STATEMENT OF DR. JON E. KEELEY

U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS

SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERIOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES

UNITED STATES SENATE

NOVEMBER 27, 2007

Madam Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the
opportunity to join in this discussion of the issues raised by the
catastrophic 2007 southern California wildfires.

The fire community, including USGS, conducts fire-related research to
meet the varied needs of the land management community and to understand
the role of fire on the landscape; this research includes fire
management support, studies of post-fire effects, and a wide range of
studies on fire history and ecology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) and the Department of the Interior (DOI) are active participants
in the National Fire Plan, which is a long-term effort focused on
helping to protect communities and natural resources. Part of this
program includes the DOI and USDA Joint Fire Science Program, authorized
and funded by Congress in 1997 to develop information and tools for
managers dealing with wildland fires. My testimony today synthesizes
work done by the fire science community, including the U.S. Forest
Service, the USGS, and academia, over several decades.

**Southern California -- Home to large, catastrophic wildfires**

Large, fast-moving, high-intensity wildfires are a recurring phenomenon
on southern California landscapes. Understanding their causes is a
critical first step to any strategy aimed at reducing community
vulnerability to these events.

These fires are not new to this landscape. There is a rich history of
such events that is well documented in newspaper reports from the latter
half of the 19th century. Indeed one of the largest, if not the largest,
wildfire in California history occurred during the last week of
September 1889 and burned much of Orange County and a significant part
of northern San Diego County. This fire had very minor societal impacts.
What has changed today is not the size or intensity of fires but rather
the size and distribution of the human population in the region.

At the outset, it is critical to understand that these are not forest
fires. The little forest that exists in southern California is limited
to higher elevations, some canyons and urban areas. It is estimated that
no more than 3 percent of the recent 2007 fires in the region occurred
in forests \[data from [Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination
(GEOMAC)](http://geomac.usgs.gov/), geomac.usgs.gov\]. The remaining 97
percent occurred in lower elevation shrublands and urban areas, burning
native shrublands such as chaparral and sage scrub, non-native
grasslands and urban fuels (structures and landscaping).

This is important because fires and fire management impacts can be very
different between western forests and California shrublands. The type of
fire naturally sustained in some western ponderosa pine forests is a
low-intensity fire that burns dead twigs and branches on the forest
floor. In chaparral shrublands, fires are naturally high-intensity and
consume the entire shrub canopies, leaving bare much of the landscape.

This distinction is very important in understanding how fire management
practices have affected past fire activity and may impact current and
future fire activity. Understanding the unique characteristics of
shrubland wildfires is critical to making planning and management
decisions that will minimize the impacts of wildfires on our urban and
natural environments.

Historically in western forests, fire suppression excluded fire from
forests and allowed unnaturally high levels of fuels to accumulate. As a
consequence, in many (though by no means all) western forests,
high-intensity fires that consume entire forests are a partial result of
fire protection efforts during the past century.

In the past, it was argued that the same applied to California shrubland
wildfires; however, both scientists and managers are rapidly approaching
a consensus that these arguments do not apply as directly here in the
southern half of California, west of the desert. Despite a policy of
fire suppression, we have never been able to exclude fire and have
barely kept pace with the ever-increasing number of human-caused fires
that has paralleled population growth in the region (Keeley and others,
1999). The primary reason that fire exclusion has not been possible in
California is the annual occurrence each autumn of periods of gale-force
Santa Ana winds that produce extreme fire-weather conditions (Keeley,
2006).

In the past, agencies such as Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National
Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management have responded to
catastrophic fire events by renewing efforts to modify wildland fuels
that they believed responsible for carrying such fires. The most recent
2007 fires stand as the most convincing evidence that extensive fuel
modification projects will not stop such fires. Estimates are that
across southern California at least 75,000 acres burned through areas
that previously burned in 2002 and 2003. Clearly, these 4-5 year old
fuels were incapable of stopping the 2007 fires driven by the extreme
Santa Ana winds. However, many of these treatments have demonstrated
their effectiveness in improving the likelihood of successful community
protection during these events (e.g., protecting Poppit Flat from the
Esparanza Fire in 2006).

The 2007 fires could be a turning point for fire, fire management, and
planning in southern California. Modifying fuels will not prevent these
fires and was never intended to. However, fuel modification will reduce
fire intensity within the fuel-modification area and may have benefits
for fire fighters, who require defensible space in order to protect
structures from advancing fire fronts and to extinguish fires ignited on
structures by ember throw. Fuel modifications around homes are
necessary; however, additional research could focus on outlining the
most strategically important sites for such pre-fire fuel treatments in
wildland areas.

The present vulnerability of homes at the wildland-urban interface can
be reduced in the future by greater consideration of Santa Ana wind
patterns and their potential for bringing fires into the urban
environment. This and other considerations about where homes are located
relative to wildland fuels have the potential to reduce property loss.

In the past, county, State and Federal agencies have all included fire
prevention strategies in their arsenal of weapons against catastrophic
wildfires. There are many opportunities for innovation in this area. In
the past month, scientists, managers and citizens have offered
suggestions for new approaches that should be studied in response to the
2007 wildfires.

A renewed focus on ignition sources is needed, particularly those
sources that are known to be problematic under Santa Ana wind
conditions. These sources tend to be ignited by equipment operating in
or near brushy areas, car fires and cigarettes along freeways and downed
or arcing powerlines.

Post-fire response to wildfires is an area where we have made
substantial progress in recent years. It is now widely understood that
the vast majority of the wildland landscapes burned in large fires do
not require any intervention, and indeed, intervention sometimes results
in counterproductive efforts. We know from detailed studies that these
shrubland ecosystems are highly resilient to high-intensity wildfires,
and recovery within a few decades is usually guaranteed if left alone
(Keeley, 2006). Most of the plant species in these ecosystems have
dormant seed banks that are fire dependent and lie dormant for up to a
century or more until triggered to grow by wildfires. These post-fire
species, many of which are only ever seen after fire, add immensely to
the biodiversity of this region.

The key to successful post-fire management is to find those areas where
there are human values at risk and good reason to believe the natural
regeneration processes will not be sufficient to provide an acceptable
level of protection. California was a leader early in the 20th century
in the use of artificial seeding of burned landscapes to stabilize
slopes and reduce runoff. However, we now know that, when successful,
such seeding operations can have negative impacts on native
biodiversity. More importantly, seeding has proven to be ineffective at
reducing erosion on our landscapes. California rainfall patterns are
very unpredictable. Rather than experiencing the light steady autumn
rains required to initiate seed growth so that root systems of grasses
are established by the time of the intense winter rains, we often begin
the rainy season with intense winter rains. As a result, seeds are
washed off the slope along with the sediment. There are other management
practices that are far more effective than seeding. One such practice is
the use of physical barriers, such as hay mulch. The hay mulch serves as
a barrier to rainfall and helps to stabilize the soil and prevent
sedimentation. Hay bales placed at the bottom of the slope may contain
sediments before they impact values at risk (Keeley and others, 2006).

A key resource concern following these extensive wildfires is how to
reduce further burning of these landscapes for the one to two decades
necessary for the native ecosystems to fully recover. Although the
species that make up these systems are adapted to periodic fires,
frequent fires have devastating impacts on their long-term survival. In
this regard, serious attention should be given to the huge area of
overlap in the areas burned in 2003 and 2007 (as determined from
GEOMac), as it seems likely that the health of those landscapes is
threatened with loss of native biodiversity and invasion by non-native
species.

**Improving Resilience to Multiple Hazards**

Although the smoke from the wildfires has cleared, the danger is not
over. Winter rains could trigger other hazards, such as flash floods and
debris flows. My testimony to this point has focused on the factors that
led to the recent firestorm. In addition, USGS is conducting research
and developing public safety products addressing the consequences of the
firestorm in three areas: the increased risk of flooding and debris
flows, the impact on human health of possibly toxic ash, and the impact
on ecosystems and endangered species.

In order to address flooding and debris flows, we are preparing maps in
cooperation with FEMA and California state agencies that show
debris-flow probability and identify the potential volume of material in
the flows. These maps are scheduled for release in early December and
will be used by Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) Teams, the
Governor's Office of Emergency Services, FEMA, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management,
the National Park Service, and affected counties. These maps will also
be used in a debris-flow warning system run cooperatively with the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather
Service (NWS). We also are cooperating with NOAA to collect data in the
coming winter through targeted instrumentation and data collection to
improve our models and warnings in the future.

In order to understand potential health impacts from the ash, the USGS
is sampling and evaluating the composition of ash and burn products from
wildland and urban fires before the first runoff of the rainy season and
during the first runoff.

In order to address the impact on ecosystems and endangered species, the
USGS is developing an assessment for DOI partners to determine
populations of species at risk from habitat loss. Biologists have been
deployed to survey the burned areas that are the known locations of
endangered species populations. This event provides a unique opportunity
to better understand fire impacts on biodiversity with focus on species
lost, ecosystem response, and the threat of invasive species. It also
provides a unique opportunity to examine the significance of burn
severity.

These efforts are part of a new USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project
in southern California to demonstrate how integrating information and
products about multiple hazards, including wildfire, debris flows,
floods, and earthquakes, improves the usefulness of this information in
reducing the vulnerability of high-risk communities to natural hazards.
Southern California was a natural choice given that the region has one
of the Nation's highest potentials for extreme catastrophic losses due
to natural hazards.

Interior has the ability to partner with relevant agencies to help the
20 million residents of southern California manage the risks ahead this
winter and to study both the fire and its aftermath so as to better
understand how to reduce the risks in the future. In addition to the
current mitigation efforts to protect citizens from the fast-approaching
winter rains, investigations are needed to understand the nature and the
full extent of the threat from debris flows for the next few winters,
until a sufficient plant cover is established on the hillsides.
Effective hazard mitigation from the inevitable future wildfires and
associated debris flows will only be possible if there is an in-depth
understanding of the processes. The consequences of fires on our
environment, including loss of habitat for endangered species and the
introduction of toxic chemicals from the burn residue into ground water
and soils, must be documented and analyzed to plan the recovery.

**Conclusion**

Scientists have been studying the natural processes discussed in my
testimony in southern California for decades and thus have the baseline
data from which we can understand the changes brought about by the
fires. We have the scientific expertise in wildland fire research to
help in understanding the ecosystems affected by wildfire and to assist
land managers in post-fire recovery and rehabilitation in southern
California. In addition, USGS modeling of fire behavior can help improve
the placement of homes relative to wind patterns and fire behavior.

Madam Chairman, this concludes my remarks. I will be pleased to answer
any questions you may have.

References

Keeley, J.E., C.J. Fotheringham, and M. Morais. 1999. Reexamining fire
suppression impacts on brushland fire regimes. ***Science***
284:1829-1832.

Keeley, J.E. and C.J. Fotheringham. 2003. Impact of past, present, and
future fire regimes on North American Mediterranean shrublands, pp.
218-262. In T.T. Veblen, W.L. Baker, G. Montenegro, and T.W. Swetnam
(eds), Fire and Climatic Change in Temperate Ecosystems of the Western
Americas. Springer, New York.

Keeley, J.E. and C.J. Fotheringham. 2004. Lessons learned from the
wildfires, pp. 112-122. In R.W. Halsey, editor. Fire, Chaparral and
Survival in Southern California. Sunbelt Publications, El Cajon,
California.

Keeley, J.E., C.D. Allen, J. Betancourt, G.W. Chong, C.J. Fotheringham,
and H.D. Safford. 2006. A 21st century perspective on postfire seeding.
Journal of Forestry 104:103-104.

Keeley, J.E. 2006. South coast bioregion, pp. 350-390. In N.G. Sugihara,
J.W. van Wagtendonk, K.E. Shaffer, J. Fites-Kaufman, and A.E. Thoede
(eds), Fire in California's Ecosystems. University of California Press.

Syphard, A.D., V.C. Radeloff, J.E. Keeley, T.J. Hawbaker, M.K. Clayton,
S.I. Stewart, and R.B. Hammer. 2007. Human influence on California fire
regimes. Ecological Applications 17:1388-1402.