Fire Exclusion Rises from the Ashes
The media’s inflated coverage of wildfires continued to sell newspapers and foment a nationwide fire exclusion policy. Before the Big Burn, U.S.F.S. leader Gifford Pinchot, an astute politician, told the New York Times that “the timber supply in the United States . . . at the present rate of outing, will be exhausted,” which he knew was fodder for developing a fire exclusion.
A report written by Frank A. Silcox, district forest supervisor and future chief of the U.S.F.S., claims the fires of 1910 cost over $800,000 to suppress—over $28 million today—and destroyed an estimated $13 million of timber.
Pinchot briefed the media that the fire problem was one of the U.S.F.S.’s most critical issues. He told reporters at the New York Times that fire destroyed “valuable timber” and, going against Powell and Hoxie’s ideas, “[fire] caused an almost incalculable loss to watersheds.” As a result of the fires of 1910, Pinchot believed the secret to fighting fires was early discovery and immediate suppression, all-out fire exclusion—a point he stressed to Congress.
The 1910 forest fires caused congressmen to promote increased fire exclusion legislation. The 61st Congress passed the 1911 Weeks Act, which expanded the National Forest system. The act made “two hundred thousand dollars… available… [for] the protection from fire of the forested watersheds.”
This funding blossomed the U.S.F.S. budget, leading to state and federal government partnerships that blazed the trail for fire suppression infrastructure. Forest districts carved roads into forests to access remote regions.
The 1924 Clarke-McNary Act bolstered the Weeks Act by codifying a fire exclusion policy and providing executive power to establish new national forests. The bill authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to “[devise] such forest protection systems as will adequately protect potential forest lands from the ravages of fire . . . keeping them covered with growing trees for the production of a future timber supply.” These two pieces of legislation helped set in motion nearly a century of fire exclusion policies that land managers are grappling with today as climate change has further complicated fire management.
Instead of sparking dialogue about fire inclusion as a tool, the fires of 1910 and over the following decade ended the long-standing debate between inclusion and exclusion policies. By 1935, the “10 a.m. policy” solidified fire exclusion. The directive dictated the suppression of any fire by the morning after discovery.
What followed was over sixty years of total warfare against wildfire. The quelling of flames allowed the thick understory to grow, accumulating fuel loads that guaranteed a hotter and more destructive fire when an area burned.