"Even with all our technological advances, we're not able to stop a lot of these fires today."
We're looking at fire nowadays more how we can manage fire. By that I mean not necessarily fighting fires and suppressing fires as we've done for the last hundred years in this country. We've gotten very effective at it, our technology has certainly advanced where we're using the global positioning system in virtually every vehicle that's out on a fire, and the supervisor has a GPS [global positioning satellite] unit that they can pinpoint exactly where the fire is. That certainly has been an advancement, along with some of the other technological advancements. We have what we call probe-eyes that are handheld devices which can detect the slightest amount of heat on the surface. And so the hot spots that come up and flare up later, we can mop them up more effectively with the technology we have. So that's just to mention a few of the advances we've made in firefighting and fire suppression.
You know, I don't think we've come along as rapidly in the fire management world, though. By that I mean using fire to benefit the resources, because so many of these ecosystems that we're working in throughout, especially the Intermountain West, and the plateau, the northern Arizona and Colorado Plateau where we live today is a fire-dependent ecosystem—whether it's the mixed conifer, ponderosa pine, or the chaparral, sagebrush, and grasslands and piñon-juniper woodlands. Much of this land has burned historically on a frequency of anywhere from seven to twenty-five years—again, depending on what fuel type you're in. The evidence we have for that is in the dendrochronology or tree ring records that we can extract and count the number of fire scars, especially on ponderosa pine. It's a real valuable tree in that regard. Where fire has burned at the base of a large ponderosa pine on a frequency of seven to twelve years, it will oftentimes leave that scar tissue behind, and you can take a cross section of the tree and count the fire scars. So the turn of the century [i.e., early 1900s] was a time I'll use as when we removed fire from that ecosystem. There's an absence of fire scars for the last 100-125 years in many cases. What that's done to the ecosystem is what we're living with today. Fires are much more difficult to suppress, there's much more extreme fire behavior we're witnessing, and so it's making our job much more hazardous, much more unsafe, and much more difficult to accomplish. Even with all our technological advances, we're not able to stop a lot of these fires today. Oftentimes we've just got to work with them, flank them, and let them burn themselves out, because they're burning so extreme.