Keeping BWCA paddlers safe: How agencies have partnered to improve firefighting up north

When a wildfire June 13 began chewing up aspen, pine and balsam fir between Spice and Ogishkemuncie lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, it kicked in a multi-faceted response to suppress the flames and protect lives.

Planes dropped water, a "hotshot" crew was airlifted to start work on the ground and the U.S. Forest Service got busy with an evacuation plan that rerouted canoe groups and closed 100,000 acres of the wilderness to the public. Even when the fire was deemed 100% contained by June 21, emergency support stood ready and an all-out campfire ban remained in place until July 3.

The vast, collaborative response to the Spice Lake fire was a patchwork of lessons learned from decades of previous fires, including near-death episodes as recently as 2011's shocking Pagami Creek fire.

Is the evolving BWCA wildfire playbook enough to prevent fatalities in a fast-moving firestorm? No one can say for sure, but visitors to the million-acre wilderness now have more safeguards going for them.

The work is shared by the Forest Service, the state Department of Natural Resources, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, local fire departments, and others. They're unified by the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center (MIFC) in Grand Rapids.

If anyone wonders who has eyes on the BWCA before, during and after a fire, it's the MIFC. Its staff monitors weather, follows up on lightning strikes, looks back at historical land records to see what type of fuels are lining up, and stands ready.

"There are people who are projecting the next 24 hours, the next 48 hours, the next 72 hours,'' MIFC spokeswoman Leanne Langeberg said. "There is more strategic planning that comes into play than I think most people realize.''

For example, the MIFC monitors the state of potential wildfire fuel. Are the larger trees or vegetation to a point where if they catch fire, they are going to hold onto fire a lot longer?

On any given day, from program managers to dispatchers to cache experts, 50 people might report to the center.

"We are looking at all of those pieces of the puzzle continually," Langeberg added.

Tom Hall, supervisor of the 3 million-acre Superior National Forest, said making a comprehensive plan before something is ablaze is just proper land management in a forested region where fire is always a risk.

The Forest Service uses old-school tactics with high-tech tools. For example, Hall said the agency might fly over a region — like the Department of Natural Resources does — for days to as long as a week after a report of a lightning strike. It'll also use satellite, heat-detecting imagery to pinpoint possible hotspots with smoke or fire. Geographic Information System (GIS) data allows visualizing and mapping areas to watch.

He said there are certain constants in fire risk, including spruce budworm killing off balsam firs and dried remnants of the 1999 bow echo storm that blew down and destroyed 478,000 acres of forest inside and outside the BWCA.

"There is that connection of, what are we doing to reduce fuels proactively? And then there is the suppression — the reaction part of that. They go hand in hand,'' Hall said.

Wildfire is a natural ecological process, so decisions about suppression have to be weighed against natural forest evolution and the safety of BWCA visitors — more than 8,000 people on any given summer day.

"So how do you balance those things inside the wilderness, knowing that we are trying to have the minimum tool, the minimum impact in there as well?" Hall said.

Patrick Johnson, one of two U.S. Forest Service fire management officers assigned to the BWCA, said the agency wrongly preached for years that lakes were reliable safety zones against encroaching firestorms. When the opposite proved to be true in the Pagami Creek fire, the agency abandoned its "soft closure'' approach of encouraging campers to leave areas potentially in the path of an active wildfire.

Instead, as practiced last month in the smallish Spice Lake fire, the Forest Service now orders evacuations and complete shutdowns of travel routes remotely close to a blaze. In the case of Spice Lake, public safety crews immediately entered the closure area by float plane and canoe to command paddlers out of the danger area.

Formerly, Johnson said, the Forest Service was too concerned about disrupting paddlers' vacations and upending local outfitting businesses with all-out, widely applied travel bans.

"At that time [of the Pagami Creek fire], we were too considerate,'' Johnson said. "If we are weighing economics or life and safety, we've definitely realized we need to move with life and safety right now.''

Abiding by that philosophy and by recognizing the unpredictability of wildfires, he said, the Forest Service now draws exclusion zones bigger than they used to be. "We do them early and we do them pretty big,'' he said.

New, too, is a procedural change that puts public safety crews in direct contact with a supervisor of their own who is in the field with them and watching the fire, Johnson said.

Lack of communication between Pagami's fire command and six public safety crew members who became trapped in the inferno was a major wakeup call. All six were forced to deploy emergency shields to survive as dense smoke, flames and burning embers overran them.

Todd Stefanic was one of the six crew members assigned to paddle into the BWCA to alert campers about possible danger.

"As soon after that as I could, I quit the Forest Service,'' he said. "I think about that fire all the time. When they finally got us out of there and back to Ely, they told us not to talk to the media. They didn't even ask us if we were OK. There were a lot of mistakes made in managing that fire.''

When it comes to monitoring dry forest conditions and predicting wildfire behavior, Johnson said the Forest Service has spent more than a decade updating its fire management computer models. One important change constantly improves data on the status of vegetation throughout the Superior National Forest. "That drives what the fuels are and what the fire behavior will be,'' he said.

Another precaution is bringing extra firefighters to the edges of the Boundary Waters before fires are detected. Johnson said. "When things get really dry, we have extra resources on hand,'' he said.

Already this season, the Forest Service has ramped up its BWCA firefighting resources with extra hands from Ohio, Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana and Illinois.