Global warming forces Forest Service to reconsider strategy

Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: July 30, 2007 06:40:39 AM

WASHINGTON — It was a monster fire — 175,000 acres of tinder-dry timber just south of the Canadian border in north-central Washington state. In places it burned with an intensity rarely seen, crowning through stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa and lodgepole pine that had been weakened by a bark beetle infestation.

“It was clearly a firestorm,” said David Peterson, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab in Seattle.