Wildfires are intensifying. Here’s why, and what can be done.
Wildfire experts see the signature of climate change in the dryness, high heat and longer fire season that have made these fires more extreme. “We wouldn’t be seeing this giant ramp up in fire activity as fast as it is happening without climate change,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA. “There’s just no way.”
These conditions have been exacerbated by fire-suppression policies. Before the modern settlement of the American West, forested land in the region burned naturally from lightning or else was intentionally burned by native communities as a form of forest maintenance. But for the past hundred years, most Western states have suppressed fires. That has led to increasingly dense forests and ample brush on the forest floors.
“We’re primed for fire,” Ms. Quinn-Davidson said.
Why does California have so any wildfires? There are four key ingredients to the disastrous wildfire seasons in the West, and climate change is a key culprit.
“In pretty much every single way, a perfect recipe for fire is just kind of written in California,” Dr. Williams said. “Nature creates the perfect conditions for fire, as long as people are there to start the fires. But then climate change, in a few different ways, seems to also load the dice toward more fire in the future.”
Fighting wildfires in western WA requires different approaches
Although the 2020 fires were a new and devastating experience for modern society, such fires are very much business as usual when viewed over longer history.
For millennia, massive and severe fires have periodically burned millions of acres in the western Cascades. Unlike the east side of the state, where fire suppression and fuel buildup have contributed to uncharacteristically large and severe fires in dry forests, such fires are entirely characteristic for the west side.
Lack of federal firefighters hurts California wildfire response
Forest Service firefighters in the Golden State say all kinds of jobs are sitting open, from hand crew members to bulldozer operators, and that crews assigned to major fires are struggling to assemble teams.
We must burn the West to save it
To live in the American West today is to live with wildfires. And to suppress those fires is only to delay, and worsen, the inevitable.
A number of unique factors in recent seasons combined with long-term trends and created the devastating blazes. But a major reason for the massive scale of the destruction is that natural fires and burning practices first developed by Indigenous people have been suppressed for generations.
Residents of Gates, Oregon, aim their ire at Pacific Power nearly a year after their town burned
Dan Benjamin, assistant chief for the Gates Fire Department, remembers going from one fire to another after 9 p.m. that night. He said he had just helped extinguish a power line fire at a fellow firefighter’s house when he noticed a new fire on Potato Hill. Then, he was called to help with the fires ignited by power lines at Gates School, where about a hundred members of the Beachie Creek firefighting team were stationed…Firefighters were forced to evacuate immediately, and the incident command station was relocated from Gates School to Salem.
What western society can learn from Indigenous communities
As the world increasingly recognizes the accomplishments of many Indigenous communities that successfully coexist with ecosystems, there is much for Western society to learn.
As Western Wildfires Worsen, FEMA Is Denying Most People Who Ask For Help
The techniques FEMA uses to weed out ineligible or fraudulent applicants can end up denying aid to disaster survivors whose cases may be legitimate but who can't provide the documents FEMA needs to verify a claim — people who in some cases just lost their entire home and belongings.
‘The people’s land.’ Will the feds close California forests to hunters, campers again?
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who now heads the environmental advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said he understands why forest managers don’t want the public to interfere with active firefighting efforts and to tamp down the risk of starting fires. But when the public is allowed in the woods, it serves as an important check to make sure the forests are being managed appropriately, Ingalsbee said.
As wildfires get worse, so are firefighter shortages. Climate change and low pay aren’t helping
Stephen Pyne, a former wildland firefighter who teaches courses on fire and fire history at Arizona State University, said the Forest Service has long struggled with staffing for what used to be a seasonal-only occupation. “They didn’t want to hire people full-time and they only wanted them when they needed them,” he said. These days, the U.S. wildfire season is nearly year-long. Pyne said it’s like the federal government is fighting 2021 fires with a 1951 staffing mindset. “It’s the gig economy,’ he said. “You’ve got people who are working for relatively low wages, seasonal, very little career advancement for many of them. That sounds like a lot of unhappy workers in today’s economy.”
White House to raise federal firefighter pay to $15 an hour. Biden focusing on increased threats from climate change as wildfires, heat waves beset parts of the U.S.
President Joe Biden is raising wages for federal firefighters to no less than $15 an hour, as the White House seeks to put a spotlight on the growing threats of wildfires and heat waves exacerbated by climate change.
Bay Area nonprofit touts greenbelts as proven protection from wildfire
Greenbelts are “an interesting idea” -- provided they’re properly stewarded, he added -- “another tool in the toolbox.” They are a very old tool. Panelist Tim Ingalsbee called in from Oregon’s Willamette Valley -- the traditional lands, he pointed out, of the Kalapuya tribe, which lived in that fire prone area “for 10,000 years” without a single fire engine or air tanker. “How did they do it?” asked Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “They didn’t attempt to fight fire. They worked with fire. They carefully and selectively and strategically burned around their village sites, creating greenbelts, if you will, with fire.”
Beyond the plume of smoke: There are choices in how and when we are exposed to smoke from fires.
There is growing recognition among fire scientists, air regulators, and policy makers that we need to return to controlled burning—Indigenous cultural and prescribed fires, which gives us more choice in the timing and quantity of smoke we are exposed to. Fire has always been part of California’s landscape, so we can either embrace the opportunity to use it on our own terms—as Indigenous cultural burns have done for millennia by working with nature—or continue to be subject to the fire nature will inevitably bring.
Newsom misled the public about wildfire prevention efforts ahead of worst fire season on record
An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities.
Colorado prison inmates fight wildfires while they’re serving time, but can’t get hired when they get out
For $12 a day, Colorado prison inmates trained to fight wildfires stand alongside the state’s seasonal fire crews, battling some of the state’s most devastating wildfires. It’s a job that is physically demanding and risky. And, until this year, it likely wouldn’t have led to a career fighting fires after they finished their sentence, thanks to stigma and discrimination against convicted felons.
‘Forever war’ with fire has California battling forests instead
It is a Sisyphean task. The state is home to some 33 million acres of woodland. An efficient crew, working with hand tools under ideal conditions, can get through a quarter of an acre a day, give or take.
Oregon’s comprehensive and contentious wildfire response bill left for the last week in session
Tim Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, says his organization isn’t opposed to thinning on a broader scale in areas with high fire risk. But he says the state needs to sequence its efforts and concentrate its investment around communities. His organization is supporting another provision in the bill, the creation and funding of the Oregon Conservation Corps, a workforce training program that would employ youth and young adults in fuel reduction projects directly around communities.
“If some back country patch of forest burns, OK, it’s going to recover,” he said. “If it’s a community, it’s a catastrophe. Where would a taxpayer prefer their money go to? This kind of work has got to become a way of life. If you’re living in a fire environment, you better have your home and yard prepared.”
KSWild podcast focused on living with wildfire
The podcast offers a hopeful glimpse into sustainable firefighting and management operations, shifting away from “a perpetual state of war against wildfire” by communities and emergency responders, according to Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters for United Safety, Ethics and Ecology.