Firefighting helicopters collide over Southern California desert, killing 3 in crash
Two firefighting helicopters collided while responding to a blaze in Southern California, sending one to the ground in a crash that killed all three people on board.
The crash late Sunday afternoon in the desert about 85 miles (137 kilometers) east of Los Angeles involved a huge Sikorsky S-64E and a smaller Bell 407. The larger Sikorsky landed safely.
A giant Oregon wildfire shows the limits of carbon offsets in fighting climate change
The Bootleg Fire upended the Green Diamond carbon storage plans in Southern Oregon. In burning through nearly 20% of the company’s Klamath project lands, it also has helped to stoke a broader debate about the ability of multibillion-dollar forestry offset markets to deliver the carbon savings that are supposed to happen from these deals.
Earlier this year, Green Diamond filed documents with a California state regulatory board that calls for an offset project covering most of the company’s Southern Oregon acreage to be “terminated.”
Why California is having its best wildfire season in 25 years
Lunder, who has worked for the past 25 years developing fire mapping and fire behavior models, said that as the climate has warmed, some public officials and climate activists have given the incorrect message that every year is going to be catastrophic. But local weather conditions like wind, lightning, soil moisture and availability of firefighting resources are still key, he said.
“I don’t think you’ll find any firefighters who will say climate change isn’t changing the dynamics,” he said. “But it’s not predictable, and it’s not across the board.”
Canada is ravaged by fire. No one has paid more dearly than Indigenous people.
The country’s record-breaking fire season has led tens of thousands of Indigenous people to flee their homes and ravaged forests they rely on for sustenance.
Our climate reality: Learn to live with wildfire
We need to shift the paradigm from fire prevention and suppression to fire preparation and restoration, while making a distinction between urban and wildland fires. Let’s do the simple things needed to keep fire out of our homes, and do the planning and preparation needed to safely put fire back into our forests and prairies.
A grim climate lesson from the Canadian wildfires
Nowadays, the goal of most forest management in North America is to manage fire rather than always rush to extinguish it, to focus suppression efforts around denser human settlement and elsewhere to find ways to allow some burning. In the 20th-century model, firefighters parachuted in to snuff out flames, ultimately contributing to a continental buildup of the dry forest, grassland and scrub that fire experts casually call fuel. Now, to reduce it, fire scientists and forest ecologists try to cultivate more of what they call good fire.
Legislation may finally let two tribes based in Oregon do traditional food gathering on their lands
In a tall, grassy field in West Eugene, a small group of Native Americans dig for a traditional food: camas bulbs. In the setting sunlight as traffic passes by in the distance, there are moments of discovery…and also of regret. “There they are,” said Joe Scott, examining a shovel load of dirt. Small bulbs protruded from a mass of reeds and roots.
Scott is a Siletz tribal member, who directs the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program for the Long Tom Watershed Council. He told KLCC that he enjoys educating people about Indigenous practices, including the gathering and preparation of camas, which is often baked in an earthen oven and pounded into cakes. And he said this particular patch is beautiful, and filled him with good feelings.
Good Fire Returns to Oregon’s Willamette Valley
These young burners hail from the brand new Willamette Valley Fire Collaboration. As an Indigenous crew, the module has self-dubbed as the “Wagon Burners,” taking back the power of the derogatory slur. Aside from their module leader, Sara Fraser, who came from Eugene-based Oregon Woods, the crew members are just starting their fire careers, eager to learn and excited to make a difference in the world of wildland fire management. From the moment they arrived back to Oregon from their prescribed fire projects on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State in mid-September of last year, they hit the ground running, ready to take on the remainder of a busy fall 2022 burning season.
Flat Fire in SW Oregon prompts questions about firefighting in Kalmiopsis Wilderness
Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, said running bulldozers in the Kalmiopsis would be enormously destructive to a very fragile area.
"The scars from that use would far outlast the effects of the fire, and it would just be a mistake, not just to the spirit and intent of wilderness, but a real, real damage to the land itself," he said.
He also pointed to the benefits of wildfire as helping rejuvenate landscapes and reduce fuels in the environment.
"Fire is a natural process. Wildfire kind of helps keep the 'wild' in wilderness. Many other wilderness areas we have, the fire's influences account for its beauty, its wildness, its naturalness," he said.
Boosting firefighter pay gains momentum in Congress
“Young people are just not that interested in just jumping on a treadmill of endless attack of fires; they want to be part of solutions, particularly in the climate crisis,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and co-founder of the group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
Firefighters are leaving the U.S. Forest Service for better pay and benefits
Thousands of federal wildland firefighters could walk off the job if Congress fails to pass a permanent pay increase, officials and advocates warned amid an already scorching summer that could lead to an explosion of wildfires later in the year.
College students work to change our relationship with fire
“There needs to be a continuous place for our generation in [responding to] a crisis that we’re most impacted by,” said Kyle Trefny, a student at the University of Oregon and seasonal wildland firefighter.
The young people reshaping wildfire policy
In 2022, Reed, Trefny and two other students — Bradley Massey, a junior at Alabama A&M University, and Alyssa Worsham, who recently completed her master’s at Western Colorado University — formed the FireGeneration Collaborative (FireGen, for short), a group that advocates for centering Indigenous knowledge and bringing more young people into the wildfire space.
Local firefighters tend to flames and mental health
Firefighters are often expected to work through anything without concern for their own well-being, according to wildland firefighter Courtney Kaltenbach, who is employed by a local contractor.
“Firefighting is an extremely patriarchal, masculine field, so it’s dominated by a culture of toxic masculinity, which is ‘don’t show any weakness,’ so already there’s a huge difficulty trying to change the culture around talking about mental health,” Kaltenbach said. “It’s especially difficult I think for people who aren’t men, mental health-wise, to exist in that world.”
Kaltenbach mentioned that in their experience, they have only just begun discussing mental health in their training process, but it is far from adequate.
Can mushrooms prevent megafires?
If you’ve gone walking in the woods out West lately, you might have encountered a pile of sticks. Or perhaps hundreds of them, heaped as high as your head and strewn about the forest like Viking funeral pyres awaiting a flame.
These slash piles are an increasingly common sight in the American West, as land managers work to thin out unnaturally dense sections of forests — the result of a commitment to fire suppression that has inadvertently increased the risk of devastating megafires.
Firefighters across Canada focusing more on mental health as wildfire seasons worsen
Fighting wildfires has always been a physically demanding job, but attention is increasingly being paid in Canada to its psychological toll.
Wildland firefighters and professionals who work with them say the job has become mentally tougher as fires have become larger and more complex, increasingly getting close to or reaching areas where people live.
"I hear it over and over again that these are unprecedented conditions, and yet every every other week there's new unprecedented conditions," said Steve Lemon, an incident commander with BC Wildfire Service.
Debate Over Wildfire Retardants Continues in CA
Some groups are pushing to stop the use of fire retardants dropped at wildfires, saying the impact on nature is worse than the fires they halt.
As California fire season begins, debate over wildfire retardant heats up
When it comes to preventative spraying along roadsides, Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, argued that resources would be better spent hardening homes and communities and conducting controlled burns, which are “more effective and actually less damaging than chemical warfare.”
Ingalsbee has long been critical of how fire authorities use air-dropped retardant in wilderness areas, saying the material is overused and frequently deployed in areas where its effectiveness is limited. The new product, he said, will only help the manufacturer earn even more profits. He calls the use of both materials “a government boondoggle.” “It is true that a lot of ignitions do start along roads, but how many roads do we have?” he said.
The emerging science of tracing smoke back to wildfires
Smoke traveling long distances is “the new normal,” he said. This reality challenges the ways governments have historically dealt with air quality, through regulations like the Clean Air Act. Now that pollution is increasingly crossing borders, Dr. Lin said, the way that people manage air quality should evolve accordingly.
Biden’s Forest Service is dragging its feet on protecting ancient trees from logging
Critics say it is time for the White House to make demands of the Forest Service instead of letting the agency advance pro-logging policies.