Fire and Fuels

FYI..to all TSW folks..

To all Region 6 employees,

Many of you have probably seen the news and social media coverage about one of our employees arrested for leading a prescribed fire that slopped over onto private lands. There’s a lot of context and additional information about this incident that would be inappropriate to share publicly at this time, but none of that information revolves around the work conducted during the prescribed burn, the professionalism of our employees, partners, and contractors, or how the burn sloped over onto private land.

While I can’t go into specifics around the arrest of the burn boss, I want each of you to know that all times he, and the entire team that engaged on the Starr prescribed fire, had, and continues to have, our full support.

Communication and coordination between all levels of the Forest Service and the department were effectively in place within hours of this incident. This included local, regional, and national level leadership, Fire and Aviation Management leaders, legal counsel, and law enforcement – which reflects our commitment to this important work and our promise to share in the accountability for any and all outcomes.

I spoke with the Burn Boss last night and expressed my support for him and the actions he took in leading the prescribed burn. In addition, I let him know it’s my expectation that the Forest Service will continue to support him throughout any legal actions.

No one person or crew is in this work on their own. I need you to know that I am with you now and into the future, whatever that future may look like.

I trust and respect our firefighters and employees who carry out the complex and dynamic mission of applying fire treatments to the landscape. They are well-trained, well-informed, and well-equipped for the mission.

Prescribed fire is critical to our responsibility to improve the health of our natural landscapes and the safety of our communities, and we are committed to continuing this work together. Thank you all for staying the course.

Glenn Casamassa

Regional Forester

High Country News and many others have written stories on the burn boss arrest, including a variety of views on the importance of it.

Fire scientists and prescribed fire practitioners say the reported arrest is unprecedented and shocking. “This is a really big deal,” said Christopher Adlam, a regional fire specialist for Oregon State University’s fire extension program. possible outcomes “Practitioners fear a chilling effect on future operations.”

Others say the incident shouldn’t hurt burning regionally. “It’s an isolated example, and I would not anticipate that it would have a big impact on work that’s going on across the West,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension and the director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.

Just today I was planning a trip and there is a prescribed burn planned in the vicinity posted on Twitter.  Responses to the post on Twitter included weather maps that showed winds coming up later today, questioning the wisdom of the burn plan (oops, a fire weather warning just came up on my screen). Since this is in the area of the North Fork escaped prescribed fire, residents tend to be especially sensitive to potential misapplications.

And if you’re interested.. check out the Hotshot Wakeup podcast today for what he has heard from the ground and context. I like how he imagines being on both sides.. I think we all could use more of this imagining.

Personally I see it the burn boss arrest as one more Malheurian outlier.

But what do we know about peoples’ responses to escaped prescribed burns?

Journalists: I think there’s a story here about what social scientists have learned about how people in communities respond to escaped prescribed burns.

I bet there are other social scientists who have studied this, and please add any suggested references in the comments.  I know Catrin Edgeley at NAU and Trvis Paveglio at U of Idaho and others have done much work in this and related areas.

However, specifically on attitudes about prescribed fire escapes, I did find this interesting piece in Katie McGrath Novak’s recent master’s thesis at CSU on the Elk Fire, an escaped prescribed burn in Colorado.

All of the outreach recipients interviewed expressed continued support for forest restoration projects in their community following the Elk Fire. Most said that their perceptions of prescribed fire had not changed at all as a result of the escape; a few said that, while still supportive of prescribed fire, in the future they would be more interested in learning the qualifications of those implementing burns. Their continued support was often attributed to a sense that wildfire risk in a landscape where fuel loads had not been reduced outweighed the risk of a prescribed fire escaping. Many outreach recipients also attributed the continued support to existing relationships with outreach providers. Several recipients said that they were always aware of the risk associated with prescribed fire, but that they “trusted” the implementers to do their best. At least five of the recipients were planning forest restoration projects before Elk Fire, including two who were planning prescribed burns. All five were still moving forward with the projects at the time of their interviews.

The greatest challenge outreach recipients faced was information accessibility during the fire. During the Elk Fire, most recipients lost electricity; with many also living in an area with no cell service, this made it difficult to get any information. Others expressed that there was not enough information available about the prescribed fire before it escaped or while it was an active wildfire.

It seems like it’s all about trust. And some places are better at it than others, based on personalities and histories through time; and any way you slice it, some places are just…outliers.

McGrath Novak also did a literature review.

While it is important to keep in mind that people utilize multiple sources throughout each stage of their learning process (Ardoin et al. 2013), interactive communication may be the most telling factor in whether an information source is useful and trustworthy (McCaffrey and Olsen 2012). Earned over time through personal relationships and establishing credibility, trust is essential for successful fire management in the WUI (McDaniel 2014). Trust plays a key role in minimizing disorder and facilitating compromise in natural resources decision-making; lack of trust has been cited as a key barrier to implementing management activities (Davenport et al. 2006).

While government agencies are generally perceived as trustworthy information sources, one study found that many WUI residents were unsatisfied with USFS outreach efforts related to
prescribed fire (Paveglio et al. 2009). Non-federal partners often hold stronger relationships with landowners and possess more sophisticated outreach techniques than the USFS alone, and  collaborative groups can establish greater credibility within the community. Defined by Crona and Parker (2012) as “organizations linking diverse actors or groups through some form of strategic bridging process and that are more or less distinct from the parties they work to link”, bridging organizations have been explored as a way to connect stakeholders, managers, and decision-makers in the face of problems too large for a single entity to solve. Some key qualities of successful bridging organizations are their ability to create a politically neutral environment and promote knowledge utilization (Crona and Parker 2012). Established bridging organizations can help work through the challenges of necessary cross-boundary land management collaborations (Cyphers and Schultz 2018). It is important that the outreach entities within a collaborative effort establish consistent, jargon-free language to minimize mixed messages and misunderstandings (McDaniel 2014, Wright 2007).

A literature review by Dupéy and Smith (2018) found that fire professionals are one of the most understudied groups in the social science literature on fire. They note that filling this gap in the literature would provide a better understanding of the perceptions, strategies, and goals of those on the “front line” of fire management. Additionally, despite a growing emphasis in prescribed fire literature on the need for implementation of broad management goals to be tailored to local conditions and stakeholders (Toman et al. 2006, Schindler and Neburka 1997, McCaffrey and Olsen 2012), few empirical studies exist analyzing the factors that go into a successful customization.

Please share your own experiences and any social science studies.

Many thanks to Jim Furnish for posting this piece and generating much good discussion and observations.  But there are many different claims within it, and so I think each is worthy of its own post and focused discussion. I’m hoping that posting them individually will lead to a more in-depth discussion.

But I’d like to start with framing the problem. I think later we’ll be able to reflect back and see how specific observations or research may be relevant or not based on each person’s framing of the issue.

I’ve written before about some people arguing that the issue is burning houses. At the time, (10 years ago) I said

In this case, the difference in framing is as simple as it’s not about the structures- it’s about the fact that people don’t want fire running through their communities. It is about all kinds of community infrastructure, stop signs and power poles, landscaping, fences, gardens, trees and benches in parks, people and pets and livestock having safe exits from encroaching fires. It is about firefighter safety and about conditions for different suppression tactics. That’s why fire breaks of some kinds around communities (not just structures) will always be popular in the real world. 

If we don’t agree on framing, then we are unlikely to agree on what science is relevant, and then the discussion devolves to “science-slinging.” But if we talk about our different framings it might help us understand each other. Each person can frame the issue their own way.. there is no right or wrong.  Policy actors strive to get their framings incorporated into policy, but that is a factor of political power, not morality or “science.”

My framing would be “how best can we work together protect our communities, watersheds, wildlife and so on from negative impacts of wildfires?” What have we learned from suppression experts, fuels experts, wildfire scientists, social scientists, communities’ and practitioners’ and Indigenous experiences and knowledge  that can be used to do better?

At the same time, others can have different framings and end up with similar policy options. That’s always encouraging when it happens. Here’s an example.

There’s a new group called Megafire Action with a mission to “end the megafire crisis within a decade.” That sounds very different from my framing.

Here are their

GOALS FOR 2023

Enact policy to treat millions of acres of hazardous fuels in high risk areas
Pathway to achieve 50M acres treated by 2032

Address structural barriers to progress
Fix Forest Service workforce problems
Streamline burdensome regulations
Support sustainable forest product markets

Double the federal investment in wildfire science innovation
Harness the full potential of the scientific community

I’d go along generally with those options.. but the policy devil is always in the details.

What is your framing of the “wildfire management” issue?

This is a guest post by Jim Furnish.

Commentary: Counteracting Wildfire Misinformation, by Jones et al 2022: Response

I recently read and reflected on Commentary, a piece from a well-intentioned group of authors, in which they attempt to bring clarity to efforts to identify solutions and responses to the
increasing impact on wildfires on homes, communities and wild lands. They appropriately titled their contribution as commentary, as I find it long on opinion and short on facts. Any time one
sets out to discern what constitutes “misinformation” they should have facts on their side, lest they be just one more voice suggesting they alone are credible, as is the case here.

First, let me lay out incontrovertible truths and observations. Climate change is upon us and increasing wildfire activity in both human communities and large swaths of forest, particularly the American West. Rising temperatures and prolonged drought have lengthened fire seasons and, along with strong wind events, have led to many large fires that are too often becoming destructive to human communities. Costs of fire suppression have risen dramatically, with little correlation to reduced acres burned. Nor have we experienced reduced risk to communities and development near and within forests, in spite of increasing investment. Fire science has made dramatic gains in recent decades, yet forest fires present an enigma: how can we bend the curve of escalating cost and losses, for both natural resources and urbanized areas?

The authors of Jones et al suggest that part of the problem is misinformation, and ask us for their faith that they alone are the arbiters of what is true and what is working. Let me begin by citing the large Jasper Fire, in SD’s Black Hills National Forest, circa 2000. Jasper Fire burned almost 90,000 acres of intensively managed Ponderosa pine forest, about 10 percent of the entire national forest. Human caused, it was ignited on a hot, dry, windy July day – quite typical of weather in peak burning periods nowadays. Suppression efforts were immediate and used every tool in the agency’s tool box… to no avail.

Notably, the burned terrain exemplifies what we consider the best way to fire proof a forest. This mature forest of small sawtimber had been previously thinned to create an open stand
intended to limit the likelihood of a crown fire. Yet, the fire crowned anyway and raced across the land at great speed, defying control efforts. Much of the area remains barren 20 years later,
while the Forest Service slowly replants the area.

I cite this example, because it represents precisely what agencies posit as the solution to our current crisis: 1) aggressively reduce fuel loading through forest thinning on a massive scale
of tens of millions of acres (at a cost of several $billion), while trying to 2) come up with sensible answers about how to utilize woody material that has little or no economic value; and 3)
rapidly expanding the use of prescribed fire to reduce fire severity. These solutions are predicated on the highly unlikely (less than 1%) probability that fire will occur exactly where
preemptive treatments occurred before their benefits expire. These treatments are not durable over time and space, and only work if weather conditions are favorable, and fire fighters are
present to extinguish the blaze.

How does this relate to misinformation? To be blunt, the ineffectiveness of current practices has led many scientists to suggest, based on peer reviewed science and field research as
opposed to modeling, that agency “fire dogma” needs to be revisited. The call for a true paradigm shift is occurring both within and outside the agency. Several themes and truths have
emerged, for example:
1) Fires burn in ways that do not “destroy”, but rather reset and restore forests that evolved with fire in ways that enhance biodiversity.
2) Forest carbon does not “go up in smoke” – careful study shows that more than 90 percent remains in dead and live trees, as well as soil, because only the fine material burned.
3) The biggest trees in the forest are the most likely to survive fire, and thinning efforts that remove mature and older trees are counter-productive. We are seeing more cumulative fire
mortality in thinned forests, than in natural forests that burn.
4) Thinning and other vegetation removal increases carbon losses more than fire itself and, if scaled up, would release substantial amounts of carbon at a time when we must do all we
can to keep carbon in our forests.
5) If reducing home loss is our goal, experts are telling us that the condition of vegetation more than 60 feet from the home has nothing to do with the ignitability or likelihood a home will
burn. The best most durable investments to reduce home loss are focused on hardening homes in at-risk communities using proven fire wise technology.
6) Large, wind-driven fires defy suppression efforts and many costly techniques simply waste money and do more damage. Weather changes douse big fires, people do not.
Do the authors of the Commentary believe these scientific findings are misinformation necessitating “debunking and prebunking” based on their authors “collective experience in wildfire science.” Boiled down, their commentary suggests that they know best what constitutes valid information; that they are the self-appointed gatekeepers of fire science and truth.

My charitable judgment is that their belief that thinning forests to reduce fire severity may be effective sometimes at accomplishing that goal – if weather is favorable, when we don’t
have extreme wind and drought, and we have adequate firefighters on hand. Overall, however, this strategy is not working out well for human communities – as we have been at it for over
thirty years, and we are seeing increasing loses. While careful thinning can work in favorable conditions, the authors cannot and do not claim that their recommendations for careful thinning
are always faithfully implemented by the line officers in federal agencies. They cannot and do not say that careful forest management is occurring on private industrial lands that dominate
significant swaths of at-risk forestland in the Western United States, nor do they suggest that private industrial forests incur less fire losses. In fact, studies have shown that fires are often
worse on private forests. They spend no time identifying industry misinformation, which are often grossly oversimplified and pushed out to the public through well-funded campaigns.

The authors are dismissive of anything that questions their position, and uncomfortable with answering the hard questions about the costs and challenges of scale regarding landscape
vegetation management. No credible business plan exists for scaling up what they propose based on a full accounting of costs and operational challenges, and that is free from confirmation bias .
They also fail to acknowledge the scientific findings that efforts to control vegetation and fire severity in wet, western Cascade forests, for example, are unequivocally useless over space and
time because the forests quickly grow back.

I encourage authors to welcome contrary opinion and emerging science that does not conform to their collective experience. The nasty truth is that forest fires defy simple explanations and solutions. They ought to embrace paradox, not demand fealty. They ought to ask the tough questions, not claim that there are no questions to ask.

But one thing is quite clear – what’s been done and being done hasn’t worked well, and we are not close to pulling ourselves through the knothole of now. We need new thinking and new approaches that see fire management in context with climate change, forest carbon sequestration and storage, biodiversity, clean water and good air quality. New voices are as worthy of careful consideration as those authoring the subject commentary.

References

CITATIONS

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Jim Furnish
Deputy Chief, USDA Forest Service (Ret.)
Author: Toward A Natural Forest (Oregon St Univ Press 2015)
Gila, New Mexico

I found the above video on the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project website while looking for a photos to illustrate the below Esquire article.. it relates to prescribed fire as practiced. And I liked the background music.

Here’s a story in Esquire by a reporter who covers many things. One thing I’ve noticed about the Coastal Gaze is that stories usually involve (at least peripherally) partisan politics and climate change. I don’t know if those bring in more clicks, or it’s just a habit. Certainly hiring lots of climate reporters, as did the WaPo, would incline people to frame stories through a climate lens.

In this article, two individuals were interviewed from Southern Cal and, perhaps not surprisingly, have a different take from what we usually hear in these discussions.

This from Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA:

The area encompassing both Southern California and Baja in Mexico have what’s known as chaparral ecosystems: dry soil, hot weather, and short shrubs. But these two regions’ fire lives have played out very differently. “Right across the border, there are very similar chaparral ecosystems,” Pincetl said, but “that chaparral has not had the benefit of fire suppression, because the Mexicans simply can’t afford it. And it continues to exhibit this low intensity fire pattern, which does not kill the chaparral, but there are unsuppressed fires that occur on a relatively regular basis. And people don’t die. The houses aren’t burned. There’s not huge conflagrations. So how do we get back to that kind of chaparral, is the question.”

It seems to me that people could still die and houses still burn if they are in the way of low level fires.. at least that seems to be the case in grasslands.  Does anyone know more about this?

Miller is a AAAS fellow at USC. I think this is probably the first time that private property has been discussed as an obstacle to forest management..

Here Miller pointed towards a whole bunch of modern obstacles to forest management, be it prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, or “managed wildfires” (a naturally ignited fire that burns out in an unpopulated area). One issue is the fairly basic concept of private property. It’s one thing for the government to organize prescribed burns on land it owns. But of California’s 104 million total acres, according to a study Miller co-authored, 45 million—or 43 percent—are owned by the federal government. Local governments below the state level own another 27 percent, and the remaining 30 percent belongs to the state of California and private entities. The state administers just 2.2 percent of forested land, but CAL FIRE, a state agency, provides wildfire protection to private lands as well.

It’s one thing for the state to enter private property to respond to a natural disaster, an intervention that enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. But once you get into preventative behavior like mechanical thinning and prescribed burns—“fuel treatments”—it becomes a different issue. “Are they trained in how to conduct a prescribed burn?” asks Miller, introducing some elements of the calculus for a private citizen. “Are they concerned about it escaping and causing a liability issue? Are they going to go bankrupt because it set their neighbor’s property on fire?” She added that “a tiny, tiny sliver, far less than 1%, of prescribed burns actually get out of control,” but the possibility is still in the equation. There’s a larger kind of eminent domain question at work around whether the government has the authority to insist that private landowners manage their forests in a certain way based on the public interest in having fewer catastrophic fires. California seems to be looking for a way around this, taking a page out of Florida’s book to change the incentive structure for private landowners—who, by the way, include big lumber companies as well as ranchers or private landowner.

Anyway, the article isn’t paywalled and is an interesting take or at least an angle.  There”s also the “people shouldn’t live there” argument.

Beyond people’s opinions about these fuel treatment techniques, though, we have a more fundamental problem. Put simply, there are Americans living in places no human beings should realistically live. It’s true down on the Gulf Coast on the flood plains, it’s true in water-starved areas of the Southwest, it’s true in some basement apartments in Queens, and it’s true of fire-prone spots throughout the wider West. One basic fact of life in a climate-adjusted world is that people are going to be on the move, but it’s no easy thing to convince somebody they have to. And to make them? It’s a major political battle to institute any rules at all, a contest of competing interests that, as it always does in America, comes down to power and who has it.

I don’t really understand this.. it sounds like people move places because they like to live there.  Especially with work from home.  If it gets unpleasant enough, overcrowded or too expensive or whatever, they will move elsewhere.  Why exactly do we need to convince people “they have to”? What’s that about?