Fire News

Trump administration’s climate denial is now colliding with its quest to shrink and incapacitate the federal workforce. Federal firefighters—spread across government land management agencies—are on the front lines of both crises, facing dire staffing shortages and bureaucratic chaos on top of shockingly meager pay, benefits, and protections.

Prescribed burns are widely recognized as an effective wildfire mitigation tool. Now, using satellite imagery, land management records and fire emissions data, a team of researchers has put hard numbers to those impacts. During the 2020 season, fires that burned over recent prescribed fire areas were 16 percent less intense and emitted 220 fewer pounds of smoke per acre.

The Dragon Bravo Fire at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, sparked by lightning on July 4, has decreased significantly in containment over the past few days — down to just 4% — as the blaze pushes north with extreme fire behavior.

Stephen Pyne, author of "Pyrocene Park: A journey into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park," joined The Show to talk more about what fire crews are facing.

“Wildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,” the letter stated. “The critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.”

Pyne said it’s unfortunate that managed fires only make news when they get out of control and destroy large tracts or someplace special to people. He pointed to two controlled burns near Payson and Pine, Arizona, that achieved their desired effects without fanfare earlier this year.

Pyne likewise welcomed an investigation. He just hopes it won’t lead to an “all-suppression” fire management regime.

This is a transcript and video of an investigative report that critiques the South Korea Forest Service’s proposal to use logging, road-based fuelbreaks, and planting conifers to address wildfire risks.

Note: there are numerous errors in translation from Korean to English

Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, called the state’s long-standing emphasis on aggressive initial attack a “paradox.”

“Of course, they are successful with initial attack early in the season, those are the same conditions where it would be ideal to manage the fire to reduce the fuel when wildfires burn in peak wildfire season, where they won’t be successful with an initial attack. And that’s the paradox,” Ingalsbee said. “When we are successful with initial attack, it’s probably when we shouldn’t be so aggressive in putting fires out and when we’re not successful with initial attack, it’s during pretty severe fire weather and we wish we had let fires reduce fuel loads earlier in the year.”

He advocates letting fires burn in unpopulated areas, allowing for natural fuel reduction and preserving resources for when lives and property are at risk. Shifting from an “attack” to a “monitoring” mindset, he said, is safer for firefighters and better for ecosystems.

The beaches are empty in Malibu as a wildfire tears through swaths of the iconic Southern California coastline, consuming homes and vehicles and forcing residents – including legendary actor Dick Van Dyke – to flee their coveted hillside properties.

Mike here: ndividuals often cling to pre-existing beliefs on politicized topics like climate change, even in the face of contradicting evidence. This phenomenon, well-documented in social psychology, shows that people frequently double down on their beliefs rather than reconsider them. For example, a study involving supporters of the false WMD claims in Iraq revealed that even after being shown evidence to the contrary, including President Bush's admission, their conviction in the validity of those claims increased. Interestingly, some who have experienced climate-related disasters may also deepen their denial, influenced by partisan media that supports their views.

“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size,” wrote Jennifer Balch, associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her colleagues in the new study, “but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow and their consequent societal impacts.” While large fires have a major effect on air quality, ecosystems, and the release of planet-warming carbon, it is fast fires that have the greatest impact on infrastructure damage, evacuation efforts and, ultimately, death tolls.

When it comes to wildfire threats, “we’ve been so focused on size,” said Jennifer Balch, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. “But what we really need to focus on is speed.”

Many of today’s deadliest fires burn so ferociously that firefighters cannot do much in the moment but get out of the way, Dr. Coop said. “If we’re not prepared for them, they hit us and they hit us hard.”

“They’re backed into a corner, but they’ve backed themselves into a corner,” Quinn-Davidson said. “They’re not leading, and it seems like they’re not capable of leading on prescribed fire, given the nature of politics and how they do business — always choosing short-term risk over long-term vision and strategy.”

She calls for a rethinking of how prescribed burns can be applied on federal lands.

“If the Forest Service is consistently not able to do the work, how can we lean on local resources — tribes and prescribed burn associations, for example — to get that work done?”

Fires are moving quicker in California versus other regions in the West, the scientists found. Between 2001 and 2020, wildfire growth rates increased by 249% across the Western U.S. — defined as a group of 11 Western states — but 398% in California alone. Mountainous regions of Southern California were found to have the largest increase in daily wildfire growth rates in the two decade span.

“This is the California foothills,” Kolden said. “The Coast Range, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, all through the Central Valley. This is the region where you really have fires being carried by that grass understory.”

Republicans are backing a proposal to scale back environmental regulations to “thin” forests while Democrats and environmentalists want to fund community preparedness

In the era of climate change and forest mismanagement, it’s tempting to shrug one’s shoulders and presume that firefighter shortages are inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Unlike urban firefighters, wildland firefighters are specially trained to take on the wildfires that plague the West. For years, those employed by the federal government have complained about profound levels of attrition driven by poor pay, increasingly exhausting working conditions and a lack of mental-health support. And unless Congress gets it together, a government shutdown on Oct. 1 will cut their wages across the board.

Extreme heat increases the chances that firefighters can suffer heat exhaustion or heat stroke — which can be deadly.

And as wildland firefighters face longer seasons, they may also face additional health risks down the line.

“Fire just is. Fire is inevitable,” said Bloemers. “The problem is the vulnerability of the communities that we’ve built in the fire plain, not the fire, because we aren’t going to eliminate the fire from a Western fire-prone, fire-adapted landscape. It is a natural reality.”

A study Bloemers co-authored emphasizes improving resilience in at-risk communities. Modifying structures and landscaping around communities can make them less likely to burn in a wildfire, and can reduce the potential for ignitions in conditions in which a fire could be difficult to control. 

In an excellent story timed to Smokey’s 75th birthday in 2019, HuffPost reporter Chris D’Angelo made the case that the federal fire-prevention campaign “may be a net negative for the environment.” He talked with experts who told him that the bear’s “only you can prevent wildfires” message had obscured the important role that natural fire plays in healthy forest ecosystems.

More frequently, those living in fire-prone areas are turning to groups who have coexisted with fire for generations. Controlled, intentional burns and other strategies enable the landscape and wildlife to thrive, mitigating climate change and offsetting future wildfires. “The way that I was raised, we look at resources as relatives. It is our obligation to take care of them,” Mahseelah says. “Our tribe practiced fire management long before we were on the reservation. Fire is medicine, it's rebirth, regeneration, cleansing. It is needed.”

A report published this year by the University of Washington concluded that on average, the base monthly pay of federal firefighters, including hotshots, was about 41 percent less than their counterparts in state agencies.
The pay disparity is at the heart of the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act, legislation that would raise the base pay of entry level federal firefighters by 42 percent. The bill is currently pending before Congress.

Rather than mount a whole flamethrower to a drone, the Drone Amplified device works by dropping small potassium permanganate shells that had been injected with anti-freeze, causing the shells to ignite, over a landscape. (The shells are known as “dragon eggs.”) This allows fire agencies to conduct controlled low-intensity burns in hard-to-reach locations to limit the available fuel for future wildfires. It also allows firefighters to start what are known as backburns, defensive “counter-fires” of last resort that block an advancing wildfire from moving into a new landscape, and that are traditionally started by hand with dip torches.

To celebrate Native American Heritage Month and bolster wildfire resiliency efforts, a group of University of Oregon students and alums are working with local Indigenous fire practitioners on a fun-for-all approach to fundraising: basketball.
The group is turning one of its favorite hobbies into social good by organizing Oregon’s first Wildfire Resilience Hoop-A-Thon on Nov. 19. The event takes place at the UO’s McArthur Court with the goal of raising $100,000 for workforce development and wildfire resilience efforts around the state.

“Our generation needs pathways for resilience so we can live with fire on the landscape,” said Kyle Trefny, a wildland firefighter, FireGeneration researcher and economics student at the UO. “We face hotter and drier times ahead, but by preparing proactively we can be ready for both wildfires and the prescribed and cultural burning we need on the land.”

A project incorporating traditional Native American management practices for oak habitat restoration in Oregon has been awarded $9.23 million.

The project also seeks to permanently protect designated oak savannas and woodlands, and give Native Americans access to them for cultural use and environmental stewardship.

The death of numerous sequoias got lots of media coverage, though subsequent analyses are finding many trees assumed to have been killed are in fact alive. More recently, attention has shifted to what’s happening with sequoia regrowth after the fire. There’s been a concerning lack of new sequoia seedlings surviving over the past century, putting the future of sequoia ecosystems in doubt.
This is what I witnessed in Redwood Mountain Grove: verdant carpets of young sequoias stretching up to my knees and covering the hillsides. And this new generation is thriving. Researchers are finding high survival rates, vigorous growth and new seedlings continuing to emerge two years after fire.
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article280709210.html#storylink=cpy

Forest fires may get more attention, but a new study reveals that grassland fires are more widespread and destructive across the United States. Almost every year since 1990, the study found, grass and shrub fires burned more land than forest fires did, and they destroyed more homes, too.

Those efforts might benefit communities immediately adjacent to the work, but the overall impact is likely to be small in a state with more than 30 million acres of forestland, said Zeke Lunder, a Chico-based pyrogeographer who also runs The Lookout, a wildfire information website.

Fuel-reduction work is “not necessarily going to fundamentally change the megafire regime,” said Lunder, noting that the Dixie fire burned a nearly million acres despite forest treatments in the area. He added that the Camp fire quickly transitioned from a wildfire to an urban conflagration, which highlights the importance of home-hardening efforts in addition to forest management.

The U.S. Forest Service is scrambling to correct the mistakes of generations of foresters who believed all fire was bad until the 1990s. Overgrazing, logging and fire suppression have left much of our forests in a mess, and the only realistic way to correct these past errors is with prescribed fire. Thinning close to homes and towns needs to happen, too, but the ultimate tool to protect wildlife habitat and ensure safety from future firestorms is prescribed fire.

Dead trees, known as “snags,” are some of the most valuable wildlife structures in the forest and help support hundreds of animals.
“A tree really has a second life after it’s been killed, particularly with fire-killed trees, which decay far slower than if a tree succumbs to disease or insects,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildfire ecologist and executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “I’ve called them ‘living dead trees.’”

Like dozens of previous reports from the U.N. and other international organizations, it describes a situation that, while dire, isn’t yet hopeless. Despite those ever stronger, hotter, drier winds that will fan the flames, governments could slow climate change by improving their forest management techniques, planning and preparing far better, and communicating more effectively. To reduce the likelihood of future mega-fires means working with forests where fire is an element as essential to ecosystems as sunshine or rain. It also means working with forest communities, where local knowledge accumulated over generations is too often shunned. And of course, it means honestly confronting our reluctance to ween ourselves from the fossil fuels that power our factories, cars, and those absurdly unnecessary leaf blowers that are backing us toward the cliff.

Although the Chico State walks have not yet been the subject of published, peer-reviewed research, studies show that other forms of forest therapy can lower stress hormones, boost immune systems and ease the symptoms of trauma. And after the dual ordeals of fleeing from fire and navigating an overburdened disaster bureaucracy, participants say the program has helped relieve some of their pain.
“The forest is the therapist,” Nelson says. “Nature knows how to heal.”

Control of fire is considered a crucial milestone in human evolution, providing light to navigate dark places, enabling activity at night and leading to the cooking of food, and a subsequent increase in body mass. When exactly the breakthrough occurred, however, has been one of the most contested questions in all of paleoanthropology.

Created in 1944, Smokey Bear has served as a stalwart public service announcement about the dangers of unplanned wildfires ever since. With his slogan—“only YOU can prevent forest fires”—Smokey has raised awareness about a problem which continues to destroy wildlife and infrastructure on a mind-boggling scale. Over 62,000 fires have burned more than seven million acres in the U.S. this year alone, according to National Interagency Fire Center stats.

But as the necessity of wildfire safety has increased, so too has Smokey Bear’s hotness. Despite being originally designed to have a body similar to that of an actual bear, the character’s appearance inadvertently dropped ursine realism in favor of a leaner, voluptuous look in a 2007 redesign, according to Slate.

CHANG: That's right because even though there is more awareness today of good fire and traditional Native American management practices, there is still largely a culture of fire suppression which guides how the state manages fire and all the expectations of people who live here in California. A lot of them want to see fires go away. How do you unwind all of that, especially in an era where wildfires are getting larger and more destructive?

MARGOLIS: Yeah. I just think we've lived in an unrealistic place with fire for so long that we're being, like, forced to reckon with the reality we need to accept. We're not going to suppress our way out of it. We need to stop thinking of fire as only as the enemy. We need to let some fires burn instead of putting them out right away. And we need to do more prescribed burns. And in turn, people have to be OK with smoke throughout more of the year, with the additional risk that prescribed burns bring because though they rarely escape, it does happen. So ultimately, at the end of the day, we do need a radical rethinking of fire. It is starting to happen. But my feeling, to be honest, is that it's not happening fast enough.

The documentary’s central theme is that wildfires are primarily driven by climate/weather and that fuel treatments are ineffective in protecting communities. Home hardening, not logging, makes communities safe.
As Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee of Firefighters United For Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) says in the video, we need to change our entire paradigm toward wildfire. Instead of trying to suppress or prevent wildfires, we need to develop a new relationship with the blazes.

A 2021 Work of Wildfire Assessment compiled by the Department of Natural Resources found prescribed fires that had been conducted recently helped reduce wildfire severity. Those treated areas also gave firefighters a place to corral the wildfire, said Garrett Meigs, a forest health scientist with the Department of Natural Resources. “It's not really a question of if these landscapes are going to burn, it's really when and how. And so if we anticipate that we can try to harness the work of wildfire for good outcomes,” Meigs said.

“We’ve created a real problem,” said Rich Fairbanks, a forest landowner in Jackson County and a longtime firefighter. “The basic idea is if you get rid of low-severity fire, you get high-severity fire. You get rid of controlled burning, all you really lose is the control.”

In 2005, Tim Ingalsbee, a wildland firefighter since 1980 with a doctorate in environmental sociology, started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, and has been trying ever since to educate Congress and anyone else who would listen about the misguided fire policy which has led to the megafires we have seen in California in the past decade. “It’s horrible to see this happening” he said, “when the science is so clear and has been for years. . . Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We’ve got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”