Fire and Fuels

Thanks to Marek Smith for sending this in!

Wildfires Consume Funds Flagged for Prevention

This year, the U.S. Forest Service has spent hundreds of millions of dollars fighting wildfires, cutting into funds originally set aside to prevent them. Fire historian Steve Pyne compares the way we manage fires today to how we manage health—focused on emergencies, and not prevention.

Produced by Christopher Intagliata, Senior Producer
Guests

Chris Topik
Former staffer, House Appropriations Committee
Director, “Restoring America’s Forests”
The Nature Conservancy
Arlington, Virginia
Steve Pyne
Fire historian
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

Note: toward the end of the interview, Chris mentions the use of goats to keep firebreaks in the chaparral.

So we have seen news articles that attribute wildfire problems to climate change, protecting timber by fire suppression, protecting people by fire suppression, and too many people now living in the WUI.

What I find interesting about this Colorado article is that its framing is a bit “just another problem we need to deal with directly. People like living where they live, but we need to figure this out together.” Not a lot of finger-pointing..

So I have two potential hypotheses for the differences in coverage. 1) “Distance leads to Narrative Drift”: the further you get from the site of the issue, the less people know about the details, and the more people write the story to fit into their own preferred narratives or 2) when wildfires are assigned to “environment” reporters, who call people on their rolodex who look at things through the lens of “the environment”..and that’s how you get “larger and hotter wildfires caused by a variety of people messin’ with Nature” and the related “wildfires are good for The Environment, it’s people who are the problem.” There is an inherent logical conflict there, though.. if people are messin’ with the environment such that they burn hotter and larger than “natural” then they aren’t “natural”, and we can’t expect that their effects would be the same as “ecosystems are adapted” to.

Which doesn’t leave a lot of things to do, except to “stop messin'” which in not a viable option with our current population distribution, and is maybe too late anyway to help in the next 30 years or so.

Anyway, here’s a fairly complete story about what’s happening in Colorado in response to the recent wildfires. Below are excerpts.

Search for solutions

A governor’s task force and a legislative committee have been exploring possible solutions to problems that continue to grow as more and more people move into Colorado’s “red zones,” the high fire-risk areas that more than one-fourth of the state’s population calls home.

It’s here that policy intersects politics: Will those panels lead to legislation or executive orders mandating tougher statewide standards, such as more fire-conscious building codes or property mitigation? Or will they lean toward incentives and recommendations that preserve local government control?

It could be a little of both, said state Sen. Jeanne Nicholson, D-Black Hawk, who heads the bipartisan legislative committee. She can envision a “wildfire mitigation package” of bills — rather than a single “megabill” — being introduced in the next session to address several issues.

Among them: the possibility of an air fleet, either alone or in partnership with another state; mandatory disclosure of fire dangers and homeowner responsibilities in real estate transactions; incentives and resources to coax property owners toward voluntary mitigation; and possibly a bill to create a statewide consistency in some aspects of fire mitigation.

The Wildfire Task Force, which will make recommendations to Gov. John Hickenlooper by Sept. 30, has talked about encouraging counties to develop new building and zoning codes, advancing public education campaigns about mitigation, instituting the real estate disclosure and clarifying parameters for controlled burns.

Colorado, which has so far spent more than $35.7 million on fire suppression this season, faces the conundrum of several Western states when it comes to crafting a plan for minimizing the devastation to property and human life in the so-called wildland-urban interface — dubbed the WUI, or “wooey.”

The state’s strong affinity for local control, whereby counties or municipalities adopt fire standards as they see fit, has left Colorado a regulatory patchwork. And that, some contend, makes individuals or even entire communities that practice fire mitigation vulnerable to fires sweeping through areas where residents don’t.

“Wildfire is notoriously disrespectful of political boundaries and property lines,” said Lloyd Burton, professor and chair of the Environmental Affairs Working Group at the University of Colorado Denver. “To have one county that has mandatory mitigation and the next has nothing, the ones who have nothing imperil the ones who do.”

In describing Colorado’s uneven mitigation regulations, Burton noted that the mountain town of Breckenridge in 2009 actually rolled back a local wildfire mitigation law requiring property owners to thin trees around their homes.

“We’re a state with a political culture heavily weighted toward local control, as little government authority exercised as possible,” Burton said. “But to some extent now we’re living with the consequences of that history. There are some hard questions that it’s time for us to start re-asking.”

Colorado state forester Mike Lester said there are 24 million acres of forest in the state, 68 percent of which is federal land, and 700,000 acres of wildland-urban interface, where development abuts public lands. The WUI is expected to grow to 2.2 million acres by 2030.

“It’s fair to say we took about 100 years to get in this situation,” Lester said. “And it’s going to take us about 100 more to get out.”

A few miles west of Creede, Starr Pearson, who manages Freemon’s Guest Ranch, struggled with the sparse tourist trade like many area businesses.

But she said residents have come to grips with the natural burn-off and already have started to plan for the inevitable next fire.

“Everybody’s made their peace with it, and now that we know how it goes, we’re ready for another round,” Pearson said. “With all the beetle kill, we haven’t seen the end of it. It’s our new normal.”

Even seasonal residents who once adamantly opposed the concept of controlled burns have started to see the wisdom of that approach, she added.

This is tomorrow.. thought some folks might be interested..

Public Perceptions of Smoke in Oregon & California
Webinar
Thursday, September 5, 2013 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
NW Fire Science Consortium 2013 Webinar Series

Presenters: Dr. Christine Olsen, Oregon State University and Dr. Eric Toman, Ohio State University.

Drs. Toman and Olsen will describe ongoing research in Oregon and California on public perceptions of wildland and prescribed fire smoke. They will focus on identifying factors that influence perceptions of smoke, and how communication in various forms may influence those perceptions.

Here’s the link.

Thanks to Char for sending this.. here’s an excerpt:

Not all fire’s consequences are as obviously beneficial, at least not for those of us dependent on mountainous watersheds to sustain our thirsty downstream communities. Yet it turns out that in this context too words, and the thoughts and actions they generate, matter.

Although some reports about the Rim fire have highlighted San Francisco’s complete reliance on the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, located within Yosemite National Park, they have been freighted with dire anticipation — will airborne ash clog up its century-old works, imperiling the City by the Bay’s supply of potable water and electricity?

The immediate answer is no, or at least not yet, leading the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to predict that due “to the rocky, granite terrain and limited brush along the perimeter of the reservoir, there is little risk for direct impacts on the reservoir.”

Whatever relief this response may bring to its anxious customers, it may only be temporary and is certainly partial. That’s because the real question, which compels us to think across a multi-year future, is what happens when rain falls and snow flies in the high-elevation watershed of the Tuolumne River that feeds the threatened reservoir?

This coming winter and spring, and in successive storm seasons, precipitation landing on the burned-over terrain may trigger debris flows that could compromise the water quality within and the functioning of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir as spigot and generator.

Denver had to confront a similar challenge in the wake of the massive Hayman fire of 2002. Then the largest and most intense blaze in Colorado history, it had a major impact on the Mile-High City’s water supply. Ever since, the American Planning Association reports, the tributaries of the Upper South Platte River have experienced an “increase in the number and severity of flooding events” which in turn has let loose “large amounts of sediment and debris threaten[ing] the vitality of watersheds and ecosystems.” These post-fire environmental consequences accelerated public and private collaborations to restore affected riparian ecosystems, an involved and expensive process that continues more than a decade later.

The 2009 Station fire likewise damaged key portions of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers’ watersheds, leading to initial interventions, with more projected, to regenerate forest cover, river flow, and water quality.

It’s unfortunate that San Francisco did not pick up on these broad hints and in advance work with local, state, and federal agencies to reduce the threat that a fire like the Rim could pose to its single-source water supply. But this would have required the city’s Public Utility Commission and Division of Public Works to think proactively, for journalists there and elsewhere to offer more historically informed stories contextualizing fires across time and space, and for us collectively to build a more forward-thinking culture determined to resolve problems before they blow up in our faces.

I did have a quibble with “Set aside the concept that fires inevitably, irreparably destroy forests and consider instead the idea that fire may have regenerative capacity.” I think there are “good” fires from that perspective and “bad” fires. Hayman (photo above) may have been a “bad” fire.

I know it’s not irreparable, but I think people can say they prefer living green forests to this (photo above); knowing it will come back in a couple hundred years provides little satisfaction, and people’s (and certain wildife, bugs, plants, etc.) preferences for living green trees are OK. Aren’t they?