Beaver Creek Fire

Cheat Grass

Fire can have negative effects such as presenting the opportunity for noxious and invasive plants to take over. Invasive plants can compete with native plants for water and soil causing the death of the native plants. The death of native plants leads to a loss of habitat and less food for native animals causing their populations to shrink.[11] Invasive plants can affect the growth and spread rate of wildfires based on the invasive plant's moisture content, location, and type of fuel.[12] An example of an invasive species in the area of the Beaver Creek Fire is cheat grass, Bromus tectorum.[13] Cheat grass sprouts before Idaho's native plants, thus taking growth area away from native plants and habitat away from native animals. Cheat grass affects fires in the area because it grows in a continuous bed of grass, unlike the local grasses that grow in patches, which can be burned through more rapidly than native grass causing faster moving fires.[11]

Mountain Pine Beetle

Invasive species can affect fire behavior. The area of the Beaver Creek Fire is known to be infested with Mountain Pine Beetles, Dendroctonus ponderosae.[10] Mountain Pine Beetles kill trees by latching on to trees, consuming bark, and laying eggs inside the tree tissue.[10] Trees able to reseed and grow continue to be attacked by the beetles. The tree mortality caused by the Mountain Pine Beetles increases fire hazard in the area and causes more high intensity fires. It is a proven fact the Mountain Pine Beetles have an increasing effect on the fire spread and fire intensity.[10] The more trees the Mountain Pine Beetle kills, the more large woody fuel falls to the ground causing increased fire intensity and severity. The first few years after the destruction from the beetle is the time period when large amounts of fine dead fuels are present and woody fuels that produces the highest intensity and severe fires.[10]

Plants in fire related disturbance-dependent ecosystems can have serotinous pines, or they have a resin over their seeds to delay seed release.[14] When the fire comes through it melts the resin and allows the seed to begin growing.[14] Germination timed to fire is another method for plant survival. Germination timed to fire means that chemicals in a plant will trigger its growth once the ground is heated to a certain temperature by a fire. Resource allocation, a plant able to disperse its seeds in a large area, helps with plant survival during fire as well. In the area where the Beaver Creek Fire took place, lodge pole pine trees and juniper trees are just two plants in the ecosystem that are fire-dependent.[11]

Animals in fire-dependent ecosystems have protective or survival methods just as plants do. Animals have internal mechanisms that cause them to reproduce around the fire disturbance regime, this is called reproductive timing. Animals can smell or sense a fire coming so they can either escape or hide to survive the fire.[15]

Fire is beneficial in fire-dependent ecosystems. Fire can increase soil nutrients, increase resource availability, decrease competition, decrease soil microorganisms, and control invasive species.[16] If no fire occurs for an extended period of time, plants can begin to crowd out new plant growth, such as sagebrush and grasses in the Beaver Creek Fire area, and cause habitat loss, for birds such as sage grouse.[11] Fire acts as a cleansing agent because "by burning dead trees and other vegetation along with the crowded plants and trees"[11] more space is made for new growth. The best type of fire for cleansing an ecosystem is a slow moving fire that burns few trees and lots of ground vegetation. These types of fires usually produce a "mosaic pattern", not all trees and vegetation is burned, so that there is a good mixture between new growth and fully matured plants.[11]

Firefighters working on the fire

Many areas had to be evacuated due to the fire as it approached populated areas. The fire was also fought by thousands of firefighters and some groups of specialized firefighters, called hot shots. Hot Shots are groups brought into an area to contain a wildfire.[2] Eight helicopters with buckets attached filled with water mixed with a retardant were used[3] to contain the fire, along with helitankers, helicopters with a built in container for water. Humans fighting the fire tried to contain the fire and prevent "slop over", where the fire crosses a control line to an unburned side. Lines of trees were cleared or "sawcut" so the fire had less fuel and by digging a fire line down into the mineral soil to stop the fire whenever it reached the ditch helped with containment.[2] Firefighters even used the paths of past wildfires to help slow down the Beaver Creek Fire.[18] They accomplished this by forcing the fire towards the boundary of the past fire and into a natural barrier.[8] The last resort to stop the fire implemented by humans was the Governor of Idaho, Butch Otter, who declared the Beaver Creek Fire a state disaster area on August 14. This allowed the area more financial funds to fight the fire and more human resources, such as firefighters.[3] The fire entered the Wood River Valley through Greenhorn Gulch, a canyon halfway between the towns of Hailey and Ketchum, and to some extent, through Deer Creek Canyon, just to the south. One home in Greenhorn was destroyed by the fire but more than 25 other homes were saved by the efforts of firefighting crews.

Once the fire was contained the effects of the fire on the ecosystem do not stop there. The Beaver Creek Fire, first and foremost, gave new vegetation more room to grow and more access to sunlight for new trees. Grass will be the first to regrow and will begin to bring back wildlife.[11] The fire had a variety of effects on animals. During the fire the larger animals were able to easily escape from the fire, but the smaller animals could not. Many of the small burrowing mammals in the area probably could not survive the intense heat of the Beaver Creek Fire, or the smoke, and died.[15] Even if the fire decimates a native species, the species will eventually return to the area. Some animals will benefit from the fire. The elk will benefit from the new growth after the fire, and wasp and beetles will benefit because they can deposit their eggs in the burned stumps.[15] The ecosystem will return to maximum capacity after time; it is what disturbance-dependent ecosystems do. First the insects will return, followed by the birds, and then the mammals; this is referred to as primary succession.[15] The intense heat of the fire, combined with the massive amounts of ash, turned the soil into a condition known as hydrophobic, whereby water beads up upon and is effectively repelled by the soil. The resulting inability to absorb or percolate rainfall created dramatically altered drainage patterns. Very substantial rains in late August and early September 2013 caused a large number of debris flows down the hillsides and flooding in the Greenhorn area, resulting in serious damage to homes, roads and topography. The U.S. Geological Survey completed an analysis of the effect of the fire on drainage patterns and the risk of debris flows under three different rainfall scenarios within the area affected by the Beaver Creek Fire.[19]

The area of the Beaver Creek Fire is known for the Douglas-Fir Beetle, Dendroctonus pseudotsugae,[20] invading after fires. They invaded after the Castle Rock Fire. They can cause "undesired amounts of tree mortality" after a fire has taken place. For the beetles to "attack", they must be in adult stage, and there must be sufficient bark left for them to deposit their eggs on. The outbreak of the Douglas-Fir Beetles usually last up to 3 – 6 years. The beetles attack could be prolonged though since they will be attacking an area where fire recently took place.[21]