It’s getting scary in Helena, Montana
by Tim Delahanty
The road is lined with timber – almost endless stands of Douglas fir, lodge pole, and Ponderosa pine. Then it drops down to a valley, more of a bowl really, where Montana’s state capital lies. The forests are full of dead trees, and fire season is just beginning. For 30,000 people who live here, climate change has taken on a whole new reality.
Rains over the last month haven’t eased concerns among patrons at the Fire Tower Coffee House in Helena. “Most people I guess are talking about what’s in the news,” says Michelle Harvey. “They say it could be a bad season. We just have to wait through it.”
Even the mayor, a self-described conservative who doesn’t care to share philosophical space with Al Gore, admits that something has to be done. “Whether this climate change is man-caused or just the natural order of things, I don’t know, and I don’t have a lot of time to ponder that important question,” Jim Smith told a public radio reporter. “We just got to deal with the situation on the ground here regardless of what the cause is.”
At least two causes have been identified. In recent decades, the Forest Service has harvested less old growth and has suppressed fires. Without the natural thinning of a regular blaze, a huge amount of fuel has built up.
To make matters worse, the mountain pine beetle, which is native to the West, has thrived in warmer temperatures. Winter cold snaps used to keep its population in check, but now it can breed with abandon and feast on an oversupply of timber. Anyone can see the devastation with the naked eye. Green forests have turned strange shades of yellow, orange, and red – locals call the eerie look “red and dead.”
Two and a half years ago, the city commission passed a resolution acknowledging what’s going on. “Human actions are driving disturbing climatic trends observed in Helena in recent years,” said the document, “including earlier snowmelt, reduced stream flows and increased wildfire activity.” The city created a climate change task force, which issued an action plan last year calling for such things as LEDs in street lights and biofuel at the power plant. But Helena can’t do much to control its climate; effective measures truly must be global. In the meantime, citizens have to think about how to guard against fire.
The danger for 2010 appears to be higher than last year’s. That’s why the Helena Citizens’ Council recently held an informational meeting at the Lewis and Clark Library, one of a series through the winter and spring to give townspeople strategies to protect themselves.
“The mood here is something I can’t convey to you,” says Pat McKelvey, tasked with coordinating fire safety for three counties. “There’s fear, which in some places becomes angst. I’m getting calls from people demanding, ‘Get up here.’ But I’m telling people, containment is your issue.”
Townspeople have realized that the fire danger is not just “out there,” in the forests, but also within the city limits. After all, there are 2,000 acres of “red and dead” trees on city parkland. Moreover, a fire from the South Hills could reach Helena in just over four hours. McKelvey notes that homes themselves would become fuel and would burn faster than trees. The cost of clearing firebreaks around homes in rural areas may be $1,000 an acre, but in town, it’s easily twice that, as workers have to deal with power lines, traffic, and other houses.
Does Helena have an adequate water supply? “That’s a whole ‘nother issue,” McKelvey says. A fire in the hills might shut off some of the water to the city. Are they doing some controlled burns? “We have – not as much as we’d like to – as much as I’d like to.”
Officials have put hundreds of hours into evacuation plans. They’re enormously complex, dependent upon so many variables – the origin of a fire, direction of wind, and how citizens respond. People are urged to keep gas in their cars and to know where they might rendezvous with family. These plans are no longer just contingencies. “It’s not a matter of if, but when,” says McKelvey.
For several years, crews have been busy clearing dead wood in the hills north and south of town. “What people were used to was not a healthy forest,” says Amy Teegarden, director of Parks and Recreation. She means it was not regularly managed, or thinned. “Those trees that are left are going to be more resilient. In addition to reducing the fire risk…we are trying to create a buffer on our open space, so that if we get a fire from the west or south, we have a chance to defend the city.
“If there is one place we have got to do it right,” she says, “it’s on Mount Helena. That’s sacred landscape.”
Up on Tower Hill, there’s a wooden fire tower dating to the 1870s. It was built after a series of harrowing fires in April 1869, November 1869, October 1871, August 1872, and January 1874. It’s called “the Guardian of the Gulch,” a name that Helena’s firefighters likewise call themselves. Should fire sweep through the region, this wooden structure will certainly be at risk.
At the Fire Tower Coffee House, you can order the Wildfire Panini – ham, provolone, black olives, roasted red pepper, lettuce and Italian sauce. Michelle Harvey says she has friends in the South Hills, where the danger is high. “I live a good ways out of town, but even my mountain is three-quarters brown now,” she says. “It’s a worry. If a fire comes through here, a good chunk of our state will never look the same.”
