The deadly dynamics of Colorado’s Marshall Fire
When it comes to meeting the challenge of escalating fire catastrophes amid overstocked forests, an ever-expanding urban interface, and worsening climate change, there are no easy answers. Because the underlying causes are complex and multifactorial, so must be the solutions: there simply is no silver bullet. Many folks would rather there be a singular villain—but the reality is that all of these factors are critically important to varying degrees. Making real progress toward mitigating this crisis means addressing each component head on: using more prescribed, beneficial fire to reduce hazardous fuel buildup and improve ecosystem resilience; reimagining how we design neighborhoods and retrofitting homes to make them more fire resistant; and, of course, zeroing out global greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to eventually halt climate change. None of this will be easy, but given that the alternative is an ever-increasing risk of catastrophic fires, we simply can’t afford not to act.
Yelling timber
FUSEE believes that doing better requires a complete reevaluation in how we view and treat wildfire in our society; the organization strives for a “paradigm shift” in society’s relationship with wildfires, manifesting in new firefighting strategies that focus on using controlled burns and working with wildfire as a natural occurrence.
“Nothing influences fire like fire,” Ingalsbee says. “We’re pitching that new kind of strategy for active ecological fire management — incorporating this concept of fire mosaics and prescribed fires.”
PG&E blamed for massive Northern California wildfire
PG&E equipment has been blamed for several of California’s largest and deadliest wildfires in recent years.
Last September, PG&E was charged with involuntary manslaughter and other crimes because its equipment sparked the Zogg Fire in September 2020 that killed four people and burned about 200 homes west of Redding. Investigators blamed a pine tree that fell onto a PG&E distribution line. The company could be heavily fined if convicted.
In California, Tribal members and more protected from liability for cultural, controlled burns
Hankins said that, while cultural burning achieves the same goal as controlled burning, it also goes way beyond risk mangement and back to a core Indigenous principle: connection to the land.
“What it really comes down to, in my mind, is this idea of cultural competency,” he said. “ If you're a practitioner, like a weaver or a hunter, and you're using fire to help you with those particular things, that's very unique.You're setting fire and you're coming back into that spot continually to collect plant materials, or to hunt or to provide that habitat so that you can hunt in a different area and the animals have that place that you burned for their wellbeing.”
With prescribed burns, he said, you walk away.
This isn’t the California I married. The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?
I asked Zeke Lunder, the best wildfire analyst that I knew, who should be worried. He rejected the whole premise of the question. Worried? Ha. We’ve passed that stage. We exist in a world of knowing that not everywhere nor everyone will be spared. “We need to accept that there’s going to be a fire,” he said. “It’s going to burn the whole town down. When that happens, let’s have identified a pot of money to buy these 5,000 lots that are in the worst places and we know are never going to be safe. So, let’s buy them and rebuild in a footprint that’s defensible.”
I asked if he knew of any towns doing that. He said no.
‘It felt like the apocalypse’: Colorado wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes.
Wildfires in the American West have been worsening — growing larger, spreading faster and reaching into mountainous elevations that were once too wet and cool to have supported fierce fires. What was once a seasonal phenomenon has become a year-round menace, with fires burning later into the fall and into the winter.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.
Rekindling with fire
Wearing deerskin leather gloves dampened with drops of diesel and gasoline, I tilted my drip-torch down toward the earth and ignited the dry blackberry bush below. With a flick of my wrist, I made a C-shaped movement and the fuel followed my gesture, lighting the vines and leaves quickly. Aside from the faint crackle of the fire, it was silent where I stood on a hilltop at Andrew Reasoner Wildlife Preserve near Eugene, Oregon. I paused to look at my surroundings. Hundred-year-old Oregon white oaks, draped in old man’s beard — a lichen called Usnea — reached toward the crisp blue sky. Yarrow leaves poked through the bunches of invasive crabgrass, and sword and bracken ferns dotted the landscape. The hairy yellow leaves of a hazel plant next to me indicated the changing seasons.
The U.S. government is wasting billions on wildfire policy that doesn’t work
More than 6.5 million acres in the U.S. have been affected by fire so far this year. The Dixie Fire, at nearly 1 million acres burned, was the second-largest fire in California’s history. Faced with such catastrophic wildfires, it seems only natural for fire services to respond with every resource available. But according to many of the country’s most respected fire experts, there is little evidence that most of these fire suppression campaigns are effective. These critics say that the current practice of trying to suppress every big wildfire is foolhardy, especially given the huge, climate-driven fires more and more common in the West. Some blame this policy on what they call the fire-industrial complex: a collection of the major governmental fire agencies and hundreds of private contractors, who are motivated by a mixture of institutional inertia, profiteering, and desperation.
Wildfires are erasing Western forests. Climate change is making it permanent.
Now that the winter has cooled the 2021 fire season, scientists are looking at the big burn scars across the West with the grim understanding that, in some places, the pine and Douglas fir forests will not return.
The devastation of the Gatlinburg wildfires offered hope, in a way, for scientists
National park personnel have been intentionally burning sections of the park since the 1990s, for conservation purposes and to thin out debris. But for a prescribed fire to work as intended it needs to mimic the effects of a natural fire.
"I thought it was interesting that the prescribed fires done in earlier years by the park staff had similar effects to wildfire," Franklin wrote in an email to Knox News. She explained that it was difficult to mimic the effects of more intense wildfire with safe, controlled fires set during the wet season. The 2016 fire revealed that it is possible to get some of the effects of a wildfire without a fire going wild.
Using the old burns to help lessen the new burns
When you hear that a fire burned 100,000 acres, the degree of burning can vary wildly inside that perimeter. In fact, some patches may not have burned at all.
This is the "mosaic" of fire, where burned land is not burned evenly. The firefighter group FUSEE--Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology--advocates making use of the fire mosaic to lessen the intensity of future fires in the same area.
We explore the concepts with FUSEE Executive Director Timothy Ingalsbee and Mike Beasley, retired Fire Management Officer for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service.
Timber, Interrupted
Anti-logging environmentalists protest Freres Lumber Company's executive's presentation at Knight Law Center, the day after activists announce an occupation to stop post-wildfire logging.
Hotter Summer Days Mean More Sierra Nevada Wildfires, Study Finds
Wildfires are increasing in size and intensity in the Western United States, and wildfire seasons are growing longer. California in particular has suffered in recent years, including last summer, when the Sierra Nevada experienced several large fires. One, the Dixie Fire, burned nearly a million acres and was the largest single fire in the state’s history.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires.
Environmental groups, scientists raise concerns over Monsanto’s Phos-Chek
Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist, told EHN that aerial retardant is used wastefully, and that resources should instead be directed towards preventative strategies like prescribed burns, ecological fire management, and getting more firefighters.
U.S. firefighters on climate frontline face 'broken' health system
From 2017 to 2020, 2,500 work-related injuries or illnesses were reported on average each year by the roughly 10,000-strong U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighting force – the nation's biggest wildland force, a database provided to the Thomson Reuters Foundation showed.
"Our occupation is very risky, with high consequences ... We have to make sure we're taking care of people," said Kelly Martin, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a group lobbying for better workplace protections.
Too often, that is not the case, she said.
What it’s like to fight a megafire
In 2017, Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of the organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in which he argued that firefighters know that large fires will defy suppression until weather conditions change or fuels run out. Steve Pyne, a historian and a former wildland firefighter, asked me, “Why are firefighters there at all? That’s the fundamental question.” Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the “fire paradox.” Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.
Wildfire, drought provisions in infrastructure bill bring new funding to old ideas on Western Slope
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, told Energy & Environment News that other portions of the infrastructure bill reflect a legacy of misguided wildland firefighting tactics, citing a provision in the bill which calls for $500 million in creating fuel breaks, areas near communities in the wildland interface which have been cleared of vegetation to contain a fire. “But fuel breaks have proven ineffective in wildlands, because embers can travel so far on the wind,” Ingalsbee told E&E News, citing the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire in Oregon that jumped the Columbia River.
California burning: A special edition on wildfires — Debate rages amid smoke and flames: How do we stay safe?
Our ‘California Burning’ series originally ran in Fall 2020. It was recently awarded First Place by the National Newspaper Association for Investigative Reporting. We are reprinting the series in the next several weeks, because issues covered in this reporting still pose threats to our Mountain Communities. We also have many new residents who have settled here in the past year who may benefit from understanding these urgent issues.
Opinion: Don’t clearcut in fire-adapted, mature forests
Additionally, according to Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and senior wildland fire ecologist certified by the Association for Fire Ecology, “Studies show that forests that have been degraded by past commercial logging, livestock grazing, or fire suppression typically burn more severely than native forests that have not been subjected to these past land abuses and are more resilient to fire.”