Prescribed burns started a wildfire, but experts say they're a crucial tool
MATTHEW HURTEAU: A lot of the planning tools that fire managers rely upon for planning prescribed burns were built under a climate that no longer exists.
CHANG: Last year, the U.S. government spent a record $4.3 billion on fire suppression - something that has actually worsened wildfire conditions. Meanwhile, from 2009 to 2018, just over $500 million were spent per year on treatments to reduce wildfire fuel like prescribed burns. Experts like fire ecologist Timothy Ingalsbee argue the agency should rethink its priorities.
TIMOTHY INGALSBEE: If we were to shift those resources and that funding into prescribed burning, that would be a big help.
Youth crews help protect Oregon homes from wildfire thanks to training program
Nava, 22, is on a five-person team of young people working to clear fire hazards from around homes and buildings in Southern Oregon, through a new effort funded by the Legislature in 2021 as part of a sweeping $195 million package to boost Oregon’s wildfire preparedness. The Oregon Conservation Corps program allows young people to develop the skills to become wildland firefighters and land managers while helping vulnerable communities mitigate fire risks. The Higher Education Coordinating Commission, which distributes the funds, expects nearly 400 corps members ages 16 to 26 to work on crews overseen by tribes, schools and nonprofits around the state.
Forest Service fell short of executing plan to protect town from fire, probe finds
The Forest Service originally said it would finish the Trestle Project by 2020. However, that timeline fell apart. Our investigation found the agency finished only 14% of the planned work before the Caldor Fire, which burned through the unfinished project and then devastated Grizzly Flats. Forest Service officials cite a number of reasons for the stalled effort - staffing shortages, pushback from environmental groups, too many days when prescribed burns would be dangerous due to hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, and maybe the biggest hurdle of all...
RANDY MOORE: We did not have the funding to do the level of work that needed to be done out there.
Colorado forest lovers brace as feds rev up multi-billion-dollar “wildfire crisis” logging across West
The government faces opposition from forest lovers and environmental advocates who contend logging contractors operating with minimal oversight often mow down trees — rather than thinning — converting forests to grasslands, which the opponents argue could actually accelerate wind-driven fire. They accuse federal authorities of short-circuiting legally required environmental impact reviews. They favor “fire-wise” home safety as a smarter way to shave wildfire risks.
How to prevent deadly wildfires? Stop fighting fires.
Climate change is widely blamed for the record wildfires of recent decades, and no doubt it is a factor. But for more than a century, we’ve pursued the idea that the only good fire is an extinguished fire, and along the way our wilderness has filled with flammable fuels. Fires get bigger, and move faster, when there is more to burn.
Enlightened managers of the Forest Service and other agencies are coming around to a new approach, but they have a steep hill to climb in public opinion. Perhaps it’s time to update Smokey Bear: Only you can prevent firefighter deaths.
Wildfire smoke is erasing progress on clean air
One solution, experts say, is to reduce the potential for wildfires to grow into long-lasting and destructive infernos. In recent years, California has recognized that decades of fire suppression have led to a build-up of fuel in forests where smaller, contained fires actually contribute to the health of the forest. The state has been increasing prescribed fires and other forest management techniques to help reduce the risk of out-of-control megafires.
The new research indicates that the health risk is rising as the hot and dry conditions for wildfires continue to worsen with climate change.
Scientists: Warming climate ‘loads the dice’ for wildfire in west Cascades
For millennia, wildfires have burned forests on the west side. Tree ring records in the North Cascades show evidence of “enormous” fire events from 300 to 500 years ago, Donato said, where hundreds of thousands of acres burned at once. Fire resets forest growth, making room for more diverse organisms to flourish.
“Right now, a lot of our west-side forests are fairly homogeneous,” Donato said, “due to a legacy of how we’ve managed many forests in the past and how we continue managing forests.”
The rarest habitat condition found in forests in the Cascades is called “preforest,” the condition immediately following a fire where there is an abundance of snags, downed wood, ferns and grasses. Preforest is also one of the most biodiverse habitats found in the region.
The prescribed burn paradox: Climate change makes them harder to contain, and more necessary
So far, the Forest Service has only announced new restrictions on the practice. Now, prescribed burns will have to begin within 24-hours of being authorized, and senior administrators will need to be present for complex burns.
“Which means that they’re less likely to happen,” said Michael Wara, with Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator. “We need to have much greater levels of resources to safely conduct these burns.”
Forest Service resumes prescribed fire program, but some fear new rules will delay projects
The Forest Service says its prescribed fire program has a 99.84% success rate. Of the 0.16% of burns that do escape control, even fewer cause damage, said Quinn-Davidson, who is also the director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.
“Why are we spending so much time focused on the things that go wrong when almost 100% of the time it goes right?” she said.
California’s heat wave fueling destructive fires. The worst is yet to come, officials fear
Wildfire activity has also been intensified by the compounding effects of climate change, which have made fires larger, more disastrous and burn for longer periods of time, according to UC Merced fire scientist Crystal Kolden, a former firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.
Whereas a heat wave of this length and magnitude would typically occur in July in previous years, Kolden said it’s significant that the current one hit between late August and September.
‘Cheerleading for a broken system’: fire exclusion in the Klamath National Forest
The experience that people like me have had living here my whole life on the ground is just watching everything we love being destroyed by the effects of fire exclusion and fire suppression on our landscapes. What we see time and again with the Forest Service response to wildfires is just cheering on the firefighters. And in the moment, you know, the public agrees. I mean, we all agree. We want to save our towns from being burned down, and in that moment, we do need to suppress fires. But what's disingenuous is not addressing the root cause which is the wildfire paradox – the more fires we put out, the more at-risk our communities are.
N.M. debacle won’t deter Forest Service prescribed burns
Although the report encourages the use of prescribed fire, one advocate for the practice told E&E News on Friday that he worries the Forest Service may be adding layers of bureaucracy.
“It’s going to require a lot more paperwork,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, in Eugene, Ore.
The report’s emphasis on promoting fire as a tool was comforting, Ingalsbee said. But he added that one related practice that’s increased dramatically — “back fires” lit to influence the behavior of wildfires already in progress — received little attention.
Extinguishing fears
Elemental: Reimagining Our Relationship With Wildfire isn’t supposed to be grim, communicating that climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme wildfires and that it’s “game over,” Jennings says. The documentary features incredible shots of Oregon terrain burned in 2020 and explores how people in wildland-urban interface areas can co-exist with wildfires and how communities can withstand the most extreme climate change-caused mega disasters.
How to save a forest by burning It
Prescribed burns are key to reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Scientists are using high-tech tools to ensure they can be done safely in a warming world.
California fires killing people before they can escape their homes, making seconds count
“What we’ve seen almost over the last 10 years now is a huge change in the ways fires have been burning throughout California,” said Jon Heggie, a battalion chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “They burn with such increased speed and velocity and intensity that it gives residents very little time sometimes to escape fires, just because the fuels are so receptive and burn so much hotter and so much faster.”
The Forest Service's ban on controlled burns has come to a close
Rich Fairbanks spent most of his career fighting fires for the Forest Service. He says the whole issue of controlled burns gets political real quick.
RICH FAIRBANKS: You got to admit, it's a very risky thing to ask some senior land manager to light a fire in the winter when, if it gets away, it's on him, than to fight a wildfire where you're a hero no matter what happens.
SIEGLER: Still, foresters like Fairbanks are seeing a slow evolution within the Forest Service and the public - an acceptance that fire is a critical part of the ecosystem and it needs to be brought back if we're ever going to make some of these modern, extreme wildfires even just manageable again. In the Democrats' new infrastructure and inflation laws, tens of millions of dollars are going to preventative projects like tree thinning and controlled burning.
Humility and hope for the future: Lessons learned from the 2020 Labor Day firestorms
We now know absolutely that we cannot prevent wildfires, and firefighters cannot stop and put out all wildfires. Decades of Smokey Bear propaganda that conditioned people to wrongly fear all forest fires is now being amplified by the valid fear of climate change, and the specter that people are powerless in the face of climate-driven megafires. The despair and disempowerment known as “climate doomism” is expressing itself in a kind of wildfire doomism that wrongly believes there is nothing we can do to avoid catastrophe.
But we are not powerless.
As forests go up in smoke, so will California’s climate plan
California will need to cull some smaller trees to create less dense forests, according to the state climate plan. This process, called forest thinning, is expected to initially result in some carbon losses. But, with more spacing and less competition, it hopes to produce larger, more resilient trees, which will sequester more carbon over time.
But California’s climate plans will mostly hinge on whether forestry managers can increase prescribed burning to ensure there’s less dry, dead plant material that essentially acts as fuel during wildfires.
Why suppressing wildfires may be making the Western fire crisis worse
Everyone along this road signed up for the free treatments. Fairbanks also is encouraged by what he sees as a paradigm shift in state and federal agencies toward prioritizing work like this, and among Westerners who are starting to understand they have to learn to live with wildfires.
But some people still don't get it.
"Unfortunately, there are politicians who make hay out of saying, 'They should put out every single fire all the time forever,' which is just really dumb," Fairbanks says.
The age of consequence: Wildfires in New Mexico
In future retellings of New Mexico’s 2022 wildfire season, many will distill the story to this moment, the instant that the Forest Service lost control of the Hermit’s Peak Fire, which would later combine with yet another escaped prescribed fire to become the largest in state history.
But while the Forest Service lit the proverbial match on Hermit’s Peak, the fire’s true origins trace back to thousands of missteps over the centuries. From overgrazing and logging in the late 1800s to fire suppression in the decades since and inaction on climate change today, America’s institutions have contributed to the deterioration of forests across the West.