Fire and Fuels

Thanks to Wildfire Today for posting this!  Here’s a link to the Chief’s announcement.

FWIW this seems eminently sensible to me.  Here are some excerpts:

Today, because of the current extreme wildfire risk conditions in the field, I am initiating a pause on prescribed fire operations on National Forest System lands while we conduct a 90-day review of protocols, decision support tools and practices ahead of planned operations this fall.  …

In 99.84 percent of cases, prescribed fires go as planned. In rare circumstances, conditions change, and prescribed burns move outside the planned project area and become wildfires.

The review I am announcing today will task representatives from across the wildland fire and research community with conducting the national review and evaluating the prescribed fire program, from the best available science to on-the-ground implementation. Lessons learned and any resulting program improvements will be in place prior to resuming prescribed burning.   ..

The pause I am announcing today will have minimal impact on these objectives in the short- and long-term since the agency conducts more than 90 percent of its prescribed burn operations between September and May.

My broader question is that the Forest Service is not the only group that does prescribed burning and has them escape (see the North Fork Fire conducted by Colorado or the Bastrop Fire in Texas).  That may be why people (particularly those impacted by these fires) get an impression that it might be more than 99.84 percent, or that it can be a problem.  The distinctions that make so much difference to us in terms of “who is in charge”  may not make a difference at all in the mind of the public when they think about prescribed burns.

Personally I know evacuees from the North Fork Fire (not fire experts) who are very suspicious of burning at times when they themselves judge it to be too dangerous.

How can we increase public confidence in prescribed fire when the organizational responsibilities and requirements are so diffuse and unknown? NGO’s, States, Feds, private landowners and so on?  I am SO not a fan of national standards, but FAA does give the public confidence in the safety of air travel.

I don’t think it would be out of line to do a similar review on Wildfire With Resource Benefits, although it seems to me like it might have best been done over the winter.

Interesting article from Colorado Public Radio on Colorado and Denver metro-area fires, the difficulties of implementing state-wide regulations, how CWPPs aren’t doing the job, and how other states may have better policies. I’d be interested in hearing from folks in other states. There’s quite a bit of interest in the story, and I only include a brief excerpt below.

I also wonder if a lack of coordination among the different government levels (fed, state, country) and zones of influence (sheriff, fire, health) are problems elsewhere, and how they have been successfully dealt with. While building codes are important for structure loss, evacuation plans and testing are an even greater concern for those in relatively crowded forested areas. Does anyone do this (evacuation testing?). I know there are models, but…

Other states are better prepared for wildfire
In November 2021, Lisa McBee moved into her new home in Conifer. McBee, who moved to Colorado from Houston, knew there was some wildfire risk in her new neighborhood, but she did not realize how extreme it was.

McBee did not know her home was at risk for a simple reason: during the sale process, no one told her. In Colorado, Realtors are not required to disclose wildfire risk to properties during the sales process. She says she instead found out through discussions on Nextdoor, a neighborhood messaging app, where she also learned about resources through her local fire department. She later scheduled a FireWise inspection to learn how to make her home more resilient, which recommended she clear out vegetation on the property.

“Nobody wants to cut down 50 trees on their property, but then I also want to save my home,” said McBee.

Still, she said she would have appreciated more information about risk before moving in. “Would I have not moved here?” said McBee. “I don’t know. I mean, I love my house and I love our view and it’s beautiful, but, I don’t know if I would’ve not moved there because of that.”

After she finishes her property, McBee hopes to help her neighbors make their properties safer.

“The house next door, it’s like a thick forest to get to their house,” she said. “When we finish ours, I’d be happy to go over and help them, but you don’t know people’s circumstances — whether they can’t physically do it themselves, they don’t have the time to do it, they can’t afford to do it.”

Other states have also found answers to some of the obstacles to wildfire safety. In California, homeowners selling homes are required to bring their home up to code by making repairs or clearing defensible space prior to the sale. The home’s wildfire risk is also disclosed to the person purchasing the property, meaning a realtor wouldn’t risk losing a sale by telling potential buyers about wildfire risk if other realtors were not disclosing that information. Buyers like McBee in Conifer would always have wildfire risk information before the sale closed.

In Oregon and California, state agencies have mapped wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interfaces where homes and businesses meet forests and grasslands. Both states have also adopted statewide building codes in areas at risk of wildfire, understanding that even one home with flammable roofing or overgrown land in a community could spread flames to other properties.

“California and Oregon have been much more forward-thinking on this, in terms of implementing mandates and regulatory measures, than Colorado has,” said Brenkert-Smith.

In the meantime, volunteers like Latham are still working to get residents prepared.

“We need to do something, you know, we can’t just sit on our hands and wait for it to happen,” said Latham. “But it shouldn’t be that way. It really shouldn’t.”

It appears that Peter Williams and I are coasting along the stream of the Zeitgeist as I saw two stories this morning (from Nick Smith, thank you!) specifically on building trust around prescribed fire.

This is based on the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, a prescribed burn that got out of control and merged with the Calf Canyon Fire. Here’s one story.

“There are a few pieces of legislation that the members of the delegation are working on,” he said. They specifically aim to change how the federal agency decides an area is safe for a prescribed burn.

“Who allowed that fire to take place and everything, that I’ve been told, is that when that decision was made to do the prescribed burn, that based on the model, it met the parameters, it was that it was safe—well, clearly, it wasn’t!”” Sen. Luján said. “One thing that doesn’t make any sense to me is we have a federal agency who’s responsible for weather predictions NOAA, why wouldn’t we just use their weather predictions to be able to make decisions like this as well, that’s just one example.”

Here’s an editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It sounds like they are calling for increased transparency around procedures.

In 2000, the devastating Cerro Grande Fire near Los Alamos began as prescribed burn, not by the Forest Service, but by the National Park Service. That fire, ignited May 4, 2000, and burned more than 43,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of homes.

Twenty-two years later, it’s déjà vu.

In mid-March, a prescribed burn for the Gallinas Watershed in the Santa Fe National Forest near Las Vegas, N.M., was delayed because of snow on the ground. On April 6, the burn, named Las Dispenas Prescribed Burn, went ahead, with disastrous consequences.

A report from the Las Vegas Optic on April 6 was matter-of-fact: “A prescribed burn in the Las Dispensas treatment area, in the Santa Fe National Forest north of Las Vegas turned into a wildfire Wednesday afternoon, the Optic has learned.” At that time, the fire was estimated at 100-plus acres.

The decisions that led to the go-ahead for the burn must be examined in detail. A red-flag warning — meaning ideal conditions for wildland fire ignition — was in effect for much of the region that day. Conditions at the burn launch, though, were predicted to be calmer, fire managers have said.

The exact language: “forecasted weather conditions were within parameters for the prescribed burn.”

The obvious question: Just what were those parameters? Because when unexpected, erratic winds kicked up in the afternoon, the fire went rogue. Once the winds blew and sparks dispersed, the Hermits Peak Fire was born. Which begs another question: Did the U.S. Forest Service have adequate crews on hand in case the fire got out of hand?

***********

To that end, Lujan Grisham is insisting federal prescribed burn guidelines need reviewing. That process should begin as soon as possible. This debate is crucial to Santa Fe. We’re not burning — yet — but any of the prescribed burns planned for the watershed here could go wrong. The city has a definite interest in making fire choices less risky.

I’m not sure what models were used, but that reminded me of this earlier story from the Albuquerque Journal:

Modeling tools

Rod Linn, leader of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s atmospheric modeling and weapons phenomenology team, studies how fire interacts with the atmosphere.

“The buoyancy that comes from the heating of the fire feeds back on the wind field around the fire, and redirects it and changes the way it then heats the unburned fuel and spreads,” Linn said.

LANL worked with the Forest Service to develop the FIRETEC tool, which models the shape and growth of wildland fires and prescribed burns.

FIRETEC runs on supercomputers and is primarily used for researching past fire behavior.

A newer LANL modeling tool, QUIC-Fire, can run on a laptop and is more accessible for crews planning fires or predicting wildfire growth.

The tool helps agencies design ignition patterns and predict where smoke will flow.

The lab was not involved in helping plan the prescribed burn that turned into the Hermits Peak Fire.

*************

And perhaps an even broader question, what causes people to trust models?  Would be interesting to do a survey of fire behavior analysts.  Which perhaps circles back to what makes people trust climate models? Are the factors the same for micro and macro models? And what about the role of institutions (Forest Service, IPCC)?

I’d be interested in what current employees think of this fairly extensive BuzzFeed article on fire staffing. Tagline:

US Forest Service deputy chief Jaelith Hall-Rivera’s statements on staffing have sparked confusion among lawmakers and outrage from wildland firefighters, who say she overpromised what they can deliver.

Clearly we have an outrage shortage in our communities that needs to be remedied as soon as possible…

Based on the article, the FS and other agencies have serious problems with staffing. I don’t think attacking the Deputy Chief for being not having the details of ongoing hiring events is really going to help; but maybe I’m missing something.

As a result, large swaths of the drought-stricken Southwest are now facing a critical shortage of much-needed experienced personnel. Plus, some regions have been unable to share resources with others during emergencies as is normally the case, Forest Service employees told BuzzFeed News.

“This is worse than other years. We are getting crushed on the hiring front,” the official told BuzzFeed News. “Unless there’s a major system overhaul, our land management agencies’ fire programs could be extinct in the next 10 to 20 years.”

In Washington, fire crews have more than 50 midlevel positions open and will be unable to staff eight engines due to a lack of firefighters, according to meeting notes from a fire management officer call on April 11. Rachel Granberg, who works at the Forest Service’s Okanogan-Wenatchee station, said 21% of her unit is unstaffed, and for an unprecedented second year in a row, they cannot use an engine.

“That’s huge. Engines bring water. In plain terms, if we can’t bring water, it’s very hard to keep small fires small,” she laid out. “And that’s alarming.”

Clearly the FS has problems. If I had interviewed the FS folks, I would have asked “if you were the FS, what would you do differently?” “this year?” “over time?”

Many thanks to Anonymous for sending a link to this paper. I wrote to the primary author and (quickly, thank you, Jacob!) received a copy, attached here.

What the paper does is correlate observations of high severity fire with landownership patters. When we talk about top-down versus bottom-up research, this is definitely a top-down. And for many of us bottom-up types, it can be great fun to hypothesize the mechanisms for these correlations, whether our own observations support these findings or not, compare with similar research (although the authors did that) and possibly dream up studies that have not been done to test the hypotheses.

So, bottom line, more acres of high severity fire on private industrial than private non-industrial and USG land (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM combined).
I can’t say anything about the technical details of their analysis, but they have a number of caveats in the discussion and conclusions section on page 5.

What would you do with this paper?

Based on the places I’ve formerly lived and worked, I’d want to look at each fire and the industrial forest landowners’ practices. My first thought was perhaps the private folks ended up with the most productive (able to grow high biomass) of the area. That would explain the fires reaching into nearby landowners’ properties, because nearby properties would have the same high biomass.

It also seems a bit counterintuitive.. in many places I’ve worked, jackstrawed dead trees are on the forest floor, conceivably leading to high severity impacts, while industrial landowners tend to remove dead trees, so you’d think there might be less fuel, at least on the ground.

In my experience, industrial landowners vary widely in their practices (think Basin and Range (NE Calif) versus the Coast Range). Some may be barely distinguishable from FS practices. So I think if you looked at each landowners’ practices, and looked at the ground where the high severity fire occurred, you might be able to explain for each landowner/fire combination, based on, I guess, four factors I can think of:

For each fire:

1. Did the industrial landowners (ILs) tend to have a certain location (topographical/soil) differences?
2. Did the ILs tend to have different age classes or other historical effects?
3. What IL practices may have influenced fire intensity?
4. Was the IL forest in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Other ideas?

It seems to me that building up from each fire, although labor intensive, might yield a great deal more information. Including how much sense it makes to combine over fires, ecoregions and industrial landowners. For a mere $300k, I’d do it; I see lots of fun interviews and field trips. Anyway, I know there are many Californians in TSW ranks and I’m curious what you think.

Here’s is the letter. I’m going to focus on the WFWB (Wild Fire With Benefits) and prescribed fire section, since that seemed to cause the most controversy.

As we work to address immediate threats of uncharacteristic wildfire, it is important we continue to take proactive steps to reduce future risks of damaging wildfires when and where opportunities present themselves to employ fire in the right place, at the right time, and for the right reasons. In addition to mechanical treatments, extensive science supports using fire on the landscape and recognizes it as an important tool to reduce risk and create resilient landscapes at the necessary scale. I recognize that can be controversial and cause concern. Therefore, we must have a clear understanding of when, where, how and under what conditions we use this tool.

We do not have a “let it burn” policy. The Forest Service’s policy is that every fire receives a strategic, risk-based response, commensurate with the threats and opportunities, and uses the full spectrum of management actions, that consider fire and fuel conditions, weather, values at risk, and resources available and that is in alignment with the applicable Land and Resource Management Plan. Line officers approve decisions on strategies and Incident Commanders implement those through tactics in line with the conditions they are dealing with on each incident. We know the dynamic wildland fire environment requires the use of multiple suppression strategies on any incident; however, this year we will more clearly articulate how and when we specifically use fire for resource benefit. The Red Book will be updated to require that during National and/or Regional Preparedness Levels 4 and 5, when difficult trade-off decisions must be made in how to deploy scarce resources most effectively, Regional Forester approval will be required to use this fire management strategy.

This is commensurate with Red Book prescribed fire direction during these periods. I am committed to an ongoing dialogue with our partners to ensure safe and effective risk management principles are followed to protect communities, keep our firefighters safe, and produce results that mitigate current and future risks from wildfire. Working closely with our partners to engage in robust dialogue before and during incidents and effective pre-planning has been shown time and again to be a best practice that yields better outcomes when wildfires happen. It is my expectation that all line officers and Fire leadership will fully utilize pre-season engagement planning with their state, county, and local governments, community leaders, and partners, leveraging the best science available, including the Potential Operational Delineation (PODS) program led by Research and Development. When PODS are in place, agency administrators should ensure that incident management teams use them to inform suppression strategies; when they are not, every effort should be made to develop them real-time as part of strategic operations.

****

I’ve been talking with people on both “sides” of the (now I can call it FRB, good-bye WFWB!) issue.  That is the “just stop it, this is not the time and it’s too dangerous with unprecedented fire behavior” school and the “trust us, we’ve got this” school. By implication (perhaps?) from this letter, prescribed fire is not included in this new acronymn, so we’re talking about managing wildfires for resource benefits.  Which seems enormously complex because there are other concerns, like safety and resource availability that also could look like FRB. I think that’s probably focused on making it clear what is FRB and the other reasons for choosing strategies and tactics.  So it seems like this approach of better communication and more clarity is an important step to building the necessary social license.

It also seems to me that if I were a person living in a fire-prone community (I am, but not surrounded by federal land), pre-season engagement would be vital. I also like the check that running it through the RF’s office provides.  Some people might worry that when a team is called in from say, Region 8, and the Ranger and FMO are new to the unit, line officers possibly less experienced with fire, or the current person is from somewhere else on detail, that something could slip through the cracks.  These are life and death worries, and raising them to a level where the RF can round up all the most knowledgeable people, at least would give me more confidence in the decision.

There is another more wonky concern, that I think Jon articulated, that if you are going to plan activities that will affect the environment, perhaps there should be NEPA involved.  Yes, there was in some cases with Forest Plans, and certainly with prescribed fire projects, but not necessarily talking about PODs or FRB. Since FRB covered 642K acres last year, and it pre-planned, it seems like some NEPA and public involvement couldn’t hurt.  It seems to me also that there is a narrow NEPA ridgeline of emergency and planning that the FS is navigating.  Which is not to say that 10 year EIS’s or plan revisions would be the solution.  There are lots of smart NEPA people within the agency who could figure out something useful and manageable, if left to their own devices. IMHO.

Anyway, the Fire People are great at formal lessons learned.. perhaps with the FS emphasis on pre-season engagement practices, next year there will be a report of interest on best practices.

I also thought this was interesting..

This year in fire camps you will see QR codes you can easily access on mobile phone to participate in a ThoughtExchange that will inquire into the lived experiences of wildland firefighters as it relates to harassment and discrimination in everyday work experiences. We need to hear from firefighters directly to learn and then correct harmful cultural norms. Together, we can create an environment where all are treated with dignity and respect.

Interesting description of these efforts here. You can click on either image (above and below) and they will be large enough to read (at least on some devices).

Here are the considerations that led to those choices:

These considerations are on page 26.  I think the social justice discussion would have been interesting to sit in on.  Thinking about the Colorado Front Range, for example, there are certainly poor people in cities that could be influenced by smoke.  There are more people who could be harmed in cities, for sure, by their very nature of being concentrated human populations.  And, of course, many parts of the Front Range have exceedingly high income folks in the forests or the edge (think Boulder) and the less-well-off tend to spread to the grasslands east. But if we’re thinking cumulative impacts of smoke as air pollution, it would be worse where there is already pollution problems (like the Denver Metro area).

Nevertheless,  most of the landscapes selected were not near large cities.  Anyway, not that I think that there is a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do social justice, as it’s quite complex, it would be interesting to know more of the details.  I also wonder whether the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture think about it the same way.  Does anyone know?

A California Conservation Corps crew works on mitigating small diameter trees and branches off Spring Creek Road atop the Ridge in the Sherwood Corridor to help provide a safe exit to Highway 101 in case Sherwood Road is impassible on Feb. 6, 2022.Mathew Caine/Willits Weekly

Thanks to one of my fave reporters, Sammy Roth of the LA Times, for retweeting this story by Scott Rodd of Capital Public Radio.  California seems to be at the forefront of so much in terms of wildfire and climate change, and is such a gigantic force, it’s always interesting to see what they’re up to. I’d be particularly interested in any experiences TSW readers have had with this process. Note the link with our week’s theme of acronyms.

Some excerpts below, but the whole thing is worth reading.

Area residents, who had to evacuate before, are worried about the slow progress.

“It makes me very angry, very cynical, [and] frustrated,” said Brooktrails retiree Luis Celaya, 85. “This is something that is so important and the potential is so high that a fire could happen.”

A monthslong investigation by CapRadio and The California Newsroom found that projects across the state, like the one in Brooktrails, are encountering a bureaucratic bottleneck before shovels can even break ground. The state’s byzantine environmental approval process, required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is slowing projects from Mendocino County to the Sierra Nevada to the Central Coast. The landmark environmental law was intended to protect ecologically and environmentally sensitive landscapes. But foresters worry that the glacial pace of environmental approvals under CEQA may lead to a much worse outcome — extreme wildfires obliterating these areas.

To combat this, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration launched a program more than two years ago that promised to break the logjam, by fast-tracking environmental reviews. But that program, called the California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP), hasn’t led to the completion of a single project so far. This stands in stark contrast to projections by the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which anticipated CalVTP would lead to 45,000 acres of completed work in its first year.

Keith Rutledge, project manager for Sherwood Firewise Communities in Brooktrails, told CapRadio and The California Newsroom that he had never heard of CalVTP. The nonprofit instead used the established system to satisfy CEQA to clear the first few miles of road, which took over a year. When they later asked a Cal Fire representative about using CalVTP on the rest of the project, the representative discouraged them from using the new program, cautioning it would be even more burdensome, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

In interviews, foresters and fire prevention experts around the state said they still don’t fully understand how the program is supposed to work. Others were turned off by the large amount of unfamiliar paperwork required under the program. CalVTP’s official workflow template, published on the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection’s website, includes a dizzying decision tree of acronyms.

Fire prevention project managers who’ve tried to use the program have faced unforeseen hurdles. For example, the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association wanted to use a single CalVTP application for a series of controlled burns across Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties. The 10 prescribed burn sites would help protect homes and ecologically sensitive habitats, including freshwater wetlands. The threat of fire isn’t hypothetical in this area — just two years ago, the 48,000-acre River Fire burned within 15 miles of one project site.

But the projects straddle two Cal Fire units, according to Nadia Hamey, a forester and environmental consultant working with the burn association. She said each unit wanted a separate CalVTP application for the proposed burns in their area. Completing two versions of the new, unfamiliar paperwork proved too burdensome.

So the burn association decided to use the traditional environmental review process. That required 10 separate project applications. As of this winter, two burns had been completed, with the rest moving through the development and approval process.

………………

And of course, litigation-induced uncertainty..

Although two years had passed since Newsom formally launched the program, Kerstein told lawmakers that “it’s very early days” for CalVTP.

There are other potential complications. A lawsuit brought by two groups opposed to CalVTP’s expedited environmental review — the California Chaparral Institute and the Endangered Habitats League — could invalidate CalVTP completely or introduce more burdensome and timely hoops for forest managers to jump through, according to a memo from the Board of Forestry.

While the lawsuit isn’t preventing any projects from moving forward right now, the board memo cautions that project managers should consider the “uncertainty” posed by the litigation before using CalVTP.

***************

The agency did not provide current figures on the number of project acres approved through CalVTP. In December, it told CapRadio and The California Newsroom that the program had approved 28,000 acres.

“This is not enough by any stretch of the imagination,” said Char Miller, professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College, who has monitored the development of CalVTP. He says California has millions of acres in desperate need of forest management and fuel reduction.

**********************

I think we mostly agree with Miller’s observation.

TSW readers may remember that Miller also wrote in 2018 in an op-ed with Chad Hanson in the LA Times and other outlets.

The science is clear that the most effective way to protect homes from wildfire is to make homes themselves more fire-safe, using fire-resistant roofing and siding, installing ember-proof vents and exterior sprinklers, and maintaining “defensible space” within 60 to 100 feet of individual homes by reducing grasses, shrubs and small trees immediately adjacent to houses. Vegetation management beyond 100 feet from homes provides no additional protection. Subsidizing logging in remote forests won’t protect us; we need to live with fire, the way we do with earthquakes.

Here’s Matthew’s  TSW post about that op-ed and associated comments.

*********************

Anyway, if you were the State, what would you do to fix this?