The US Forest Service was not legally responsible for the 2020 Labor Day fires, which saw vast acres of forestland and timberland go up in flames due to high winds and, most ominously, downed power lines. That is according to US District Judge Michael McShane, who, on December 6, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Freres against the federal agency.
The lawsuit, which sought $33 million in damages, alleged the Forest Service was negligent in battling the Beachie Creek Fire in the Willamette National Forest. As the complaint, Freres said officials did not use their full aerial firefighting arsenal or other resources in the first 14 days of the fire before it spread and became part of a complex of fires in Santiam Canyon fueled by high winds and downed power lines.
The Beachie Creek Fire spread to more than 193,000 acres, mainly in the Willamette National Forest, killed five people and destroyed dozens of homes in the towns of Detroit, Gates and Mill City. However, lawyers for the Forest Service presented detailed evidence to the court that agency officials and firefighters followed directives to suppress the fire entirely and that firefighters used their best judgment.
Instead, they said resources were deployed where and when appropriate, including dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water over the area via helicopter for months and dispatching a crew of smoke jumpers to parachute into the burning forest to suppress the fire:
“Ultimately, conditions were too difficult for the smokejumpers to land safely in the forest in the first few weeks of the fire,” the lawyers said, “leaving the service to attempt to suppress it almost exclusively from the air in the first few weeks and to pause water drops for a week due to dangerous flying conditions.”
“It appears that the thrust of plaintiffs’ claims is not that the Forest Service’s response to the Beachie Creek Fire violated some mandatory policy; it is that the Forest Service’s response to the Beach Creek fire conflicted with plaintiffs’ vision of the best course of action,” Judge McShane wrote in his opinion.
Rob Freres, the president of Freres Timber Inc. and Freres Lumber Co., said they would appeal McShane’s decision. The company claims it lost 7,000 acres of privately owned forest in the fire, worth nearly $30 million, and that it lost $3 million in profits from trees it was slated to log in the Willamette National Forest but couldn’t because they burned.
“Forest Service misconduct, negligence and failure to act is protected by this decision. Our purpose in bringing this litigation was to change the Forest Service’s behaviour toward extinguishing fire,” Freres told the Oregan-based Capital Chronicle in an emailed statement. The notion in the lawsuit that Freres holds more knowledge about fighting fires than the Forest Service was among the central issues McShane questioned.
“Plaintiffs’ brief dedicates pages to explaining how, from their perspective, the Forest Service missed an opportunity to put out the fire in its early stages,” he wrote. “Plaintiffs may be right. But lacking the insight and expertise of the Forest Service, plaintiffs are ill-positioned to make that judgment call.”
Freres argued that the Forest Service ignored its directive to fully suppress the fire by not utilising all aircraft and crews in the first few weeks of the blaze. However, the judge ruled that the service had the right to weigh risks, firefighter safety, and the effectiveness of strategies in various weather conditions and to decide how to fight the fire.
“Not only is plaintiffs’ characterisation of the decisions plainly wrong, but their insinuation that the Forest Service was ‘idle’ is dramatically unfair,” McShane wrote.
Thirty billion reasons why America must fix its power pole network.
The verdict comes as Wood Central reported in May that the United States is grappling with a growing power pole crisis, with investigators blaming aging infrastructure for many of the country’s worst wildfires. And the problem is set to worsen as climate change exacerbates challenges faced by the nation’s aging electrical infrastructure, potentially leading to utility companies – like Warren Buffet’s PacificCorp going out of business.
PacificCorp – owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway – has been besieged by rolling court cases over its aging utility infrastructure, leading Mr Buffer to warn that wildfires could threaten the survival of the $30 billion utility industry across the United States.
“Whatever the case, the final result for the utility industry may be ominous: Certain utilities might no longer attract the savings of American citizens and will be forced to adopt the public-power model,” Mr Buffett said in a letter to his shareholders mid-year. Adding that “when the dust settles, America’s power needs and the consequent capital expenditure will be staggering.”
Dubbed the world’s largest power machine, the US electricity network is supported by more than $150 million treated Southern Yellow, Douglas Fire and Western Red Cedar poles. The vast majority of the US’s electric grid was built 60 to 70 years ago, and that’s a problem, according to Rob Gramlich of consulting firm Grid Strategies, who said: “The lines, the transformers, the towers are often very old.”
In addition, “many utilities don’t have tech to know when power lines are overheating or sagging, potentially onto brush or trees,” according to Julia Simon from NPA, who said, “Those things spark fires.” And then there’s climate change, according to Michael Wara of Stanford University, who said global warming increases the risk of large wildfires because the brush is drier, making more fuel for the fire.
- To find out more about problems faced by the American power network amid greater climate risks, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
