A controlled burn at Audubon Canyon got a bit out of control on Wednesday, highlighting the power and unpredictability of fire as a management tool. The unplanned blaze was far from disastrous: it covered just one and a half acres and was entirely within a planned five-acre prescribed burn area. Fire officials agree that Marin’s forests urgently need more prescribed burns to promote tree health and prevent future catastrophes.
“We had beautiful fire behavior that was still very easy to contain and control,” said Sasha Berleman, the director of Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Fire Forward program. “It was perfectly in line with what we had prescribed. If it had happened in an area that was more remote and had less eyes on it, no one would have blinked.”
But, she added, “We don’t want to be making people nervous and we don’t want to be putting any stress on our partners.”
Last Tuesday morning, a team of a dozen Fire Forward volunteers gathered in Stinson Beach, on land owned by the conservation nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch. Their plan centered on a new-growth redwood forest that hadn’t burned in more than 75 years. The flames licked the top inch of leaf litter and decomposing duff, rejuvenating the forest floor and encouraging healthy plant diversity among the redwoods.
In recent months, Fire Forward has conducted controlled burns of redwood groves around Occidental, and has worked on the nonprofit’s Sonoma County preserves, which were scorched by wildfires in 2017. Some burns need wind to keep them going; redwood burns require minimal wind.
After last week’s crew noticed the fire was burning hotter than expected, they scaled down their five-acre plan to just an eighth of an acre. The flames were out and the area cold by 5 p.m. But the following morning, Bolinas residents reported smoke rising from the ridge, and several called 911. High overnight winds had rekindled embers from the cooled burn area and ignited trees on a more remote ridge.
Marin County Fire Chief Jason Weber said that although it was a great time of year for prescribed burns on the coast, he was discouraged that Fire Forward’s burn had led to an unexpected “slop-over” that needed an emergency response.
It didn’t take long to contain the fire: Crews stopped forward progress by 1 p.m. with the help of a Cal Fire helicopter, and there was never any threat to Bolinas or Stinson Beach. But Mr. Weber said the incident strained the county’s thin wintertime resources.
“We’re not staffed this time of year to be in our wildland response mode,” he said. “I had to recall personnel.”
Mr. Weber said the department would be setting tighter parameters around prescribed burns, including taking into account the weather forecast more than 24 hours after the fire.
“We need to make sure that whoever is doing the burning has the resources to manage it from start to finish so we don’t have to bring multiple engines out, which becomes quite expensive,” he said. “We’ll work with them to teach them what they need to know in order to be successful.”
Fire Forward is not planning any more burns in the immediate future, but Ms. Berleman said the program closely monitors the weather surrounding any burn. Last week’s slop-over affected a smaller area than the five acres the team was prepared to burn. The crew made sure the fire’s perimeter was clean and the area was cold before they left for the day, she said.
Yet as climate change twists normal weather patterns, it can be difficult to predict fire conditions, especially in coastal Marin’s microclimates. “Every single ridge within the Martin Griffin Preserve has a completely different relationship with the wind,” Ms. Berleman said. Still, she stressed the urgency of seizing the narrow window of opportunity for prescribed burns afforded by this time of winter, when soils are moist but plants are slightly drier.
“We’re trying to get good work done that needs to happen now,” she said. “Though harder-to-predict winds and more dryness are the case, we’re still getting a ton of great burn days and burn windows, and we need to be maximizing those.”
The Fire Forward program is one of the few groups working in Marin with the knowledge and skills to conduct prescribed burns. The program conducted its first burn in October 2019, addressing about 10 acres of Douglas fir and brush on the Martin Griffin Preserve to help restore native coastal prairie and create a fuel break. The program had already been in the works for years: Since 2015, Ms. Berleman and others have consulted regularly with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria to learn about Indigenous burning practices.
“Redwood burning hasn’t been happening here since fire suppression began,” Ms. Berleman said. “Colonizers came in, clear-cut all the old redwoods, and we’ve done nothing to build resilience or steward them since, so they’re in a really bad state across this region.”
Reducing fuels through prescribed burns not only makes forests safer, it also makes them healthier and more resilient, Inverness forester Tom Gaman said. Tree ring analyses show that historically, most redwood stands burned every 10 to 25 years, and Indigenous cultural burns often coaxed the process along.
“Up and down the coasts, these forests have evolved for thousands of years, with Native American assistance, to burn regularly,” Mr. Gaman said. “In the last 100 years, we’ve treated these forests as static, as non-changing, and the forest fuels and ladder fuels have grown up.”
This week, Mr. Gaman plans to take part in a 100-acre prescribed fire in a grove of redwoods on the Sonoma Coast owned by Inverness resident Rip Goelet. The Rip’s Redwoods burn has been in the works since Mr. Goelet bought the property in 2018 with the intent to restore the forest to old-growth conditions. Prescribed burning is an important way to get there.
“This is a practical tool that is a little difficult to use, but it works,” Mr. Gaman said. “Redwoods are used to it.”