Fire and Fuels

Here’s a new paper on PODs. It’s Open Access, so yay! Check it out, lots of interesting stuff.

I’m a big fan of PODs’n’PLANNING, that is, I think the FS should put a time-out on plan revisions (after all, now we don’t know where the Mature and Old Growth potential rule will go, which could upend all that) and just do EIS’s for PODs and other fire management related decisions requiring NEPA, including POD maintenance through time.  PODs’n’PLANNING would necessarily take into account the resource values (including old growth) that would be desirable to protect from wildfires.  Perhaps by putting into the “wildfire management strategies” box we will get away from the old “fuel treatments don’t work; just protect houses” discussion.  Note that the protection of water and ecosystem function  are included in Fig. 6 below.  A girl (even an old lady) can dream…

Through a combination of conceptual strategic frameworks and real-world examples, we have demonstrated the potential value of PODs to support wildfire preparedness and response as well as fuels mitigation and forest restoration. A key argument here is that PODs can provide rich opportunities for innovation in both backward-looking evaluative and forward-looking anticipatory frameworks, by leveraging place-based collaboration, science-driven analytics, and risk management principles. We argue that PODs help us prepare for the future by facilitating more informed and adaptive wildfire management strategies and help us learn from the past by providing a logical platform for nuanced performance measurement clearly linked to locally defined fire management objectives. Key aspects of the PODs concept include (1) instilling boundary spanning and anticipatory lenses into wildfire planning efforts; (2) stressing monitoring, learning, and improvement of best practices; (3) co-producing knowledge and infusing analytics with expert knowledge; and (4) delineating fire management and analysis units in ways that are relevant to fire containment operations by linking features like roads, water bodies, and fuel type transitions.

Three salient areas of opportunity for PODs highlighted in this paper are supporting climate-smart forest and fire management and planning, informing more agile and adaptive allocation of suppression resources, and enabling risk-informed performance measurement. These efforts can be synergistic, as the presence of robust plans and decision support can for example support timely identification and communication of incident resource capacity needs, which in turn can support effective response, which in turn will be captured in next-generation performance measures. Similarly, effective assessment and planning based on risks and control opportunity can inform development of fuel break networks and strategic containment units that facilitate both intentional restoration of beneficial wildland fire as well as containment efforts to slow the spread of undesired fire. In sum, enhanced performance of the wildland fire system is premised in large part on enhancements in planning capacity and capability at local levels, and we believe PODs can play an important role in this space.

PODs are by no means a panacea and real challenges remain. The pace and scale of environmental, social, and organizational change is leading to ever more extreme wildfire behavior and consequences. Within this environment, we will likely continue to experience increased negative outcomes even where planned mitigation efforts and response strategies are well organized and based on the best available science. The PODs planning framework is no exception. We outline some potential pitfalls, broken down by thematic area with a description of potential failure modes (Table 7). Some of the themes relate to social aspects of the collaborative process planning process, and lessons learned from previous studies have found that a dedicated and coordinated effort is essential (Greiner et al. 2020; Caggiano 2019) and recommend following the best principles for collaborative engagement and stakeholder involvement to ensure PODs are designed effectively (Talley et al. 2016). Other themes relate to the dynamic nature of the problem and highlight how outdated assessments, plans, and mental models can diminish the value of PODs. The current wildfire crisis will likely result in substantial change to our wildfire management approach including the need to engage new partners, take advantage of emerging technologies, and explore critical resource needs.

You can click on this screenshot to make it larger.

Here’s the link… seems to me that much learning could occur and be shared via this Dashboard.   Rumor has it that Region 5 (California) wants to be included. Seems like BLM would be a natural as well. My understanding is that FTEM itself is interagency, although at this point the Dashboard is only used by Region 6 of the Forest Service.

2021 was a year of both some West-side fires and the Bootleg as well as some Washington fires.
There is a new feature added called “Complexity Level” that takes into account the number of treatments on the site (say thinning, prescribed fire versus one entry).

A few thoughts.. I looked at the Little Bend Creek fire on the Umpqua and noticed many treatments occurred on relatively few acres (7 to 35 ish). It’s hard to imagine those sizes having much impact on “contributing to the management of the fire” but I suppose it’s possible. It’s interesting to look at the treatments also (e.g., would you expect a precommercial thin to have an impact on wildfire? what does that stand look like?) And of course, it’s always interesting to look at places you’re familiar with and the photos.  Please share your own observations in the comments.

As always, feedback to the designers is appreciated. Scroll down on “how to interact with this dashboard” and there’s a link where you can enter questions, feedback and suggestions, and technical issues.

If you’ll recall, last week the New York Times ran its first article that pointed out that Chad Hanson’s views are not in the scientific (not to speak of practitioner) mainstream.

Well it looks like Saturday they posted another op-ed from… Chad Hanson (!) and an interesting character named Michael Dorsey. Here’s Dorsey’s bio from the Club of Rome  and one from InfluenceWatch. Apparently his affiliation with ASU is funded by the Walton foundation and doesn’t seem to have much to do with trees, or forests, or wildfire.

Of course, everyone’s entitled to their opinions. Hopefully the Times will accept another op-ed that described mainstream views. Pretty much it’s the same stuff that we have come to expect, but I’ll focus on a few new twists..

There’s the new “Trump caused logging in Yosemite” narrative. Here’s how this one goes..

Yet federal land agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, are under significant political pressure to conduct commercial logging operations that benefit timber companies but tend to exacerbate overall fire severity. In December 2018, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Forest Service and the Interior Department to prioritize and expand commercial logging operations on public lands, targeting mature and old trees and forests with chain saws and bulldozers.

Yosemite National Park subsequently began an unprecedented commercial logging program, with the park’s superintendent, Cicely Muldoon, agreeing in August 2021 to initiate projects on over 2,000 acres of forest in the Yosemite Valley area under the auspices of thinning, with no prior public notice, comment opportunity or environmental analysis of impacts.

I find this to be a fascinating argument: “significant political pressure to conduct commercial logging operations that benefit timber companies” -where would that come from in a D Administration with a majority D Congress? It’s Trump’s fault. But if the project was (as the link says) an August 2021 decision, how can Trump be responsible? Have D’s themselves (suddenly) become beholden to corporate logging interests?

Ah, the Ninth Circuit.. where financial interests might create bias, but ideological orientations do not. OK then.

In fact, a large and growing body of scientific research and evidence shows that these logging practices are making things worse. Last fall over 200 scientists and ecologists, including us, warned the Biden administration and Congress that logging activities such as commercial thinning reduce the cooling shade of the forest canopy and change a forest’s microclimate in ways that tend to increase wildfire intensity.

A quick look at the signatories did not show many scientists I see as actively publishing on wildfire and fuels.

Worryingly, the Biden administration announced in January a proposal to spend $50 billion of taxpayer money to log as much as 50 million acres of U.S. forests over the next decade, again using the wildfire management narrative as a justification. Under this plan, which congressional backers are attempting to enact in piecemeal fashion in different legislative packages — including a wildfire and drought package passed by the House on Friday and the new climate and tax deal in the Senate — most of the logging would occur on public forests, including national forests and national parks.

The president and Congress must instead increase forest protections from logging to reduce carbon emissions and allow intact forests to absorb more of the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. A failure to do so will put countless species at risk, worsen global warming and increase threats of wildfire to vulnerable towns. Current logging subsidies should be redirected into programs to directly help communities become fire safe.

Such policies could have prevented the loss of over 100 homes in the Oak fire. After all, fires occur in forests, as they have done for millenniums. Assuming otherwise is like living at the coast and expecting no hurricanes. We need to help communities prepare.

In responding to a comment by Jim Furnish, I found this fascinating paper on the fire history of the southern US and Native American burning. Quite a bit of interesting info. I had no idea that bison migrated into the area after 1500.. I actually didn’t know bison had been there at all.

Some historical texts mention fire without commenting on the purpose or whether it was intentionally set or not.
White (1600, cited in Russell 1983), for example, saw from his ship rising smoke, when he was searching for the colony on Roanoke. Others describe habitats that may have been fire-maintained including large treeless zones, canebrakes, park-like forests, and pastures occupied by grazing bison. The fact that fallow fields grew into forests within decades after Indians abandoned an area (Day 1953; Maxwell 1910) and Indians’ lack of metal tools to clear forests (Bass 2002) support the proposition that Native Americans used fire to clear forests. Vast open areas or grasslands in western Virginia and along the Virginia-North Carolina line were described by Beverly (1947) and Lederer (1891, cited in Maxwell 1910), who traveled through different parts of Virginia in 1669 and 1670. In 1705, Beverly (1947) described the hundreds of acres of grasslands on the Virginia Piedmont.
In the 1720s Mark Catesby noted that in the Carolinas there were large meadows with overgrown grass (Barden 1997). In Ashley County, Arkansas survey records from the General Land Office note the presence of grasslands (Bragg 2003). Several sources, including George Washington’s writings from 1752 (Brown 2000), mention large grassy areas in the Shenandoah Valley and conclude that Indians used fire (Fallam 1998; Fontaine 1998; Maxwell 1910). The presence of the bison in the Southeast provides indirect evidence of wide-spread grassland resulting from Indian burning practices. The bison migrated into the region sometime after 1500 AD. Their eastward movement was probably a combination of the open areas created by anthropogenic burning and the lack of predation after the decrease of the Indian population through European diseases (DeVivo 1991; Bass 2002).

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The exclusion of fires from southern landscapes caused changes in vegetation. When fires became less common, forests began to regenerate or the composition of existing forests began to change. The Appalachian hardwood forests recovered in the almost complete absence of fire, which had detrimental effects on fire-tolerant oak and fire-dependent pine stands (Brose et al. 2001a). The establishment of oaks (Q. rubra, Q. alba) had formerly been facilitated by Native American fire—possibly over thousands of years—and by logging, burning and the chestnut blight from the time of European settlement until the beginning of the 20th century.
However, during the time of fire suppression these sites have been invaded by late-succession species. Abrams et al. (1995) studied an old growth white pine (P. strobus) and mixed oak
community in southern West Virginia and came to the conclusion that fire and other fairly frequent disturbances maintained this forest over the past 300 years. After the exclusion
of fire, oak recruitment ceased in favor of maple (mainly Acer rubrum), beech (Fagus grandifolia) and hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). Today, sites that have been cut over since 1930
are often dominated by maples (Acer rubrum, A. saccharum), yellow poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) and hickories (Carya spp.). Only on drier or nutrient-poor sites do oaks still regen-
erate successfully (Lorimer 1993).

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And from Norm Christensen at Duke.

Analysis of soil charcoal samples demonstrated that fires became more frequent about 1,000 years ago. This coincides with the appearance of Mississippian Tradition Native Americans, who used fire to clear underbrush and improve habitat for hunting, Christensen said.

Fires became less frequent at the site about 250 years ago, following the demise of the Mississippian people and the arrival of European settlers, whose preferred tools for clearing land were the axe and saw, rather than the use of fire. Active fire suppression policies and increased landscape fragmentation during the last 75 years have further reduced fire frequency in the region, a trend reflected in the analysis of samples from the study site.

The relative absence of fire over the past 250 years has altered forest composition and structure significantly, Christensen said.

“The vegetation we see today in the region is very different from what was there thousands or even hundreds of years ago,” he noted. “Early explorers and settlers often described well-spaced woodlands with open grassy understories indicative of high-frequency, low-intensity fires, and a prevalence of fire-adapted species like oak, hickory and chestnut, with pitch pines and other (low-moisture) species on ridgetops. Today, it’s become more mesic – we find more species typical of moist ecosystems. They’ve moved out of the lower-elevation streamsides and coves, up the hillsides and onto the ridges.”

Aside from any inherent historic and scientific interest, knowing more about pre-settlement fire regimes in the region may help forest managers today understand the likely responses of species to the increased use of prescribed fire for understory fuel management, Christensen said.

However, he cautioned that because of widespread changes that have occurred in the forests as a result of centuries of fire suppression and other human activities, as well as climatic changes, “prescribed burns may or may not behave similarly to fires that occurred in the past. Fires today likely would burn hotter and more intensely than fires did in the past.

“Also, although history tells us what could be restored, it doesn’t tell us what should be restored,” he added. “That depends on which species, habitats and ecosystem services we wish to conserve.“

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I so agree with Norm’s last sentence.

Here’s a press release.

The commission will prepare a report with policy recommendations and submit them to Congress within a year of its first in-person meeting in August. A virtual introductory call is scheduled for this month. The Departments of Agriculture, the Interior and FEMA will provide support and resources to assist the commission with coordination and facilitation of their duties.

The commission’s work will build on existing interagency federal efforts such as the Wildland Fire Leadership Council and the White House Wildfire Resilience Interagency Working Group and will continue to pursue a whole-of-government approach to wildfire risk reduction and resilience. It’s creating comes at an important time as shifting development patterns, land and fire management decisions, and climate change have turned fire “seasons” into fire “years” in which increasingly destructive fires are exceeding available federal firefighting resources.

The roster is here.

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From Sharon:

Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today has some thoughts on the new Wildfire Commission appointees.

Bill is interested in people with on-the-ground experience as firefighters, he found one but thinks there are probably others. Not to wax all epistemological here, but what does it mean to know about things?  It seems that perhaps “knowing” in this case is often “writing about” but not direct experience.  When mechanisms need to be set in motion to do things, it seems to me that all things need to be considered at all levels.  Otherwise we writers, politicians and the vast array of internet-enabled pontificators can ramble on about things that are fundamentally undoable, or miss obvious things that screw up our best-laid plans.  How best to ensure that they don’t “gang aft agley“?  Considering more voices from all places. Hopefully that will happen somewhere in the process, perhaps an open public online time for ground-truthing.

A government official who is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue said the makeup of the commission “Has been close hold between fire leadership and intergovernmental affairs. Need to know basis; tighter than budget issues or executive orders.”

The members have their work cut out for them, already up to seven months late on mileposts. Their appointments were to be made no more than 60 days after the date the legislation became law, which works out to January 14, 2022. Their initial meeting was to be held within 30 days after all members have been appointed — no later than February 13, 2022. They are to meet at least once every 30 days, in person or remotely and will serve “without compensation” but can be reimbursed for travel expenses and per diem.

The Hotshot Wakeup Person (HWP) also has some thoughts about the Commission on this podcast at 28:56.  He has more concerns that whatever they come up with will be implemented than I do.  It seems to be there is plenty of politics between the Commission coming up with ideas and the Congress implementing them.

One of the questions is about “streamlining environmental reviews” or some such thing and I didn’t know anyone I recognize on this on the commission.

I used to count the number of females on commissions (HWP has noticed that females seem to be overrepresented in this group) and so on, but lately have been counting the locations of folks- I’m interested in representation of those impacted, which for wildfires tends to be in the western US, and I’d go so far as to say the “dry forest” part of that west (not, say, the Bay Area, for the most part).  Here’s what I came up with:

11 DC federal folks.

Az 2

CA 10

CO 5

DC 1

ID 1

MA 1

MT 2

NC 2

NM 1

NV 1

OK 1

OR 3

OK 1

WA 3

Others can check my counting, but it looks like a possible DC/CA show.

Points I like:  Of the two scientists, one is a social scientist.

Points I am not keen about:

*Forestry and forest industry as a category.  Forestry is a profession, forest industry is a business.  It’s kind of like having a category that says “doctors and health care providers” and having hospital businesspeople on the list. Of course, I think getting someone from the ITC is good, but still.

*Forest Stewardship and Reforestation
Sam Cook, Executive Director of Forest Assets & Vice President, NC State University Natural Resources Foundation, NC
Brian Kittler, Senior Director of Forest Restoration, American Forests, OR

From my experience, reforesting dry forests is a tough learning and tech transfer effort which we slowly accomplished in the 80’s at least in the drier parts of Region 6. Oh, and you also need nurseries. I would have selected someone with at least some time in the trenches of doing it (perhaps echoing Bill Gabbert and HWP re:firefighting). I don’t know why they picked these particular folks but it feels more like assuaging interests than developing policy and practices coordinated from the ground to the sky.  Which is of course what some of us have pointed out about current policies.. lack of integration and cohesion across governments and communities.

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Given all that, I know there are good people on the panel, and I hope they reach out somehow to the rest of us for ideas and comments.

I thought this NPR story was interesting.
Here’s the headline
Ecologists say federal wildfire plans are dangerously out of step with climate change

As far as I know from talking to a variety of folks, most fire ecologists and fire experts would agree with this claim:
Claim 1. Prescribed fire mostly works (especially in the East and South), but the FS needs to up its game with improved technology, better practices, less pressure on individuals for acres, more and better trained people, and so on.

Claim. 2. This is due to some combination of previous fire suppression, more housing, so that escapes are more dangerous (and perhaps have fewer suppression options), availability of suppression forces in the case of unwanted expansion, and climate change- all these factors in some unknown combination, making a new and increasingly combustible (so to speak) mix of conditions.

Please add your own thoughts on claim 1 or 2, or your own claims, in the comments.

On May 20, USFS Chief Randy Moore halted all so-called prescribed fires on its land for a 90-day safety review. The New Mexico fire has burned more than 340,000 acres and is still not fully contained.

But many fire ecologists and forestry experts are concerned that this “pause” is only worsening the wildfire risk. Critics say it’s merely masking the agency’s dangerously incremental, outdated and problematic approach to intentional burns and fire mitigation, a policy that has failed to adapt to climate change and megadrought.

Of course, many other ones, not cited in the story would not agree.  But logically, I don’t get this.. how much PB would the FS be doing IN THE SUMMER in the west. Let’s see, 90 days from May 20 is August 20. And the FS was having trouble hiring enough firefighters to handle wildfire this summer. So what possible PBs would be happening through that time?

Well, in the scientists’ letter, they say:

Today, we ask you to consider re-instating prescribed burning in areas on US National Forests that are not in extreme drought during the 90-day pause. For example, Regions 8 and 9 are not currently experiencing drought, have a long history of success stories with prescribed fire, and show strong need for growing season burning. The recent NOAA drought forecast for the US shows that much of the area of Regions 8 and Region 9 will be amenable to continued burning actions. Moreover, allowing FS scientists to collect data on prescribed burns conducted by non-federal partners during this period would likewise maintain a national leadership stance in the study of prescribed fire. Once the national review is complete and it is deemed safe to do so, we ask that you consider re-instating prescribed burning in the American Southwest and the western US, even if this occurs before the end of the 90-day pause.

It seems like they’re mostly talking about the Midwest and the South, which of course is not where people are concerned about accumulations leading to fire risk (and who, arguably do PB more often, with fewer undesirable results). So that statement does make sense (allow prescribed burning to continue) but not for the reason given (excessive fuel accumulations in the West).

But perhaps the 90 days is giving the FS a chance to “improve its dangerous… etc. approach.” Or set in motion longer term efforts to improve the approach. Why wouldn’t we think that’s what they’re doing?

Hurteau and others are concerned that the Forest Service — and other fire agencies — continue to fail to put climate change at the fore of decision-making, despite mounting scientific evidence and the agency’s own stated goals about reducing dangerously high levels of built-up fuel in western forests.

But what does it mean in practice to put “climate change at the fore?” Clearly one possibility is..conditions are different due to CC and we don’t exactly understand them, so let’s be very very careful with PB, more careful than we were before. But it doesn’t sound like the the scientists are arguing that in their letter.

Numerous sections of the report underscore that point, including noting that prescribed fire officials failed to realize it was set “under much drier conditions than were recognized.”

But was that a “climate change” thing, or a “measurements that the FS didn’t do correctly at the site” kind of thing (my reading of the report was the latter)? And if climate change doesn’t translate to something measurable (fuel moisture or air temp or humidity) at the site, are we missing measuring something really important?

For those reasons and others, experts worry that the agency’s prescribed fire “pause” is little more than political window dressing that tapes over those ongoing, glaring gaps between rhetoric and reality. Hurteau notes that just about all of the peer reviewed research on the issue as well as the Forest Service’s own plans for reducing hazardous forest fuels call for a historic scaling-up of prescribed burns.

“The question remains: Is the agency ready to make changes to the point that it will create conditions where the personnel, their personnel can do that effectively and that they’re well supported and well-resourced in order to accomplish those goals?”

Well, that is one question. Another question is whether the FS can build the coalitions with governments and other institutions to make that happen, including social license for that practice.
Anyway, just by reading this article, you might get the impression:

(1) The FS is really messed up.
(2) But experts feel that they should keep burning while they figure out how not to be messed up.

Which is not the impression I get from the actual scientists’ letter. I’m feeling quite sympathetic to reporters who try to navigate this..

And of course (predictably) a solution from me..

I think we’ve probably put zillions of dollars into modeling and technology development (say drones for sensing temperatures in burn piles, and models of varying degrees of accuracy and timeliness) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a major gap between what is funded versus what is practical. So one suggestion would be to have a prescribed fire practitioner/researcher panel jointly determine key questions and approaches to any research purported to be helpful to PB.

Yes, we could move everyone out of the Interior West, I suppose, and hope that climate change would bow out long enough to return to “natural” fire regimes denaturalized by climate change, but that doesn’t seem very realistic. Other folks are dealing with making their communities fire resilient and working on evacuation.

Those of us who observed the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, noticed what seemed to be a tension between current urban/suburban planning ideas (densification and taking public transportation) and dealing with wildfire (houses further apart and individual vehicles for evacuation). Meanwhile people like living where they do. This extensive article from the Colorado Springs Gazette talks about efforts to plan better for wildfire evacuations and also touches upon mitigation treatments. It’s interesting to me that fuel treatments don’t seem to be controversial here.. for one thing timber industry doesn’t make a good enemy, and most of these projects are on private forest land.

There’s quite a bit of interest in this article. I think you can get it without a paywall here, but if not, please let me know.  You might also be able to get it here.  It’s interesting as we’ve been discussing climate change and prescribed fires, how this reporter characterizes the “equilibrium”.

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Whereas a metric like the Forest Service’s “burn probability” estimates the likelihood that an area will burn in a wildfire, but does so without regard to where people might be affected, “exposure” shows where wildfire risk collides with communities.

Within the Forest Service’s five-state Rocky Mountain Region, Evergreen has the highest exposure risk. The second- and third-highest-risk areas in the region are the planning zones that occupy the rest of the Front Range between Evergreen and Colorado Springs. In El Paso County, the high-risk areas include Manitou Springs, the Ridgecrest area northeast of Garden of the Gods, and the Broadmoor neighborhood. Although their populations are smaller, some pockets closer to Boulder and Fort Collins also show high risk, around Estes Park and Cripple Creek and north of Lyons.

Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, combined with geospatial roadway data from Open Street Maps, shows that more than 35,000 residents — not accounting for seasonal or weekend visitors — in the state’s highest exposure area, in Evergreen, have only a few possible evacuation routes, putting the number of people per lanes of egress routes near or above the number in Paradise, Calif., where residents burned in their cars trying to evacuate, depending on the particulars of a future fire’s location and behavior. Estimates that include more of the outlying areas put the possible evacuation total as high as 60,000 people for the area.

A computer program designed to simulate evacuations, called the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET), operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia, similarly shows the Evergreen area has the longest evacuation time for wildfire-prone parts of the state.

Roxborough Park and Woodland Park are not far behind Evergreen, either for computer-simulated evacuation times or the simpler people-per-lane of evacuation rates ratio.

“There’s a heightened awareness of the wildfire danger here,” Chuck Newby, a resident of South Evergreen who was recently elected to the Elk Creek Fire Board in the southwest portion of the larger Evergreen area.

Conversations he’s had with other residents, he said, are more and more often about evacuations.

“After seeing the Camp Fire, East Troublesome, Marshall, these major fires,” Newby said, “you have people asking what would happen? What would happen if this happened here? What would I do?”

The buzz, flutter and gurgle of chainsaws pierced an otherwise calm June afternoon, emanating from the home of Rich Mancuso, in the Echo Hills neighborhood near the center of Evergreen.

Mancuso, who grew up in Staten Island, N.Y., and moved to Evergreen in 1980, watched as the crew from Lam Tree Services strategically felled trees on his property and prepared them for disposal.

Mancuso said he had his property’s vegetation thinned in order to keep his homeowners’ insurance, after his agent told him about the company’s new approach to proper fire mitigation in the high-risk area.

“They told us to do it,” Mancuso said, “or they would cancel our policy.”

The science behind mitigating fire-prone vegetation echoes the natural cycle of wildland fire and puts a mirror to the now broadly panned fire-suppression strategy of forest management deployed in the West for more than a century.

Without human intervention, wildfires burn through forests, destroying saplings but sparing the oldest and largest trees, which has the multiple effects of re-nutrifying the soil, clearing space around and strengthening the bark of the forests’ largest trees, and helping new seeds take root. The sparser forest left behind is healthier overall, and less susceptible to larger fires that spread through the forest canopy instead of closer to the ground.

In the American West, however, the longstanding forest management that favored rapid fire suppression led to forests that are denser than they would be naturally, making fires more intense and harder to fight.

Forest management practices have begun to move toward allowing the natural fire cycle to play out, but it’s estimated that millions of acres of forests in the western U.S. would need to see small-scale fires that naturally restore forest health, in order to get back to equilibrium — a dangerous prospect, given the proclivity of the forests to burn more intensely, because of the misguided policies of the past.

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And a quote from FS retiree Bernie Weingardt

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The Evergreen Fire Protection District’s wildfire protection plan, updated in 2020, includes a roadway analysis that estimates “non-survivable” evacuation routes are spread throughout the area, meaning the roads risk putting drivers adjacent to 8-foot or larger flames, based on the fuels along the roads.

Bernie Weingardt, an Evergreen resident who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 37 years, said the report told him and other residents what they had long suspected.

“They ran the simulations on it, and in Evergreen, you see it will bottleneck really fast,” Weingardt said. “Just a normal day out here, with everyday traffic, you have cars backed up at the main intersections. So the small roads feeding into the main arteries, they’ll end up gridlocked, with traffic backed up into the neighborhoods.”

The plan goes on to show where traffic-pattern analysis suggests congestion could form, based on the roadway capacity and number of possible evacuees.

“If high congestion and non-survivable roadway are in the same place,” the plan explains, “there is a high risk to life safety.”

The plan’s introduction nods to the most prominent example of such conditions, when the Camp fire devastated Paradise, Calif.: “Failed communication, poor evacuation routes, and unmitigated vegetation were all contributing factors in the 83 casualties that took place in November 2018.”