Fire and Fuels

This is a guest post by Sarah Hyden. 

The Indios Fire in the Jemez Mountains of the Santa Fe National Forest Photo: US Forest Service

At midday on May 19th, Santa Fe National Forest (SFNF) fire managers were notified of a new wildfire start within the Chama River Canyon Wilderness on the Coyote Ranger District, northwest of the traditional rural village of Coyote. The cause of the fire ignition was a lightning strike.

By the next day, the fire had grown to approximately 150-200 acres and was named the Indios Fire. It spread primarily to the northeast over the next three days, burning along the boundary of the wilderness, with no imminent threats to people or property. The fire was burning in dry forest, and in the midst of a strong wind pattern.

A May 20th SFNF press release about the fire quoted Forest Supervisor Shaun Sanchez as stating, “Wildfires have the potential to decrease fuels and increase the health and resilience of forests. Fire is a natural and frequent component of the ecosystem in the area, and our team will look for opportunities to restore forest health when conditions permit.”

It seems apparent that the Forest Service took the opportunity to ignite much of the Indios Fire themselves for “resource management objectives,” based on #firemappers satellite thermal hotspot maps, along with some cloudy language in Forest Service press releases and fire briefings. The Forest Service provided very little information to the public about what actually caused the majority of the Indios Fire to burn. That was the secret fire. The secret was that most of the fire wasn’t caused by the lightning strike; it was from intentional aerial and ground ignitions by the Forest Service called firing operations. Anyone simply reading the Forest Service’s fire news releases and listening to the fire briefings would not have understood this, and in fact most of the public still does not realize what actually happened.

The fire grew slowly for the first few days, as it burned to the northeast up and across a canyon slope. Then it suddenly turned downhill and quickly burned two miles east through the canyon bottom and up to the mesa on the other side. A few days later, the fire burned at high speed four miles to the south, although the prevailing winds were to the east and north. It appears from the aerial hot spot maps that firing operations largely caused these movements, but more information from the Forest Service would be necessary in order to confirm.

Although it was stated in the daily Indios Fire updates that the fire was being allowed to burn for ecosystem benefit and that firing operations were being used at times in support of this strategy, these explanations were extremely understated relative to what can be seen from the aerial hot spot maps. In the fire briefings available on the SFNF Facebook page, the briefing officer would wave his hand around the fire map with such comments as “we did add a little bit of fire yesterday,” and “we did put a little bit of heat in here with the helicopter.” It generally sounded as if they were implementing fairly localized back burns to contain the fire.

The May 22 Indios Fire press release stated “The Northern NM Type 3 IMT is currently moving forward with a strategy to contain the wildfire. The containment strategy means using tactical actions to manage the fire within a predetermined area.” The predetermined area was never shown on a map in press releases or fire briefings, nor was the approximate acreage of the predetermined fire containment perimeter provided. The “containment strategy” often involves greatly expanding a wildfire, while attempting to contain the expanded fire within a predetermined perimeter. That is very different from the conservation strategy of simply allowing naturally-ignited wildfires to burn in a relatively natural way for ecosystem benefit, which is highly supported by conservation scientists and conservation organizations. The agency was igniting fire far beyond back burns and burn outs, and was essentially implementing a large-scale prescribed burn without the required NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) analysis or public inclusion. Planning was being done on-the-spot.

Since the size and location of the predetermined area was not publicly available in Forest Service media, I personally attempted to find out the size of the predetermined area, and to obtain a map of the potential perimeter. I also wanted to find out why the Forest Service believed this kind of wildfire expansion operation was safe to implement in such windy and dry weather conditions. I was provided with only unhelpful and non-specific information and advice from Forest Service personnel such as – “The incident objectives you see on Inciweb [interagency incident information management system] are used to determine the specific firing operations which, like wildfire, are dynamic. Since Forest Plan direction is listed on the Inciweb objectives, I would suggest looking at the Forest Plan for insight into what those are.”

There was just one sentence on Inciweb regarding the Indios Fire management objectives – “Incident objectives include protecting values at risk and meeting Santa Fe National Forest Plan objectives by reintroducing fire into a fire dependent ecosystem.“ The Santa Fe National Forest Plan states, “When conditions facilitate safe progress toward desired conditions, consider managing naturally ignited fires to meet multiple resource objectives concurrently (i.e., protection and resource enhancement), which can change as the fire spreads across the landscape.” Nowhere does the Forest Plan state that the Forest Service can intentionally greatly expand wildfires utilizing aerial and ground firing operations.

None of this addressed my questions regarding the specific objectives and plans for managing the Indios FIre. Since the Forest Service was creating fire lines to contain the expanded fire, it
was clear that they must have had an approximate plan for the containment perimeter that they intended that the fire could potentially expand out to. Yes, fires are dynamic situations, but still there had to be a potential perimeter before deploying bulldozers and cutting and burning fire lines.

Jonathan Glass of Public Journal eventually located a federal interagency repository map from May 21, the third day of the fire, containing an 18,218 acre “Indios Fire Potential Perimeter.” The fire was 688 acres on May 21st, so apparently the Forest Service planned that the fire would be expanded and contained in an area up to 26 times its size at the time. However, the agency chose to not make the size and map of this containment area reasonably publicly available, even when specifically requested. Also, the Forest Service must have believed they had justifications for expanding a wildfire during such risky fire conditions, but they did not publicly reveal them in any substantive way.

During the 2023 Pass Fire in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and Wilderness, the Forest Service published a map on their Facebook page of the planned fire perimeter. The fire eventually filled that perimeter with a high level of precision, with the assistance of Forest Service firing operations. That the Forest Service actually made public to what extent they wanted to expand the fire, even if they were not clear about the extent to which they were causing the landscape within the fire perimeter to burn, was possibly due to publicity by a few fire management watchdogs about the huge expansion of the 2022 Black Fire. During management of the Black Fire, the Forest Service carried out aerial and ground firing operations that more than doubled the size of the fire and burned most of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, including important natural resources, and Sierra County infrastructure.

The SFNF seems to have reversed that recent trend towards more openness, and contradicted its many recent statements about wanting better public communication, by largely obscuring their intentions to complete widespread intentional burns while managing the Indios Fire. Even after the Indios Fire operation is complete, we will almost certainly still not have any official estimate of how much of the fire the Forest Service ignited, versus how much burned due to the original ignition combined with the elements. There will simply be one number given for the size of the fire – the total acres that burned during the fire and fire expansion. We need to know what the Forest Service is doing during fire management operations so the potential risks and consequences of the agency’s wildfire management strategies can be effectively evaluated.

Language concerning fire management operations has become increasingly obscure and confusing. At first the Forest Service described progress on managing the Indios Fire as the percent of the fire contained, but after May 28 the term ”completed” was used. According to the agency, percent completion comprises a broad mix of Forest Service objectives – it’s “an indication of the total amount of work being accomplished on the ground relative to how much they intend to accomplish.” But since they never told us how much they intended to accomplish during the Indios Fire, providing the percent completed did not clarify to what extent the agency had completed expanding the fire to burn landscape within the predetermined perimeter. Below an Indios Fire briefing on the SFNF Facebook page, a bewildered local commented – “I just wish someone would tell us [how] much of the fire is being contained, how many acres are still  burning? Or is the fire continuing to expand because of the completion goals?” Another asked, “What is the percentage of containment within the percentage of completion, please, since you mentioned it as a component of completion?”

All of this was occurring at the start of the New Mexico fire season, when fire risk is at its highest. There were strong winds throughout the wildfire and fire expansion operation, and a red flag warning at one point. This was very reminiscent of the conditions under which the Forest Service ignited the Las Dispensas prescribed burn, which erupted into the 2022 Hermits Peak Fire. Due to hazards from the expanded Indios Fire, the local Sheriff’s Department put a nearby ranch on “Set” status for potential evacuation.

One might hope that after the three major wildfires of 2022, ignited due to three separate SFNF escaped prescribed burns which burned a total of 387,000 acres and burned out entire  communities, the Forest Service would become much more careful about putting forest and communities at risk. They do not seem to have become substantially more careful. Firing operations planned and implemented essentially on-the-spot to expand wildfires are likely much more risky than prescribed burns which are planned in advance within a NEPA-analyzed project, and also more risky than allowing a wildfire to burn without adding substantially more fire. Add in dry conditions and high winds, and this strategy just seems reckless. Given the trajectory on which the Forest Service is continuing to manage fire, it seems extremely likely that we will have more escapes of intentional fire that will over-burn forests and burn communities.

Currently, the Indios Fire operation appears to be in its final phase, at 11,500 acres. Some rain has fallen since June 8th. At least so far, the fire has burned largely at low severity, and  fuels were consumed which may reduce future fire risk in the area. In terms of Forest Service objectives, it was a very successful operation. But the Forest Service is playing Russian roulette with our forests and communities by implementing large-scale intentional fires under the wildfire management umbrella, without advanced planning and in risky conditions. And, this is done without clearly informing the public of what they are doing – or even answering legitimate questions. They are sowing the seeds of even more public confusion, fear, mistrust, and anger, but most of all they are putting what we value so deeply at risk.

The Forest Service seems to be taking the viewpoint that if the rules do not say they cannot utilize a fire management strategy, such as greatly expanding wildfires with firing operations, then they can do so. In addition to a coherent and transparent national wildfire policy, there needs to be much clearer guidelines in forest plans about how fire can be “managed,” including direction that the agency cannot implement categories of actions that it is not specifically allowed to implement. It is necessary to revise forest plans so risky fire expansion operations cannot be carried out, and so there are reasonable parameters for managing naturally-ignited wildfires for resource benefit. And the agency must be required to be genuinely transparent about how fires are being managed.

Indios Fire on Firemappers – 2024-05-27 232334  May 27, 2024  Observe firing operation hot spots, carrying the fire to the south towards highway 96. Not all hot spots are firing operations; some are simply heat from the fire, but the more or less semi-straight lines of hot spots generally represent aerial ignitions.

The Hotshot Wakeup seems to be one of the few folks out there (not in the affected Colorado area) writing about a new trend called the Public Safety Power Shutoff Program.  I’m with him in not liking the trend,  but so far being agnostic about solutions. From his Substack post:

We saw this in action in Colorado not too long ago. This spring, Red Flag warnings were forecast for the area, and high winds were predicted for multiple days. Xcel Energy decided this would be the first time they would run the protocols for the Public Safety Power Shutoff Program. An important thing to remember, Xcel had just been sued for allegedly causing the 1M acre Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas from a downed rotten power pole. They were not about to be blamed for another.

So they sent out a warning and flipped the switch.

In a great article by Kate Ruder, she explains that a large 20 acre nursing home facility only had a 75-minute warning before the power went out:

In Boulder, Frasier staff and residents heard about the planned outage from news reports. A Frasier official called the utility to confirm and was initially told the home’s power would not be affected. The utility then called back to say the home’s power would be cut, after all, said Tomas Mendez, Frasier’s vice president of operations. The home had just 75 minutes before Xcel Energy shut off the lights on April 6.

Staff rushed to prepare the 20-acre campus home to nearly 500 residents. Generators kept running the oxygen machines, most refrigerators and freezers, hallway lights, and Wi-Fi for phones and computers. But the heating system and some lights stayed off as the overnight temperature dipped into the 30s.

Power was restored to Frasier after 28 hours.

By law, these types of facilities must own some sort of backup system; Florida mandated it, saying these facilities need 92 hours of backup power. However, it seems the fairly new Public Safety Power Shutoff Programs have not been planned for, especially for extended periods of time during Red Flag Days.

275,000 customers in Colorado had their power shut off that week; some people I’ve spoken to said it was for 3+ days in some areas where lines needed to be checked before the power came back on. A large portion of these communities are very rural and lower-income areas.

At the same time,  Xcel in Colorado is spending lotsa bucks to electrify heat  (as this Colorado Sun story says: “some worry the utility could make windfall profits from fighting the climate crisis”).  Now if you’re from around here, you might know that we get many high winds during winter, when it’s cold. The day after the Marshall Fire, for example, it snowed.  What could go wrong with going to electric heat, in the winter, when electricity will be shut off? I’m thinking fireplaces (for those who have them) and generators (for those who can afford them).

I’m seeing some potential problems here..

For example, a $4.5 million pilot project is looking to electrify about 65 mainly commercial customers along the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder rather than replace a gas main. This could serve as a model for removing areas from the gas system and reduce the need for new infrastructure.

….

The challenges, however, are big. Xcel Energy estimates that between 200,000 and 400,000 heat pumps must be installed through 2030. Direct air heat pumps either heat or cool a home by removing the ambient heat in the air — even on very cold days. They are much more efficient than gas furnaces.

This would require an average of 28,000 to 57,000 installations a year  — or 14 to 28 times the number that were installed in 2022.

Blank, the PUC chairman, said that he was concerned that all the costs of the Clean Heat Plan are falling only on the utility’s customers. “So far there is no shareholder skin in the game,” he said at a May hearing. “The company is making money off this stuff. They may make windfall profits off fighting the climate crisis.”

This is one of those situations where no one is really to blame, but the system and the incentives are not working out for ordinary people.  Then there’s the whole question of being ready, and how and how far ahead to notify people about losing power.

This table is from Reilly, et al. I think this way of divvying up causes is helpful.  I wonder if this is standardized anywhere?

I’ve often asked “how can we afford to fund studies that model wildfires in 2100 under different climate scenarios, but can’t afford the social science to help reduce human ignitions?”

Anyway, a big shout-out to Reilly et al. for their 2023 paper “The Influence of Socioeconomic Factors in Wildfire Ignitions in the Pacific Northwest USA”

On pages 2, 3 and 4, they have a roundup of other studies on the topic around the world, with links. I think it will be fairly interesting to Oregonians, especially how they talk about how different areas have different relationships between socioeconomic and physical factors and human-caused (as well as natural) ignitions.

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Last year, Axios San Diego had an interesting story on human caused fires in California

By the numbers: About 86% of wildfires in California between 1992 and 2020 were spurred by human activity, burning 63 acres on average, U.S. Forest Service analysis of wildfire data found.

• Meanwhile, Cal Fire officials say 95% of fires are human-caused currently.

Of note: Lightning strikes accounted for the other fires with known causes, mostly in the northeastern and mountainous parts of the state that border Nevada.

• Lightning strikes were behind California’s largest fires, which took place in August 2020, burning more than 2 million acres combined — that’s about three-quarters of the size of San Diego County.

Details: The top three human activities known to have led to these blazes were from equipment and vehicles, arson and debris burning, the data shows.

• That includes accidental incidents and neglect, such as leaving a campfire unattended or a malfunctioning catalytic converter spitting a molten substance out of an exhaust pipe.

Between the lines: While firearms and explosives caused 0.2% of wildfires, they led to the largest human-caused blazes, at 380 acres on average.

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The Hotshot Wakeup reported that Arizona folks are beginning to investigate and address human-caused wildfire ignitions. The ones in Pinal County seem to be focused on using equipment in the wildland-urban interface in areas with greater fuel loadings than people are used to.

“Our last seven starts have been human-caused and they have actually been construction companies starting these,” Scottsdale Fire Capt. Dave Folio said.

The department is asking those construction crews to create a 10 to 15-foot defensible space around their work areas.

Folio says we have seen how dangerous not taking these precautions can be.

Last June, the Diamond Fire, which was caused by a construction crew cutting rebar, forced 1,000 people to leave their north Scottsdale homes as the flames got within feet of properties.

“Construction crews choose a place to cut the rebar that isn’t in the middle of the desert,” Folio said. “Move the combustibles off your construction site. Help us eliminate one spark and that’s all we’re asking for.”

Meanwhile, the Tonto NF  reported human-caused fires from recreational uses.

In many cases, human-caused fires could originate from target shooting, fireworks, Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) use or other vehicle fire, escaped campfire, accidentally or intentionally set. Human-caused fires outnumber natural starts by 3 to 1 on the Tonto, with several already this season such as the Spring Fire, related to target shooting, and Wildcat fire, related to OHV use.

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For many areas, it’s the beginning of the fire season, but please add links where you find local concerns about human-caused fires and what the locality is doing to reduce them.  Smokey’s back!

This map demonstrates the fireline effectiveness of the 2022 Midnight Fire. The coral color is the 2022 Midnight Fire perimeter;brown is the 2019 Francisquito managed fire perimeter; and red is the 2018 Alamosa prescribed fire perimeter. The analysis shows that when the Midnight Fire ran into the previous burn areas, they contributed to a high degree of suppression effectiveness.

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A helpful TSW reader has sent me more information that addresses some of the questions we’ve raised directly, rather than floundering around, as I have been doing.  So a big shout-out to SWERI for this paper ! As a person who supports MF, is a big pre-planning and POD fan,  (gasp for me) even supports putting fire stuff in forest plans (making forest plans more useful) and agrees with the approach in this paper, but also wants to help all of us understand each other better, I made a few comments as if I were an MF skeptic living in a potentially-impacted community.

Analysis of managed wildfires demonstrates that destructive outcomes are rare. The 2021 Tamarack Fire in California was a lightning-caused fire for which the initial decision was not to engage directly due to firefighter safety concerns, not as a managed wildfire, and which resulted in structure loss and prompted scrutiny of management responses to natural ignitions. Recent research demonstrates that from 2009 to 2020, there were 32 fires with characteristics like the Tamarack Fire, of which only 6 were managed wildfires. Most structure losses from wildfire are due to human ignitions on private lands that spread into adjacent areas under extreme weather conditions. Managed wildfires that result in negative outcomes are rare, yet fire managers are incentivized to suppress natural ignitions to minimize short-term risk rather than use them under favorable conditions to maximize long-term risk reduction.

So this paper says that fire managers are not sufficiently incentivized to do MF.  Other folks have told me the same thing. At the same time, some people are worried that the FS is over-incentivized to do it based on  fuel reduction targets. I suppose both can be true in different places at different times? How can we (or can we) reconcile these two observations or points of view?

Current policy, the 2009 Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, is effective and allows for using managed wildfire when an existing, approved land, resource, or fire management plan is in place,

I’d like more details on what any plans should contain.. any old forest plan might not do it.  This paper, of course, is not the place to go into details.  Perhaps that is to be found somewhere else? I’d go so far as to say “put the fire part of plans in an easily accessible place on the Forest website.” Perhaps forest plans nowadays do have their material sorted by topic (say fire or grazing) as well as by plan component (desired conditions, standards, etc.)?

but myriad factors can frustrate its use. 1) There is inconsistent terminology and multiple terms for “managed wildfire.” The approach can entail engaging fire at locations deemed safer and more effective for suppression or engaging fire to achieve natural resource or risk management objectives after analyzing risk to firefighters and local landscape values. Inconsistent terminology creates confusion when current policy (i.e.,2009 Guidance) allows for all fires to be managed for different objectives and strategies depending on the context. 2) Operational concerns also pose challenges. Fire managers may worry there are insufficient resources,

This seems like a legitimate concern to me, especially projecting into unknown future time periods with unknown numbers of starts elsewhere.

leadership backing, and political or public support for implementing managed wildfire. 3) Risk aversion and uncertainty, when combined with a high degree of autonomy in local decision making and the perception that managed wildfire is risky, have resulted in hesitance to use managed wildfire approaches despite current policy.
In many cases, managed wildfire is a lower risk option when considering its potential to reduce future fire risk,

I think this could be one of the understanding gaps, how different folks talk about risk. It seems to me (and to the federal budget) that there are other options to reduce future fire risk, aka prescribed fire and/or mechanical treatment plus prescribed fire. At least everyone has been doing these projects assiduously saying they reduce wildfire risk.  But maybe there won’t be funding. We also don’t know if some equally or better conditions for MF will occur next year, or some other year, before the future WF risk.  And of course in the wrong conditions a WF could be worse.  Predicting the future is tough for anyone, even with super-sophisticated models.

but when faced with a risky decision, decision-makers often take the risk-averse option of fully suppressing a fire. Rather than sharing risk across boundaries, fire managers who do opt to take a managed wildfire approach are often left carrying the burden of potential bad outcomes, which are uncommon.

Hmm. Some would say people who lose their homes and businesses or get killed or injured and, say FEMA (aka taxpayers) are “left carrying the burden.”

Managed wildfire often comes down to the willingness of individuals to take on the risk because the 2009 Guidance has not been codified into law. 4) Building public and political understanding of, and support for, managed wildfire strategies, especially in the pre-season before a fire starts, can facilitate its use. 5) Existing performance metrics and financial structures may also disincentivize using managed wildfire, and regional and local planning may be outdated or not explicitly demarcate alternative fire management strategies for different land or resource objectives, which can lead to additional confusion in implementing policy on the ground.

I don’t think MF is a big thing in my county planning (partly forested, partly FS). Maybe what they meant is that all communities have not decided MF is a good idea, and hence it isn’t in plans?

There are several facilitating factors that lead to decisions to use managed wildfire. 1) Discussions of fire management options in the pre-season (e.g., creating Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) of the most effective containment opportunities and pairing those with quantitative wildfire risk assessments) can help identify and document strategic response zones where managed wildfire may prove beneficial under the right conditions. 2) The characteristics of individuals, incident management teams, or organizations with experience using risk-informed decision support systems (DSSs) and the characteristics of the DSSs themselves can facilitate decision making to allow for managed wildfire use. 3) Many other facilitators such as existing collaborative relationships, personal ethic to use managed wildfire, favorable conditions, reduced exposure, minimal values at risk, agency support, cost savings, and many others also encourage use of this approach.

I would use “support” and not “ethic.” Yes I can be pedantic, without being an actual pedant.
“ethic- a set of moral principles, especially ones relating to or affirming a specified group, field, or form of conduct.”

Recommendations

Consistent terminology that better aligns with the existing 2009 Guidance should be identified, and the 2009 Guidance should be fully used. The 2009 Guidance already provides the appropriate sophistication and flexibility to respond to unplanned ignitions, both human and natural, but is not fully realized due to the barriers previously described. Once common language that adequately incorporates managed wildfire into the broader context of all wildfire management has been identified and vetted, the National Wildland Fire Coordinating Group Incident Status Summary database (ICS 209) categories for documenting and tracking wildfire should be reviewed and potentially updated to reflect this terminology. New terminology will allow for more realistic tracking, communication, and articulation of incident decision-making that highlights that wildfire response is a combination of strategy actions.

Duh. I still like FWB, for fire with benefits…

Framing should emphasize that all fires are addressed with a risk-informed, strategic approach. Expanding managed wildfire use has long-term health, safety, and risk reduction benefits. More awareness, socialization, outreach on the benefits, and communication of the complexities of fire decision making are necessary to facilitate the use of managed wildfire. Indigenous perspectives and cultural burning must be part of the conversation. Learning from success stories is invaluable for demonstrating the potential of managed wildfire to reduce future fire risk. Training programs must adapt to accommodate more nuanced framing and communication of approaches.

Leadership must share risk with fire managers and provide support, resources, and incentives for using managed wildfire. Fire managers need commitment and support to use managed wildfire from all levels of leadership and the necessary resources and incentives. Risk sharing and co-managing risk at all levels will help reduce risk aversion for individual fire managers who bear the greatest costs for the few bad outcomes. Leadership should acknowledge the reality of risk reduction, not elimination, in fire response. Leadership direction to use DSSs at all levels is also critical, otherwise using these tools often comes down to an individual’s willingness, rather than as a standard procedure.

Again, I think using “risk sharing” this way is confusing to me. Co-managing with whom exactly?- it sounds mostly internal.

The use of risk-informed, science-based DSSs before and during incidents is critical to increasing the use of managed wildfire, and these DSSs should be better integrated into land, resource, and fire management plans to fully realize the 2009 Guidance. More agile and risk-informed DSSs that deploy resources during windows of opportunity, prioritize resources in areas that have the highest probability of success, are identified through spatial pre-season fire planning, and are incorporated into land, resource, and fire management plans are critical to success. PODs are a collaborative, strategic spatial fire planning framework and DSS that pair local knowledge and expertise with advanced spatial analytics to pre-identify areas on the landscape where there is a high likelihood of containing a fire (e.g., roads, rivers, ridges). The collaborative development of PODs in the pre-season with diverse partners and across jurisdictions11 can inform fuel treatments to improve POD boundaries using strategic fuel breaks and/or as anchors for prescribed fire implementation.12 During fires, it is important to use pre-identified information and strategic approaches to prioritize resources in areas that are most likely to support safe and effective response. Using pre-identified control features that have been vetted by fire management professionals and partners can hasten situational awareness, conserve scarce resources, reduce future fire risk of high-severity wildfire, and incentivize line officers and incoming Incident Management Teams to consider indirect, “big box” strategies (i.e., managed wildfire) when it is safe and effective. Utilizing the Risk Management Assistance (RMA) Dashboard and engaging in the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) will facilitate risk-informed decisions and the development of a spatial and temporal strategy using the best available science throughout an

Point being, I agree with all the ideas in here and still have a few questions about the way the info is conveyed.

We’ve been talking about the factors that suppression folks take into account when they talk about what I’ll call for now “wildfire with benefits” since I’m not sure that everyone agrees on the appropriate expression. Mike mentioned checklists and WFDSS (pronounced Wiffids, I think, please correct), and there is also the Incident Strategic Alignment Process. There’s a story map here about ISAP that was a bit buried in the previous TSW post about the San Juan. There are some good videos in the story map about how fire managers make decisions.

Folks I’ve spoken with say that they do fire pre-planning, and they do involve the public. There also seems to be more concern on some forests than on other forests, which may relate to a more generic trust or distrust of forest leadership. I’m wondering whether this is a typical Forest Service decentralization thing, that different places have different ways of doing things, some relationships are better than others, and as Mike says “there’s no “one size fits all.” Forests may well diverge in the way they do fire planning, the extent to which it is covered in the forest plan and so on. Do fire teams also diverge in the way they approach things? It could get really confusing to the public. Then there’s communication between the teams and forest leadership, and among teams, forest leadership and communities. And communities may view risk differently than the FS.

And yet forests like the San Juan have a track record of excellence. So it can be done. How to make that happen everywhere?

Maybe a national review with recommendations would be helpful.

This is a guest post from Frank Carroll.  I think it’s a good illustration of specific concerns that people (including some TSW readers) have about a specific fire.

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I was taking a look at a more recent Taxpayers for Common report on wildfire (to be posted later) and ran across this report from 2002.  The title is Wildfire: Just the Facts.

1. During the 2002 wildfire season:

• 2.4 million acres of Forest Service and burned, in addition to 4.8 million acres of other federal, state, and private land.
• Firefighting costs reached a record-breaking $1.6 billion.
• 2,381 structures were lost.
• Over 30,000 people were involved with firefighting efforts, including firefighters and support personnel.

2. Decades of fire suppression have actually increased the risk of wildfire, especially in forests that experienced frequent low-intensity fires that cleared out undergrowth. Wildfires are a natural part of many forest ecosystems, thus some wildfires should be allowed to burn within certain limits. Human safety and the protection of property and natural resources should remain priorities.

3. Funds spent on fire preparedness directly reduce the amount spent on fire suppression. According to the Forest Service, every $1 spent on fire preparedness decreases suppression costs by $5-$7.

4. According to the General Accounting Office, the Forest Service relies on the commercial timber sale program to reduce wildfire risk and tends to concentrate on forests with high-value timber rather than those facing the greatest risk. Also, fire-risk reduction projects are judged based on the number of acres treated, leading to the treatment of the cheapest areas, as opposed to those that are at the highest risk.

I’d say that the first statement is not true anymore, the second still a topic of concern.

5. Commercial logging can increase the risk of wildfire. Logging removes large, green, fire-resistant trees leaving behind smaller fire-prone trees; opens the forest canopy which leads to drier forests that are more susceptible to fire; and leaves behind flammable materials (i.e. twigs, branches and needles) that increase the rate of fire spread.

I don’t think that this was a “fact” then.. I guess it has to do with the “can” in the bold versus the plain old statements in the rest “logging removes” not “can remove.”

6. Congress gives the Forest Service a “blank check” when it comes to firefighting and does not even try to set a realistic budget for fire suppression. Congress has always reimbursed the agency for any and all costs.

Perhaps fire borrowing came and went since 2002.

7. Fifty-six percent of all National Forests lack approved fire management plans, which were required by the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Policy. These plans outline what will and will not be done in the event of a wildfire, and the lack of such plans can actually make it harder and more expensive to fight wildfires. Because of the blank-check funding for fire suppression, the Forest Service has little incentive to try to reduce costs through the implementation of these plans.

What are these? Were they really required? Does every Forest have one now? What’s the difference between a fire management plan and a fire plan amendment?

I certainly don’t know, but some folks sent me links to this article in the Nevada Globe with that title. It’s by a reporter named Dana Tibbitts who has also written a three part series called “license to burn: wildfire as the ultimate public-private partnership.”

Now we know that different folks here have views on all sides of this issue here at TSW so this may lead to a good discussion.

Indeed, the Chief’s “Burn Back Better” letter has caused a firestorm among firefighters and Forest Service veterans nationwide.

“We ain’t seen nothing yet,” said one fire veteran in response to the letter. “The USFS is doubling down. The Chief’s claim of a ‘historic achievement of 4.3 million acres of restoration’ prioritizes rampant ‘Wildfire Use’ over a strong ‘Initial Attack’ to put the fire out from the get-go. It’s also a misappropriation of congressionally appropriated funds allocated to the agency for emergency fire suppression.” 

Last year was a reprieve,” National Wildfire Institute (NWI) sources say. “Forest maintenance is down, so acres burned will likely increase. It’s only May 22, and about two million acres have already burned. Look for about eight million acres to burn in the 2024 fire season as a strong ‘Initial Attack’ policy gives way to a ‘managed’ or ‘beneficial’ fire. If history is a guide, the West will bear the brunt.”

I couldn’t find out much about the National Wildfire Institute via Google searching. I know TSWites know more about this group, so hopefully you will provide links below.

The colossal fiascoes of the Caldor, Tamarack, and Dixie fires of 2021 are case in point. These fires were allowed to run for months, consuming almost 1.3 million acres of Sierra Nevada forest. The costs of Caldor Fire damages alone ran in the billions of dollars, not including trees and wildlife lost, or damages to 1,200 residents displaced from their homes.

Burning an average of more than six million acres a year over the last decade is now a standing order for the USFS, not only in California but across the nation. The wholesale use of “managed” or “prescribed” fire under the guise of firefighter safety, forest health, and resilience and restoration, is scarring landscapes, devastating forests, and leaving vast lifeless ecosystems with few signs of recovery.

This sounds more like an op-ed than reporting- but then that’s fairly common today.  Anyway, here’s a local fire chief with concerns:

Tahoe-Douglas Fire Chief and head of the Northern Nevada Fire Chiefs Association, Scott Lindgren said, “The latest forecast and guidance from the Chief is so unhinged from firefighting realities on the ground as to defy rational analysis or practical guidance.”

USFS Regional Foresters are deploying a new policy, calling for all fires in the Tahoe Basin to be risk-assessed and monitored by USFS Regional Foresters, who alone would determine the appropriate response to new fire ignitions.

Lindgren rejects the idea. “It’s a non-starter. If a fire in the Basin threatens my jurisdiction or community, we’re not going to wait around. We’ll hit every fire hard and direct with everything we’ve got. Managed fire is not an option. Look at Caldor and Tamarack. We need to put fires out immediately.”

“The USFS decision to allow these fires to burn is criminal,” Lindgren added. “I’m very disturbed that, by allowing these fires to burn like they did in the Tamarack Fire, they get to count those acres as ‘treated.’ These are not treated acres—they are destroyed acres!”

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When Fire Chief Lindgren testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources in 2022, he raised concerns about Chief Moore’s LOI continuing to advocate the catastrophic burn policy, even after the Caldor and Tamarack fire debacles.

“Many local fire chiefs were very upset,” Lindgren testified. “So, we wrote our own letter of intent, which we believe reflects the public’s expectations and demands of us.” Over 30 chiefs in California and Nevada sign the letter annually.

“We will aggressively attack all fires within or threatening our jurisdictions. We will hit them as fast and hard as possible when they are small. In these unprecedented conditions, we can’t afford the risk to our public, our communities, the environment, the wildlife, critical infrastructure, or our firefighters by letting these fires grow out of control. We will use every available resource and tool to keep this from happening…We will find a way to get ahead of it and stop it at all costs,” Lindgren stated.

“Why can’t the USFS take a similar stance?” Lindgren asked. “Burn Back Better isn’t working.”

The Biden-Harris administration’s plan to Burn Back Better, detailed in Confronting the Wildfire Crisis, lays out a 10-year plan to treat (code for burn) 20 million acres of National Forest System lands, 30 million acres of other Federal, State, Tribal, and private lands, and an additional 10-million-acre targeted burn. That’s a whopping 60 million acres of unauthorized, ill-conceived, unilateral burn treatments for America’s forests, rangelands, and Wildland Urban Interface communities—all in the name of so-called science, resilience and restoration.

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My understanding is that the treatments in the plan include prescribed fire, mechanical treatments, and managed fire.. does anyone know if those categories are broken out in reporting?  Last time I had to dig out the managed fire from a budget statement.

I followed the link to Lindgren’s testimony..and here he is on pay and benefits:

There has been some great work done on State and private land in the Basin. But work on the USFS land is inconsistent and sloppy. This is not the fault of the USFS Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, but more so due to lake of funding and lack of staffing. The pay and benefits for the USFS are incredibly deficient and frankly embarrassing. They have massive trouble recruiting and retaining employees. The good employees that they do have are very dedicated, but can only do so much. I have heard the promises in this year’s budget
to fix their pay and benefits, but from what I have recently heard from some of their employees, they have not seen any change. Why? They deserve to be paid what the state and local
government fire departments make. Until the pay and benefits are fixed, you won’t fix the problem. I urge you to fix their pay and benefits ASAP.

Of course, Lindgren’s testimony was in 2022; I haven’t been keeping track of whether pay and benefits (and housing) have been fixed or  not.

Right now in the wildfire space, we have many new folks entering from the political and philanthropic world. How should we welcome them gracefully to what has been historically our space? How would we like them to work with us? I myself have felt territorial from time to time; and yet, these people have far more money and political power than our own communities, so the better we work together the better off we will be. They’ve got new and different ideas from many of us in this space, and they well may be good ideas!  In some cases, they have ideas about how to deal with Climate, and to them, wildfire is one aspect of climate.  We tend to look at wildfires as something we’ve dealt with in various ways (both of thinking and of action)  at least for the last half century- within the memory of TSWites.  Clearly these different perspectives could lead to different framings and different solutions.  We have advantages in terms of knowledge and experience, they have advantages in terms of funding, access to media, and political power.  How can we best work together?

In this series of posts, we’ll take a look at some of the players, their backgrounds and interconnections. Today I’m going to lay some groundwork.

I’m assuming that the new folks have good intentions. But in political world, charitable groups (c3s and 4s) and foundations are not known for transparency. And many of the new players in wildfire space are affiliated with the D political party and/or SIPs (self-identified progressives).  Does their source of funding matter? I’d suggest it does. Not that they are bribed by it, nor that the people funding them are questionable. As the article below argues, Ds as well as Rs have every right to use so-called dark money, since that’s the way the world currently works.

I’m interested in increasing trust in government and making government better; everyone probably agrees with that.  Using dark money, by either party, does not help with that.  I understand the tendency to keep donors secret, but also what they spend their money on seems to be secret.  Lobbying for what exactly? And is anyone checking that the c3s (tax exempt) moving money to c4s are following all the rules (which seem pretty convoluted to me)?

If we were in the New Folks’ shoes, we might foresee a time that our partisanship and our goal of improving wildfire resilience might diverge. Since many fire-prone areas have R politics,  since both parties seem to be around 50% of the population of the country, and since wildfire is going to take long-term investments and coalitions, off the bat, bipartisan solutions seem like the way to go.  And sometimes partisans (on both sides) seem more interested in using issues to gain power than in actually solving real-world problems.

So I want to be very clear that my work to make these folks’ funding and goals more transparent is in the ultimate interests of all of us, to work together toward shared and supported outcomes with minimal Distracting, Expensive and Unnecessary Partisan Drama.  Other concerns include possible tendencies of the New Folks to not interact directly with those in the traditional wildfire space, which could lead to unworkable policy ideas and/or reinventing the wheel.  Hopefully, we can encourage them to work directly with those currently in this space, scientists, practitioners, county and state governments, and so on.

So basically I’m not doing this to pick on Ds- I’m not asking them to do anything different from what I’d ask R’s. It just happens that they are moving in to wildfire space.

I first noticed a few weeks ago that some of the funding for our our new folks (and some newly going to traditional folks in the wildfire space) is indirectly from sources identified with “dark money.” In 2021, Rachel Cohen wrote an interesting article in The American Prospect on dark money and Ds. According to Wikipedia (not always a trusted source) The American Prospect is a magazine from the liberal and SIP perspective. The article has a great explanation of some of the complex context for the lack of transparency, and the concerns that SNPs themselves have with it.  The whole piece is worth a read.

WITH UNION MEMBERSHIP RAPIDLY DECLINING, progressives struggle to counteract the massive power and influence of the corporate lobby. To fill the gap, they turned to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, of which there are two main kinds, both named for the section of the federal tax code under which they are regulated. 501(c)(3)s, also known as public charities, range from symphonies to the Boy Scouts to (full disclosure) The American Prospect. They can engage only in limited amounts of lobbying, and cannot donate to political campaigns. Financial contributions to c3s also yield donors a tax deduction. 501(c)(4)s—the social welfare groups—provide no tax deduction for contributions, but they can endorse candidates and engage in unlimited lobbying, so long as this doesn’t comprise the majority of their activities. Importantly, they need not disclose their donors.

One doesn’t have to squint to see why dark-money groups are attractive to the rich. The vehicles allow them to donate and avoid the negative attention that might come with disclosing their identities, like protests outside their home or bad press. Anonymity also helps them avoid threats of violence or actual harm, defenders of the status quo like to say. The Philanthropy Roundtable, a conservative advocacy group for charitable giving, says shielding donors from public scrutiny is necessary for “philanthropic freedom.”

While some issues—particularly abortion access—have a real record of harm for supporters, most advocacy groups hide today behind harassment of abortion activists to rationalize their own lack of transparency. Other groups cynically cite a Supreme Court decision from six decades ago that unanimously ordered Alabama to stop accessing the NAACP’s membership list, concluding that doing so interfered with members’ right to freely associate. However, a billionaire donating to a political nonprofit to run anonymous ads against Medicare expansion should not be likened to the legitimate threats Black Americans faced in the South during the civil rights movement.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the lead sponsor of the DISCLOSE Act, says he has no problem with rich donors who want to, say, give discreetly to their alma mater. “There are some good reasons for anonymity, maybe you want to give a big donation to your university and want to avoid other people coming to ask you for money—there’s nothing really wrong with that,” Whitehouse said. “But it’s different when you’re trying to exert political pressure over others and refuse to stand up for your views.”

I’m totally with Whitehouse on that.  At the same time, he is one of the supporters of WEG.. who.. don’t disclose their donors.

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DOES IT REALLY MATTER if liberal political advocacy groups and campaigns disclose their donors, if the house is on fire?

Dorfman thinks that transparency is “helpful to the cause” and that groups should disclose “a great deal of information,” but acknowledged that sometimes donors just don’t want to do that. “I think each organization in the progressive space needs to make that call, on their own within the limits of the law,” he said.

One challenge of hiding donors is that it makes it more difficult for the public to assess which organizations authentically speak for the communities they purport to, and which are just pet projects of the rich or schemes by companies.

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These advocacy groups, and their donors in turn, exert real influence on the priorities of politicians, leading them too often in less populist directions. This isn’t new, and the Democratic Party in particular has been making itself more easily swayed by the whims of the wealthy ever since the early 1980s.

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Political scientists Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol have noted that the structure of these elite donor consortia have potential to influence politics in uniquely powerful ways, even beyond similar partisan super PACs and single-issue advocacy groups.

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My bolds:

The suggestion that wealthy donors on the left never advocate for their economic self-interest doesn’t hold much water, either. The rapid demise of the ambitious and extremely popular redistributive tax proposals in the Democrats’ Build Back Better Act suggests who still has the ear of those in power.

“This stuff is so opaque and no one is holding anyone accountable,” said one staffer whose employer works with the venture philanthropy funds. “The organizational landscape of civic and political organizations is just totally being transformed as inequality grows and rich people get uber rich and we are finding more creative ways to distribute their money.”

The staffer, who works in progressive movement building, says the landscape is becoming “extremely donor-centric” in a way that no longer even resembles the industrial-titan philanthropic milieu they once knew. “We’re entering this new era of capitalism dominated by finance, tech, and insurance. The money is different,” they said. “We’ve linked our fates here to new powers within capitalism, and [how] that money is moved, aggregated, pooled, and filters down is really different than even several years ago, and it scares me a little bit.”

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AS PROGRESSIVE GROUPS GROW more dependent on rich donors who’d like to keep their contributions private, liberals find themselves contorting into awkward positions to justify the status quo, insisting groups that are clearly affiliated with the Democratic Party are not, in fact, partisan. Political nonprofits tend to insist they’re independent and simply “issue oriented”—a framing that’s practically dubious but legally necessary to keep their nonprofit status.

This strained logic was on display this past year when The New York Times profiled obscure Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has become one of the top funders of left-leaning organizations, donating hundreds of millions of dollars since 2016 both to entities that distribute funds to other progressive political advocacy groups, and directly to organizations like the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank where Wyss sits on the board. While Wyss does not donate directly to candidates or PACs, the groups benefiting from Wyss’s contributions work to help Democrats and defeat Republicans. Representatives for the billionaire insisted to the Times that his money was not “spent on political campaigning” and was merely “bolster[ing] social welfare programs in the United States.”

With a heavily weakened and embattled IRS, partisan c4s are so confident today that they will face no punishment for engaging too much in political activity that even Majority Forward, a c4 founded in 2015 and affiliated with Senate Democrats, told the Federal Election Commission that it did not receive contributions in 2018 earmarked for political purposes and thus refused to disclose its donors, despite spending more than $45 million that cycle boosting Democrats.

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As to Wyss.. I wrote about him on TSW here (Swiss dude with outsized policy influence).

More recently, I ran across an article from last fall by a fellow in Maine about Wyss:

Wyss is hardly a newcomer to influencing Maine politics — even if he is, as a Swiss foreign national, prohibited under federal law from voting in America or donating to American political campaigns.

Through his $2.7 billion Wyss Foundation, his $232 million Berger Action Fund, the Democracy Alliance’s Democracy Fund, and the Arabella Advisors network of dark money, Wyss has joined other progressive billionaires like George Soros, S. Donald Sussman, and Pierre Omidyar in financing Democratic politicians and progressive activists, in Maine and nationally.

And one in February in Politico:

After the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Berger Action Fund’s next largest beneficiary was the Fund for a Better Future, a dark money group that supports causes like abortion rights, social justice immigration and public health, and is behind the green group Climate Power, which has supported Democratic climate priorities like the Inflation Reduction Act. Fund for a Better Future received $19.8 million from Berger Action Fund in fiscal 2022, down from $20.2 million the year prior.

More about Fund for a Better Future in wildfire space in a later post.