The bill is climbing to fight California wildfires. How much are they costing taxpayers?
The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire, has projected an all-time high of $1.3 billion for the last fiscal year. California approved $373 million for its emergency fund, but the budget ended up being about $900 million short, according to a budget post from the State Legislative Analyst’s Office.
We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?
Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter, directs the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, & Ecology and believes, like Stahl, that state and federal fire agencies should be more restrained and targeted in their use of retardant.
"The price of just one air tanker load of retardant can fund so many more workers [on the ground]," he told EHN. "They're much more flexible and nimble and versatile than that air tanker, which has one single function."
Why Everything We Know About Wildfires May Be Wrong
Ponder the title “fire rangers.” That’s what Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, wants to substitute, universally, for the word that happens to be the first one in his organization’s name—a title he now considers overly militaristic. “It’s a very different mission, different identity now,” he says.
Raging debate over burned trees could leave residents vulnerable to disastrous fires
Removing burned trees after a wildfire has been standard practice for the U.S. Forest Service for the past century, but an NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals an increasing number of scientists now blame post-fire logging for leaving communities even more vulnerable to hotter, faster fires
These maps show where prescribed burns helped curb the Caldor Fire’s rapid growth
The Caldor Fire defied expectations, climbing up mountains and crossing highways, destroying more than 1,000 structures in the process. South Lake Tahoe narrowly avoided the fire’s wrath, which fire experts say was largely thanks to fire prevention activities, including prescribed burns. The following maps show how prescribed burns and other methods of removing vegetation to reduce the risk of hotter, larger fires — known as “fuel treatments” — slowed or curbed Caldor’s growth.
What likely saved the General Sherman Tree from the KNP Complex Fire
It seemed like a miracle of sorts, but Mark Garrett, a fire information officer for the National Park Service, said there's an explanation for why these trees survived — and that's prescribed burns. More than 400 acres around the General Sherman Tree underwent a prescribed burn as recently as 2019, Garrett said. Prescribed burns, in which fires are set intentionally and monitored closely, can maintain the health of a forest and prevent overgrowth of vegetation that can intensify fires.
Anatomy of a wildfire: How the Dixie Fire becamethe largest blaze of a devastating summer
The fire’s tear through remote, rugged terrain, exceptional drought bringing moisture levels in California’s forests to historic lows, searing heat, as well as a series of unexpected obstacles, combined to fuel a monstrous blaze unlike any firefighters said they had seen before.
CalFire, timber industry must face an inconvenient truth
The latest science finds that conventional logging practices, together with a century of overzealous fire suppression, are eroding forest health and increasing the severity of wildfires. While news to some, the U.S. Forest Service has recognized this inconvenient truth for over a quarter century. Logging is also diminishing forests’ ability to help fight climate change and so-called “thinning” projects can result in more carbon emissions than the wildfires they are meant to prevent.
Remote cameras capture life returning to Oregon forests after wildfire
Bloemers said he hopes people will see the beauty in his post-wildfire photography and start enjoying burned forests in new ways.
“I hope they will see it not as a destroyed thing but a young thing full of potential,” Bloemers said. “It’s like a charcoal forest. It’s black and gray and brown in the beginning, but it’s basically a blank canvas that nature will start to paint green, and the wildlife will come back.”
Interview: Pyrogeographer Crystal Kolden on fighting California's modern megafires
Crystal Kolden is a professor of fire science at UC Merced and what's known as a pyrogeographer, studying not just how fires function as a natural process, but how we humans interact with it as well. She is also trained as a wildland firefighter.
"I often say, let's be honest, I was not a very good firefighter," Kolden said. "I am not athletically inclined at all. And that is incredibly difficult work. But what I really got interested in was trying to understand what I was seeing on the landscape and why we were fighting fires in some of the most remote places in the U.S. that I knew had adapted to fire, that had evolved with fire."
Firebrands: How to protect your home from wildfires’ windblown flaming debris
Firebrands can travel over a mile by the wind and can be a major cause of spreading fires. In the Tahoe region, for example, firefighters couldn’t just focus on the main fire line in summer 2021 – they also had to patrol for spot fires.
‘Moneyball’ analytics help fight wildfires. This year’s blazes are testing their limits.
Forest conflagrations are so extreme that the best new weapons crews have—computer models to predict how flames spread—sometimes can’t keep up.
Worsening California blazes prompt new calls for innovations to fight fires smarter
“The technology for monitoring, mapping, and modeling wildfires is like a technological renaissance,” he added. “What we have as a problem is under-utilization of all this investment in technology for fire management.”
“We still are in this kind of war-on-wildfires paradigm, still seeing fire as an enemy to attack, extinguish or eliminate,” he said. “And this technology really has the ability to shift our paradigm, so we see fire more as I dare say ally, or at least a tool, for managing ecosystems in ways that really better protect communities and also sustain the ecosystem services that we all rely on.”
The Labor Day fires burned towns and homes. Oregon has a plan to avoid a repeat.
Clearing that fuel is part of a new program called the Wildfire Workforce Corps that provides young people with paid job training and experience as well as college tuition credit.
The program has $11 million in funding through Oregon’s new wildfire protection plan to work in the “home ignition zone” in areas like the South Hills of Eugene, where forests and other wildlands meet houses. Collectively, these areas are called the wildland urban interface, or WUI, and they’re known to face higher fire risks.
EXPLAINER: What are some key decisions in fighting fires?
WHY DO FIRE MANAGERS LET SOME WILDFIRES BURN?
Sometimes fires fit a beneficial land management goal, like when they burn in a wilderness area or national park.
Fires are part of the natural forest cycle, and “at times that’s the right approach,” said Lane, who is in his 35th season as a firefighter, much of that spent in western Oregon. He joined Washington’s natural resources agency in 2019.
Also, wildfires sometimes burn in areas where it is unsafe to put firefighters.
Fighting fire with fire. As climate change continues making wildfires worse, how do we learn to live with fire?
The Forest Service also has been slow to embrace another kind of good fire that experts say the West desperately needs: managed wildfires, in which fires are allowed to burn in a controlled manner to reduce overgrowth. To protect the future of the land and people – especially with climate change making forests drier and hotter – the Forest Service needs to embrace the idea of good fire.
The racist removal of Native Americans in California is often missing from wildfire discussions, experts say
Climate change is a driving factor of California wildfires, but so is a build-up of excess fuels. That’s often attributed to a century of fire suppression dating back to the era of the Great Fire of 1910.
But what experts say is often missing from this conversation is the racist removal of Native American people from California. Along with their physical beings, the knowledge of taking care of the land was also removed resulting in overgrown forests, experts say.
Wildfires in the West are inevitable, but this strategy can help control them
Fuels treatments aren’t a panacea. Super hot fires or wind-driven spread can overwhelm even a treated area. But treatments—either mechanical thinning or prescribed fire, or ideally a combination—can help drop flame lengths and the “fireline intensity,” measures of how intensely a fire burns. In turn, that can help slow the pace of fire spread.
As California burns, anger and pointed questions for caretaker of its vast forests
Oftentimes, keeping fire crews away from a new fire is “the right call from the standpoint of firefighter safety,” said Ingalsbee, head of an Oregon-based group called Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology. What’s more, trying to put out every fire at once can be unrealistic, he said. “Sending crews to attack all fires in all places ... spreads the resources thin,” Ingalsbee said.