NBC Interviews FS Researcher Jeff Prestemon on Arson Fires

With the Park Fire, I think they’re going to have to use a log scale (no not that kind of log scale) for next year’s chart.

 

These are some of many cool statistics kept by  Calfire here.

Thanks to Center for Western Priorities for this story from NBC news.

Here’s the summary you can click on (perhaps AI generated?)

In California, nearly half the acres burned this year were due to blazes allegedly ignited by arson. The damage shows how climate change is exacerbating the danger of arson.
Technically speaking it seems like it was one blaze, the Park Fire.  I’m not sure I can get from the Park Fire to climate change,   but OK.

Here are the paragraphs in the story itself.

The Park Fire was the fourth-largest in California’s history, burning 430,000 acres. It set a state record for acres burned in an alleged arson.

“We don’t have an arson-caused fire that’s gotten to that size on record,” said Gianni Muschetto, the chief of police for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “That’s going to be something of historical significance.”

In total, just over 1 million acres of California have burned so far this year, and nearly half were the result of blazes allegedly set by arsonists, according to fire authorities and an NBC News review of state incident data.

If the “half” refers to acres, the Park Fire itself is responsible for nearly half.  But maybe it refers to starts? Not clear.

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But let’s go to Prestemon’s observations:

Jeffrey Prestemon, (note his email and phone are available), a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in North Carolina, said arson also presents an acute risk because fires started that way tend to cause more damage per acre than blazes caused by lightning or other factors.

“They’re often set where … people live, where there are structures,” Prestemon said.

I’d also add that they are often set at particularly bad times of the year.  We actually don’t know how that enters, if it does, into the minds of the arsonists.  With some, as The Hotshot Wakeup has covered, the time and place are selected so that the wildfires do as much damage as possible.  Others seem to be more or less random.

Given that, he said, “an arrest can have a big payoff.”

Prestemon has studied wildfire arson events in Florida, Spain and other locations. He and other researchers found in one study that the arrest of a single arsonist in a particular region of Spain correlated with a decrease of nearly 140 wildfire starts in that area the following year.

“What we surmise: It’s mainly a serial effect, it’s one individual setting multiple fires over a brief period of time usually spanning over several days, a week or two weeks,” Prestemon said. “If they’re not caught, they will repeat this kind of serial episode.”

Prestemon added that arrests could deter other arsonists.

This year in California, Cal Fire had arrested 91 people on suspicion of arson by the end of August, Muschetto said. The number appears to track with normal trends.

Wildfire arson isn’t well studied, but researchers in the U.S., Europe and Australia have narrowed down the profile of typical perpetrators. Wildfire arsonists tend to be men, often young. Many set multiple fires.

“They’re often likely to do repeat fires,” said Janet Stanley, an honorary associate professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “People who have got a psychological need for some reason around fire will do it many times, and often they’re not caught until they’ve done it multiple times.”

In California, Muschetto attributed fluctuations in the number of wildfire arsons to fire risk levels and how likely the landscape is to burn.

Cal Fire has counted between 182 and 386 arson fires each year since 2014, with rates roughly consistent relative to the number of overall fires. However, the true number of fires caused by arson is likely higher than the official count, because investigators can’t always determine how a blaze started. The causes of more than 320 fires in 2023 remain unknown.

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Muschetto said the rise in the use of security cameras, smartphones and satellite-tracking devices in rural areas has helped Cal Fire clear more cases over the past 10 or 20 years.

It seems like it would be hard to compare numbers of arsons over time, strictly speaking, due to improvements in criminal-catching technology over time.  Some of the previous unknowns may have been arson.

 

 

3 thoughts on “NBC Interviews FS Researcher Jeff Prestemon on Arson Fires”

  1. And Chief Moore is telling his fire folks to use arson as “unplanned ignitions” to be an opportunity to increase the number of “treated acres” for forest and range fuels ‘treatment.’ End run, back door, legal machinations, all Supremacy Clause protected. Under that scenario, isn’t arson and prescribed fire a real splitting of fine hairs? How are damages accounted for? $1 for arson damage and $5 benefit for cheap fuels reduction to “return resiliency” to what? US Government or the “grandeur of the landscapes” lost? Will we have an annual beauty contest at the Shiners Burn Center? Mr or Ms, Mrs Burn Beauty. The new aesthetics. A photo contest for the best description of “introduced diversity, complexity, and resilience?” I have issues with “Wilderness to preserve the last of..” and the last of 30 years later is dead trees, fuel for the next fire, and Bud Tugley Memorial Wilderness.

    It takes some agility to traipse down that fine line. But, when you have the supremacy clause protecting you from tort liability, all the USFS has to do is “plan” to use arson as “unplanned ignition source” on the PODs or any other NEPA, FLPMA, ad nauseam , mandatory planning to according to all the court decisions, case law, congressional rules and then agency administrative rules published in the Federal Register. Best the Congress also fund FEMA for showing up a week late and broke, to take over the little housing available for flood, fire, wind victims, and pontificate from on high. The present government has used FEMA as a slush fund to deviate from law to foil the attempts to enforce dominion over our borders, and house victims of bad governments abroad. Mother Superior Joe Biden, head of his own Sisters of Mercy. FEMA financed 13,000 murderers entry and support in the US. You just cannot “make this stuff up.”

    Reply
    • Why not – it looks like you did.

      And I think you mean “sovereign immunity” rather than the Supremacy Clause.

      But more to the point, why isn’t the cause of a fire like a “fixed cost,” and you make decisions about moving on from there? Because you think that would lead federal employees to do dastardly deeds to meet targets?

      Reply

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