Bootleg, Biscuit, Rosland and Milli: lessons from past and current fires
“Because Central Oregon is a fire-adapted forest, we have kind of been one of the forests at the forefront of reintroducing fire into the system,” said Jean Nelson-Dean, the public affairs officer for Deschutes National Forest. Each prescribed burn takes years of planning. Other forest officials send crews from around the country to train with crews from Deschutes.
How years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today
Unintentionally, by focusing on short-term risks of wildfires, the U.S. is predisposing forests to burn under the very worst conditions. Active fire suppression contributes to what is often referred to as the wildland fire paradox – the more we prevent fires in the short term, the worse wildfires become when they return.
It looked like an atomic bomb’: Surveying the Bootleg Fire’s devastation
Earlier this summer, punishing heat waves gripped the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, temperatures reached as high as 116 degrees, and a majority of the state has been primed to burn while undergoing severe drought. The past few weeks have felt especially chaotic, as climate change has helped make extreme weather and extreme disaster commonplace in the region.
White House forms working groups to target heat, wildfires
The White House has also established the Wildfire Resilience Interagency Working Group, which will coordinate strategies for battling wildfires, including investments in forest thinning and prescribed fire. It will be co-chaired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
Fighting fire with fire
An ancient art perfected by Indigenous people and verified by scientific data, the practice could be used more in the struggle against ever-intensifying wildfires amid climate change. So what is standing in the way?
Meet the people burning California to save it
California is reckoning with a terrifying new normal, and it’s fueling a movement to radically rethink how we deal with fire.
The climate change link to more and bigger wildfires
Something else to keep in mind is that fire is normal. Lots of forests need fire - before Europeans got here there was lots of natural fire in North America, and Native people also set fires to manage the landscapes they lived on. It helps open up the land, it can rejuvenate growth, some species of animals thrive after burns.
Trapped in flames
“We really need to shift the paradigm toward proactive ecological fire management that is a high-wage, high-skill, high-status career available to all people,” Ingalsbee said. “That’s the better future.”
The Bootleg Fire grew fast. Did forest management play a role?
Past commercial logging and livestock grazing has encouraged wildfires, according to Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. Ingalsbee, who is an advocate of prescribed burning, notes that when the fire entered the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness, an area with more potential fuel but fewer small trees and flammable grasses, it appears to have burned more slowly.
The rapid spread of the Bootleg Fire also poses a risk to firefighters. “These fires are just hop-scotching across the landscape, leap-frogging across fire lines and all other traditional places you might try to contain a fire,” Ingalsbee says.
Amid summer of fire and floods, a moment of truth for climate action
“What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes and other deadly events?” United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa told a gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. “Numbers and statistics are invaluable, but what the world requires now, more than anything else, is climate action.”
Underpaid firefighters, overstretched budgets: The U.S. isn’t prepared for fires fueled by climate change
Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.
“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”
‘Fire is medicine’: How Indigenous practices could help curb wildfires
Lake and the Cultural Fire Management Council are trying to revive the intrinsic knowledge that long guided Indigenous life in a natural fire zone.
“It’s important to recognize there was a fire system in place that was culturally influenced,” Lake said, referring to the Indigenous fire management he has researched and participated in for the last several decades. “We have to question the narrative of history that has demonized fire, coming from a colonial perspective,” he added.
Technology has growing role in corralling US West wildfires
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, also said firefighters need to adopt a new approach when confronting the most dangerous wind-driven wildfires that leapfrog containment lines by showering flaming embers a mile or more ahead of the main inferno.
It's better to build more fire-resistant homes and devote scarce resources to protecting threatened communities while letting the fires burn around them, he said.
"We have these amazing tools that allow us to map fire spread in real time and model it better than weather predictions," Ingalsbee said. "Using that technology, we can start being more strategic and working with fire to keep people safe, keep homes safe, but let fire do the work it needs to do — which is recycle all the dead stuff into soil."
Climate change or forest management? ‘Everyone is right’ Wildfires. OSU prof: 'The bill for those decisions has come due'
“As a society we’ve made every wrong choice. When it comes to dry forests in the American West, we made a choice to log most of the old fire resistant trees. We made a choice to exclude fire from forests that need fire to thrive,” he told KOIN 6 News. “We made a choice to warm the atmosphere by several degrees, and we made a choice not to thin stands and re-introduced fire under the right conditions. The bill for those decisions has come due.”
‘A recipe for catastrophic fire’: how an Oregon blaze became the nation’s largest
Beyond the heat and dryness, experts say decades of forest-management policies are partly to blame for the Bootleg Fire and many other large blazes. Under aggressive fire-suppression policies, every fire, no matter how small, is extinguished. But fire ecologists say it is better to allow some smaller fires to simply burn, or to conduct controlled burns, to consume the underbrush that ends up feeding much larger blazes.
Experts: more logging won't stop Oregon's wildfires
Dr. Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for Wild Heritage and an evacuee of last year's wildfire in Talent, Oregon, said increasingly the term "wildfires" is a misnomer, because they become urban fires that destroy unprepared communities.
"Every dollar spent in the backcountry logging forests is a dollar that is not being spent assisting communities in hardening their homes for our new climate/fire reality," DellaSala asserted.
Extreme fire behavior has erupted in the West. Here’s what that means.
It’s likely that more extreme fire behavior is in the offing over the next several months. While the environment, characterized by excessive heat and a pronounced lack of humidity, is a tinder box, winds are a major factor in fueling fire expansion. They usually ramp up during the autumn. Offshore wind events are also effective at drying the landscape even more, particularly on the western slope of hillsides and within mountain valleys.
As climate change continues to foster more extreme heat events and a drying of the West, it’s probable that bouts of extreme fire behavior will continue.
Indigenous-led prescribed burns could help reduce wildfire risks, experts say
Pacific Gas & Electric equipment may have been involved in the start of the big Dixie Fire burning in the Sierra Nevada, the nation's largest utility reported to California regulators.
PG&E equipment has repeatedly been linked to major wildfires, including a 2018 fire that ravaged the town of Paradise and killed 85 people.
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.