Remote cameras capture life returning to Oregon forests after wildfire
Bloemers said he hopes people will see the beauty in his post-wildfire photography and start enjoying burned forests in new ways.
“I hope they will see it not as a destroyed thing but a young thing full of potential,” Bloemers said. “It’s like a charcoal forest. It’s black and gray and brown in the beginning, but it’s basically a blank canvas that nature will start to paint green, and the wildlife will come back.”
Interview: Pyrogeographer Crystal Kolden on fighting California's modern megafires
Crystal Kolden is a professor of fire science at UC Merced and what's known as a pyrogeographer, studying not just how fires function as a natural process, but how we humans interact with it as well. She is also trained as a wildland firefighter.
"I often say, let's be honest, I was not a very good firefighter," Kolden said. "I am not athletically inclined at all. And that is incredibly difficult work. But what I really got interested in was trying to understand what I was seeing on the landscape and why we were fighting fires in some of the most remote places in the U.S. that I knew had adapted to fire, that had evolved with fire."
Firebrands: How to protect your home from wildfires’ windblown flaming debris
Firebrands can travel over a mile by the wind and can be a major cause of spreading fires. In the Tahoe region, for example, firefighters couldn’t just focus on the main fire line in summer 2021 – they also had to patrol for spot fires.
‘Moneyball’ analytics help fight wildfires. This year’s blazes are testing their limits.
Forest conflagrations are so extreme that the best new weapons crews have—computer models to predict how flames spread—sometimes can’t keep up.
The Labor Day fires burned towns and homes. Oregon has a plan to avoid a repeat.
Clearing that fuel is part of a new program called the Wildfire Workforce Corps that provides young people with paid job training and experience as well as college tuition credit.
The program has $11 million in funding through Oregon’s new wildfire protection plan to work in the “home ignition zone” in areas like the South Hills of Eugene, where forests and other wildlands meet houses. Collectively, these areas are called the wildland urban interface, or WUI, and they’re known to face higher fire risks.
EXPLAINER: What are some key decisions in fighting fires?
WHY DO FIRE MANAGERS LET SOME WILDFIRES BURN?
Sometimes fires fit a beneficial land management goal, like when they burn in a wilderness area or national park.
Fires are part of the natural forest cycle, and “at times that’s the right approach,” said Lane, who is in his 35th season as a firefighter, much of that spent in western Oregon. He joined Washington’s natural resources agency in 2019.
Also, wildfires sometimes burn in areas where it is unsafe to put firefighters.
Wildfires in the West are inevitable, but this strategy can help control them
Fuels treatments aren’t a panacea. Super hot fires or wind-driven spread can overwhelm even a treated area. But treatments—either mechanical thinning or prescribed fire, or ideally a combination—can help drop flame lengths and the “fireline intensity,” measures of how intensely a fire burns. In turn, that can help slow the pace of fire spread.
Why the South is decades ahead of the West in wildfire prevention
As Western states contend with increasingly catastrophic wildfires, some are looking to the Southeastern U.S., where prescribed fire is widespread thanks to policies put in place decades ago. From 1998 to 2018, 70% of all controlled burning in the country was in the Southeast.
To save Lake Tahoe, they spared no expense. The fire came over the ridge anyway.
They sent thousands of firefighters, 25 helicopters and an arsenal of more than 400 fire engines and 70 water trucks. Yet the fire still advanced.
They dropped retardant chemicals through an ash-filled sky and bulldozed trees and brush to slow the march of the flames through the steep and rugged terrain of the Sierra Nevada. Yet the fire still advanced.
The difference between direct and indirect fire line
In the wrong situation, namely fast moving and intense fires, direct attack can be both dangerous and futile. Sending firefighters out day after day to employ the wrong tactics can expose them to undo risk and waste precious time if at the end of the day no real progress has been made. Deciding when to shift from direct attack to indirect attack is one of the more critical decisions firefighters must make.
Wildfire, drought and chainsaws: California’s iconic trees are casualties in the war on fire
California’s forests are in trouble. Wildfire and drought have ravaged millions of trees. Scientists say, perhaps surprisingly, the answer is more frequent fire.
Humans are largely to blame. Researchers say climate change underpins the devastation, while a century of aggressive logging and fire suppression has left timberlands choked with younger, thirsty trees primed by drought for destructive conflagrations.
The health of these exalted landscapes has for the last century taken a backseat to human interests and militarized firefighting forces. But a tipping point has been reached. Fires have become overwhelmingly explosive.
Why top California fire expert is so worried about Caldor Fire as it approaches Tahoe
The thing that’s surprising this year is the spot fires. Almost 90% of embers that are dropping on unburned fuel have the potential to start a new fire this year because it’s so dry after two years of drought. That’s very extreme and just really enables these fires to move ahead of the fire lines.
Attacking fires by air often does no good, expert says
More than three-quarters of air attacks on wildfires are ineffective, according to internal data from the fire command in the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia, whose head researcher is calling for major changes in how the warming world battles its blazes.
The science of how wildfires got so hellish
Two factors have collided to turn “good” fires into “bad” ones: climate change and, ironically enough, a history of fire suppression. Climate change means that vegetation is drier and primed to burn catastrophically. Extinguishing burns, especially those that threaten lives and structures, means that mountains of that fuel have built up.
Wildfires are ravaging forests set aside to soak up greenhouse gases
“The worst fire season in Western U.S. history is going on,” said Danny Cullenward, the policy director of CarbonPlan. “That story is just crashing headfirst into some of the big bets that policymakers and private companies have made about the role of forest carbon as a climate solution. What we are seeing is, a bunch of projects are on fire.”
The burning debate: manage forest fires suppress them?
Fire suppression will not alter this unsettling dynamic. We paradoxically need more fire, not less — targeted, site-specific reintroductions designed to restore ecosystem health. This may seem counterintuitive, but as forest ranger and firefighter Allen Calbrick advised Pinchot in 1940, fire is “nature’s way of cleaning up her backyard” and providing “good clean ground on which to grow.”
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”
Documenting a wildfire when it’s in your backyard
I’ve photographed wildfires for The New York Times and other news outlets for 20 years. I covered the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa in 2017 and the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018. Seeing the aftermath of the Tubbs fire was the real eye-opener. It jumped six lanes of Highway 101, burning through strip malls and destroying the Coffey Park neighborhood. To me, it showed that nowhere in the West is truly safe from wildfire.
California can either make fire part of its cultural identity, or it can watch its heritage go up in smoke
In the early 1900s, this practice of cultural burning was criminalized when federal and state officials initiated an era of fire suppression. The stated goal was to save trees — to protect forests from the very process that had shaped and maintained them through time. Yet we know now those losses weren’t avoided; rather, by removing fire, the losses were stalled, accentuated. It’s clear that the fires that burn now are making up for generations of missed fire. The more we’ve rejected fire as the natural — and human — process that it is, the more volatile it has become.