Colorado wildfire only 10 percent contained

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- As firefighters battle blazes in New Mexico and Colorado that have forced evacuations and destroyed hundreds of structures, the U.S. Forest Service chief is renewing his call to restore forests to a more natural state, where fire was a part of the landscape.

Experts say a combination of decades of vigorous fire suppression and the waning of the timber industry over environmental concerns has left many forests a tangled, overgrown mess, subject to the kind of super-fires that are now regularly consuming hundreds of homes and millions of acres.

The Forest Service is on a mission to set the clock back to zero and the urgency couldn't be greater, Tom Tidwell said. The plan calls for accelerating restoration programs - everything from prescribed fire and echanical thinning - by 20 percent each year in key areas that are facing the greatest danger of a catastrophic fire.

This year's target: 4 million acres. The budget: About $1 billion.

"We need to understand the conditions we're facing today,'' Tidwell said. "They're different than what we used to deal with. We're seeing erratic fire behavior, more erratic weather.''

In southern New Mexico, a lightning-sparked fire raced across more than 37,000 acres in recent days, damaging or destroying at least 224 homes and other structures in the mountains outside of the resort community of Ruidoso.

Officials say the Little Bear fire, which has scorched 58 square miles in the Sierra Blanca range, has been 40 percent contained and firefighters will continue building lines to contain the fire Thursday. But they note that sunny, dry weather will result in more active fire behavior and an increase in visible smoke.

Hundreds of residents have been evacuated but some have begun returning home.

The Colorado blaze, about 15 miles west of Fort Collins, was still spreading. It had burned 78 square miles by Thursday, destroyed more than 100 structures, including at least 31 homes, and forced hundreds of people from their homes.

More than 1,300 firefighters have been working around the clock to build containment lines and protect structures from the fire, which was 10 percent contained.

Authorities have tightly controlled access to the fire and haven't allowed a handful of media representatives to take escorted tours, which is customary at other blazes. Larimer County sheriff Justin Smith said he won't allow reporters in until it's safe enough to allow residents back too.

The fire has canceled shows by Bruce Hornsby and others at an amphitheater in the evacuation area and forced a revision of the final leg of the Ride the Rockies tour. Because of concerns about smoke, cyclists will be given the option of taking a shuttle to the finishing line on Friday in Fort Collins.

The accelerated restoration effort is focused on several landscape-scale projects, the largest of which is a 20-year plan that calls for restoring 2.4 million acres across four forests in northern Arizona. The Forest Service recently awarded a contract to start thinning the first 300,000 acres.

A similar project is planned in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, where a historic fire ripped through 244 square miles and threatened one of the national's premier nuclear laboratories just last summer.

Another concern is the 8.6 million acres of standing trees killed by beetle infestations.

Restoration projects from Oregon and South Dakota to Colorado are aimed at tackling that problem. One of those, the White River National Forest collaborative project, is expected to result in more than 190,000 tons of biomass through thinning.

Forest officials estimate the cost of fire suppression in some of the areas targeted for restoration could be reduced by up to 50 percent because of the work.

The directive doesn't stop at the landscape level, however. Each forest in the Southwest is part of a pilot project that pools regular watershed and wildlife program funds for restoration.

Regional forester Corbin Newman said that amounts to millions of dollars.

In an era of tight budgets and taxed resources, forest officials acknowledged that restoration will be a challenge. They said part of the solution is setting priorities and forming more partnerships with states, municipalities and even water utilities given the impacts catastrophic fires can have on watersheds. Some 66 million Americans rely on drinking water that flows from the nation's forests.

Still, there are millions of acres - wilderness and roadless, rugged areas - where mechanical thinning won't be an option. In those areas, fire will have to take its natural course.

"Everybody has to keep in mind hat fire will play a huge significant role in our landscape for the rest of time,'' Newman said. "Sometimes people think through either restoration or suppression we can just make fires go away. We have to remind folks we're just trying put fire back into its natural processes and cycles as opposed to what we're seeing in today's world.''

With more natural fires, experts contend the forest has a better chance of recovering.

Severe fires tend to sterilize the soil, destroy any banks of seeds stored in the ground and leave mountainsides primed for erosion.

Newman and other forest officials lamented that educating people about the complexity of restoring forests and fire's natural role will take something more than Smokey Bear, the black bear that became the nation's most successful symbol of fire prevention in the 1940s.

Tidwell said campaigns are under way at the federal and state level to address the benefits of restoration, particularly prescribed fire under the right conditions.

"We're going to have trade-offs of either dealing with smoke at different times of the year or dealing with what we're dealing with now,'' he said, pointing to the fires burning across the country.

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