Fire danger in BWCA blowdown area hasn't gone away, report says

DULUTH, Minn. -- Torrential autumn rains have brought an end to the forest first season in northeastern Minnesota, ending driest, most destructive year since 1918.

But the fire danger in the "blowdown" area of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area hasn't gone away, the Duluth News Tribune reported Sunday.

The destructive Ham Lake fire in May hardly touched the areas where a July 4, 1999, windstorm knocked down millions of trees in the BWCA and nearby areas of the Superior National Forest. It burned only a few hundred acres of blowdown.

A News Tribune review of U.S. Forest Service data shows that more than three-fourths of the blowdown in area remains unburned and uncut, mostly in the BWCA.

The Ham Lake fire started May 5, apparently from an unattended campfire, and burned almost 119 square miles in Minnesota and Ontario.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis is still deciding whether to pursue criminal charges or to seek civil damages against the party who investigators believe is responsible. Jim Sanders, supervisor of the Superior National Forest, said law enforcement investigators remain in contact with federal prosecutors, but there's no indication if or when charges might be brought.

Despite the dry conditions, no fire bans were in effect when the Ham Lake fire started because it was so early in the camping season.

The Minnesota part of the fire was the state's largest and costliest forest fire since 1918. About 140 structures in Minnesota and 15 in Canada were lost. But heroic efforts by fire crews and local residents are credited with saving dozens more structures. Nobody was seriously hurt.

In contrast, the 2006 Cavity Lake fire stayed within the undeveloped wilds of the BWCA. It burned more than 20 square miles of blowdown.

The Forest Service has burned another 40,000 acres of blowdown, but the 1999 storm toppled trees across nearly 781 square miles in and around the Superior National Forest. Less than 23 percent of the blowdown area has been burned or logged to reduce the fire danger, the News Tribune reported.

"If we've learned anything in recent years, with fire behavior we've seen up there, it's that the blowdown's legacy (for fire) is going to be with us longer than we originally expected," Sanders said.

Instead of 10 years of elevated fire danger ending in 2009, as once expected, Sanders said the fire danger will remain elevated through 2017 or longer because of all the dead timber still out there.

"It's still standing, still drying out. It's not rotting, not decomposing," Sanders said.

The remaining trees are big and won't start on fire easily. But a few weeks without rain would dry out the forest floor, creating a ladder of leaves, brush and small trees that could carry fire into the dead trees as well as live trees.

Sanders noted that western parts of the forest, closer to Ely, have been mostly spared by wildfires in recent years. He said that's mostly due to luck and fast action by firefighters. That could change during any dry spell, he said.

However, a nearly two-year drought seems to have broken in September and October. Near-record rainfall has helped streams, swamps and lakes refill to normal levels or higher.

And the Forest Service is more than halfway toward its goal of purposely burning 109 square miles to create a strategic series of firebreaks across the blowdown area. The 2006 Cavity Lake fire burned nearly 20 square miles of downed trees that the Forest Service was going to light on its own.

Sanders calls it "creating defensible space."

With good weather — not too wet or too dry — the plan could be completed next year, said Ellen Bogardus-Szymaniak, former fire and fuel expert for the Superior and Chippewa National Forests.

That won't end the fire danger, but it will reduce the chances that blowdown fires will expand into developed areas like the Ham Lake fire burned this year.

"The plan never was to clean up the entire blowdown. We could never do that, nor would we want to," Bogardus-Szymaniak said. "But we're well on our way to creating that patchwork of prescribed (intentional) fires that will slow fires down, diminish their intensity and buy us time to get people out of the way and then develop a plan" to fight a wildfire.

Although this year's fire has reduced changes of another catastrophic blaze along the Gunflint Trail, officials aren't letting their guard down for future fires in other areas.

"The Ham Lake fire wasn't the big blowdown fire we've been talking about for so many years. That's still out there, still a possibility," said Mark Falk, Cook County sheriff. "Ham Lake was more of the perfect storm from the drought. Luckily, it wasn't in the blowdown much or it might have been even worse."

The sheriff said emergency management officials at all levels continue to fine-tune firefighting, evacuation and communications plans that, almost everyone agrees, worked so well during the Ham Lake fire.

People who live along the Gunflint Trail are treating the threat of fire not so much as something to fear but as something to plan for and avoid — from planning evacuation routes to maintaining sprinkler systems to remaining alert for smoke plumes on the horizon.

"I haven't sensed any bad feelings about how things ended up (after the Ham Lake fire). It could have been a lot worse. If it would have been midsummer, with hundreds more people up there, who knows?" Falk said. "But I don't think the general public up here has let their guard down at all. If anything, Ham Lake helped remind people what can happen."

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Information from: Duluth News Tribune, http://www.duluthsuperior.com