Fire and Fuels

No wonder people are confused about “treatments should focus near communities.” I think the discussion of the Crystal Clear project was helpful. I’m beginning to think “in some forests, people do treatments for a variety of reasons (forest health, resilience, HRV) that includes designing places for firefighters to do backfires and use other tactics to reduce negative effects of wildfires.” This is called “landscape resilience” in the Cohesive Strategy.

I’m a fan of FACNET The Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network (#EnvironmentWithoutEnemies) and they have a quote on their website.

We realized that there isn’t a line where fire adapted communities stop and fire resilient landscapes begin.
FOREST SCHAFER, CALIFORNIA TAHOE CONSERVANCY

Here’s an interview with the Dean of the OSU School of Forestry about Oregon fires, by the Portland Tribune. Thanks to RVCC, I found this link in their monthly newsletter. Below is an excerpt, but there are interesting ideas about what he thinks the State or Oregon should do.

Eastside forests are a little more straight forward. … The west side is more tricky — I don’t think we can thin or burn our way out of these types of fires. We need better community planning. More upfront, preventative, mitigation efforts are needed. More of an investment upfront for pre-planning on a landscape basis cross-boundary. We have a planning process that has worked in the south-central part of the state. (Click here to see it.)

This is an interesting document: “This guide describes the process the Klamath-Lake Forest Health Partnership (KLFHP) has used to plan and implement cross-boundary restoration projects to achieve improved forest health conditions on large landscapes.”

Wildfires today are larger and more severe, starting earlier, ending later, and resulting in loss of homes, forests, and other resources. Past and current
management practices, including fire exclusion, have left forests in dry regions stressed from drought, overcrowding, and uncharacteristic insect and disease
outbreaks. Compounding the problem is the fact that humans cause 84 percent of all wildfires in the United States. These human-caused fires account for 44 percent
of the total area burned and result in a fire season that lasts three times longer over a greater area (Balch et al, 2017). The increase in size and severity of wildland fires is causing ecological, social, and economic damage. The departure from historic fire patterns is also having an impact on water, wildlife habitat, stream function, large and old tree structure, and soil integrity.

Wildfires are affecting communities across the West. The 2017 fire season again illustrated the risk of wildfire to communities large and small. Subdivisions
in urban areas have become a fuel component, burning from house to house similar to how crown fires burn from tree to tree. Economically, wildfires burn valuable
infrastructure and timber, make recreation and tourism unappealing, and can have direct impacts to municipal water supplies (Diaz, 2012).

In 2009, the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy (https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/strategy/thestrategy.html) was developed as a strategic push to encourage collaborative work among all stakeholders across all landscapes to use best scientific principles and make meaningful progress towards three goals:
1) Resilient landscapes
2) Fire-adapted communities
3) Safe and effective wildfire response
This strategy establishes a national vision for wildland fire management, describes wildland fire challenges, identifies opportunities to reduce wildfire risks, and
establishes national priorities focused on achieving these national goals.”

Here’s a link to a video called Timber Crater 6 Fire- A Fuel Treatment Success Story that was on the Klamath-Lake Forest Health Partnership website. I think it does a good job of explaining the interaction between fuel treatments and suppression tactics.

So when people say “focus on the WUI for fuel treatment” perhaps they mean:

A. Focus on projects that are solely for fuel treatment to protect communities and not landscape resilience.
B. Funding – the hazardous fuel $ agencies have should be only/preferentially for x miles from (houses, roads, powerlines..?)
C. Priority -“do not do PB or WFU or mechanical treatments anywhere else until all the fuels treatment work around communities is done”
D. Just don’t- “don’t do PB, WFU or MT at all away from communities.”
E. PB and WFU are OK, because “fire is good for ecosystems” but not mechanical treatment (away from communities).
F. WFU is OK, but PB and MT not (away from communities).

Hopefully with these ideas laid out, we can look deeper into what people mean. Do you have any other possibilities to add?

I thought this Oregonlive news piece by Ted Sickinger was interesting, as I had never heard much before about western Oregon fire history. The story is very long and very interesting, with many parts we could discuss. Excerpt below. I recommend reading the entire piece.

East wind events:

The strong and persistent windstorm that started Monday and stoked the big fires is unusual, but academics say similar conditions were a prime factor in many of the most infamous, fast-running west-side conflagrations since Europeans settled in Oregon.

Those include the 1902 Yacolt Burn, which torched 500,000 acres in Southwest Washington and parts of Oregon and killed at least 65 people. Easterly gales were a main ingredient in the Tillamook Burn of 1933, which initially burned 40,000 acres west of Gales Creek over 10 days, then devoured an additional 200,000 acres in 20 hours when stoked by hot east winds. East winds were also implicated in the Bandon fire of 1936, which burned 143,000 acres, consumed the town of 1,800 and killed at least 10 people.

In 1957, Owen Cramer, a meteorologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, authored a paper describing the close relationship between occurrences of severe easterly winds and large forest fires in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington.

“The history of forest conflagrations in the Northwest is, for the most part, a history of the simultaneous occurrence of small fires and severe east winds,” he wrote, going on to describe the exact weather pattern that took place on Labor Day. “Under these conditions fires run wild and fire-control men must be prepared for the worst.”

Daniel Donato, a natural resource scientist at Washington Department of Natural Resources, is currently studying the relationship between east wind events and large fires. He says there’s ample precedent and it’s fair to say it’s characteristic of the landscape west of the Cascades.

He likens it to the recent awakening around the likelihood of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. “We get lulled into this sense that it doesn’t happen here. It’s a California problem. But it does happen here, with low frequency,” he said.

Dan Gavin is a geographer at the University of Oregon who studies the history and pattern of fires in wet forest types west of the Cascade Range. He says the best evidence of pre-European, west-side megafires comes from core samples of remaining old-growth trees in protected areas and tree-ring studies in stumps from 1980s clearcuts. Coupled with sediment studies, they show that big fires have been a constant presence on the landscape for at least 11,000 years, leaving uniformly aged stands of Douglas-fir across Western Oregon and Washington at intervals of 100 to 250 years.

In the hierarchy of factors that dictate how fast and far a fire will burn – fuels, topography and weather – wind speed and direction are key drivers. And since those fires have no obvious ignition source, he says, they were likely either “lightning holdovers” or fires set by indigenous tribes along hunting routes that smoldered for days to weeks before a hot and persistent east wind kicked up, bellowing the fires and preventing the typical nighttime increase in relative humidity that comes with normal westerly marine flows.

Ten years or more ago, when I was Planning Director, our Regional Forester decided to have a meeting with some professors/scientists from CU Boulder. One of the professors at the meeting said “doing fuel treatments in the backcountry doesn’t work to protect communities”. I tried to ask the question “what specific projects are you talking about?”. I didn’t know of any, but I certainly didn’t know of all the projects in the Region.

I felt that if we got down to the details, we might agree. But I’d want to look at the fuels specialist’s report, and the purpose and need of the project. There is a strategy for resolving factual disputes called “joint fact finding” and I thought that it would have been powerful to do that with our team of (awesome) regional specialists and the CU folks. Alas, it was not to be.

And here we are over 10 years later, and people are still saying the same thing. So we are still apparently talking past each other. But it’s not too late to try again..

1. “Backcountry” is an abstraction, as is “close to” communities. When I think backcountry, I think Wilderness or Roadless. Which takes us back to the 2001 Rule for most states, and no roadbuilding. If it’s a logging project, as most people I think would define it, you need to take the trees out (yes, there are roads in Roadless, so-called substantially altered acres, so it’s possible, but I think most Roadless Geeks would say that those acres are a minority of roadless). You can still have tree-felling without mechanical removal, but is that “logging”?

Also, as Steve points out in a recent comment, how far is “too far”, given how fast fires can go? It seems to me to understand whether a project is “too far” you would have to understand a) what the project is trying to do and b) local fire behavior, slopes, vegetation and so on (as per the Stewardship and Fireshed Assessment process, for example).

2. There are other things that fuel treatments can help protect besides communities. Watersheds around reservoirs is one obvious example in Colorado. I’m not sure why this wouldn’t be true in other places. That’s why the purpose and need would be important to look at.

2. I’m sure TSW readers can help me here. I thought that there was (maybe HFRA?) an effort to encourage the FS to focus on WUI for fuel treatments. My memory could be bad on this, but I think I remember those acres being harder and more expensive to accomplish, so at one time metrics favored getting more cheaper acres wherever it was convenient, until the change.

So here are my questions:

1) Can we figure out where the Forest Service is doing fuel treatment in “the backcountry” and why? I’m sure we disagree on the definition of backcountry, and what the WUI is and so on, but those are all abstractions and looking at projects would bring it down to earth.

If some believe it is due to the influence of the timber industry, we could expect “backcountry fuel treatments” to occur in the big timber areas (where trees have positive value), and not so much elsewhere. We also can look at the purpose and need and the fuels specialist reports for those projects.

2) Were “backcountry fuel treatments” something that the FS used to do more of, and then changed policies for whatever reason? If we looked at “far from communities” projects with a purpose and need of fuel treatment, would we see more in the past and fewer today?

I’m thinking that if people have been saying this for at least ten years, we should be able to engage more deeply here at TSW on where it happens, how often it happens, and why it happens.

We’ve had some discussions about “what communities in fire-prone areas need to do.” Throughout the West (not to speak of the rest of the country, which also has fires) there are a variety of efforts ongoing to help communities plan for fires.

I’ll point out two things here. First, one of my early post-retirement volunteer gigs was being a member of the El Paso County Planning Commission. So I understand that because planners think something, it doesn’t necessarily get done. Elected officials and voters make the calls ultimately.

Second, there is a substantial body of literature on the topic of “what communities are doing” and “people’s behavior around wildfire mitigation.” I don’t know of a place where it has recently been rounded up but please put links to studies you know of in the comments below. To have an in-depth conversation around the topic of what communities need to do, we have to know what they are doing (of course, there are thousands, so it’s hard to generalize) and what the research tells us about the problems.

Of course, there are CWPPs via the Community Wildfire Protection Planning process. Please add links to other wildfire planning efforts.

Then there is also CPAW or Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire, a joint effort by Headwaters Economics and the Forest Service. The map of communities they’ve helped is above.

Working with communities across the country, Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW) provides communities with land use planning solutions to better manage their wildland-urban interface (WUI). Established in 2015 by Headwaters Economics and Wildfire Planning International, CPAW is funded by the U.S. Forest Service and private foundations. The CPAW team includes planners, foresters, economists, researchers, and wildfire hazard modelers. All services and recommendations come at no cost to the community.

We work with and learn from communities at all scales and sizes across the U.S. Since our founding in 2015, more than 70 communities have received CPAW’s customized recommendations, trainings, and research. Explore some CPAW communities by clicking the map below, or go right to the list of community profiles.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that the American Planning Association, the professional society for county and urban planners, also has a variety of helpful information about what planners are doing. It’s interesting that their book Planning For Wildfire was published in 2005. Clearly they have been thinking about this for awhile.

Just like foresters, accountants, ecologists, wildlife bios and so on, planners have their professional society meetings where they learn and exchange best practices. In Colorado, planners have had many sessions on this topic.

I’m sure other states have chapters with wildland fire planning topics as well.

It’s snowing here, and so hopefully that will give relief to some of the Colorado fires (and firefighters!). It seems simple to thank and honor firefighters (and pray for, for those so inclined) and the people supporting them (working on fires, their families, and people doing their work while they’re on fires). And yet there are more Forest Service (and other) folks to thank and appreciate for their work.

I caught this in an this story about one Forest Service person helping evacuate campers in California.

While some campers were rescued by helicopters, others made a white-knuckle drive to safety. Juliana Park recorded video of flames on both sides of her car as she and others fled down a mountain road.

“A backpacking trip cut short by unforeseen thunder, ash rain, and having to drive through literal fire to evacuate #SierraNationalForest in time,” Park tweeted. “Grateful to the SNF ranger who led us down … wish we got her name.”

If you see other such examples highlighting FS employees please share.

Thanks to Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today for posting this. What I like about this study is that researchers interviewed people (PB practitioners) working in the field. Well worth reading in its entirety (no firewall). Schultz, Courtney A. ; McCaffrey, Sarah M. ; Huber-Stearns, Heidi R., 2019.

I got the impression of “a lotta things have to go right at the right time for it to work” and “air quality (public or regulators) can or can’t be a major factor. It depends on where you are.” People have to be there at a particular time and there might be a narrow window when conditions are right or none at all that year. Very very difficult to budget and organize for, especially when the trained folks might also be called out on wildfires.

Here are the key findings:

*Findings support previous survey work that found that capacity is a major limitation for applying prescribed fire. We found less support for previous findings that air quality regulation is consistently a significant barrier, except in specific locations.
*Interviewees emphasized that owing to a lack of incentives and the prevalence of risk aversion at multiple agency levels, active prescribed fire programs depend on the leadership and commitment of individual decision-makers and fire managers.
*Successful approaches rely on collaborative forums and positions that allow communication, problem solving, and resource sharing among federal and state partners, and that facilitate dialogue between air-quality regulators and land managers.
*Although not a focus in the present work, interviewees also discussed other barriers to burning, like drought conditions, short burn windows, and the presence of challenging landscape conditions, such as the presence of invasive cheat grass (Bromus tectorum), that limit their ability to conduct prescribed fire.

I think it might be splitting hairs to say “We found less support for previous findings that air quality regulation is consistently a significant barrier, except in specific locations.” It’s one of those things we often see where findings are dependent on the spatial scale the researchers choose. It could be consistently a significant barrier in Washington State but not in Nevada and in this case it’s hard to think how you could average the various hassles across the western States to arrive at a western state-wide conclusion. I’d say that peoples’ experience and this research both show that both can be problems, and both need to be solved in some way, for PB efforts to be more successful. Again, perhaps splitting hairs, but another both/and thing.

One thing I thought was interesting was a characterization of fear of escapes. I’d think that would be an important factor, especially with people living near the PB (and of course we had three deaths in Colorado from the North Fork PB escape) but maybe that’s more of a localized concern?

There’s a bit of a mention in the Leadership section.

Leadership, riskaversion, incentives
‘There’s always disincentive. If you have the potential for putting your whole career on the line and all your people and everything else, why would you do that? What is there that gives you points for that? Really, nothing.’
‘While we intellectually recognise the need and value of prescribed fire, our culture is that of ‘firefighter’. And we are also pretty risk-averse organisation that really gets scared by the possibilities of a major escape.
We have plenty of opportunities to draw on negative experiences of others.’
‘I mean the personality of the person that’s talking to the burner, the person signing the permit, all the way up to the commissioner of public lands, who’s an elected official, [those things all matter]… If the elected official is extremely risk-adverse, that pretty much shuts down burning. If the [decision-maker] is a very proactive, forest health-[focused person], we can have a little bit of risk, and maybe a [smoke] intrusion and learn from it moving forward.’
‘We had the projects lined up. The burn window looked great, actually, for our region. But the politics of it… [an agency leader] asked me to cancel the event, for one because of the resource draw-down, but also just the optics of doing any kind of prescribed burning while people are losing their homes and people are losing lives and stuff. And I understood thaty But I did have this feeling like… when we start cancelling the good work that needs to happen because bad things are happening somewhere else, we’re just getting farther behind.’

I wonder if these risks feel the same for WFU vs. PB? Also how does AQ regulation work for WFU compared to PB?