Locals have been sounding the alarm for years about Lahaina wildfire risk
But while the inferno happened shockingly fast for the people of Lahaina, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been building for years, like the dry grasses that caught alight and fueled the blaze. The enormity of the catastrophe speaks to both the challenges of preparing for the unimaginable and the incredibly high stakes of inaction.
Susanne Moser, a New England-based climate change resilience expert, says communities and governments are going to have to confront that reality as climate change makes disasters like Maui’s more likely to occur. It may be expensive, but if people don’t pay for it upfront, they may pay later in lives.
Why wildfires are at their deadliest in more than a century
That fires are suddenly inflicting mass casualties again “should be a really significant red flag,” said LeRoy Westerling, a climate and wildfire scientist at the University of California, Merced. “Our perception of the underlying risk is no longer reflective of the reality we currently have. All over the world, this is happening right now. … That is a warning sign that something’s happened that we need to take into account.”
Learning how to garden a forest
After more than a century of mismanagement, and given the challenges of climate change, forest restoration for wildfire resilience presents an unprecedented and complex task that requires diverse tools and tactics tailored to each site. A growing body of research shows that the most biodiverse and resilient forests are often located on protected Indigenous lands where people make a sustainable living from it. Providing funding, legal support, and more rights to Indigenous communities to manage their land is key to climate conservation goals. McKay believes that collaborative stewardship through Native advisory councils, created with the right intentions, can serve as a meaningful step in that process.
The age of the urban inferno is here
In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. But increasingly, fires emerging hotter and more intense from the natural landscape are burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel, jumping from home to home as earlier fires would jump from tree crown to tree crown, with vegetation, Swain told me when I interviewed him in the wake of the Marshall fire for New York magazine, acting only as a wick. These firestorms may seem like a harbinger, he said, but they are also a throwback, to a time a century or more ago when towns and cities, in a time of wood-frame buildings and premodern firefighting, regularly stared down the threat of incineration by flame.
Our wildfire problem is growing beyond our ability to tame it
Fire is indiscriminate under the right conditions. Our island towns, our mountain towns and our coastal communities are all now vulnerable. We have spent decades loading the dice. How many lives will be lost and homes burned before we invest what’s really needed to create a fire-resilient nation?
Why jumping into water to escape a wildfire should be a last resort
Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at the University of California at Merced, said people often imagine wildfires travel in a “wall of flame,” and once the fire sweeps past you, you’re relatively safe.
Wildfires, like the one in Maui, do travel fast, but smaller fires can “hopscotch” in front of the main inferno. Certain sources of fuel, like houses, burn for hours.
“You can’t outrun these fires,” Kolden said.
Drought and wind: How Maui's wildfires turned into a tragedy
“Our most disastrous wildfires in U.S. history have been associated with extremely strong wind events,” said Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer and associate professor at the University of California, Merced, who once worked as a wildland firefighter herself.
But it was how those strong winds interacted with Maui’s mountainous topography that created such volatile fire conditions in the town of Lahaina, she said.
Firefighters back off growing fires in dangerous dead forests north of Pagosa Springs in southwestern Colorado
Federal land managers have declared a full suppression approach to both fires, even though the national policy calls for letting fires in remote forests burn when that can be done safely — in order to let forests benefit ecologically from fire and become more resilient and healthy.
But the practical difficulties of suppressing the Quartz fire, deep in the South San Juan Wilderness, has prevented ground and aerial attacks.
“There is no way to engage the fire because it is extremely deep in the wilderness. There are no roads. No trails. It is burning in extremely thick timber that is mostly standing dead and downed trees. It is extremely steep terrain. We’re not going to put firefighters at risk,” San Juan National Forest spokeswoman Lorena Williams said.
At least 36 people killed as fire devastates Lahaina town in Hawaii
At least 36 people have died and 30 have been injured in wildfires that have ravaged the historic town of Lahaina in Hawaii, local authorities have said.
Officials warned that the death toll in could rise, with the fires still burning and teams spreading out to search charred areas at first light.
Wildfire on Maui kills at least 6, damages over 270 structures as it sweeps through historic town
A wildfire tore through the heart of the Hawaiian island of Maui in darkness Wednesday, reducing much of a historic town to ash and forcing people to jump into the ocean to flee the flames. At least six people died, dozens were wounded and 271 structures were damaged or destroyed.
People are starting a lot of fires in the Pacific Northwest
So far this summer, Washington and Oregon have seen a “huge increase” in the number of wildfires caused by humans, according to the Forest Service. By the end of July 2022, there were 86 human-caused or undetermined-caused fire starts on national forest lands, officials said in a statement on July 28. This year, there have been 197 over the same time span.
Yellow jerseys of the fireline: A day fighting wildfires can require as much endurance as riding the Tour de France
Hotshot crews like this one are the elite workforce of the forest, and the demand on their bodies can rival that of the cyclists in the Tour de France, as my team’s research shows.
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.