Forest Service fell short of executing plan to protect town from fire, probe finds
The Forest Service originally said it would finish the Trestle Project by 2020. However, that timeline fell apart. Our investigation found the agency finished only 14% of the planned work before the Caldor Fire, which burned through the unfinished project and then devastated Grizzly Flats. Forest Service officials cite a number of reasons for the stalled effort - staffing shortages, pushback from environmental groups, too many days when prescribed burns would be dangerous due to hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, and maybe the biggest hurdle of all...
RANDY MOORE: We did not have the funding to do the level of work that needed to be done out there.
Colorado forest lovers brace as feds rev up multi-billion-dollar “wildfire crisis” logging across West
The government faces opposition from forest lovers and environmental advocates who contend logging contractors operating with minimal oversight often mow down trees — rather than thinning — converting forests to grasslands, which the opponents argue could actually accelerate wind-driven fire. They accuse federal authorities of short-circuiting legally required environmental impact reviews. They favor “fire-wise” home safety as a smarter way to shave wildfire risks.
How to prevent deadly wildfires? Stop fighting fires.
Climate change is widely blamed for the record wildfires of recent decades, and no doubt it is a factor. But for more than a century, we’ve pursued the idea that the only good fire is an extinguished fire, and along the way our wilderness has filled with flammable fuels. Fires get bigger, and move faster, when there is more to burn.
Enlightened managers of the Forest Service and other agencies are coming around to a new approach, but they have a steep hill to climb in public opinion. Perhaps it’s time to update Smokey Bear: Only you can prevent firefighter deaths.
Wildfire smoke is erasing progress on clean air
One solution, experts say, is to reduce the potential for wildfires to grow into long-lasting and destructive infernos. In recent years, California has recognized that decades of fire suppression have led to a build-up of fuel in forests where smaller, contained fires actually contribute to the health of the forest. The state has been increasing prescribed fires and other forest management techniques to help reduce the risk of out-of-control megafires.
The new research indicates that the health risk is rising as the hot and dry conditions for wildfires continue to worsen with climate change.
Scientists: Warming climate ‘loads the dice’ for wildfire in west Cascades
For millennia, wildfires have burned forests on the west side. Tree ring records in the North Cascades show evidence of “enormous” fire events from 300 to 500 years ago, Donato said, where hundreds of thousands of acres burned at once. Fire resets forest growth, making room for more diverse organisms to flourish.
“Right now, a lot of our west-side forests are fairly homogeneous,” Donato said, “due to a legacy of how we’ve managed many forests in the past and how we continue managing forests.”
The rarest habitat condition found in forests in the Cascades is called “preforest,” the condition immediately following a fire where there is an abundance of snags, downed wood, ferns and grasses. Preforest is also one of the most biodiverse habitats found in the region.
The prescribed burn paradox: Climate change makes them harder to contain, and more necessary
So far, the Forest Service has only announced new restrictions on the practice. Now, prescribed burns will have to begin within 24-hours of being authorized, and senior administrators will need to be present for complex burns.
“Which means that they’re less likely to happen,” said Michael Wara, with Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator. “We need to have much greater levels of resources to safely conduct these burns.”
Forest Service resumes prescribed fire program, but some fear new rules will delay projects
The Forest Service says its prescribed fire program has a 99.84% success rate. Of the 0.16% of burns that do escape control, even fewer cause damage, said Quinn-Davidson, who is also the director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.
“Why are we spending so much time focused on the things that go wrong when almost 100% of the time it goes right?” she said.
California’s heat wave fueling destructive fires. The worst is yet to come, officials fear
Wildfire activity has also been intensified by the compounding effects of climate change, which have made fires larger, more disastrous and burn for longer periods of time, according to UC Merced fire scientist Crystal Kolden, a former firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.
Whereas a heat wave of this length and magnitude would typically occur in July in previous years, Kolden said it’s significant that the current one hit between late August and September.
‘Cheerleading for a broken system’: fire exclusion in the Klamath National Forest
The experience that people like me have had living here my whole life on the ground is just watching everything we love being destroyed by the effects of fire exclusion and fire suppression on our landscapes. What we see time and again with the Forest Service response to wildfires is just cheering on the firefighters. And in the moment, you know, the public agrees. I mean, we all agree. We want to save our towns from being burned down, and in that moment, we do need to suppress fires. But what's disingenuous is not addressing the root cause which is the wildfire paradox – the more fires we put out, the more at-risk our communities are.
How to save a forest by burning It
Prescribed burns are key to reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Scientists are using high-tech tools to ensure they can be done safely in a warming world.
California fires killing people before they can escape their homes, making seconds count
“What we’ve seen almost over the last 10 years now is a huge change in the ways fires have been burning throughout California,” said Jon Heggie, a battalion chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “They burn with such increased speed and velocity and intensity that it gives residents very little time sometimes to escape fires, just because the fuels are so receptive and burn so much hotter and so much faster.”
As forests go up in smoke, so will California’s climate plan
California will need to cull some smaller trees to create less dense forests, according to the state climate plan. This process, called forest thinning, is expected to initially result in some carbon losses. But, with more spacing and less competition, it hopes to produce larger, more resilient trees, which will sequester more carbon over time.
But California’s climate plans will mostly hinge on whether forestry managers can increase prescribed burning to ensure there’s less dry, dead plant material that essentially acts as fuel during wildfires.
The age of consequence: Wildfires in New Mexico
In future retellings of New Mexico’s 2022 wildfire season, many will distill the story to this moment, the instant that the Forest Service lost control of the Hermit’s Peak Fire, which would later combine with yet another escaped prescribed fire to become the largest in state history.
But while the Forest Service lit the proverbial match on Hermit’s Peak, the fire’s true origins trace back to thousands of missteps over the centuries. From overgrazing and logging in the late 1800s to fire suppression in the decades since and inaction on climate change today, America’s institutions have contributed to the deterioration of forests across the West.
California’s giant sequoias are burning up. Will logging save them?
The question of how to protect the remaining sequoias, and more broadly how to manage America’s remaining forests in an era of climate-magnified megafires, has divided scientists and the public. The two wildfires that burned in and around Yosemite National Park this summer — including among the famous Mariposa Grove of sequoias — rekindled the debate about what humans can or should do to protect these iconic trees.
Aggressive attacks on fires money well spent
The aggressive initial attack and continued flow of resources that saved those homes reflects back to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s commitment to do whatever it takes to extinguish all wildfires in the state this summer, whether they’re on state or federal forestland, tribal reservations or wilderness areas.
“In Montana, we do not, and will not, have a ‘let it burn’ policy,” the Republican governor told land managers at a fire briefing in early May.
Of course, such aggressive attacks don’t come cheap.
The average annual cost for fire suppression in the state was about $23.3 million over the last decade. The Elmo and Redhorn fires alone have eaten away half of that amount in just two quick weeks.
A year after wildfire disaster, life returns to California forests
One year after a wind-whipped wildfire charged across a craggy mountainside above Lone Pine, California, flashes of new growth are emerging in this still-charred corner of the Inyo National Forest, a hiking, camping, and fishing playground about 350 miles southeast of San Francisco.
Tiny clusters of white and purple wildflowers stand out against denuded pines, many stripped of bark in the fire. Green shoots of horsetail as thin as yarn strands break from the ground below a tree’s barren branches. A fistful of new leaves emerges like a fresh bouquet from within an incinerated stump. It’s the start of a long recovery, and a cycle that’s being repeated more often across the West as climate change brings drier, hotter seasons and more wildland fires.
Announcing a new Program in Wildland Fire at Lane Community College!
A new Wildland Fire Management Certificate program at Lane Community College is for wildland fire practitioners and those who seek to understand the ecological role of wildland fire, indigenous use of fire, and the issues facing fire managers today.
Including the required “red card” training and a whole lot more. Lane Community College (LCC) in Eugene, Oregon, is currently accepting applications for the upcoming Fall Semester to participate in the rollout of their new Wildland Fire Management Certificate. Some courses have a field component, and every effort will be made to get students experience on-site to view and participate in nearby prescribed burns this fall in the Willamette Valley. Registration for classes closes September 15th.
Starting this September, introductory courses in fire science and management will be offered in a unique, first-of-its-kind certificate program in ecological fire management. Courses are designed to prepare the next generation of fire practitioners with the skills and knowledge needed for fire-related jobs enhancing community safety, resource sustainability, and land stewardship. Certificates can be earned in three academic terms, but current "red carded" firefighters can earn their certificates in just two terms. Community members not interested in earning a certificate can enroll in individual courses that interest them. Classes will provide valuable information for anyone who is interested in or affected by wildland fire including those who work in the woods, aspiring and current wildland firefighters, forest conservationists, members of prescribed burn associations, prescribed fire councils, Fire Safe & watershed councils, environmental educators, small woodlot owners, and rural residents. Be among the first in our region to enter LCC's new "trailblazing" program in wildland fire!
Learn to monitor fire weather and fire behavior.
To complete the certificate program, students will take National Wildland Fire Coordinating Group (NWCG) courses required to qualify for an agency “red card,” unless they already have one. That basic instruction is followed up with help in applying for wildland fire jobs at the Federal, State and local level. Students will explore traditional cultural burning practices alongside the writing of fire historians like Stephen Pyne. They will learn the language of wildland fire behavior. Those in the program will also learn how to plan and implement a prescribed fire and how to characterize and measure forest fuels. Working with fire, rather than always fighting and excluding fire, students in the certificate program will also get coursework in Forest Ecology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). And, most importantly, they will go to the field to watch fire practitioners from other agencies conduct burns and participate directly in those burns if they already possess a current red card. Sign up for classes now! Spaces are filling fast.
Learn to measure live and dead fuel attributes.
The Forest Service is overstating its wildfire prevention progress to Congress despite decades of warnings not to
NBC News found that throughout the country, the Forest Service has counted many of the same pieces of land toward its risk-reduction goals from two to six times, and, in a few cases, dozens of times. The agency has reported that it reduced “hazardous fuel” on roughly 40 million acres of land in the past 15 years, but that figure may be overstated by an estimated 21% nationally, according to the analysis of public Forest Service records. In California, it is overstated by approximately 30%.
The inflated figures provided to Congress deprive those making funding decisions of knowing the true scope of the challenge, experts say.
Billions in Feds’ spending on megafire risks Seen as misdirected
Congress is spending billions to save communities from Western megafires by thinning large swaths of forests even as scientists say climate change-driven drought and heat are too extreme for it to work.
The money would be better spent thinning woods closest to homes and shoring up houses against embers raining down from firestorms, according to academics, former agency officials, and others who study wildfires.
In red California, a deadly fire ignites political rage at liberal government
Research has shown that government fire suppression policies, along with the displacement of Indigenous people who performed cultural burning, have contributed to denser vegetation in the Klamath bioregion. But experts also say commercial logging can lead to the replacement of larger, fire-resistant trees with stands of abnormally dense and young trees that are more susceptible to carrying fire.
“There’s plenty of evidence to say that if you just did logging and thinning you could actually make the problem worse,” said Jeffrey Kane, a professor of fire ecology and fuels management at Cal Poly Humboldt. “Because it’s not just a matter of removing trees, it’s a matter of reducing fuels, and in many cases when you thin forest you don’t always remove the fuels.”