SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — A raging wildfire that could become the largest in Arizona history is rekindling the blame game surrounding ponderosa pine forests that have become dangerously overgrown after a century of fire suppression.
Some critics put the responsibility on environmentalists for lawsuits that have cut back on logging. Others blame overzealous firefighters who have altered the natural cycle of lightning-sparked fires that once cleared the forest floor.
Either way, forests that once had 50 trees per acre now have hundreds, sometimes thousands, and the landscape is choked with tinder-dry brush.
The density of the growth has fueled immense conflagrations in recent years like the 525-square-mile blaze now burning in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest northeast of Phoenix.
“I think what is happening proves the debate,” said state Sen. Sylvia Allen, a Republican.
In the past, a 20,000-acre fire was considered huge. “And it used to be the loggers got right on it. Never in the past have you had these huge fires,” she said.
Today, it’s not uncommon to have fires that exceed 100,000 acres.
On Thursday, the huge blaze known as the Wallow Fire was burning completely out of control. After reportedly being sparked by a campfire, it has become the second-largest wildfire in state history and is still growing.
The fire conditions were made worse by an extremely dry late winter and spring that dried out the forest, allowing fierce winds to carry the flames into the treetops, where they spread by miles each day.
More than 336,000 acres have been blackened, and thousands of people have been forced to flee from mountain resort communities and two large towns at the forest’s edge.
Many in Arizona blame the legal battles that have erupted over old-growth logging that threatened endangered species such as the Mexican spotted owl. Since those disputes prevented regular logging that would have thinned the number of trees, the forests became overgrown, they say.
Environmentalists insist that theory is just a scare tactic. “These people are misinformed or they’re intentionally trying to scare people in a time that they’re already terrified. It’s pure politics,”said Bryan Bird of Wildearth Guardians, which has been involved in some of the lawsuits.
Wally Covington, a professor at Northern Arizona University who has studied Western forests for decades, said the problems have been building for decades, and blaming lawsuits ignores those facts. As much as 300 million acres of ponderosa and conifer forests are at risk across the West, he said.
Historically, those forests were relatively thin, with grass and wildflowers growing beneath the canopy. Every two to 10 years, a fire would move through and burn out the undergrowth and small trees.
As the region was settled in the 1880s, cattle were brought in to feast on the grass, which limited fires and let small trees mature. Early foresters liked that, because they wanted the forest fully stocked with trees. And they began putting out fires early in the 1900s to help the trees grow, Mr. Covington said.
As the forest got thicker, fires got harder to fight, and the U.S. Forest Service hired thousands of men to battle the flames. Small fires that reached into the treetops were first seen in Arizona in the 1940s. In the following decades, the typical treetop fire went from a few acres to a few thousand to more than 10,000 by the 1990s.
Then early in the 2000s, huge conflagrations emerged that turned hundreds of thousands of acres to ash.
The Forest Service has acknowledged the problem, setting up nine restoration projects across the West designed to let private industry thin small trees.
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