Fire and Fuels

The last few posts have been about what we might call “fuel treatments at the stand level.” Now we can move on to “fuel treatments on the landscape.” To that end, the next few posts are based on interviews with a scientist who specifically studies “where to put fuel treatments on the landscape.” Dr. Mark Finney, is the originator of SPLATs or “strategically placed landscape treatments.” Mark is a well-known fire scientist at the Missoula Fire Lab. Here is a link to his profile at Rocky Mountain Research Station (warning: people who study fires in action, and deal with fire suppression have more acronyms than you can shake a drip torch at.) Here is a more list of publications.
Below are my questions and his answers.

What is a “SPLAT”?

It stands for “strategically placed landscape area treatments.” They may also be called SPOTs for “strategic placement of treatments.” It derives from the theory that separate treatment units must overlap in the primary heading direction of the fire to interrupt routes of fires. The concept is not to stop fires, but to change the behavior, including spread rate and intensity. The pattern of disconnected treatments can interrupt the movement of the fire to reduce the intensity, buy time for weather to change or for suppression efforts. There can be an aggregated benefit if they are designed properly.

What’s the difference between a SPLAT and a fuel break?
A “fuel break” is a designed defensible location that requires active suppression. There is a long history of ineffective fuelbreaks. There have a number of limitations for landscape scale uses. First, they are intended to stop fires, and if they don’t then they’re not successful even if they modify fire behavior dramatically (lots of examples of green fuel breaks that are black on both sides). Second, stopping large fires on fuel breaks rarely succeeds because the length of the fuel break impacted by the fire perimeter requires too many personnel for suppression. Third, fuel breaks have to be maintained – which can become quite a burden in perpetuity. In contrast to the landscape objectives, fuel breaks are useful near areas of high value (structures) where defensive actions are going to be occurring anyway – reduced fire behavior will be very beneficial to protection even if the fire doesn’t stop (i.e. spots over).

How do you know where to place SPLATS?
They must overlap the primary wind heading direction. How do you know what wind direction?
In a given area, there can be a common wind direction from previous fires. “Large fires” are also called “problem fires”, from Bahro et al 2007. “A “problem” fire is a hypothetical wildfire that could be expected to burn in an area that would have severe or uncharacteristic effects or result in unacceptable consequences.” These past fires can give you a lot of information. You can use that information to find out how spread usually works in an area, usually or two main directions. You can look at fire weather and fire history and use that information to design treatments against exactly those fires.

What about size of individual treatment units? Ideas come from modeling. In the modeling, there is no exact size, it’s more about the pattern. In practice, there are a number of factors, one is operational constraints, one is the size of fire you are trying to interrupt. You can’t make them so large that fires can fit between untreated ones. Then you have to factor in spotting. Past suppression removes mild and moderate conditions, so now we have spreading under most extreme conditions, with more spotting. If, for example, spotting is ¼ mile then you need to have a ¼ mile. In theory, they can be small or big and they don’t have to be all the same size. You can choose them to fit terrain, ownership and roads. You can work around areas in which you can’t do the treatments.

To actually implement them, you need the to design them, work through the NEPA and appeals process. Through the appeals process, maybe you have to redesign everything if you can’t do a particular unit. But you can take that unit out and rerun the modeling and see what the impacts are and see if you need to redesign other units or add another unit.

The next post in this series will be on SPLATS in practice.

We now know why the 747 firefighting jet is just sitting on the tarmac at the Colorado Springs Airport.

Some federal government bureaucrat has decided it is more important to glue thousands of paper cups to thousands of posts, arrange them in a grid, have the aircraft drop water on the grid and then weigh each cup to see how much water is in each of them than it is to put out fires.

This ridiculous exercise in bureaucracy is a required part of federal approval for an aircraft to dump water onto a raging forest fire.

Evidently the dispersion pattern of an air drop must be just so, must meet some exacting standard set up by the government that cannot possibly be set aside for now, so that lives and property can be saved. Talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees.

The company, GlobalSuperTanker has designed and tested the dispersion system extensively. It is designed to atomize the liquid to prevent crushing amounts of water smashing things as it comes down. It’s a system that exceeds what the government requires, but the government won’t believe its eyes or company data.

Here’s how they should be doing their approval: Load the aircraft up with 20,000 gallons of fire retardant or just plain water. Fly it over a forest fire. Dump the load on the fire. Repeat until the fire is out. Then, after the fire is out, examine the effectiveness of the air drops and if necessary make corrections to the system over the winter, when people’s lives and property are not at stake.

There’s a fundamental rule of firefighting: Get water on the flames. If you’ve got a bucket, use a bucket. If you’ve got a garden hose, use a garden hose. If you have a fire truck with a fire hose, use the fire hose. If you have an air tanker capable of dropping 20,000 gallons of water on a forest fire, use it.

There’s another fundamental premise of firefighting: Get water on the fire as soon as it is humanly possible to do so, because the smaller the fire is when you do so, the more quickly you can put it out. Five gallons of water at the right place at the right time can completely stop a forest fire from happening.

Twenty thousand gallons can put out a lot of fire instantly. The GlobalSuperTanker can lay down a 1.5-mile long strip of fire retardant or plain water in one pass. Using compressed air the tanks can be reloaded in less than 30 minutes. In Chile, they had it down to 13 minutes. One pass takes the place of five smaller 5,000-gallon drops in a fifth the time and is more effective.

It is not as if this aircraft has never put out a fire.

It is FAA-certified and has been doing so for some time, just not in the U.S. One need only view the many YouTube videos of this very aircraft saving the town of Santo Domingo, Chile, in January to see proof of this, and these videos should be all the Forest Service needs to put the GlobalSuperTanker in the air.

More delay only puts lives at risk without justification for doing so. Set aside bureaucratic obstacles and get it in the air, tomorrow.

Nobody in Chile cared how many drops of water were in a bureaucrat’s paper cup. They only cared that miles of fire line were snuffed out in moments by an aircraft that isn’t allowed to do the same thing here in the United States.

That is simply unconscionable and President Donald Trump needs to sign an executive order commanding the aircraft be placed into service immediately, suspending all further certification requirements until after fire season ends.

So give the White House a call, or send an email. Contact your members of Congress and demand that they contact the president and make him aware of this nonsensical bureaucratic obstructionism that is pointlessly endangering property and lives. Do whatever you can to get the GlobalSuperTanker into the air and free of the chains of bureaucracy that bind it to the ground for no good reason.

****An aside , I thought I had read somewhere that Calfire wanted to use this plane and while hunting for the quote ran across this cool Calfire recognition guide to its firefighting fleet. In case you wondered about Cal Fire…

The CAL FIRE Air Program has long been the premier firefighting aviation program in the world. CAL FIRE’s fleet of over 50 fixed wing and rotary wing, make it the largest department owned fleet of aerial firefighting equipment in the world. CAL FIRE’s aircraft are strategically located throughout the state at CAL FIRE ‘s 13 airbases and nine helicopter bases.

Where you stand depends on where you sit and all that… not very often do I see a blog contributor mentioned in an editorial in my hometown paper…from the Colorado Springs Gazette editorial board. If anyone knows the FS side of the story, or the FS side of the Waldo Canyon story in the editorial, please comment. Here’s a link, and below is the editorial.

As fires race through forests in the West, threatening property and lives, the world’s mightiest firefighting air tanker sits idle on a runway at Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs.

Like Nero watching Rome burn, federal officials fiddle with a contract and won’t let the aircraft fly. The plane offers taxpayers the lowest per-gallon delivery of retardant for any fire requiring two or more planes, with an ability to drop nearly 20,000 gallons of retardant.

U.S. Forest Service officials won’t offer Springs-based Global SuperTanker Services a contract allowing more than 5,000 gallons of suppressant. Forest officials won’t say why.
A 5,000-gallon limit defeats the purpose of fighting fires with a 747, which can dramatically increase the efficiency and results of aerial attacks.

The whole affair brings up sad memories of the Waldo Canyon fire, which burned for almost three days before federal authorities allowed a group of Air Force C-130 firefighting planes to fly.

Then-Mayor Steve Bach, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn and others expressed dismay when administrative process superseded the urgency of using every tool available to fight for property and lives.

The C-130s were based about 10 miles from Waldo Canyon, at Peterson, and could have battled the fire in its infancy – when airstrikes are more effective.

By the time the paperwork was signed, the inferno was out of control and consuming homes.

With a cruising speed of 600 miles an hour, the Spring-based Spirit of John Muir 747 can reach most wildfire-prone areas of the country in less than two hours. It can drop its entire load and leave a 200-foot wide fire barrier nearly a mile long. Alternatively, ground-based fire commanders can order multiple smaller drops.

The plane has double the capacity of any other tanker in the world. Unlike the others, it can fight fires throughout the night.

We don’t know why this tanker is grounded through fire season, but news reports suggest environmental politics may be in the mix.

Outside magazine reported on the Springs-based tanker in 2016. The publication paraphrased Timothy Ingalsbee, co-director of the Association of Fire Ecology, complaining that aerial fire retardants aren’t “ecologically friendly,” so why drop them from a bigger plane?

Andy Stahl heads the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an activist group of federal workers dedicated to holding their employer accountable for “responsible land stewardship.” The Associated Press quoted him opposing the tanker last week, in a story about the grounding of John Muir.

Wildfires don’t negotiate. They don’t listen to environmentalists or seek permission from bureaucrats.

Wildfires quickly destroy forests, property and lives. The Forest Service is responsible for controlling them and should stop fiddling while our national forests burn.

For partisan-watchers, John Hickenlooper is a D governor.
For tech enthusiasts more on the tanker here at Wildfire Today (with videos).

Some of the fuels folks I’ve spoken with think you shouldn’t bother doing mechanical fuels treatment (in forests) unless you also do prescribed burning. The question to me is whether prescribed burning is 1) the only way or 2) the best possible, sort of the gold standard, but in some cases, fuel treatments can work without prescribed burning.

When you think about the world of fine fuels, it is easy to think about subdivisions and how we don’t run fires through them. So I looked at Firewise. In Firewise Zone 3, 100-200 feet from the house, it tells you here

“Zone 3 (High Hazard Areas) Thin this area, although less space is required than in Zone 2. Remove smaller conifers that are growing between taller trees. Remove heavy accumulation of woody debris. Reduce the density of tall trees so canopies are not touching*.”

Which sounds like getting rid of “heavy accumulations”, not exactly the same as burning, or mowing, or raking finer fuels.
(*Question that relates back to the “crown thinning” discussion: is this the same thing as “crown thinning”.. so is Firewise advice “wrong” to people who don’t think crown thinning is helpful for fuels treatments? Am I missing something here?)

Here’s an example of another paper about mastication in the Southwest. It talks about examples in which mastication without burning was successful in changing fire behavior, but it had to do with making sure the fuels were distributed across the site to avoid soil burning. You certainly get a feel for local differences in reading this paper.

I was hoping that there would be one paper that describes the situations where and why people do or don’t do burning and why, and how it works, but it seems that most of this work is thought and written about by fuels practitioners and at the local level based on their own experiences.

Potential Points of Agreement

1. Prescribed burning is generally best for fuels reduction in terms of fine fuels.
2. Due to long- term fire suppression, there are heavy accumulations of biomass in some areas. In these cases, you may need to do some kind of mechanical treatments in advance of prescribed burning, so you can run fire through and not kill them all.
3. There are situations (here, some mastication, and in wildland-urban interface, others?), in which you can’t do prescribed burning and mechanical treatments alone can be still helpful.
4. (I think the mastication paper is very helpful with this) It is hard to generalize because fuels and fire behavior tend to vary locally. Local fuels specialists may know the most about what works and what doesn’t.

Does everyone agree? Do you want to restate/clarify any of these?

(Note: this is not about the cultural, economic and environmental issues related to prescribed fire- that will follow later as we see where everyone is on the utility of prescribed burning for fuel treatments).

One of my favorite climate change books is called “Why We Disagree About Climate Change” by Michael Hulme (here’s a micro-version of the book). In honor of that book, I’m going to call this series “Why We Disagree About Fuel Treatment”. This should be an opportunity to slowly work through observations and conclusions from various practitioner and scientific communities, and see why people disagree.. what they are disagreeing about, specifically, and what evidence can be brought to bear for each point of view.

Starting with the basic fuel treatment nomenclature.. what is a fuel treatment? If we go to the NWCG glossary here they have “Manipulation, including combustion, or removal of fuels to reduce the likelihood of ignition and/or to lessen potential damage and resistance to control.” There might be better definitions (suggestions welcome!) but those are the general ideas. In this comprehensive paper by Jain et al.(with terrific photos IMHO ) “Fuel treatments are designed to meet short-term and long-term fire management objectives. This may include altering fire behavior or influencing post-fire outcomes.”

I guess you can start anywhere, but let’s start with fuel treatment basics. Coneniently, there is a 2005 paper by Jim Agee and Karl Skinner called Basic Principles of Forest Fuel Reduction Treatments.

It has a handy descriptive table:

As Jain et al. say…
”

When the treatment objective is to change fire behavior and create protected space for active fire suppression, then biomass removal to aid fire suppression efforts tends to follow the suggestions of Agee and Skinner (2005): (1) reduce surface fuels, (2) increase height to live crown, (3) decrease crown density, and (4) keep large trees of fire resistant species. “

Prescribed fire is thought to be the best for reducing surface fuels (this seems to be so broadly believed and obvious that it doesn’t need a citation). But in many cases, you can’t do this without risking a crown fire, and/or burning up all the trees, without removing ladder fuels. Keeping big trees of a fire resistant species is good because you have trees with tree habitat for critters and other tree-lovers (plus I think trees store more carbon ?), plus if they are fire resistant species you can run prescribed fire through there again (or if there is a wildfire, these trees will be fine). Now, the Agee and Skinner table characterizes that as “historic structure” and I guess that’s also a good thing, but you don’t necessarily need to go there- you can choose to keep big trees for the pragmatic current and future purposes that I just described.

Based on all this… fuel treatments remove or rearrange fuels in order to change fire behavior. And where you have forests, you should ideally do 1-4 as in Agee and Skinner to do fuel treatments.

Is everyone in agreement so far? Any additions, clarifications, or ?

The Colorado Springs Gazette just completed a great series on five years after the Waldo Canyon Fire- lots of photos and videos.. Here is a link to a piece of the story from which you can click around to find other pieces. Maybe I am old-fashioned but I found it much easier to read and interpret in the more linear (and fewer clicks per bite of information) print edition. The excerpt below talks about the impacts on a recreation trail, which is something you don’t hear much about. I’m sure there are other discussion-worthy parts to the article as well.

A CHANGING FOREST
Five years after the devastation, land managers maintain a hopeful narrative. The Forest Service calls the burn scar 70 percent revegetated – a figure that does not allude to the return of the previous conifer-covered state, but to a transformed one.

The area is taking on a look it likely had centuries ago, says Pikes Peak District Ranger Oscar Martinez. Mother Nature has “reset the clock,” he says, by pulling up the aspens that long lay dormant beneath the now-destroyed pines and firs that dominated for generations in forest time. Also covering the slopes now are tangles of scrub oak; they, like aspens, were eager to make their presence known soon after the conifers departed.

There has always been fire, Martinez explains. “There’s always been an ebb and flow,” he says.

But locals have endeavored to bring back the dense green scene they recall, most fondly from their days of hiking the Waldo Canyon trail, super popular before its closure in the fire’s wake. From 2013 to 2016 the Colorado Springs Office of Emergency Management tallied 94,730 volunteer hours from individuals who, among other recovery tasks, spread conifer seedlings. The Forest Service reports overseeing the planting of 60,000 conifers across the scar.

And all those attempts could very well prove futile. What’s certain is the trees grow slow, too slow for those volunteer adults to see them stand tall in their lifetimes.

“There are questions as to whether or not they will ever come back,” says Melanie Vanderhoof, the scientist with the U.S. Geological Service who has been tracking the scar’s revegetation from annual satellite imagery.

A fire of Waldo Canyon’s magnitude heats the ground to a point of hydrophobicity, where instead of water being absorbed, it is repelled. Further complicating the conifers’ return is the forest’s unique soil – “calling it a soil is kind of a generous term,” Martinez says. Conservationists call Pikes Peak granite “kitty litter,” for its pebbly, porous condition, which rain had no problem moving in the days after the burn, washing the sediment into the canyon and piling it up to heights of grown men.

That phenomenon made portions of the Waldo trail disappear along its 7-mile loop. The Forest Service continues to take questions as to when the trail will reopen, and land managers say people should refine their questions, considering the trail no longer really exists. Realignment seems more than likely.

“The question is where will it be, if there will ever be a trail in there,” Martinez says.

Serious conversations about reintroducing recreation have yet to be had. The management plan for the Pike National Forest is due sometime between 2018 and 2020, and that, Martinez says, would identify areas where a trail is feasible.

Susan Davies with the Trails and Open Space Coalition understands the Forest Service’s concerns – the dangers of flash floods and dead trees that could fall on heads at any moment. “It is the five-year anniversary” of the fire, she says, “and I think it would be great if the Forest Service were willing to put together a timeline, or even state a goal of when we might be able to start a public process. Could we at least start a conversation?”

In various comments so far, we’ve had some links to interesting and helpful fuel effectiveness reports. If you would like, please post or repost yours as comments here, so anyone looking for them can find them in one central location (feel free to post links to collections of them as well.)

I’d like to highlight my current fave here. It’s the Carpenter Road Fire Fuels Treatment Effectiveness Monitoring in this Youtube video.

What I like about it:
1. time lapse photography of fire moving through the stands
2. music
3. other photos that give context for the fire
4. clear summary of effectiveness findings

Many thanks to all involved from Spokane Tribal Forestry, the producers Ben Butler and Sheldon Sankey and A Tribe Called Red for the music.