestorm created by North Fork fire, which gobbles 56,000 acres and 17 structures but spares Old Faithful Inn. Sept. 10: Jardine and Gardiner, northeast of Yellowstone, are placed on evacuation alert.

Lake, Tower, Canyon and Mammoth are evacuated. Mr. Hodel tours Yellowstone and calls for a review of the park's fire management policies. Light rain falls in north-central Yellowstone, slightly quelling fires. Sept.

13: Rain, snow, humidity and reduced winds aid firefighters. Marines arrive from Camp Pendleton, Calif. Sept. 15: Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis visits the park.

He says the fires should be put out before policy debates begin. Sept 15-17: Wyoming's Republican Sens. Alan K. Simpson and Malcolm Wallop call for the resignation of National Park Service Director William Penn Mott, saying the Park Service refused to follow a June directive from Mr. Hodel to suppress all Yellowstone fires.

Sept. 22: After snowfall in the park's higher elevations, the Clover Mist fire is 83 percent contained at 413,380 acres. Total containment of the North Fork fire is not expected until mid-October. Sept. 23: Yellowstone's rehabilitation plans, begun in mid-August, continue.

Fire officials begin planning for fall congressional hearings. An area of 1,632,452 acres, more than double the size of Rhode Island, is reported burned in Yellowstone and adjacent national forests since June. Many crews have been sent home; military personnel are mopping up, improving fire lines and retrieving equipment from the back country. As of Friday, the cost of fire suppression had reached $111.6 sent from Washington to try to stop the fires plaguing the region. He used Civilian Conservation Corps crews to build truck trails through the mountains, and he initiated a policy decreeing that a fire would be out by 10 a.m.

the day after its discovery. That practice remained Forest Service policy for nearly 40 years. According to Mr. Moore, in the early 1960s, when he was working in Washington and traveling to fires across the country, he began sensing what researchers were suggesting through controlled studies that complete suppression was denying fire its natural regenerative role. "We found that through zoning and fuel management, we could influence fires, but fires in California, The need for a forest protection policy became more pressing after 1910, which was marked by a dry summer and a rash of small fires, most of which were manned.

In late August 1910, high winds whipped several fires into a single inferno that blew like a hurricane across western Montana and Idaho, torching Wallace and Kellogg, killing 80 people and consuming 2.8 million acres in three days. Firefighting funds and manpower increased over the next two decades, but accessibility remained a primary problem in the Forest Service's Region 1. It included 29 million acres primarily in Idaho and Montana, with several rugged, remote and roadless mountain areas. In the early 1930s, Maj. Evan W.

Kelley, a World War I veteran, was dividuals or small crews with pack horses who sometimes would battle the same blaze for an entire summer. They followed no formal policy but simply tried to maximize their limited capabilities, Mr. Moore said. The situation was different in Yellowstone, where the Army had been guarding the park and systematically extinguishing all fires since 1886. The Associated Press Park.

In the wake of the near-loss of the complex, fire management policies face review. A firefighter tries to save a cabin Sept. 7 in the Old Faithful Village at Yellowstone National million. i Battling Fires Is Dirty Work For Park's 'Ground Pounders Yellowstone From Page 1 A south-central Yellowstone, were booked for the entire month. The campground was crowded with Win-nebagos from Wisconsin, and tour buses of elderly people routinely were stopping at the lodges.

A glimpse of black smoke the last week of June did not trouble Marti Tobias, manager of Grant Village, "because there are always fires and there didn't seem to be anything unusual," she said. Miss Tobias has Worked at Yellowstone for nine seasons. Other people were watching the fires appearing in the park. Yellowstone's six-member fire management team composed of the park superintendent biologists and fire behaviorists monitored all the lightning-caused fires in the park and met daily to discuss the situation, said Assistant Superintendent Ben J. Clary.

He added that Park Service personnel in Washington were kept abreast of their decisions. In past years, Mr. Clary said, most lightning-caused fires have fizzled out after burning less than an acre, as did 11 of 20 such fires this June. Weather records indicate that July and August 1987 were exceptionally wet with 200 percent more precipitation than normal. Guided by last year's data and anticipating a soggy summer, the committee decided to let the fires burn, ex- plained Joan Anzelmo, Yellowstone public relations director.

"Last summer it rained about every week, so I started leaving my umbrella in the office," Miss Tobias' said. "It started dawning on us when it didn't rain that something was going to happen." By now it was early July, and many of the Grant Village campers seemed more focused on their Fourth of July feasts than on the fires. A slight sprinkle during the first full week of July somewhat lifted the spirits of park officials, even as it briefly dampened a few smoldering fires. By mid-July, no significant rain had fallen nor would it in the weeks to come, for the first time in Yellowstone's 112 years of weather records. The lack of precipitation combined with exceedingly dry fuels and low humidity to create an ideal incubator for wildfire, one that fire experts say occurs about every 200 years.

Instead of dying as they might have in other years, the lightning-caused Clover and Mist fires in the northeast section of the park began feasting on dry vegetation and bits of bark, and getting stronger. Another blaze, the Mink fire, doubled its size overnight Fires usually are named for the natural feature closest to their point of origin. The Clover fire, for example, began near Clover Creek. On July 13, Ms. Anzelmo said, "We experienced our first 'wind as 60-mph gusts fanned the fires throughout the park into fury.

Park officials requested that the Boise Interagency Fire Center send a Type 1 fire incident management team a group of fire experts drawn from across the country to Yellowstone, as well as about 200 experienced firefighters. "When the fire jumped the channel between Shoshone Lake and Lewis Lake, that was the last natural barrier between Grant and the fire," Miss Tobias said. At that point, she said, she thought evacuation was inevitable. Although smoke was troubling some of the Grant Village employees, tourists continued coming, some just to gaze at the columns of smoke rising in the southeast Some members of the three additional Type 1 teams who arrived in Yellowstone on July 22 said they could see from the air that the situation was serious: The mosaic burn pattern confirmed that the fires were "spotting out," or being blown far from the central part of the fire. "We had been having problems from the smoke for a while, so I wasn't too surprised they evacuated us" July 23, Miss Tobias said.

As more than 3,000 visitors and Grant employees were relocating to other park locations, the Clover and Mist fires also were moving, becoming one gigantic fire. By late July, with more than 10,000 fire personnel in Yellowstone, the fires had become another awe-inspiring attraction for park visitors. Tourists would park their vehicles along the narrow roads those that had not been closed and stand with cameras up and hats tilted back, gazing at the rolling smoke clouds, a Forest Service employee said. Restaurants in West Yellowstone continually seemed crowded, and tourists and reporters were competing with Forest Service personnel for hotel accommodations. After leaving the West Yellowstone airport travelers were likely to encounter a traffic jam.

The pace quickened in August as fuels continued to dry and fires devoured thick stands of dead lodgepole pine. Other Western fires were demanding some of the resources allocated to Yellowstone. Stephen Morefield, a firefighter assigned to the Clover-Mist fire, said a shortage of helicopters seemed to slow transportation. While the managers were studying infrared photographs and weather records, Mr. Morefield and his crew were strug-.

gling to breathe and work in mountains. Making matters worse was the low level of humidity. The dew that formed in Yellowstone at night was nowhere near enough to slow the fire, said Forest Service fire behavior specialist Richard Rothermel. By August, the fuels in Yellowstone were as flammable as matches. Fanned by powerful winds, the fires seem to spread everywhere, especially Aug.

20 now called "Black Saturday" twhen they moved across 50,000 acres in the Yellowstone area. As she watched towering convection columns rolling above Grant Village, Ms. Anzelmo said, "It looked like four separate Mount St Helens all going off at once. There was a sense that the world was coming to an end." The spectacular and chilling nature of the Yellowstone fires took on political overtones Sept 7, when a finger of the North Fork fire threatened Old Faithful Village. Although the Old Faithful Inn was spared, some fire officials said that incident may have prompted Interior Secretary Donald P.

Hodel to tour Yellowstone on Sept 10, as 1,000 people were being evacuated from several park communities, in cluding U.S. Park Service headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs. Mr. Hodel pronounced the fires a disaster and said the park's fire management policies would be reviewed. A few days after the Old Faithful Village fire, snowflakes began falling in the higher elevations of Yellowstone and rain spattered and sizzled in the valleys and meadows.

The fires slowed, the smoke lifted a little and park officials began discussing rehabilitation plans. Those viewing the park from the air reported seeing patches of green among the brown and black mosaic, and naturalist Scott Carsley said he found grasses and yellow wildflowers growing in the Grant Village area. More than 1,000 Marines were dispatched Sept 13 to West Yellowstone to relieve some fatigued firefighters. Even as teams of reporters, photographers and cartographers arrived from Audubon and National Geographic magazines, intent on piecing together the charred fragments of the summer, Forest Service and National Park Service officials were scrambling to assemble a narrative of the Yellowstone fires for Chief Forester Dale Robertson, trying to explain what happened and what role the Forest Service and Park Service had played. Mr.

Robertson is expected to use the document in a congressional subcommittee briefing scheduled for Thursday, fire officials said. "The question I hope comes out of these hearings is, 'What have we learned and how can we improve our Mr. Mutch said. "We need to become better at integrating fire management policies and principles with land management principles so that we can live more compatibly with a fire environment We can delay and defer fire, but as this summer shows, we can't eliminate it." containing the fires was extremely difficult, explained Richard Rothermel, a fire behavior specialist with the Forest Service. Depending on the fire's size, two to 20 or in the case of Yellowstone, 9,000 people may fight it Once the line encircles the fire and burned areas, you move inward through the ashes, -dousing any flames with dirt and turning the ground over and over to cool it a process called "mop up" or "potato patching." When the prescribed area in- side the line has been mopped up enough to be declared safe which on big fires may take until the first heavy snow you confirm its coolness by placing a bare hand on the ground.

Swinging a Pulaski to peel back the vegetation is fairly easy, as long as the terrain is level, the wind calm and the smoke minimal. But in the mountainous West, cutting a line for five, 10 or 15 hours in steep country as a roaring fire kicks up billows of smoke is a more likely scenario. Conditions were especially hazardous for Yellowstone's ground pounders because the fires were continually "spotting out," creating new blazes outside the fire line. Unusually high winds carried firebrands flaming bits of trees and embers sometimes a mile from the main fire, where they Ignited dry fuels upon contact Rebecca McCarthy YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK The blackened, tired faces of Yellowstone's forest firefighters known as "grunts," "pogues" or "ground pounders" easily can convince you that battling fires is a dirty business. Despite the advent of computers and satellites, remote weather stations and sophisticated lightning detection systems, the basic tools and techniques of fire suppression haven't changed significantly in more than 70 years.

Whether people arrive by helicopter, parachute or truck, little is required for a simple initial attack but two hands, a shovel or a Pulaski a tool with an ax on one side and a mattock on the other and a pair of boots with high tops to keep out embers and also feature thick lug soles to protect your feet from heat Starting at the anchor point, usually the bottom or the "cold side" of a fire, you use the mattock end of the Pulaski to dig a 13- to 18-inch-wide trench, bare to mineral soil, called a fire line. If branches are burning, another person may use dirt to knock down the flames. The fire line effectively outflanks the blaze, restricting its progress by cutting it off from all sources of fuel, even those underground. Natural barriers, such as rivers, streams, rock slides or canyons, also may inhibit the fire. Because Yellowstone has few natural barriers,.