What About Forest Fires?
People, especially Californians, often ask about what sorts of natural disasters Sedona is subject to. Well, write off earthquakes and hurricanes. Oak Creek has been known to flood. I think we’ve had two or three “500 year” floods in the 17 years I’ve lived in Sedona, but we’ve learned how to not build in the flood way and damage lately has been minimal. Used to be able to say that about forest fires. We just weren’t prone to them like the Flagstaff area. Well, we’ve lost our sense of complancy about that.
If you’ve been reading my newsletters over the past few years, you probably recall my almost daily posts on the Brins Mesa Fire June of 2006. Pretty scarey stuff for us as it came down the mountain and threatened Oak Creek Canyon. Fortunately the US Forest Service made that fire their #1 priority and eventually rushed in hundreds of firefighters and squadrons of aircraft and were able to put it out before it damage any home or anyone was injured. About 4,200 acres of US Forest Service land was burned. The Brins Mesa trail was closed for quite a while, but it’s open now. That followed on the heels of a 800 acre fire near Pine Valley east of the Village of Oak Creek. Both were started by human stupidity.
The positive aspect of the fires was to disrupt our complacency about fires. Up to that point, forest fires only seemed to happen in the pine forests up on the Mogollon Rim. We’d get smoke drifting down to us from those and controlled burns, but had never had a major fire of our own. I won’t say that we’ll never have another big fire, but the Forest Service, the fire departments, and individual citizens are now much more atuned and take vastly more precautionary measures to keep fires from starting and to limit them if the do start.
One of those is, on rare occasions, to close down the National Forest
if the potential for fire is exceptionally high. I can only remember that happening less than a handful of times and they seemed to be around the times of major holiday weekends when the numbers of people and the stupidity factor would likely to also be high. So, we didn’t mind. Plus, with our neighborhood trails, we’d slip in for short hikes - ostensibly to help the USFS police the ban.
May 29th, 2009 at 2009-05-29
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