Fire and Fuels

Fuel Treatments and Protecting Estes Park
One of the arguments against fuel treatments is basically that they are bad investments; 1. they don’t work, or 2. they do work, but not long enough to do any good without repeated applications, and 3. fires are unlikely to run into them (was it “only 1%” of areas are burned per year?). And yet.. we hear repeatedly of them actually working, usually in the sense of giving suppression folks some kind of an advantage. Also, if for example over 600K acres burned in Colorado in one year, you’d think that somewhere in the footprint of those acres have been some fuel treatments.

Firefighters on the Cameron Peak Fire tasked with handling the portion of the East Troublesome Fire threatening Estes Park did some serious firefighting Saturday, stopping the fire before it could spread into the wildland urban interface. They used existing fuel treatment areas where the vegetation had been thinned or removed, as an anchor from which to conduct a firing operation to widen the buffer between the fire and the community.

Paul Delmerico, the Operations Section Chief, Saturday night:

The fuels treatments helped significantly. Those fuels treatments are what gave us a really good defensive start to our day today when we saw that. It gave us something to work off of and to build off of.

The fire made a run just north of Moraine Park. Our firefighters picked up that [fuel treatment] and did a firing operation and held it just north of Moraine Park and then we had a couple of hand crews in there today and we picked that up with direct hand line. We were able to go up and over the ridge and back down and tie it in with existing road systems.

Our firefighters out there are doing a heck of a job. We had a really good day today, considering the fuel conditions and the weather conditions.

Are Size of Fires and Lack of Capacity Related?

From this post.

Wildland fire resources are scarce this time of the year with many crews losing their funding in September and October. Of the 113 Interagency Hotshot Crews in the U.S., only about 35 are still funded and available for fighting fire. In two weeks that number drops to around 13 according to projections in a September 30, 2020 planning document compiled by an Area Command Team (ACT).

There are also good comments on possible solutions.

As I was reading the Inciweb reports for some of the Colorado fires last week, it appeared that they were unable to get resources they had ordered because they were busy on other fires. It seems like that could have an impact on firefighting strategies and tactics, and ultimately acreage.

Colorado has three very large fires at the present moment- the Cameron Peak (207K acres) and the East Troublesome (170K) (at the time I checked Inciweb for this pot) with some of the Mullen fire in Wyoming also in Colorado (total 177K). According to Inciweb, “Forest closures are in place for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests. Rocky Mountain National Park has also issued closure order. There is a area closure on the Bureau of Land Management – Kremmling Field Office lands.” Cold weather has moved in and hopefully this will help.

Anyway, for Coloradans, this may bring back memories of the summer of 2000. Patty Limerick has resurrected this 12 page write-up from that summer, in which she rounded up a bunch of experts from University of Colorado, Colorado State University and other places. It’s interesting to think about what has changed and what is the same- note that blow-ups are predicted, even without anthropogenic climate change, just from “standard” droughts. What’s interesting to me is how, or if, framing the 2020 fire season as being “about AGW” changes how the stories are told, who is an expert (the climatologists or other fire researchers?), and what the solutions are. Pragmatically, we’re not sure we can reverse changes in conditions at all or in the near term, so what is the best way to adapt to an unknown future?

I’ve excerpted a couple of paragraphs.. Tom Veblen based on fire history research:

In the years 1786 and 1859, there were fires in lots of Front Range forests; “more than 50% of the area was burning.” And this example of two very heavy fire seasons from the past should, Veblen said, leave us “very concerned.” The development of dense stands about the same age meant a synchronicity in outbreaks of budworm infestations, and that, in turn, left dead trees and a greater regional fire hazard. More information on the patterns of spruce budworm outbreaks would thus be very useful to understanding fire regimes.

I think we’ve made a great deal of headway on this:

Designing community assistance and participation offers its own challenges. While we have lots of ecological and technological information available, an understanding of social attitudes is in short supply.

We have done much such research, and communities have done much work. But there are still fires.

But that hardly addressed the more compelling problem: “What to do with existing houses?” “We need a born-again Smokey the Bear,” Phil Tompkins declared, “to tell people what they need to do. This is an urgent matter.” “Terry tells me,” Phil went on to say, with Terry nodding in agreement, “that it is the consensus of the fire establishment that the Front Range is a disaster waiting to happen.” The amount of the interface between human habitation and forest here is simply “amazing.”

” Terry Tompkins said that “blow-up fires are inevitable,” and “we have not yet prepared people properly for this.” Mark Haggerty raised the the crucial question, What are we to do with people moving into rural areas and “moving into harm’s way?”.

Both of these deal with the idea that “people moving into areas” is the problem. But I agree that there are existing houses and towns, and moving people out is unlikely to work.

Since 2000, though another idea has gained traction that isn’t mentioned here.. letting fires burn through communities and somehow hardening the infrastructure so that it survives the fires. Not sure, I think this still would require evacuations for people and animals. Certainly building codes, HIZ management and evacuation planning have all been been part of the efforts of community wildfire associations and insurance companies. But houses and communities still burn down and are likely to be rebuilt, if fires close to me are any indication.

So we’re back to the same old, same old, despite the Fire Plan:
* Need more PB
* Sometimes you need to do mechanical treatments first, or instead.
* No markets for small material (plus some groups don’t want small material sold either)
* Still need suppression
* Folks who build in tree country (and other wildlands) need to take “appropriate” responsibility; with, I’m sure, “what is appropriate?” being somewhat controversial.

Please add your quotes of interest and thoughts in the comments.

The Society of American Foresters Virtual Convention is coming up at the end of the month and it reminded me of a story from early in my career. I attended a breakout session with a professor talking about his research with red-cockaded woodpecker. One of the audience, a field forester, pointed out that he had seen some in an unexpected place, and what did the professor make of that? The professor responded that it was not in the peer-reviewed literature. Unfortunately, that was the end of the discussion. For me that’s where a fascinating discussion might have begun.

As time has gone on, it seems that there are fewer structured or institutional opportunities for a free, frank, and open exchange of views. Researchers fly in, to say, the National Silviculture Workshop, give their talk, answer five minutes of questions and leave. Somehow it doesn’t seem as though our society (except, perhaps, for the the Land Grant universities via Extension) value that the world works better- research can be better focused, and practice improved, via such discussions.

From what I’ve seen, not all practitioners agree with each other, but then neither do all scientists, policy wonks or anyone else. But I would argue that that diversity is just as important to explore with practitioners as with scientists. So I’d like to give a shout-out to the CSU and other folks who actually interviewed fire suppression practitioners in this paper (you can download from Wildfire Today) about surprising fire behavior in Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) affected stands. I noted that the work was funded by the Pacific Southwest Region, not the Station (this means the research was funded by the operational, not the research arm of the FS). Thanks to them all for helping to fill the practitioner/researcher gap.

This paper’s well worth reading to see the diversity of surprising observations:

All 28 firefighter (FF) interviewees worked on multiple fires encompassed by the study (Table 1). The average experience level was 14.6 seasons and interviewees occupied various positions on fires included in the study (Table 2). Information on MPB phase, percent mortality, stand and fuel conditions, topography, and fire weather for each fire were identified using firefighter observations, available reports, and spatial data on vegetation and topography.

It seems to me that if (1) models are funded and (2) are funded based on the idea that they will be useful to someone, then (3) there should be a formalized approach also funded by which the predictions are checked against observations. I’m not sure that this happens all the time, possibly due to lack of specific funding for it. Certainly this paper contains information relevant to modelers.

Such observations are consistent with some predictions of increased crowning potential in the red phase [7,8,11,12], but are counter to other studies [5,56,57]. As suggested by Hicke et al. [7], Hoffman et al. [8,12] and Stephens et al. [58], these differences may be due to variability in canopy and surface fuel characteristics, the level of mortality or the spatial and temporal variability in mortality rates.

If they could get this much info from 28 practitioners in a relatively localized area, it sounds as if there is a vast informational harvest to be reaped elsewhere.

Given current fires in MPB country in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado, I also thought this part of the discussion was interesting, after a paragraph discussing how MPB conditions could lead to favoring indirect attack, the authors state:

This scenario is potentially at odds with wildfire managers’ preferences and societal expectations that wildland fires receive active fire suppression, although specific situations where homes, communities, and high-valued resources and assets such as water supplies that are in imminent danger may warrant more direct attack actions. In Northern Colorado and Southern Wyoming, with the exception of the 2012 High Park Fire, the MPB fires in our study occurred fairly distant from population centers and communities. In the future, in this region and in other areas throughout Western North America affected by MPB outbreaks, fires in MPB fuel complexes may pose a challenge to direct attack strategies and affect societal expectations. Such fires have the potential to become extreme wildfire events or “megafires”—i.e., fires that resist control, rapidly grow in size, last for many weeks, threaten large numbers of highly valued resources and assets, and incur high financial costs [54,55].

I don’t think I’ve read before how MPB effects could favor indirect suppression strategies.

I spoke with a knowledgeable Legislative Affairs fellow who shed further light on the Daines-Feinstein bill. To paraphrase him, it is nibbling around the edges, and the size of the issue requires a major ramping up of funding but that would involve.. appropriators. Similarly, Susan Jane Brown asked in her comment here “why don’t we all work to get the Forest Service the resources they need?” And of course that would be a solution.

Let’s just vision here.. we’re looking at an integrated effort (call it Living with Fire or whatever) across states, feds, counties, a push to harden homes, get better at evacuating, and strategically reducing fuels. We already have many people in communities working on the problem. We have State air quality folks involved. We have researchers who’ve analyzed the barriers. There are Prescribed Fire Councils. Insurance companies. County planners. And so on.. heck we don’t even know how much we are already spending working on this, and what all the different groups are doing. It would have to be an effort that is coordinated and comprehensive, and would require a great deal of funding over a long period of time. But perhaps we already tried that..

Vision: To safely and effectively extinguish fire when needed; use fire where allowable; manage our natural resources; and as a nation, to live with wildland fire.

The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy is a strategic push to work collaboratively among all stakeholders and across all landscapes, using best science, to make meaningful progress towards the three goals: Resilient Landscapes Fire Adapted Communities Safe and Effective Wildfire Response.

Perhaps the Cohesive Strategy wasn’t wide enough in the diversity of groups represented, or didn’t have the right kind of political clout to make things happen? Maybe the next Administration could set up some kind of bipartisan working group to review and improve/initiate a new strategy and budget requests. I am thinking of the Western Governors as leaders based on this Patty Limerick essay Where Bipartisanship Finds a Refuge: A Rendezvous with The Western Governors Association . Here’s the Lunch with Limerick recording with Patty interviewing Jim Ogsbury. For me it was a fun policy-geeky lunch.

“At WGA, ‘consensus bipartisan policy’ has not had a restful time of it. The Western Governors do not evade or avoid the hard issues that would fracture any conventional organization. Wildfire, water supply and drought, the divisions between the rural West and the urban West, the allocation of authority between the federal government and the states, and the reform of the Endangered Species Act: these are all issues that, in other venues of discussion, produce a high pitch of partisan noise. But when the Governors deal with these issues, they do not storm out of the room enraged with each other; instead, they stay in the room and figure out responses to these challenges that they can agree on. And then during breaks and during meals, they circulate and mingle and laugh at each other’s jokes (though, as with any human population, the jokes do vary a little in quality), and you cannot tell Democrats from Republicans.

“That insightful Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the states are ‘the laboratories of democracy.’ So if you pay attention to the work of the WGA, you will see that Justice Brandeis got that right, and a good share of the experiments conducted in these laboratories have been maintaining democracy’s heartbeat.”

Conceivably, the bipartisan recommendations of the Western Governors could give those in Congress some political cover. Nevertheless, the problem IMHO with being US Congress-budget centric for problem resolution is that it tends to get bogged down in partisanship, and then disempowers the rest of us. And if we look at the FS and BLM recreation budgets.. asking for more money from the federal budget doesn’t necessarily work as a strategy.

It would be interesting to see what a diverse bipartisan group (with the requisite political clout) might come up with.

When I googled this bill, I found many voices for and against but very little analysis. Now it seems to be a rarity for any House of Congress to produce bipartisan bills (let alone both) (or they are not so much covered in the press), so I thought it was worth us taking a look at the specifics. My comments are in italics.

According to Senator Feinstein’s website:

Earlier this month, Senators Feinstein and Daines introduced the Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act, a bipartisan bill to help protect communities from catastrophic wildfires by implementing critical wildfire mitigation projects, sustaining healthier forests that are more resilient to climate change and providing important energy and retrofitting assistance to businesses and residences to mitigate future risks from wildfire and power shutoffs. The House companion bill is being led by Reps. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.).

Here’s a link to a cpan link https://www.c-span.org/video/?475867-1/senate-hearing-wildfire-forest-management you can go to Feinstein’s remarks.
Here’s a section by section from Feinstein’s site, which includes more info on each section than I posted here.

Section 101 – Three new landscape-level, collaborative wildfire risk reduction projects:
 Requires the Forest Service to conduct three landscape-level, collaborative wildfire risk reduction projects in the West proposed by a Governor. Projects would be subject to a streamlined environmental review process and certain litigation protections.

Section 102 – Encourages the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to increase the use of wildfire detection equipment.
 Directs the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture to expedite the placement of wildfire detection equipment such as sensors and cameras and expand the use of satellite data to assist wildfire response.

Section 103 – Wildfire risk reduction activities near existing roads, trails, and transmission lines
 Establishes a new 3,000-acre categorical exclusion to accelerate management near existing roads, trails, and transmission lines.
 Background: According to the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, nearly 90% of wildfires begin within a half-mile of a Forest Service road.

I wondered about that and found this 2007 report from PDI.

Section 104 – Accelerating Post-Fire restoration and reforestation
 Establishes a new statutory tool to accelerate post-fire restoration and reforestation work on Forest Service land. Based largely on the Forest Service’s existing Emergency Situation Determination authority, this provision specifies that the agency must do environmental analysis only on the proposed post-fire project and the scenario of not doing any project, so long as the treatment area is not larger than 10,000 acres.

Section 105 – Codifying “New Information”
 Specifies that the Forest Service is not required to reinitiate plan-level consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service following the finding of “new information” related to a listed species unless the “new information” is publicly available, peer-reviewed, and consistent with longstanding federal guidelines for scientific information. Allows for the agency to conduct informal, formal, or no consultation as appropriate and allows projects to continue during plan-level consultation.
This is known as the “Cottonwood Fix” relating to a court case which others here know much more about.

Section 106 – Hazard Mitigation Using Disaster Assistance

 Allows FEMA hazard mitigation grant funding to be used to install fire-resistant wires and infrastructure as well as for the undergrounding of wires.

Section 201 – Biomass Energy Infrastructure Program
 Establishes a new Department of Energy grant program to facilitate the removal of biomass from National Forest areas that are at high risk of wildfire and to transport that biomass to conversion facilities.
 Biomass conversion facilities located within areas of economic need and seek to remove dead or dying trees are prioritized. Grants are limited to $750,000.

Section 301 – California Exemption to Prohibition on Export of Unprocessed Timber
 Allows the export of unprocessed in timber of dead and dying trees in California. The exemption only applies after domestic mills have refused the unprocessed timber.

I tried to find out more about this but the U of Calif, my own alma mater, (sadly) does not seem to have anyone that I could identify as a forest economist. Any help locating a knowledgeable person on timber markets and the possibility of exports would be appreciated.

Section 401 – Innovative Forest Workforce Development Program
 Creates a competitive grant program to provide funds to non-profits, educational institutions, and state agencies to assist in the development of activities relating to workforce development in the forestry sector. Funds can be used for education, training, skills development, and education.

Section 403 – Western Prescribed Fire Center
 Establishes a Prescribed Fire Center in the West to train individuals in prescribed fire methods and other methods relevant to the mitigation of wildfire risk.

I like the idea of a Prescribed Fire Center but I’d want it to 1) understand and coordinate existing state, federal and NGO efforts, 2) identify gaps and solutions in a biennial report to Congress, and 3) commission research. Probably other things as well but I don’t think training by itself will overcome all the obstacles to increasing PB.

Section 403 – Retrofits for Fire-Resilient Communities
 Amends the Weatherization Assistance program to make materials that are resistant to high heat and fire and dwellings that utilize fire-resistant materials and incorporate wildfire prevention and mitigation planning eligible for funds.
 Increases the level of available funding to $13,000 and allows for increases with inflation.

Section 404 – Critical Infrastructure and Microgrid Program
 Establishes a new Department of Energy grant program to improve the energy resilience, energy efficiency, and power needs of critical facilities.
 Prioritizes rural communities with access to on-site back-up power and installation of electrical switching gear

For whatever reason, this seems to be more of a California problem.

What do you think of these? And what do you think is missing?

I thought Liz Forster (currently a law student at University of Montana) wrote a great story interviewing folks on a Type I Team in Colorado in 2018 about what they do and why they do it.

When the call came June 30 to take command of the Weston Pass and High Chateau fires, the team had two hours to mobilize. Team members came from as far as New York and Florida. Many local resources already were deployed to other fires burning in Colorado and throughout the West.

From July 1 through July 14, Cheney and co-chief Steve Petersburg’s days started about 5 a.m. and revolved around a hefty Incident Action Plan — “The Bible,” as team spokesman Bob Summerfield calls it.

The document begins broadly, with the incident objectives and staff roster. From there, Cheney and Petersburg tap into the Geographic Information System specialist, fire behavior analyst, meteorologist, air resource adviser and others in the Planning Section who build the bird’s-eye view of the fire.

The Operation Section then outlines tactics: where crews need to dig lines, what communities need structure protection, where fire retardant and water need to be dropped, what safety precautions should be taken.

“We convey the leader’s intent to the people on the ground, then act as a voice for those out in the field,” said Ken Gregor of Planning Operations.

Package in the Logistics Section — facilities, food, ground support, supplies — and Finance, and the document usually tops 30 pages.

With Deputy Incident Commander Dan Dallas’ signature at the bottom, the document is ready to print and distribute. On average, the section makes 250 to 300 copies of a 35-page document. During the height of the 416 fire north of Durango, which the Rocky Mountain team also led, the action plan was pushing 50 pages and more than 500 copies.

“We have to have it, even if people are up until 2 a.m. making copies,” Cheney said. “It’s like in the military — if you have a platoon out there that doesn’t know what they’re doing at the start of each day, they’re a wasted resource.”

…

Many on the team started as wildland firefighters, digging line, sawing down hazardous trees and suppressing the fire in the field.

The past experience provides them with an intimate understanding of the experience in the heat of the flames, and many jump at the chance to get out of the office and onto the fire perimeter.

What doesn’t change from the office to the field is the sense of cohesion, that multitude of cogs turning in this complex operation.

“When I worked on the line, the guy or gal behind you is essential to your well-being and existence,” said Dallas, the deputy incident commander. “That basic human relationship is no less important as you go from the end of the shovel up to the incident commander position.”

For many, that means delaying retirement and flipping the switch to fire. For Cheney and about half of the command team, it means temporarily handing off the responsibilities of their full-time jobs elsewhere in exchange for 14-plus-hour workdays at a fire.

“It’s a lot to manage, but I keep coming back because of the excitement of it, the change of pace,” Cheney said. “I get out from behind my desk, come out here and do something meaningful on the ground.”

Extra income is a factor. But across the board, the command staff gets hooked simply on working with each other.

“If I couldn’t be with my natural family, this is the family I’d choose to be with,” Petersburg said.

Dallas struggled to articulate the bond he feels with those he leads. Instead, he referenced the signed football made of plastic wrap given to him by a camp crew on the 416 fire and a 3-by-3-foot box of cards sent to him by colleagues across the country when he had two craniotomies in 2015.

Dallas said, “I can try to package together neatly why I do this, but there’s just something different about this world.”