Inside the massive and costly fight to contain the Dixie Fire
Timothy Ingalsbee, who co-founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a group that pushes for stronger land management practices, has argued that over the long term many of the tactics employed by emergency crews hurt forest land, which benefits from periodic controlled fires.
“We’re fighting fires under the worst conditions rather than lighting fires under the best conditions,” Mr. Ingalsbee added. “There are 10,000 firefighters on the line in California, trying to keep people safe. What would those 10,000 be able to do to apply fire in the winter or spring to yield the best ecological effects — and a very different set of costs?”
Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions
Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community.
While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread.
The argument is fueling an already passionate debate.
It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling scientific studies and has fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology.
Are California’s wildfires really “disasters”—or just something natural?
“California forests are fire-adapted, which means they need fire to thrive,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California, Merced. “Precolonization, much of California’s forest would burn every five to 20 years.”
What we’re seeing now is the reintroduction of fire to forests that haven’t been allowed to burn for more than a century. These megablazes, Kolden says, are “doing the work that fire has done for millennia—taking out a lot of old dead material, thinning out the forest naturally and reinitiating that biogeochemical cycle that breaks down all the vegetation and returns those nutrients to the soil.”
‘A fire age is upon us’
Over the past decade, the U.S. fire community has developed a national cohesive strategy for wildland fire. It has three components: create fire-adapted communities, create fire-resilient landscapes, and develop a workforce capable of implementing these goals. To that triad, I would add: begin work to contain climate change. The national strategy is pretty much a master plan for living with fire. If we wait until we tackle climate change before we mitigate the risk of fire in towns and countrysides, we will suffer lots of losses, some irreversible. If we only focus on mitigation, climate change will eventually overwhelm our efforts. We need all of it all at once.
The Pyrocene is not just a metaphor: Whatever we decide to call it, a fire age is upon us. Our fire behavior made the problem and will have to unmake it.
Planning for uncertainty: U.S. Forest Service prepares for climate change impacts on public lands
Whitlock said changes are already underway, and they will likely continue through the middle of the century no matter what managers do. However, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the best strategy for slowing the changes down.
“If we’re able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can start to flatten the warming curve,” she said. “We just need to be prepared to live in a place where there is more fire and more smoke, and accept that our forests are undergoing change.”
As wildfires become more intense, we’re dumping more retardants. What’s the impact on wildlife?
As bigger, more intense fires push into the wildland-urban interface and fire crews battle to protect towns and agricultural areas, new questions are emerging about what happens when aerial wildfire retardants become a larger part of the chemical cocktail in wildfire smoke.
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.