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John Hollenhorst ReportingThe Colorado River is famous for its reddish brown silt. That's where the name comes from: "Color Red" - "Colorado". But this year the river in the Grand Canyon is frequently running black, consequences of a huge fire that's ignited fierce controversy.
People enjoying the Grand Canyon this summer have noticed day-to-day changes in the river. Every time it rains on the Kaibab Plateau high above, there's a change in the color scheme.
Cameraman: "Woke up this morning and the river's kind of blackish, pretty dark."
Steve Rich, SLC: "It's an environmental disaster."
Salt Lake resident Steve Rich's family owns ranching and tourist businesses on the Kaibab. He's furious about a government-managed fire in June. Photos taken in the area give a sense of why it's now producing flash floods filled with ash.
Steve Rich, Salt Lake City: "What we've seen is big floods, five feet deep, 200 feet across, flowing all over the area surrounding the burn."
It started with a lightning strike. Government officials still defend their decisions to "manage" the fire. That's another way of saying they let it burn for its benefits after too many years of suppressing too many fires.
Cathie Schmidlin, U.S. Forest Service: "Fire has a very important role in these ecosystems. Our current conditions here are so out of balance, so many trees, that we are trying to restore forest health."
But the fire went out of control and ultimately burned close to 100 square miles of forest, a third of it severely.
Steve Rich: "They shouldn't be playing with fire during very severe fire conditions."
Rich says thousands of people in the region are signing petitions, calling on Congress to investigate and change policy.
Steve Rich: "It's just so severe that it goes off the scale."
But forest officials say they've tried to do their managed fires outside of fire season and it doesn't work. They just can't get fires big enough to do much good. Forest Service officials acknowledge the fire severely burned some areas they had not planned to burn, but they point out they successfully managed two other natural fires in the area this summer.
