"We recognized that with the media scripting that was going on in Los Alamos, with the secretary of Interior saying we needed to do more of what was going on in Flagstaff, we were going to get approached quickly by a lot of media—national media is what it [the Flagstaff plan] was—and we had to be able to explain."
Really, it began last year. It began as a result of that Cerro Grande Fire in Los Alamos. There's an interesting story behind that. I was at Los Alamos on that fire. We came home after the event, and I was at home one morning, watching morning television, and I never do that, but I was not coming to work that day—it was the day after I got home. And Secretary Bruce Babbitt was being interviewed, and he made a comment to the effect that what we needed to do was more the Flagstaff Plan. I can't remember if he said Flagstaff Plan or Flagstaff Model or the Flagstaff Approach—he used one of those terms. And it floored a lot of us, because we had never heard the term before. And we quickly had to huddle and figure out what that was, what was the Flagstaff Model? Because we recognized that with the media scripting that was going on in Los Alamos, with the secretary of Interior saying we needed to do more of what was going on in Flagstaff, we were going to get approached quickly by a lot of media—national media is what it was—and we had to be able to explain. And we had never used the term, or heard the term before, so we had to figure it out. In one respect, he did us a great favor, because he forced us to think about what it was we were doing that was so different. And to this day, depending upon who you talk with that's involved in this general effort in the Flagstaff area, you may get a slight different interpretation. We tend to look at it as really what it is, it's not a prescription, a site-specific approach that this is how many trees per acre you're going to have, this is how far it'll be spaced, this is how large the area will be, but we look at it as more of an approach, more of a collaboration process among partners. And at the output, if we're doing stumps and smoke, that's the important thing that we're doing.
Secretary Babbitt is from Flagstaff and grew up here. Him using that term, I think was, caught us by surprise, but probably was very beneficial. And as a result of that, we were very quickly approached by a lot of media—CNN, BBC, New York Times, ABC "Nightly News," and others, Business Weekly. You know, a call, "What is this? What is this that you're involved with, and explain it to us." And as a result of that, we developed a notebook that had a lot of the information that we use within our area, a lot of history of it, some photographs, some articles, other things like that—it was a three-ring binder—that we could share with others. And since May of 2000, now thirteen months later, we have shipped out over a hundred of those notebooks to various fire departments and communities and agencies throughout the United States that have requested information about the Flagstaff Plan: "Tell us how and what it is, how we might be able to begin an effort like that in our area." So that's been a very gratifying experience to be able to be part of something that is really a national model. The programs that others may set up may be a little different than what we have here, but in terms of community support, what our goals are, how we are accomplishing the work, I think that's a really interesting thing, and something to be really proud of.