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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? e-edition | subscribe | newsletter | deals Home News Latest Stories Echo of the past: Camp begins transition Central Point launches language immersion program More smoke and stingy fire activity expected Sunday Victim's partner describes shooting in Kerby murder trial Dredgers might return to the Rogue next year Crime, Courts and Emergency Services More smoke and stingy fire activity expected Sunday Emergency Services Medford woman grazed by bullet while doing laundry Emergency Services Big illegal marijuana garden busted in forest outside Ashland Politics and Elections Senate race could be expensive Talent to consider taxing recreational, but not medicinal marijuana Candidate files false statements Just one seat will be contested for Central Point council Gold Hill mayor faces challenger; other races have one candidate each Education Central Point launches language immersion program UPDATED: Medford school bus in crash; no students hurt, officials say Free TED talk simulcast in Ashland Bear spotted near Central Point school Eagle Point helps students with first-day jitters Environment Dredgers might return to the Rogue next year Dubs' auction preview draws bidders and gawkers OR-7's pups are true wolves ODFW director Elicker will step down Medford hunter's exotic collection goes on sale State news Nation - World Obituaries Joseph Henry Bowden Jr. Thomas Vern Quinnin Irving �Ike� Eisenstein Duane George Daniels IN MEMORY Weather Photo Galleries Since You Asked Videos Web Cams Mail Tribune 100 Sports Latest Stories Mariota sets school TD record as Oregon rallies past Michigan State Oregon State holds on to beat Hawaii 38-30 FIFA audit panel asks member to explain his arrest Virginia Tech stuns No. 8 Ohio State 35-21 Rejuvenated Sky challenge Mercury in WNBA Finals Varsity 541 College Sports Mariota sets school TD record as Oregon rallies past Michigan State Oregon State holds on to beat Hawaii 38-30 Virginia Tech stuns No. 8 Ohio State 35-21 Big game, big records for Mariota No. 14 USC holds off No. 13 Stanford in thriller Pro Sports Rejuvenated Sky challenge Mercury in WNBA Finals Keselowski routs Richmond field to grab top seed Division matchups spice NFL openers In BMW, Horschel gets shot at redemption Federer, Djokovic both lose in semifinals Community Sports Barry fires back into SOGC finals Super seniors strong at SOGC Crenshaw pulls off upset in SOGC Murphy claims victory in Stroke Play Championships South Korea downs Chicago for World Series title Business Latest Stories Pleasant weather, stable interest rates spurred summer home sales Sustainable Valley receives $50,000 SBA grant Blog: And the Award Goes to... Blog: Erickson ink 5-year fire supression deal with L.A. Business briefs Real Estate News Pleasant weather, stable interest rates spurred summer home sales People In Business Transportation Agriculture 1-800-Flowers.com buying Harry & David for $142.5 million Earlier than normal pear harvest coming up short of expectations Weisinger's Winery has earliest crush on record Amy's Kitchen begins expansion in White City Opinion Latest Dana Milbank: Proving trickle-down wrong Letters to the Editor, Sept. 7 Harry & David: the next chapter George Will: In a NATO state of mind Charles Krauthammer: Ukraine abandoned Editorials Harry & David: the next chapter An unresolved conflict; A judge declines to say if county laws trump city laws Cheers and jeers Our View: Make property owners pay for cleanup Committed to community Letters to the Editor Letters to the Editor, Sept. 7 Letters to the Editor, Sept. 5 Letters to the Editor, Sept. 4 Letters to the Editor, Sept. 3 Letters to the Editor, Sept. 1 Guest Opinions Hazardous fuel treatments vital to protection from severe wildfires Wilderness for Kalmiopsis has served us well The summer of my discontent: An open letter to Bill Rauch The power of local philanthropy Lifestyle Latest stories Community blog: We Need to Talk Oregon's Top 5 wilderness areas Origin Story: 3 a.m. New Arrivals Puget Sound's south end offers solitude Food Community blog: 'Crispy Treats' a cut above rice-cereal originals The peace potential of cobblers and crisps Lunchbox recipes Community blog: Try this sweet treat for back-to-school snacking Put your kids through the school of good eats Home and Garden Trees aren't always the best companions for plants Hot tips for a cool (shade) garden An August checklist for your garden Green Scene: Diagnosing common tomato troubles Lawn talk Health Community blog: We Need to Talk Down-size is the right size Oregon Health Policy Board to meet in Medford Community blog: Health is More than Meets the Eye 'Super-Agers' are coming fast Hiking Faith Religion briefs Religion briefs Community Blog: Is Peace Possible in the Middle East - Part three of four Milestones and Achievements New Arrivals Engagement Wedding: Gibson-Hodnefield New Arrivals Engagements Columnist for a Day Healthy Aging Tempo Latest stories Live Music in Local Clubs Keith Greeninger and Matt Hill at the Rogue Theatre Jennifer Nettles plays Britt Rob Zombie plays Lithia Amphitheater Rodney Carrington at Britt Theater 'Freud's Last Session" at Ashland Contemporary Theatre OSF presents 'The Alchemy of Gender' Randall Theatre extends 'Godspell' 'Pump Boys & Dinettes' opens at Camelot Theatre Music Live Music in Local Clubs Keith Greeninger and Matt Hill at the Rogue Theatre Jennifer Nettles plays Britt Rob Zombie plays Lithia Amphitheater Britt Festivals adds to indoor fall concert lineup Community Events Ashland's First Friday Art Walk showcases new exhiits by regional artists 5 Things to Do This Weekend From business professor to artist Shady Cove Tie Days Swap Meet 'Prints From the Plateau' at the Rogue Gallery Dining Ami Sushi serves up Asian dishes Wild River Brewing & Pizza Co. NW Raw Kelly's Crepes Tempo Videos Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » Obituaries TV Listings Movie Listings Oregon Outdoors Oregon Healthy Living Magazines & Special Sections NEWS NOW Expect delays on I-5 near exit 43 ... OR-7's pups are true wolves ... A pair of recent arsons in northeast Medford have the attention of police ... Expect delays on I-5 near exit 43 ... OR-7's pups are true wolves ... A pair of recent arsons in northeast Medford have the attention of police ... Fire from the sky changed everything Twenty years ago today, the Silver fire complex ignited, and forest science has never been the same since When sizzling lightning storms peppered southwestern Oregon on the evening of Aug. 30, 1987, Dave Perry was already a well-respected forestry professor at Oregon State University. By Paul Fattig MailTribune.com By Paul Fattig Posted Aug. 30, 2007 @ 12:01 am By Paul Fattig Posted Aug. 30, 2007 @ 12:01 am A closer look at the Silver fire --> Fire officials report that 1,659 lightning strikes hit Southern Oregon and Northern California on Aug. 30, 1987, sparking the nearly 150,000-acre Silver fire complex. The estimated 230 square mi... » Read more X A closer look at the Silver fire Fire officials report that 1,659 lightning strikes hit Southern Oregon and Northern California on Aug. 30, 1987, sparking the nearly 150,000-acre Silver fire complex. The estimated 230 square miles covered by the fires burned in a mosaic pattern. While some areas were scorched, leaving little more than ashes, other areas within fire perimeters were barely singed. The largest fire was the roughly 96,000-acre Silver fire, which started in the remote Silver Creek drainage of the Siskiyou portion of what is now the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. The largely dry lightning ignited forests which had been baked by a hot summer following three years of drought. By the next morning, firefighters were battling 30 wildfires in Jackson and Josephine counties. Homes were threatened in rural areas near the towns of Rogue River, Wimer, Gold Hill and Cave Junction, prompting numerous residents to evacuate their homes. On Sept. 2, Jackson County commissioners declared a state of emergency. The state fire marshal invoked the Conflagration Act, allowing city fire departments across Oregon to leave their stations to help wildland firefighters. Fire engines were employed to protect rural homes, freeing wildland firefighters to dig fire lines. Local loggers joined in as firefighting resources grew thin. The Silver fire grew to some 20,000 acres by Sept. 4 but no firefighters were available to battle it. But as crews got a handle on the smaller fires, more firefighters were available to battle the biggest blaze, much of which was burning in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area. The Sykes Creek fire was stopped at 10,313 acres, the Longwood fire at 9,300 acres and the Savage Creek fire at 4,031 acres. But the Silver fire would continue burning through October, growing to more than 96,000 acres. It was controlled on Nov. 9, thanks to fall rains. Southern Oregon's 1987 lightning fires cost more than $36 million to extinguish, with the U.S. Forest Service spending $26 million and the Oregon Department of Forestry more than $10 million. The fire season ended that year on Nov. 12. » Social News When sizzling lightning storms peppered southwestern Oregon on the evening of Aug. 30, 1987, Dave Perry was already a well-respected forestry professor at Oregon State University. But the forest ecologist, who had been teaching at OSU for a decade, says the nearly 150,000-acre Silver fire complex ignited by thunderbolts 20 years ago today taught scientists valuable lessons about the Klamath-Siskiyou forests. "My jaw dropped nearly to my knees from what I saw," he recalled of a visit to the complex's still-smoking Longwood fire near Takilma in the Illinois Valley. "I was used to the fire dynamic in the northern Rocky Mountains, where old-growth forests are more susceptible than mature forests to crown fires. "I found out the structure of the old-growth forests here is patchy enough that it doesn't propagate crown fires as readily as a more uniform homogeneous stand," he added. "The other thing was I had not a clue in hell that the hardwoods would be fire-resistant." The 1987 fires definitely advanced ecological science, concurred ecologist Mike Amaranthus, who was then the soil scientist for the Siskiyou National Forest. The two ecologists had examined the immediate impact of the Longwood fire. "It was a paradigm buster," observed Amaranthus, 51, who has a doctorate in soil biology. "Until then, we didn't know that hardwoods could actually slow down a fire," said Amaranthus, who studied the impact of the fires on local forests. "The managed areas with the monocultures we were trying to produce had a type of canopy that really spread fire rapidly. The plantations went up like Roman candles." Amaranthus later left government service to launch Grants Pass-based Mycorrhizal Applications Inc., a firm focusing on mycorrhizae, which interact with fungi in the soil to dramatically increase a plant's ability to take in food and water. "This showed that Smokey the Bear wasn't the best thing for forests," he said of fire suppression over the decades. "There was so much fuel on the ground that it had created really explosive conditions. "It also busted the paradigm that vast acreages of even-age conifer reproduction was a good thing," he said. "They are so susceptible to an intense fire. And our area is going to get fire." The Longwood fire burned some 9,300 acres of private and national forestland, including everything from tree plantations to old-growth stands. The national forest portion, which is now part of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, also included OSU experimental plots. "The Silver opened my eyes to things I wasn't aware of before," Perry said. "It helped us turn a corner conceptually. I went away and started writing about it." Perry, 68, now professor emeritus of forest ecology at OSU where he taught for 20 years and currently teaches an online course on the ecology of sustainable resource management, recently revisited the area burned by the Longwood fire. Joining him was Dominick DellaSala, 50, a forest ecologist who is executive director of the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy in Ashland. When the Silver fire complex began, DellaSala was designing a fire management plan for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department for the Bear Valley bald eagle refuge near Keno in Klamath County. For them, the area burned by the Longwood fire, a microcosm of the larger 1987 fire complex, is an open book. "You can see where the fire left some of the big trees," DellaSala observed of a national forest parcel just south of Takilma. "And the big trees it killed are now habitat for all kinds of wildlife. Eventually those trees will fall to the ground. That's tomorrow's soil." He observed that knob cone pine, which depends on fire to release seeds from its dense cones, was now thriving. "The snag forest provided the shade for a lot of those conifers to come back in," he said of young pine, fir and cedar. "This looks like it was a healthy burn in terms of the ecology." Perry agreed. "The shade of the standing dead and standing live is important on these kinds of sites to get regeneration back," Perry said. "And the burn was hot enough to stimulate these shrubs coming back." Studies have shown that shrubs support soil organisms that conifers depend on, he explained. For instance, he noted that madrone stimulates nitrogen fixation in the root zone of a fir. "That's very important because a lot of nitrogen gets volatilized in these fires," he said. "So anything that comes back that will pump more nitrogen into the system becomes very important in the ecological recovery. For reasons we don't yet understand, a madrone will stimulate that happening in the root zone of a Douglas fir." Perry later pointed out snow brush growing under an old-growth fir tree whose thick bark had been blackened at the base by the fire. "That's a nitrogen fixer," he explained. "Its seeds will stay buried in the soil for hundreds of years. They are triggered to germinate by heat. When a fire comes through, the snow brush will pop up and start pumping nitrogen back in." DellaSala acknowledged that many foresters may look at the site and see hardwoods and other shrubs as competition for the conifers. "They would want to wipe out this hardwood-shrub understory," he said. "But if you look at it through a different lens in terms of the forensics science of ecosystems that come back from fire, it is all related, all interconnected. "There is a symbiosis going on between the hardwoods and the conifers," he added. "There is stuff going on below ground that contributed to this site coming back to become a forest." While the two scientists agreed on most of what they saw, they quibbled over some of the finer points. For instance, while Perry believes the severity of the fire depends on whether the stands are mixed or uniform, DellaSala feels that terrain and climate often have more to do with five behavior than vegetation. "In the case where you have such complex terrain, when you combine that with drought and high winds we were experiencing on the (2002) Biscuit fire, those become the driving factors in fire behavior in those situations," he said. Both agreed wildfires ultimately benefit the landscape. "It is what is making them, in part, as rich as they are on the global scale," DellaSala said. "That's a hard message to get across to folks because you have to look ahead of what these systems are going to look like 10 or 20 years from now." Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected]. By Paul Fattig MailTribune.com By Paul Fattig Posted Aug. 30, 2007 @ 12:01 am » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. calendar Connect with MailTribune.com Facebook Twitter RSS Back to top Reader Services Reader Services Home Subscriptions Subscriber controls Contact us Submissions Photos Events Letters to the editor Corrections Announcements Obituaries Story ideas Since you asked Alerts Email Alerts RSS Feeds Text Alerts Advertise Media Kit Home Products and services Ad rates Advertising contacts Mail Tribune Daily Tidings The Nickel Shop Our Valley Blogs Stay Informed Email newsletter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Your privacy is important, read our privacy policy. © Copyright 2014 Local Media Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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