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CNN Live At Daybreak
Foresters Recognize Benefits to Wildfires
Aired June 28, 2002 - 05:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: In the West, there are major blazes burning this hour across thousands of acres of land. But what is making these fires more fierce and more common?
CNN environmental correspondent Natalie Pawelski explains.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Two years after the worst fire season in half a century, the West is ablaze again, and this time it's even worse. Foresters say massive fires threatening people's homes may be the new reality in the American West.
JIM PAXON, FIRE INFORMATION OFFICER: I think everybody that has anything to do with the management of these lands has part of the blame. You know, you can go to the Forest Service and BLM and the other land management agencies that were active in suppression in a good spirited but misguided ecological standpoint for 80 years. And we're playing catch-up for that now.
PAWELSKI: Suppression is what foresters call the policy of fighting every fire you can. For most of the 20th century, that was standard operating procedure on federal lands. Where there was smoke, there were firefighters. Even kids learned that forest fires are bad.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.
PAWELSKI: Foresters have come to realize that wild land fire is natural, even essential, and without it, forests have become clogged with dense thickets of fast burning, smaller trees, brush and downed logs. So now when a fire starts, it burns with a vengeance.
Add to that a record drought. Some trees are drier than the lumber you'd buy at a hardware store. And throw in a population boom. Colorado, for example, grew by 48 percent in the last 20 years. And many of the West's newcomers have moved into the woods, into places where a few years ago a forest fire might not have mattered as much because no homes were in its path.
MAYOR FOREST HAYES, DARBY, MONTANA: So now we have homes that are back in areas that have for centuries that burned on a regular basis.
PAWELSKI: So with millions of people living near dangerously clogged forests now dried by drought, what do you do?
(on camera): Forest Service plans for fixing the problem are controversial, featuring controlled burns and targeted logging designed to thin the forest and make it less vulnerable to catastrophic fires. But even if everybody agreed on that strategy tomorrow, safety is years away.
(voice-over): There are 191 million acres of national forest across the country and the Forest Service says about 40 percent, an area the size of Arizona, is at risk for severe fire.
Natalie Pawelski, CNN, Atlanta.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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