Fires in Nature - Natural Hazards - page 146

felled branches. Considerable effort was spent cleaning
up this debris before it could contribute to major forest
fires. Fire-scarred areas take decades to regenerate,
and regeneration in these areas is particularly sus-
ceptible to future burning. In North America, large
burnouts such as the Tillamook in Oregon, burnt origi-
nally in 1933, spawned numerous fires for the next
30 years. Indians who cleared or fired forests for agri-
culture, firewood, hunting, and defense conditioned
much of the early fire history of North America. Thus,
the forests that met white settlers were park-like and
open. While European settlement adopted many native
American fire practices, the demise of such practices
made possible the reforestation of much of the north-
east and began the period of large-scale conflagrations.
A similar process followed the decline of prescribed
burning - first by the turpentine operators and then by
the loggers in the pine forests of the south-east. The
most dramatic effects are seen on the Prairies, where
forests have reclaimed a grassland habitat as land was
converted to cultivation or rangeland. In southern
California, urban development has seen grasslands
treed simply for aesthetic reasons. In each case, Euro-
peans have attempted to supplant natural fire cycles
with total suppression to protect habitation.
The onset of forest fires in reforested regions of the
United States was dramatic. Disastrous fires swept
through the north-east in 1880, and it became a policy
to restrict settlement in forest reserves. That policy led
to reduced burning-off and a build-up of forest fuel
that resulted in 400 000 hectares burning from New
York to Maine. The fires were perceived as a threat to
timber reserves and watershed flood mitigation. They
resulted in a concerted effort to set up fire lookouts in
the north-east, and prompted the passage of the Weeks
Act in 1911 to protect the watersheds of navigable
streams and to subsidize state fire protection efforts.
These efforts - along with the formation of the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s - saw the
demise of large wildland fires; however, urbanization
had expanded into forest areas. The nation's first urban
forest fire occurred in October 1947 at Bar Harbor,
Maine. Over 200 structures were burnt and 16 lives
lost. This scene was repeated over a wide area in 1963
when fires threatened suburbs in New York and
Philadelphia, and destroyed over 600 structures on
Long Island and in New Jersey. These fires led to
incorporation of municipal fire units into the state
protection system, and the signing of interstate

agreements for fire suppression assistance. By the
1970s, the latter had spread nationally and internation-
ally. Today bushfires also plague southern California's
urban areas, which since the 1950s have encroached
upon fire-prone scrubland. Little thought has been
given to building design and layout, with a jumble of
organizations responsible at various levels for fire
suppression. The costs of firefighting operations in
southern California as a result have reached high
levels. In 1979, the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica
mountain fires involved 7000 firefighters at a cost of a
million dollars per day for a month.
In the south-east of the United States, reforestation
and regeneration of undergrowth presented, by 1930,
large reserves of biomass that fuelled major fires during
droughts. In 1930-1932, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia,
and Florida suffered devastating fires. Further fires
between 1941 and 1943 saw the reintroduction
of prescribed burning. In 1952, 800 000 hectares of
forest burned across Kentucky and West Virginia;
in 1954-1955, 200 000 hectares burned in the
Okefenokee Swamp and, in 1955, 240 000 hectares
burned in North Carolina. These occurrences led to the
establishment, in North Carolina, of one of the most
efficient fire suppression organizations in the country
and, in Georgia, of the first fire research station. This
station produced the nation's leading methods in
prescribed burning.
In the virgin forests of the Lake states, similar-sized
fires have occurred historically. However, the death
tolls have been horrendous. Here, disastrous fires
occurred as settlers first entered the region, together
with logging companies and railways. The logging
produced enormous quantities of fuel in the form of
slash on the forest floor; the railways provided sources
of ignition from smokestacks; and the settlers provided
bodies for the resulting disaster. Between 1870 and
1930, one large fire after another swept through the
region in an identical pattern. Most of the conflagra-
tions occurred in autumn following a summer drought.
The worst fires occurred in 1871, 1881, 1894, 1908,
1910, 1911 and 1918. The Peshtigo and Humboldt
fires of 1871 took, respectively, 1500 and 750 lives in
Wisconsin; the Michigan fires of 1881 killed several
hundred; the Hinckley, Minnesota, fire in 1894 took
418 lives; and finally the Cloquet fire in Minnesota in
1918 killed 551 people. The fires were so common,
that most residents treated fire warnings nonchalantly,
to their own detriment.