It was the setting for a perfect disaster: historic level droughts, acres of dry forest and grassland, huge reserves of dead wood fuel, and a hurricane that sucked any moisture from the air. Locals said it was just “powder-keg dry.”
“All it needed was an ignition source,” recalls Daniel Lewis, staff forester with the La Grange area Texas A&M Forest Service, who describes the horrors of the Labor Day 2011 wildfire that raced through Bastrop County, TX. It was one of the worst disasters of the state; the Texas State Forest Service calls it “the most destructive wildland urban-interface wildfire in Texas history.”
“When that wind started, some dead standing trees blew into power lines, and that was it—the ignition source that set off the fire,” says Lewis.
He explains that Hurricane Lee had “dropped all the moisture from the southern states.” With sustained winds of 45 mph and low humidity conditions, the fire traveled “at an incredible speed of 17 miles in two and half hours,” he says.
“On the first day we had 1,000 homes that were burned, but it was thanks to the heroics of the fire department that everyone got evacuated quickly and out of harm’s way.”
Although at nearly 35,000 acres it was not the largest wildfire in terms of area, the fire was the most economically devastating, with an estimated $325 million in insured property damage alone and costs of $25 million in firefighting and recovery.
In total, says Lewis, 5,640 homes were at least partially burned, of which nearly 2,000 were beyond salvage, and two people were killed.
The fire virtually wiped out the majority of Bastrop State Park, which is in a unique setting called the Lost Pines region of central Texas.
Lewis praises the quick thinking of Bastrop’s emergency management coordinator, Mike Fisher, “who had the foresight to see the big picture immediately. Mike realized even during the process of firefighting the importance of putting a team together to identify needs and prioritize the work that would be necessary for cleanup and recovery.”
That team was named “The Lost Pines Recovery Team” with members from all the agencies it would require to pull this recovery project together.
Lewis says controlling erosion was first on the recovery team’s list, followed by a reseeding plan to hold the soil.
But it was an uphill effort, literally, in the face of subsequent events.
Within two months following the fire, the recovery team was putting together information packets, workshops, and help sessions for people to learn what they could do to recover, and was informing residents what the county and other agencies were doing to reseed, control erosion, and help rebuild a community that was virtually at a standstill.
“People were just reeling from having their homes and everything they owned lost, gone forever. It’s a sobering and terrible experience to live through,” says Lewis. Since then, the Bastrop region has had a rollercoaster of recovery compromised by additional disasters. “It’s really two steps ahead and one step back,” he notes, describing how record rainfalls subsequent to the fire were so extreme that the “topsoil that was left was washed off and moved from ridges to valleys.”
He notes, “The burnt brush acted like a net collecting topsoil, and the culverts under the roads were so clogged with soil the roads had to be resurfaced just to get above ground level.”
Fisher, who is deputy director of emergency management services for Bastrop County, points out some unusual aspects of the local ecosystem. “The land and ecosystem here is a watershed of the Colorado River, one of our seven major rivers. On one side of the Colorado River we have post oak savannah, which includes grasses and some pastureland, post oaks, eastern red cedar, and yaupon holly. On the other side we have loblolly pines, part of the Lost Pines Forest, and it is this system that is much more prone to catastrophic wildfire.”
Fisher adds that topography is also considerably different in the pines region. “It’s more hilly here, and the soil is different. When you destroy the groundcover, the erosion is much worse than if it were in the flatter savannah lands.”
Fisher says the region was declared eligible for public assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and because of the housing loss was also declared eligible for some funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “We were able to use some of those dollars for erosion and soil stabilization work.”
Adding Fuel to the Fire
For centuries, fire suppression rather than prescribed fire has been the norm, and as a consequence, says Fisher, there is tremendous pine needle drape built up under the pines, “which is so much fodder for fire.”
He adds, “The yaupon holly also has a high wax content, with a serrated leaf edge that can catch pine needles. Both of these factors create the perfect scenario for fire to ladder up the tree trunk to the forest canopy.”
By the time the fire was fully put out 28 days after it began, it was October and the end of the growing season. “All the nutrients had been burnt out. Now it was down to bare ground and ash,” recalls Fisher.
“Without a growing season we were facing destructive erosion, and this exacerbated the problems with recovery. Especially adding to that was that our drought broke in January, but this rainfall dumped seven inches of rain all at once, and it was the first significant rain after a 15-month drought. Whatever was left of the topsoil was now washed away, so when spring came the soil layers wouldn’t support strong revegetation growth.”
Fisher says the team put out bids for the revegetation. One requirement was protection of the native endangered species, along with reseeding with native species.
“The Lost Pines ecosystem is home to the Houston toad, a federally endangered species. They have a range of 220,000 acres, but there are hardly any of them. Current estimates are only 20 to 100 toads within this system, and the bulk of their habitat here was wiped out. So everything we do has to avoid any negative environmental impact on protected species.”
While Fisher’s emergency management services addressed recovery within Bastrop County, the Bastrop State Park recovery was under the purview of Texas Parks and Wildlife.
Historic Trees Reveal Four Centuries of Events
Greg Creacy, a natural resource specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife, brings a historical perspective to the destruction from this particular event, now dubbed a benchmark fire in the urban-wildland. “This wildfire was outside the normal intensity of a fire-adapted system. We know this because we’ve examined some of our oldest post oak trees that date back to the 1600s, and they show fire scars telling us that fires have been a regular part of the system, up until the most modern era of fire suppression.”
Creacy adds, “Prior to fire suppression, lands were cleared with prescribed fires, which reduced the amount of fuels available for combustion during a wildfire. With fire suppression methods, which started in the late 1800s, fuels are allowed to build up over time, setting the stage for massive amounts of fuel to accumulate for future fires that burn longer and hotter.” As a consequence, he says, this fire burned at a higher-than-normal intensity that killed virtually all the trees, including the valued post oaks whose history is now lost forever. Creacy says the fire consumed all organic material from the ground up, leaving the land very vulnerable.
“There was damage to the downstream rivers. The topsoil blew out the culverts, it blew out bridges, and it increased the sediment to the Colorado River. In terms of cost, this was the most destructive fire in Texas history and, at that time, the third most destructive fire in the US. A majority of the Bastrop State park burned; 1,600 homes were totally destroyed. It was horrible all around.”
“We looked at all the pros and cons of reseeding, and Bill Kerr from Revegetation Services, the company that was awarded the recovery contract, was a big help to preserve what we had left and to get ready for the future.”
First, Do No Harm
“Revegetation Services has extensive experience in erosion control and soil stabilization in post-fire projects,” says Kerr, the specialist who assisted and Texas Parks and Wildlife in its post-fire recovery plans. “We had to deal with the endangered species in all of our conversations about mitigation for erosion, the reseeding, and every intervention that made a footprint on this habitat.”
After going through all the benefits and cost analysis with the contractor, an engineer designed various techniques for stabilization including stone riprap, straw logs, mulch hydroseeding, and a native grass seasonal mix.
Creacy says the team decided to first put in a mix of cool-season grasses and then some native warm-season grasses for long-term reclamation.
Kerr describes the processes and focus on hydroseeding techniques, which were required to be low impact. “Bringing in dozers to clear the trees would have been easy, but we wanted minimal ground disturbance, so we didn’t do that. We couldn’t drag any heavy machinery over the landscape. The relatively steep slopes required that we use a seed mix of rye mixed with wood fiber and guar gum tackifier, which is what we did on 636 acres. After that we started using straw shredded into very tiny pieces and mixed with the seed and some wood fiber, along with guar tackifier.”
Kerr says that for hydroseeding, crews had to drag a 2-inch hose wherever it was needed, sometimes as far as 1,200 feet, which is very challenging on steep slopes.
“We used 3,300-gallon hydroseeding machines on the trucks. Those trucks would stay on the roads and then we’d roll off the hose, but it would sometimes take from six to eight guys to do the job. Three guys would be at one end, one guy shooting the hose, a couple of guys to guide the length of it, and also a few back on the road to handle the truck. We can shoot pretty far out, as much as 150 feet, so we do get good coverage.
He adds, “We have to make sure that equipment is taken only into areas that have been previously disturbed and use only existing roads so that we’re not impacting the habitat.”
The required reseeding, explains Kerr, mandated a certified weed-free mix. “We absolutely did not want to introduce any plants that were not native and would persist in the landscape. Rye grass was used because it is a quick annual that comes up quickly, does its thing, and then disappears. All the native grasses were used, and we harvested seed from another property.” He says his crews have extensive expertise in assembling the proper native seed mixes and sourcing species required for each revegetation project.
A Bonus Find in the Grocery Warehouse
As Lewis explains, the long-term forest recovery stage of this effort required large-scale production of seedlings that maintained the genetics of the loblolly pine, Pinus taeda, but also the unique adaptations this species developed for survival in the Lost Pines region, which is at the western edge of its range and separated from the contiguous population of pine 100 miles to the east.
“The whole fire burned right down what we call the Alum Creek watershed, racing through the park and beyond, through two private subdivisions.” While this watershed empties into the Colorado River, says Lewis, this is a geographic “dividing line” that separates the loblolly pine forest into different subspecies—one on the east side and one on the west side of the river.
He adds that while the cedars were burned and will not come back, the post oaks burned to the ground still had viable roots, “so where there was one tree there are now 20 new shoots per plant.” But not so for the pines.
The loblolly pine is a predominant species of the southern pine timber industry. It is the most common tree used for yellow pine timber across the South. “For central Texas, this tree is unique for us in that this population is the westernmost distribution of Pinus taeda in the country,” he notes. The pine trees in the Lost Pines area are the same species but in fact genetically different loblolly pines. Because of where the forest sits on the western edge, they have a thicker, waxy cuticle and fewer stomata, and this regulates moisture loss. They also have more fibrous roots. We couldn’t just plant an east Texas loblolly in central Texas.”
It was also a big draw for people to come to Bastrop Park and see the pine trees. The eastern ones grow to 140–150 feet tall, and on the west side not more than 75 feet tall. “This is part of their genetic difference,” he notes.
Creacy says that 75% of the forestland that was burned was privately held land, and that accounts for 50% of the pine loss. Although most of them were wiped out, Lewis relates a happy ending about finding replacements.
“I have a great story I love to tell how we got the new pine seedlings, because the loblolly pines we have are very specific to this region. At one time we had a Texas Forest Service state nursery called the Indian Mound Nursery that had stockpiled a large quantity of Lost Pines loblolly seed sourced from Bastrop, but they had never been used. They ended up in refrigerated storage in a grocery store in Lufkin—about 1,100 pounds of seed.
“Our state horticulturist, Tom Byram, had been struggling with what to do with this seed for years. Finally he set a date and made arrangements to get some help to take the seed to the dump. Just two weeks before that date, the fire started and we suddenly had a pressing need for that seed that was once thought to have been a burden. Now we have seed for the seedling grow-outs.”
Persisting in the Face of Setbacks
Although Lewis says the regions affected by the fire might never look exactly as they did before, crews have planted more than 9,000 acres of trees so far. Unfortunately, additional drought and more fire have made casualties of some of the new seedlings.
After the fire, the tops most of the dead trees were still standing, and then the tops fell, giving the landscape an eerie matchstick appearance. But Lewis says they’ve produced more than a million seedlings, the oaks are coming back, and there is a definite slowdown in erosion because of the grassland vegetation that’s coming in. “It’s greening up, and erosion is managed.”
The ultimate goal of the Forest Service is to plant 2 million pine seedlings in five years following the fire with the help of the Arbor Day Foundation and many other partners.
According to the nonprofit Texas organization TreeFolks, by the end of 2015 the Bastrop County community reforestation program had planted 1.3 million pines.
Creacy says developing soil stabilization strategies ahead of time for use in the aftermath of future fire is a valuable tool. “That’s only going to be more important in the future as these fires occur. With population and communities growing and living on the edge of undeveloped areas, and when we have these high-intensity wildfires that destabilize soils, it is ever more important to be proactive as the lines between wildlands and urban development interface.”
Bastrop County, TX
A Modern Day Round-Up
Just under 350 wild horses live on Idaho public lands in three managed areas. On August 11, 2015, a devastating fire swept through southwest Idaho and eastern Oregon, destroying more than 400 square miles of range and grassland. Suddenly the wild horse herds had nothing to eat.
The fire, which occurred 40 miles west of Boise, was dubbed the Soda Fire because of its proximity to the Soda Creek. It caused extensive loss of wildlife habitat, destroyed much valuable sagebrush, and affected a multitude of public recreation and livestock ranching uses.
Cindy Fritz of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) says the fire “burned through several ecological zones, occurring in highly varied terrain that has limited mechanical access.”
She says, “Even while it was burning, we started assembling an emergency stabilization team, planning before the fire was contained and controlled. This area is an important habitat for the sage grouse, with more than 50,000 acres designated by BLM as a priority habitat management area.”
The BLM also reported that the three wild horse management areas were burned, with two nearly 100% impacted and the third 35% burned.
Emergency gathering of the wild horses was one of the first priorities. Fritz says the horses were transported to the Boise Wild Horse Corrals. An adoption process was later open to the public, and by the beginning of November adoptable horses were finding homes.
Looking toward recovery, says Fritz, the BLM wanted to use as much local expertise as possible to assess the habitat and plan response and mitigation strategies.
“The local field office specialists are local people who can analyze the land and have the best knowledge to plan and implement treatment.” She also worked with a federal Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team—a collaborative multidisciplinary group of experts that begins assessments even before fires are fully contained—to help them assess and prescribe stabilization efforts.
“You have to use all data available and involve all resource specialists to plan going forward. We had botanists, restoration specialists, range managers, wildlife biologists, archeologists, and recreation experts. Since this is public land with multiple uses, and the fire affected areas such as recreation, mining, livestock grazing, wildlife, and off-road, the challenge of BLM is to balance the needs of all the users; we can’t pick and choose whose use of the land and needs are more important over another’s.
“Our biggest concern in such a large area was movement of soil from water and wind,” says Fritz, adding that the BAER team hydrologist analyzed the varying terrain and the need to install structures for erosion mitigation. “The reality of installing widespread mitigation structures is unrealistic across a 400-square-mile expanse with unreachable terrain in many cases.”
Other immediate concerns on the list to address were ensuring water was diverted from a previously capped-off hazardous material cleanup site, and physically closing mine shafts and adits that were exposed after the fire removed the sagebrush vegetation; these became safety hazards. The team also needed to remove approximately 2,000 burned tires and 13 vehicles from an unauthorized dumping area, and attend to road improvements such as deep ditch and water drainage.
Other priority tasks were to mend 350 miles of fence, plant sagebrush and bitterbrush seedlings, and collect and hand-plant native and rare plants “to ensure the native character of the land.”
The 2011 fire was one of Texas’s most destructive.
This “Cheat” Is Hard to Stop
Seeding to stabilize the soil in erosion-prone areas is in itself a complicated task, and one which Fritz emphasizes has an additional dimension—curbing the regrowth of an invasive species called cheatgrass.
“This was an introduced species that has become a plague of western range and grasslands. It’s very adaptable, and herbicides can temporarily reduce it, giving us a window of opportunity to seed perennial native and introduced competitive grasses that will dominate the site over time.”
But the unfortunate truth, explains Fritz, is that “Historically our native grasses didn’t evolve with cheatgrass, making them weak competitors to the invasive species. But perennial grass density using the best varieties available, whether that is native or introduced species, is the best long-term solution for the invasion.” Fritz, a former manager of the BLM regional seed warehouse, says, “I’ve worked with the species we typically use on fire rehabilitation for 20 years and understand the characteristics of seed varieties and what works in post-fire environments.” She also refers to the expertise of many of the seed producers across the west as assisting with recommendations and providing seed for restoration efforts. One such seed producer is Utah-based Granite Seed Company.
Ryan Timoney of Granite Seed describes the company’s involvement with the Soda Fire revegetation. “Granite has been in the reclamation and erosion arena for more than 20 years, and we are recognized as the largest provider of conservation seed and erosion control products in North America.” The company produces and collects seed, performs seed cleaning and conditioning, and blends seed for projects that could be “tens of thousands of acres in hostile environments, or a single lawn or garden,” he notes.
“During the Soda Fire we were directly involved with the reseeding, which required sagebrush seeds from specific zones; these are seeds grown at a certain elevation that will have a better chance of success.” Timoney says Granite provided two of the seed mixes for the Soda project that were applied aerially and also mechanically on the ground.
Fritz highlights the process using a rangeland drill for ground seeing. “We used a rangeland drill modified for rangeland to apply seed. This has been a tried-and-true piece of equipment because it provides the seed-to-soil contact necessary for germination. But for terrain that can’t be reached with mechanical means we used aerial seeding, and in this case we did 70,000 acres where helicopters can move and apply seed in areas of terrain that otherwise are inaccessible.
“It’s a lower probability of success, and you have to hope the seed hits a crack in the soil to make seed to soil contact,” she adds.
Although native grasses are important soil stabilizers, sagebrush, an iconic image of the western range, is also an integral feature of the landscape. The blue-green plant grows 2 to 7 feet tall and provides an important habitat and diet for the sage grouse and a source of food for browsers. The root system and branches have an ability to trap and hold windblown snow to increase water retention. However, plants take 25 years to reach maturity, so replacing them is a long-term process. “Sagebrush are slow growing, dense, and have a lot of tannins, so they’re also very flammable,” says Fritz.
Challenges are all in a day’s work for Stevenson Intermountain Seed, another supplier Fritz has worked with that is known for its specialty in native species. Ron Stevenson, president of the Ephraim, UT-based company, says it has been around for 40 years and “our major emphasis is supplying seed for land restoration. Wildfires are a big part of our business.”
He adds, “We also specialize in the species only available through wildland harvesting. In the whole scheme of wildfire restoration, approximately 30% [of seeds] that are used come from wildland harvesting, while about 70% have been produced by specialized seed producers in cultivated fields using agronomic techniques.”
For the Soda Fire recovery, the team wanted as much sagebrush seed as possible harvested from areas that had similar genetic profiles so it might optimize success and prove adaptable.
“Through a competitive bid we were able to harvest a certain amount of seed from two counties in Oregon and Idaho by going into the seed zones that had climates with similar precipitation and soil composition, in hopes those seeds would have the best chance of establishing,” he says.
It’s not an easy thing to reclaim arid western lands, he cautions. “We know what we’re doing, but wildland plants very seldom produce the same amount of seed every year. Each year is very different.”
For the Soda project, he says, 50–60 expert seed collectors worked in a process that sounds anything but sophisticated, but nonetheless, requires tremendous finesse and determination. “What you do to harvest on a commercial scale is find the right sagebrush plants, put down some canvas underneath the bush to collect seed, and with a tennis racket hit the seed stalks to dislodge the seeds.” Each plant can potentially produce many thousands of seeds and, incredible as it sounds, there are about 1.75 million seeds in a pound. But, says Stevenson, you need hundreds of thousands of pounds to get enough viable seed to harvest on a large scale.
“You have to work fast, and it’s a short window to work in. It can’t be too early or the seed is not mature, nor too late since the wind will disperse them. If you have bad weather the seeds may not want to come off, so sometimes you have to clip off the seed stalk and bring that back for processing. It’s tedious and time consuming.”
After the seeds are brought in for processing, workers clean them for purity and a certain amount of germination. Then the seed is sampled by a certified seed sampler and sent in to a registered seed testing laboratory for analysis to make sure it meets the BLM’s requirements.
“The recent batch of seeds destined for the Soda project was harvested in November, processed in December, and delivered the first of January 2016. The private seed industry is very serious about trying to do the best job they can to supply products that are needed so that erosion control and restoration can be a success. It’s not an easy thing, and it is really a target in motion.”
Fritz echoes the difficulty as well. “Sage may have an average of 2 millions seeds per pound, but every plant has its own reproductive strategy, and the success of sagebrush germination onsite has a low probability.”
By the beginning of December the seed drilling efforts were completed, and the Soda Fire region is now being used as a huge laboratory. With land segmented into 25-acre plots, researchers are looking at how application of a new herbicide and planting other grass species might curb the growth of cheatgrass. The Department of Interior has allocated $67 million over the next five years to support the collaborative efforts of the BLM, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Geological Survey in this effort.
Fritz is encouraged and says resprouting of species is taking place. “It’s all just a matter of time, but the public has a misconception of our timing. I don’t think they realize all the challenges we face from a timing perspective of getting contracts, doing things by the book, following all the regulations we have to abide by.”
The fire was terrible, but good can follow bad; the living laboratories for cheatgrass study, along with new strategic fire breaks being developed, may help the region better cope with future natural disasters.