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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
When President Bush visited rural Oregon to tout his Healthy Forest Initiative, huge fires suddenly broke out -- and a lot of people in the small town of Sisters think he dropped the match.
Sep 8, 2003 | The helicopters were indeed black, and when they came thwocking through the clear blue skies above Redmond, Ore., on the afternoon of Aug. 19, Don Berry happened to be having a slow day selling campers and fifth wheels at Courtesy RV. "We just stood there in the lot, my friend Chuck and me, watching," he says before launching into a bit of detail that government sources will not confirm. "They were Chinook military helicopters -- huge things with round noses. There were three of them, and they were moving in tight formation, lollygagging over the woods, zigzagging near [the town of] Sisters and out toward Black Butte," some 25 miles to the northwest.
The copters were in Central Oregon, officials from the U.S. Forest Service would later note, to do reconnaissance in advance of an Aug. 21 visit to the dry, wooded region by President George W. Bush. "They were doing routine surveillance," according to Ron Pugh, a Forest Service special agent. The president planned to speak in Camp Sherman, a little town near Black Butte, and to call, controversially, for the "thinning" of 20 million acres of fire-prone public forests.
Don Berry is detached from the fray over Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative, but as the choppers flew near Sisters that day, he gazed skyward for much of their 90-minute flight. "They came right over the top of us," he remembers, "and we watched them land, and then I looked up at the mountains, where they'd flown."
"Chuck," Berry said at that point, "I hope what I'm seeing out there is a cloud."
It was not a cloud. That afternoon, Forest Service lookouts detected high columns of smoke rising from what would soon be called the Bear Butte and Booth fires. The fires were initially about 14 miles apart. They were first noted within two hours of one another -- at 1:30 p.m. and 3:23 p.m., respectively -- and they quickly became sprawling infernos. Still burning, they have now merged and have eaten across nearly 90,000 acres of remote forest dominated by lodgepole pine and Douglas fir.
The "B & B" fires were first noticed 11 days after Central Oregon's most recent lightning storm, and they are now doing battle with 2,200 soot-smeared firefighters, most of whom are camping out on the rodeo grounds near Sisters. The fires have cost taxpayers over $20 million in firefighting fees; forced hundreds of homeowners to temporarily evacuate; closed roads; and thrashed Central Oregon's tourist economy. As yet, though, no one knows how the fires started; no one can say whether the helicopters had anything to do with the flames.
Which means that speculation is spreading like, well, wildfire. On the virtuous, leftmost edge of Oregon's political universe, out where the arugula is organic and the coffee shade-grown, a theory is taking root. Bush's cronies set the fires, supposedly, so as to create the perfect backdrop for the president's speech. It's obvious. Just look at the photo ops he got out of the fires -- at the way many Oregon TV stations appointed their stories on Bush's visit with blazing footage from the B & B fires. When Bush addressed 600 invitation-only Republicans at a resort called Sunriver on Aug. 21 (he was smoked out of Camp Sherman), he didn't even need to allude to the B & B Complex. His pyro henchmen had already ensured that that the videotape did all the talking. The trees gotta go, the pictures were saying, or every forest will burn just like this one.
The W-plays-with-matches theory emerges at a pivotal moment. Bush is now trying to rally support for a congressional bill that would give his year-old Healthy Forest Initiative some teeth. House Bill 1904 -- passed by the House and soon to get a Senate hearing -- would suspend environmental and judicial review of most fire-prone timber sales and would enable loggers to harvest some old growth trees that are not now federally protected. Environmentalists worry that the bill's passage would give the president a ticket to make good on his stated hope of doubling logging in Western forests. They say they're loath to let him market his plan by setting a couple of fires. As is common among liberals and leftists, there is much fuel for their anger -- the 2000 Florida election, the erosion of civil liberties, the Iraq war. Here, environmental issues are especially important. They already hate Bush for weakening the Endangered Species Act and for derailing what they saw as a hopeful trend. Under Clinton, the Forest Service was getting greener. Now the agency is taking direction from a former timber lobbyist -- Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture.
Portland's daily newspaper, the Oregonian, and Oregon Public Broadcasting have given serious coverage to the argument that Bush allies may have set the fire. But larger environmental groups such as the Oregon Natural Resources Council have shied away from it, perhaps for fear of appearing paranoid, and so the conspiracy theory may never get a full hearing outside of a few funky cafes.
