Experts frustrated by stalled efforts to counter megafires
"This is really a healthy-looking forest, to me,” said Beasley, looking over a spot where his crews intentionally burned 5,000 acres in 2002 as part of Yosemite National Park’s pioneering program to use prescribed fires under controlled conditions to ease the threat of extreme wildfire. The retired forest fire chief – a designated “burn boss” at the park for a decade-- looked up into a tree blackened at its base from the megafire seven years before. “This large tree is still alive, right here,” Beasley said. “It looks like a red fir -- it's still alive because all the fuels were cleared away in 2002 when we burned here.’’ Beasley said that’s because his crews removed a million tons of so-called surface and ladder fuels – a century’s buildup of small trees, dead needles twigs and branches – from the forest floor. Without the surface fuels, he says, the Rim fire still burned but did not shoot up and engulf entire trees.
Amid devastating US fires, experts urge fire prevention rethink.
Tim Ingalsbee, a former wildland USFS and NPS firefighter who now runs the FUSEE think-tank told Al Jazeera huge wildfires could be prevented if there were a more robust state and national prescribed burn strategy. “There wouldn’t be the big catastrophic fires that burned small towns, it would not be the disaster we’re seeing today,” he said.
Dylan Plummer (op-ed): Industrial forest management and the Holiday Farm Fire
While we all want an easy answer, there is no single cause for the recent mega-fires. We do know that the conditions were ripe to burn: high temperatures, low humidity, severe east winds and a surrounding landscape made up largely of cutover, flammable tree plantations. We also know that runaway climate change is going to exacerbate these types of cataclysmic events into the future.
Fanning the Flames
“It’s the legacy of forest mismanagement that is fueling the wildfires, along with climate change, which is the ultimate driver,” says Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE).
Fighting fire with fire
"More people means more pressure to suppress wildfires early and often to protect homes, and more barriers to the kind of regular prescribed burning that many parts of California needs," says Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
Paper maps, two-way radios: how firefighting tech is stuck in the past.
The scale of the fires and the rate at which they burn make them more dangerous than ever, said Ingalsbee, who has been working with wildfires since the 1980s. “The scale of activity and the incredible speed at which these fires are spreading is beyond what anyone alive today has ever experienced,” he said. “It is clear that this is climate change. The future is now.”