'The "Boxer Bill" will continue a "decades-long" pattern of "hands off"
forest management practices that continue to destroy the health of the forests
and create a potential "fire storm" disaster akin to the Arizona wildfires
that burned over 500,000 acres and destroyed over 500 homes.'

Rebuttal

The Arizona fires can serve as an example of a large fire, but they are a counter-example of any relation to land use designations.  The Rodeo and Chediski fires started on land belonging to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, then spread rapidly to the northeast.  When they crossed the Mogollon Rim they entered the Sitgreaves National Forest.  About one third of the final burned area was in the national forest.  None of the burned land is protected as a wilderness area.

At this time it may be difficult to find information on past fire management practices in the burned area.  Probably the best-studied comparable case was the 1987 fire that burned about one third of Yellowstone National Park.  A good short feature on fires in general and Yellowstone in particular aired on NPR on August 2, 2002, when William Romme, Professor of Forest Science at Colorado State University, appeared on Talk of the Nation.  He described three different types of fire ecology and identified our greatest risk in two of the three cases as the excessive fuel load built up in undegrowth and small trees due to excessive human intervention to suppress small fires.  In two of the three cases natural burns normally eliminate this problem, resulting in no fires that burn an entire forest.  In the third case the entire forest burns anyway, but very infrequently -- perhaps every 150 years or so.  He cited Yellowstone as a success in fire management, when a wildfire was allowed to burn freely at first despite the appearance of disaster at the time.  One indication is that the rate of biomass growth in Yellowstone's burned area is now as high as it had been before the fire, another is that it is returning to a natural ecological balance.

This is not an endorsement for blindly letting nature take its course, though in some circumstances that is the best thing to do.  One of the best emerging tools for managing fire risk is prescribed burns, but there's no single universal solution.  See the web references at the end of this page for some sources of additional infomation.

The first map below shows the extent of the fire on a map which identifies land use types.  Light green represents national forest or wilderness, in this case only national forests.You can see a full-size rendition of this map by clicking on it, but be prepared for a wait -- the full-sized image is almost 6 megabytes. The second map shows the progression of the fires from their start dates to the time of total containment.

Wildland fire management practices and wildfire ecology, a few web references:

Wildfire Central
USGS Wildland Fire Research
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service  Fire Management
Wildland Fire Research Group at the University of California Berkeley
Rocky Mountain Research Station  Wildland Fire Research
National Fire Plan
Yellowstone Wildland Fire Management Plan
Florida Division of Forestry prescribed-fire site  ("Fight Fire With Fire")
Science Daily article:  USGS Studies Wildfire Ecology In The Western United States
Wildfire History and Ecology on the Colorado Plateau
The Ecology of Fire (U.S. Forest Service)