Firefighters across Canada focusing more on mental health as wildfire seasons worsen
Fighting wildfires has always been a physically demanding job, but attention is increasingly being paid in Canada to its psychological toll.
Wildland firefighters and professionals who work with them say the job has become mentally tougher as fires have become larger and more complex, increasingly getting close to or reaching areas where people live.
"I hear it over and over again that these are unprecedented conditions, and yet every every other week there's new unprecedented conditions," said Steve Lemon, an incident commander with BC Wildfire Service.
The emerging science of tracing smoke back to wildfires
Smoke traveling long distances is “the new normal,” he said. This reality challenges the ways governments have historically dealt with air quality, through regulations like the Clean Air Act. Now that pollution is increasingly crossing borders, Dr. Lin said, the way that people manage air quality should evolve accordingly.
Biden’s Forest Service is dragging its feet on protecting ancient trees from logging
Critics say it is time for the White House to make demands of the Forest Service instead of letting the agency advance pro-logging policies.
Billions are being spent to turn the tide on the US West’s wildfires. It won’t be enough
With climate change making the situation increasingly dire, mixed early results from the administration’s initiative underscore the challenge of reversing decades of lax forest management and aggressive fire suppression that allowed many woodlands to become tinderboxes. The ambitious effort comes amid pushback from lawmakers dissatisfied with progress to date and criticism from some environmentalists for cutting too many trees.
“What’s driving all of this is insect infestation, drought stress, and all of that is related to the climate,” said Wild Heritage chief scientist Dominick DellaSalla. “I don’t think you can get out of it by thinning.”
These bleating firefighters have an insatiable appetite for wildfire fuel — weeds
Goats are just about the best when it comes to clearing large swaths of weeds on steep terrain, said Michael Choi, co-owner of the Mariposa-based herding company Fire Grazers Inc. Sheep are pickier eaters, he said, “and if you tried to put a cow in this canyon, it might start rolling down the hill. Goats are natural mountaineers.”
‘First of its kind’ fund established to provide liability insurance for prescribed, cultural burning
The National Park Service says that prescribed burns are conducted regularly throughout the state to eliminate hazardous fuel loads near developed areas, manage landscapes, restore natural woodlands, and for research purposes. But what happens if a controlled fire becomes uncontrollable?
This question has been answered in the form of the “Prescribed Fire Liability Claims Fund Pilot.”
Wildfires were once slowed by night and winter. Not anymore.
We live on a flammable planet. The public and government agencies need to move from an emergency and reactive mind-set about wildfire to a proactive, planning mind-set that emphasizes resilience. Data and partnerships can help: We can use satellites to give us early warning of wildfires the way we do with dangerous storms. We can use social media to better understand and manage evacuation chokepoints. We can use housing data to identify highly flammable neighborhoods.
‘The fire equivalent of an ice age’: Humanity enters a new era of fire
Sooner, rather than later, it may all start to feel normal. There will be a smoke season, just like there is now an allergy season, Pyne said. Fires will become a part of the rhythm of our everyday lives.
Prescribed burns, dramatically cutting carbon emissions — all of that will help soften the changes to come. But there is no getting around the fact that most of humanity is now plunged into an extra fiery age. “We have created a Pyrocene,” Pyne wrote. “Now we have to live in it.”
Will wildfires like these become the new normal?
In places that become hot and dry, wildfires can become more prevalent or intense.
The unifying fact is that more heat is the new normal.
The most efficient way to keep temperatures from rising further is to reduce the combustion of fossil fuels. They are the drivers of heat and its hazards.
Canada’s ability to prevent forest fires lags behind the need
“We need to do more to get ahead of the problem,” said Mike Flannigan, who studies wildfires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, a community in the heart of that province’s wildfire country. “And progress on that has been slow, primarily because we are kind of stuck in this paradigm that fire suppression is the solution.”
Forest managers using lightning-caused wildfire near Flagstaff for ecological benefit
The Volunteer Fire was initially reported as just a single acre two weeks ago within the scar of the 2021 Rafael Fire. But following the burn-out operations, it’s grown much larger though managers intend to keep it within a broader 3,580-acre footprint. In the coming days they plan to ignite another 1,800 acres, which will likely produce smoke that’ll impact Flagstaff. It’s among several prescribed and managed wildfires currently taking place in the region.
Three national forests in Colorado receive nearly $47 million for wildfire barriers
North of Pagosa Springs in Archuleta County, the 2021 fuel break project cleared shrubs and small trees across about 100 acres in a narrow, 25-foot-wide strip along Fourmile Road. During wildfires, similar undergrowth can act like a ladder and carry flames higher into tree canopies, which helps the fire spread.
Clearing it away from roads, rivers and other landscape features helps slow down wildfires, reinforces existing barriers and enlarges the buffer zone. Wildland crews use these fuel breaks as safe spaces to work while battling fires or assisting with prescribed burns.
A ‘Canadian armageddon’ sets parts of western Canada on fire
In a country revered for placid landscapes and predictability, weeks of out-of-control wildfires raging across western Canada have ushered in a potent sense of fear, threatening a region that is the epicenter of the country’s oil and gas sector.
Climate research suggests that heat and drought associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires.
Almost 40% of land burned by western wildfires can be traced to carbon emissions
Almost 40% of forest area burned by wildfire in the western United States and southwestern Canada in the last 40 years can be attributed to carbon emissions associated with the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, according to new research that seeks to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their role in climate change.
Controlled burns help prevent wildfires, experts say. But regulations have made it nearly impossible to do these burns.
Even though the 2021 Marshall Fire made it clear that the fire threat posed by Colorado’s grasslands endangers large urban areas, federal, state and local rules continue to make it difficult to address the risk.
Fire retardant kills fish. Is it worth the risk?
Retardant contains ammonium phosphate, which is highly toxic to fish and other aquatic life. In the years following the accident, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (FSEEE), a Eugene, Oregon-based nonprofit that represents former and current Forest Service employees, has called for policy changes regarding the use of retardant. The group has won two lawsuits against the Forest Service restricting its use and is now suing the agency over employing it in and around streams and creeks. The suit has reignited debates over retardant’s firefighting efficacy, and the outcome could change how it is used in the future.
This tribe was barred from cultural burning for decades — then a fire hit their community
Cultural burning — the practice of using controlled fires to tend the landscape — was once widespread among many Indigenous groups, but ended with the arrival of European settlers.
The practice is central to tribal culture, said Coats, who recalled how when he was a child, basket makers would gather basket making materials, hunters would gather hunting tools and medicine people would gather medicine. Burning was performed to help all of those tradespeople collect the best supplies possible, he said.
“We didn’t call it cultural burning,” he said. “We just called it taking care of the land.”
Prescribed fire training in Central Oregon aims to make communities safer, forests more resilient to wildfires
Forty firefighting professionals from the U.S. and Canada gathered recently in the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon to gain hands-on experience with prescribed fires.
Such fires help reduce fuel load, improve forest health and protect communities from wildfires which have grown more intense due to climate change and 100 years of suppressing fires.
Since its launch 15 years ago by the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of the Interior and The Nature Conservancy, the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange Program, or TREX, has taken place in more than a dozen states and has grown to include the involvement of Tribal nations, state and local governments, private landowners and other partners.
Arguments get heated in fire retardant case
The Forest Service in court documents argue the only way to prevent retardant from being dropped or spilled into the waterways is to stop the use of it altogether – an action the service and other stakeholders say would not be in the best interest of the public.
No formal charges yet in October arrest of Forest Service burn boss in Grant County
Six months after a U.S. Forest Service employee was arrested on suspicion of reckless burning while supervising a prescribed burn in Grant County, no formal charges have been filed in the case.
In the days that followed, the case drew national and even international media attention. It was believed to be the first time a Forest Service firefighter had ever been arrested while doing their job. The arrest was widely condemned by federal officials and members of the wildland firefighting community.