Death toll of northern California's Mckinney Fire reaches 4
Firefighters, already in short supply due to labor shortages, are exhausted. And with these erratic fires burning so hot they create their own weather, the conditions often just aren't safe for crews to even try to slow down the flames. Retired firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee runs the Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. It's a group pushing for an overhaul in U.S. fire suppression and prevention policies.
Ingalsbee says mostly crews can just try to protect homes and lives in the fire's path - you're not going to stop these blazes. That's, again, the plan today on the McKinney Fire in Northern California, where firefighters are working to slow its eastward spread toward the town of Yreka.
Wildfires are setting off hundreds of unexploded bombs on WWI battlefields, endangering firefighters
The summer's unusually hot temperatures have led to several wildfires across Europe and, according to Vice World News, they are setting off unexploded World War 1 bombs in the process. It is estimated that, as of Thursday, there had been more than 500 detonations, according to local media. The unexploded ordnances, mostly underground, explode when they overheat due to the extreme rising of temperatures as a result of the fires. An incident on July 22 saw the heat from the raging fire set off an unexploded WWI-era bomb, launching shrapnel at nearby firefighters, per local media. Nobody was injured.
Op-Ed: Why forest managers need to team up with Indigenous fire practitioners
The forests of the Western United States are facing an unprecedented crisis, besieged by wildfires and climate change. There is a precedent for part of the solution, though: intentional burns such as those set by Indigenous peoples.
Two California fires in the Sierra Nevada have very different outcomes. Why?
Why was one fire so much more destructive? Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.
The case against commercial logging in wildfire-prone forests
The truth is that logging activities tend to increase, not decrease, extreme fires, by reducing the windbreak effect that denser forests have, for example, and by bringing in highly combustible invasive grasses that are spread by logging machinery.
USDA promises $1B in wildfire preparation grants
While much of the national debate about wildfire focuses on forest management and environmental protection, critics of the federal government's past approach say the conversation overlooks the greater impact of measures that protect homes in case of fire. Those measures include clearing combustibles from near homes and reducing vegetation up to 100 feet from homes — the idea that wildfire protection begins at the home and goes outward, rather than from wilderness areas toward communities (Greenwire, Jan. 8, 2019).
"This is exactly what needs to happen," said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology in Eugene, Ore.
While forest management shouldn't be overlooked, Ingalsbee said, preventing ignition of homes through defensible space should be a high priority for public policy. "We need to do both."
Forests in the American West need more “good fire.” Tribes can help
National conversations about fire policy often ignore the fact that millennia-old models of “best available science” and “on-the-ground-implementation” are right before our eyes: Long before U.S. bureaucrats embraced prescribed burns as a forest management tool, Indigenous stewards across the West tended woodlands by routinely removing excess vegetation, pruning trees, and setting “good fires.” This practice, known as cultural burning, should be a key part of fighting what scientists predict will be a mega-wildfire season for 2022—and beyond.
At Yosemite, a preservation plan that calls for chain saws
Central to the thinking of scientists looking for ways to protect forests is research showing that the “natural state” of America’s wild lands was for millenniums influenced by humankind.
Decades of research have shown that the wilderness appreciated by early European settlers, as well as 19th century naturalists like John Muir, was often a highly managed landscape. Core samples from beneath a pond in Yosemite, retrieved in the way that scientists might bore deep into a glacier, showed centuries of layers of pollen and ash. The findings suggested a long history of frequent fires in Yosemite and buttressed the oral histories of Native American tribes who have long seen fire as a tool.
Scientists explain the factors that caused the Oak Fire to explode so suddenly
Ironically, the growth of the Oak Fire began to slow on Monday as it started to run into fire scars from previous large fires, including the Ferguson Fire, which burned in the same region in 2018, Burke said. That slowdown is further proof that fire management, including the prescribed burns that were put out of practice for more than a century, are integral to preventing large wildfires from occurring -- especially as climate change conditions continue to warm the planet and create scenarios for devastating wildfires to wreak havoc on communities and nature, Dahl said.
The California carbon rush
The outlawing of cultural fire and landscape burning in the United States emerged through industrial forestry practices that originated in seventeenth-century Western Europe—particularly in France—where foresters viewed fire as having no ecological role and considered it a wild, unnatural threat to future timber yields. In the late nineteenth century, settler-colonizers brought this approach to the western United States where, unlike Western Europe, forests had evolved to burn. Through violent means, the U.S. Forest Service imposed the idea that forest fires are the unnatural result of moral and ecological degradation.
Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), told me that we need to end the “war on fire [and] focus on helping communities coexist with fire.”
A new proposal to ensure fire protection for all
“If they’d stayed at home, they would’ve likely perished,” said Dan Efseaff, the Paradise Recreation and Park District manager. Sparked by electrical transmission lines, the Camp Fire was the deadliest, most destructive fire in California history. The blaze killed at least 85 people and destroyed 18,000 structures. And it showed how the usual suggestions for home hardening, such as clearing vegetation or removing propane tanks near homes, are not always enough on their own — especially since not everyone can afford to do them. Efseaff and other Paradise government leaders realized that when a fire is that dangerous, individual actions aren’t enough to protect homes and people from future fires. Efseaff is now working on a project that he hopes can protect entire neighborhoods, not just individual properties: a combination firebreak and trail system that would encircle Paradise.
These maps show severe fires are morphing California forests into something we won’t recognize
Megafires with high burn severity are a reflection of a landscape changed over centuries by exploding populations and suppression-oriented fire management policies and practices — one in which flame-friendly shrubs grow where trees once stood, making the environment even more vulnerable to fires.
New documentary looks at alternative approaches to wildfires
What if we learned to co-exist with wildfires rather than constantly fighting them? Portland filmmaker Trip Jennings’s new documentary “Elemental” includes the voices of climate experts, Indigenous people and fire survivors, and asks us to reimagine our relationship with wildfire. We hear from Jennings about what he hopes audiences will take away from his film.
Can we coexist with big wildfires? A new documentary, ‘Elemental,’ suggests we can
The premise is that by more heavily managing the forests, we can create better outcomes. It’s an approach consistently promoted by timber industry lobbyists and representatives or rural communities who stand to benefit economically.
But researchers featured in ‘Elemental’ suggest it’s a ludicrous strategy. The scale of the problem is simply too large. The vegetation grows back in short order. The chance of a wildfire actually encountering an area that has been treated is less than 1%, one researcher found. And when one does, the treatments frequently have little to no effect on fire behavior.
Yosemite’s sequoias survive Washburn Fire—and might benefit from it
Many of the sequoias that have died were outside the most protected parts in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, where officials have used prescribed fire to thin out the surrounding forest , said Zeke Lunder, a wildfire consultant in Chico, California. “The sequoias that burned were in the national forest surrounded by thickets of cedar and other trees,” Mr. Lunder said.
Ancient sequoias safe for now as crews continue battling 3,500-acre Washburn fire in Yosemite
But sequoias have also evolved with wildfire and in fact rely on extreme heat to help release their seeds. Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at UC Merced who has been tracking the blaze, said she was “not worried” about the trees in Mariposa Grove. “They’ve been doing prescribed burns in that grove for over 50 years, and it’s early in the season yet,” Kolden said via email. “This fire should actually be pretty beneficial for them, and it is much better for them to burn in July — which is normally when most of the lightning ignitions are in Yosemite, so it’s the natural fire timing — rather than in September.”
Are chemicals the best way to fight forest fires?
U.S. officials are testing a new chemical mixture that is able to slow down the progress of wildfires. But critics say the Forest Service should be spending less on these mixtures known as fire retardants and more on firefighters.
Karuk leader Bill Tripp appointed to new federal wildfire commission
A Karuk leader who has been among those leading the charge to bring managed fires back to the landscape has been appointed to a new federal wildfire commission.
On Thursday, the Biden-Harris administration announced that Bill Tripp, the Karuk Tribe’s director of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy, was one of 18 experts appointed to the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, established by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The commission is expected to provide recommendations to the federal government on how to address catastrophic wildfires.
Tripp said it was “quite the honor to be selected.”
“I think that we are in a new time where people are ready to listen to the perspectives that come from Indigenous communities on this subject matter,” Tripp said.
All that’s needed is a spark’: why the US may be headed for a summer of mega-fire
Fire activity is expected to increase in several US states over the coming months, according to a newly released outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), with parts of the Pacific north-west, northern California, Texas, Hawaii and Alaska forecast to be among those hardest hit by fire conditions in the months ahead.
The severity of the emergency will depend on four key factors: drought, dried fuels, windy or warm weather, and of course, ignitions. But the climate crisis and human-caused warming has turned up the dial on risk-factors with more intense conditions and a greater frequency with which these conditions align.
More wilderness, more … wildfire?
As the West reckons with decades of suppression and mismanagement, some politicians are exploiting the politics of wildfire in peculiar ways.