Let’s start our different perspectives with this Washington Post article (link goes to the Spokesman Review who reprinted it).
First the reporter interviews someone who lost his home. Why do they do this? Apparently it’s a relatively new idea in journalism:
By harnessing the emotive and transformative potential of storytelling, journalists can cut through the noise, capture audiences’ attention, and drive meaningful engagement with important issues.
Ultimately, the power of storytelling in journalism lies in its ability to touch hearts, provoke thoughts, and spur action.
Whatever happened to “describing the topic as honestly as possible and figuring out relevant facts”? My main emotion, when exposed to these stories, is annoyance. I just skip those paragraphs normally, but I note that Ahqua (who lost his home) had done controlled burns for 12 acres around his home, but we don’t know anything else. I would be the last person to critique someone else’s hardening practices, so I’m not asking that question from a critiquing point of view, but leaping from one cabin to the headline “a megafire overwhelmed even some of the best preparations” seems like a stretch. Of course, I know that reporters don’t write headlines but still…
Here’s the question:
The latest Western conflagration has residents like Ahqha asking: What if the best fire prevention is still not enough to stop a megafire?
It’s an interesting question, because “stopping fires” is not necessarily on our list of things to do. maybe “changing fire behavior” “making fire suppression easier”; and it still comes up from some folks that the point is not to stop fire at all, but to protect homes. Which, we were told, would happen based on what happens 100 feet from the home.
The Park Fire demonstrates how years, if not decades, of weather patterns in a changing climate can converge to send flames raging through remote wilderness and mountain outposts at shocking speeds. Historic drought left trees weakened or dead. Stormy winters washed debris into piles, while the rain allowed flammable grasses to thrive. Intense heat, smashing records across California this summer, dried everything out.
Not surprisingly, the reporter Scott Dance focuses on the climate aspects of wildfire, since his tagline is “global weather writer.” I don’t think most of us would make the connection between intense and problematic fires and debris piles from winter storms. the bottom line of the article seems to be “due to climate change, fires are much worse,” while the scientists keep bringing up fire suppression and fuel accumulation over the past 150 years or so. Hot and dry is California, and a plethora of stems in the ground makes trees stressed and drier. Bugs are not due to the fact that trees are old and too dense, but due to climate change. Not that climate change may not contribute to this, but as the Sierra Nevada Conservancy says:
Over a similar time period, much of the southern Sierra was gripped by an unprecedented multi-year tree mortality event. Unnaturally dense stands of trees proved no match for the stress of competing for scarce water during a multi-year drought, leaving entire landscapes vulnerable to pine beetle outbreaks. As reported in our 2017 update to The State of the Sierra Nevada Forests, 83 million trees died in the Sierra Nevada from overgrown forests, bark beetles, and drought between 2014 and 2016. Previously green hillsides turned brown with dead pine trees.
The scientists interviewed both mention fuel buildup due to fire suppression:
But other parts of the forest had no known fire history in a century of record-keeping. That made it much easier for the fire to spread and fueled extreme plumes that created towering infernos that firefighters could hardly battle.
“One might think, well, is there any area of California that hasn’t burned?” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Redding, Calif. “But there are still vast landscapes that have seen far too little fire.”
In these extensive forested lands that haven’t burned for decades, vegetation has built up to levels that could fuel hotter fires, Knapp said. Though attitudes around beneficial fire are changing, risks of huge wildfires remain heightened because, for decades, the country’s firefighting approach was to put out every new blaze as fast as possible.
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If the Park fire continues to spread to the northeast, it could soon encounter the scar left by another of California’s biggest wildfires on record, the 2021 Dixie fire. Depending on where it reaches that burn scar, the Park fire could stop in its tracks: After three years, much of the area is still a “moonscape” with nothing to burn, said David Mitchell, a volunteer firefighter who oversees prescribed burns across Butte County, which includes Cohasset, Chico and Paradise.
But in some parts of the Dixie scar, Brunton said, there are beds of fuel it left behind. The intensity of fires like the Dixie and Park fires can kill so many trees, they leave scars that end up feeding a cycle of severe fire, scientists said.
Trees have evolved to survive moderate fires and even come out of them stronger. But when fires burn so hot that they kill trees across thousands of contiguous acres, that can leave the landscape even more prone to severe fires, said Scott Stephens, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies fire ecology. Downed dead trees can fuel fires for longer and keep them burning hotter.
Any fire that spreads as quickly and burns as hot as the Park fire is capable of setting a bad cycle of blazes in motion, he said.
“You’re in a loop that’s hard to get out of,” Stephens said.
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Seems like what will happen with a reburn depends on the nature of the fuels left, and what grows back, as we have discussed here and I think is generally known. Plus if all the mother trees die, you will have trouble establishing natural regeneration. Of course, folks could remove some of the dead and downed in strategic areas, and plant trees.
What’s missing from this piece, to my mind, are the voices of suppression folks, other than
“We never had fires like this,” Mark Brunton, a battalion chief and operations section chief for Cal Fire, told The Washington Post at a Park Fire command center in Chico.
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But if wildfires keep outmatching preparations, then what? He isn’t sure.
“It just keeps happening out here,” Ahqha said. “Will it ever be safe, really?”
Overall story vibe: bad things will continue to happen or get worse, mostly due to climate change.
Next post: stories about new tech for suppression.
About one-half of the public lands are not healthy, resistant to disturbances or sustainable. The primary culprit: lack of forest maintenance (care) over the last three decades. The solid solution: mechanical removal of excess fuels and Rx Fire. A fundamental wildfire suppression tactic is to put out the wildfire immediately. For now, we must stop the wildfire suppression tactic of “managed” or “beneficial” fire. With the condition of today’s forests, the notion of “managed” wildfire does not work with any predictability. Finally, forest maintenance has to be a decade-long campaign, at least. This includes adequate forest maintenance funds. This is fully outlined in “A Call to Action” that has been developed by 78, and county, contributors that are quite skilled in forest stewardship. We absolutely know what to do. While the impacts of a changing climate contribute to this national emergency, the lack of forest maintenance is the issue. And again, we must stop this intellectual argument of using “managed” wildfire. It’s just a very wrong way to try and achieve restoration targets. Nothing said here is new. Most know exactly what the solution requires.
Very respectfully,
Please cite the research behind your statement that “lack of forest maintenance” is the “primary culprit.” You also seem to end up with a solution (putting all fires out) that everyone else says has caused the problem.
Hi Jon: By “everyone else” I am assuming you mean “other people who think the same way that I do.” There are many (many) people that have been concerned about the build-up of fuels on public lands due to a change in federal policies related to the ESA. This has nothing (or very little) to do with putting fires out and mostly a result of creating roadless areas, riparian buffers, Wildernesses, LSRs, etc. The resulting fires have been clearly predicted by me and others for the past 30 years and, unfortunately, our predictions remain accurate.
Show me the research that says “build-up of fuels on public lands due to a change in federal policies related to the ESA.” My observation is that what has changed to protect at-risk forest species is less removal of large trees, not less fuel reduction.
Hi Jon: You might want to do your own research on this. I’d start by taking a drive through federal lands in western Oregon and northern California. I’m not sure what kind of “research” you actually have in mind, but scientific predictions by me, Chad Oliver, and others in the 1990s have turned out to be very accurate. Maybe you could research those, too.
Dear Sharon,
I completely agree: “My main emotion, when exposed to these stories, is annoyance.”
Post-Modern journalists care only about emotions and political propaganda. They never care about the truth. In fact, they argue that there are no absolute truths, except those that they favor at the moment. This makes it impossible for them to do science, even with some knowledge of it.
They want us to reflexively blame human emissions of carbon dioxide for giant forest fires as well as all changes in the weather. This is excessively stupid. Forests burned and the weather changed, LONG before humans started to drive up atmospheric CO2 after World War II. Long before.
Carbon dioxide is said by them to have supernatural powers to do all sorts of bad things. That is partly because post-modern journalists refuse to entertain any of the well-known benefits of carbon dioxide, such as life on Earth! This means that they miss one very important reason why increased CO2 contributes to forest fires.
The entire forest ecosystem grows better with 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere rather than 0.03%. In controlled experiments, Sherwood Idso demonstrated how pines grew far faster with elevated CO2. Across all plant species, the average enhancement is about 20%. The result is that this planet is greener because of more CO2 in the atmosphere. And the tiny warming from CO2 helps too.
The bottom line is that journalists should not practice science, unless they have a significant background in science. British journalist Matt Ridley is a great example of a PhD Zoologist who gets the science correct. If all journalists were as competent as he is, there would be no climate nonsense.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
Oh man. This guy again. Such an expert in forest management, and canned talking points, and a need to mention he has a PhD every chance he gets.
The Forest Service Wildfire Crisis information makes it clear that we cannot reduce fire risk to 0. Yes, this person presumably did as much as they could (and perhaps more than many WUI homeowners), but that still wasn’t enough – especially if their home was made of flammable materials and they had that much vegetation around their home (I’m assuming the photo is where their home was located) and if the fire was burning under more extreme conditions. This fire was human-caused and spread very quickly, leaving very little time to prepare and respond.
I agree with Anonymous, creating a defensible space around a home does not make it fire proof. “Defensible” implies someone be there to defend it. That photo also shows way too many trees in close proximity to the structure. Trees drop litter and littler blows around. The reason it is recommended not to have trees within 30 feet of a home is not because of crown fire, it’s the litter they generate. Black oaks in California drop leaves all summer and fall. It’s a weekly task to pick up the oak leaves from around the base of my house and off the roof from an massive oak 20 feet from my house that I want to keep. In addition to needing someone there to defend a structure that has defensible space, we need the surrounding forest to be resilient so that there is little risk of a fire-nado.
Yes, I am pretty bad at defensible space, so I’m not going to critique other folks’, my problem is lurching from that cabin to “what if nothing works?” Then there’s the whole spark/vent thing.
I must disagree, wholeheartedly, on the discussions that it’s of little use to prepare for wildfires (not specifically stated, but you get the point). Models have been created that display canopy bulk densities vs winds, by Rothermel. It is a great visualization as to how to treat canopy fuels, along with “fire wise” characteristics to help protect homes during wildfire emergencies.
Yes, we did these types of treatments in Arizona and saved many homes. However, it ain’t pretty; we started feathering crown closures and resulting bulk densities over a half mile (minimum) from the general forest area, and the fire wise efforts resembled a grassland more than a forest. We (FS) took a lot of flak from homeowners for destroying their WUI. A million acres of fire and 500 homes paid the price for inactions, or as I call it “sins of the past”!
How much protection do you want? Insurance companies are becoming more and more restrictive on even covering homes in fire prone areas, and rightly so! I don’t want to subsidize a neighbor with me paying higher rates, due to them wanting to keep trees and shrubs.
We had one home burn, about three days an after the wildfire bumped the treatments pretty hard. Seemed suspect; however, the house was over a quarter mile fun the nearest fire impact, and had a huge pile of needle drape on the roof. Apparently, the fire spotted, smoldered and eventually turned into a house destroyer. Shame on the homeowner!
So, does it work every time? No; but it worked well enough to have repetitive research comport with the successes of our work. Actually, the choice is with the real of the homeowner(s).
As for earlier discussion on fire adapted, dry site ponderosa pine and treatments (gasp – what do you mean cutting trees over 20”?), I would refer you to GTR 310!
Referring to our comments on another thread, the WUI is a place where “feathering crown closures” by removing some big/old trees might be an exception that could be written into forest plans because WUI is a place where protecting infrastructure is more important than ecological integrity. What this means is that it would be even more important to protect similar trees outside of WUI (so the the average condition across an ecosystem is within the natural range of variability).