Yellow jerseys of the fireline: A day fighting wildfires can require as much endurance as riding the Tour de France
Hotshot crews like this one are the elite workforce of the forest, and the demand on their bodies can rival that of the cyclists in the Tour de France, as my team’s research shows.
Firefighting helicopters collide over Southern California desert, killing 3 in crash
Two firefighting helicopters collided while responding to a blaze in Southern California, sending one to the ground in a crash that killed all three people on board.
The crash late Sunday afternoon in the desert about 85 miles (137 kilometers) east of Los Angeles involved a huge Sikorsky S-64E and a smaller Bell 407. The larger Sikorsky landed safely.
A giant Oregon wildfire shows the limits of carbon offsets in fighting climate change
The Bootleg Fire upended the Green Diamond carbon storage plans in Southern Oregon. In burning through nearly 20% of the company’s Klamath project lands, it also has helped to stoke a broader debate about the ability of multibillion-dollar forestry offset markets to deliver the carbon savings that are supposed to happen from these deals.
Earlier this year, Green Diamond filed documents with a California state regulatory board that calls for an offset project covering most of the company’s Southern Oregon acreage to be “terminated.”
Why California is having its best wildfire season in 25 years
Lunder, who has worked for the past 25 years developing fire mapping and fire behavior models, said that as the climate has warmed, some public officials and climate activists have given the incorrect message that every year is going to be catastrophic. But local weather conditions like wind, lightning, soil moisture and availability of firefighting resources are still key, he said.
“I don’t think you’ll find any firefighters who will say climate change isn’t changing the dynamics,” he said. “But it’s not predictable, and it’s not across the board.”
Canada is ravaged by fire. No one has paid more dearly than Indigenous people.
The country’s record-breaking fire season has led tens of thousands of Indigenous people to flee their homes and ravaged forests they rely on for sustenance.
A grim climate lesson from the Canadian wildfires
Nowadays, the goal of most forest management in North America is to manage fire rather than always rush to extinguish it, to focus suppression efforts around denser human settlement and elsewhere to find ways to allow some burning. In the 20th-century model, firefighters parachuted in to snuff out flames, ultimately contributing to a continental buildup of the dry forest, grassland and scrub that fire experts casually call fuel. Now, to reduce it, fire scientists and forest ecologists try to cultivate more of what they call good fire.
Legislation may finally let two tribes based in Oregon do traditional food gathering on their lands
In a tall, grassy field in West Eugene, a small group of Native Americans dig for a traditional food: camas bulbs. In the setting sunlight as traffic passes by in the distance, there are moments of discovery…and also of regret. “There they are,” said Joe Scott, examining a shovel load of dirt. Small bulbs protruded from a mass of reeds and roots.
Scott is a Siletz tribal member, who directs the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program for the Long Tom Watershed Council. He told KLCC that he enjoys educating people about Indigenous practices, including the gathering and preparation of camas, which is often baked in an earthen oven and pounded into cakes. And he said this particular patch is beautiful, and filled him with good feelings.
Firefighters are leaving the U.S. Forest Service for better pay and benefits
Thousands of federal wildland firefighters could walk off the job if Congress fails to pass a permanent pay increase, officials and advocates warned amid an already scorching summer that could lead to an explosion of wildfires later in the year.
Can mushrooms prevent megafires?
If you’ve gone walking in the woods out West lately, you might have encountered a pile of sticks. Or perhaps hundreds of them, heaped as high as your head and strewn about the forest like Viking funeral pyres awaiting a flame.
These slash piles are an increasingly common sight in the American West, as land managers work to thin out unnaturally dense sections of forests — the result of a commitment to fire suppression that has inadvertently increased the risk of devastating megafires.
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.