Ironically, it seems our firefighting efforts are the primary cause of the larger, nastier fires we see today. We're so fixated on protecting every single structure from harm, and fighting fires whenever and wherever they start, that we don't let small fires run their natural course. Controlled burns do take place, but not nearly enough. We dump so much money into fighting wildfires with very little benefit, the numbers are staggering.
And even if we stop a small fire from becoming large, it has its consequences. Forest health suffers without fires naturally releasing nutrients and catalyzing other biochemical processes, making them more likely to burn in the future. Some forests are 30X denser with wood fuel than they were 100 years ago, making them much more dangerous.
The West region has seen the biggest population boom in the US over the last 50 years, yet there are no real deterrents in place to discourage people from settling down in "stupid zones" where fire danger is great. Also there are few incentives/laws in place to promote/mandate fire-resistant home building (house timber serves to spread fires in populated areas like trees do in a forest). Even after the recent big fire in Lake Tahoe, people haven't learned anything and are rebuilding their homes just as before (thinking beauty and comfort before safety), even though new building codes require additional fireproofing measures. They probably won't even be penalized, because there aren't enough resources/personnel for thorough inspections. Governor Arnold is planning to increasing property taxes to pay for a new fire emergency fund, with higher-risk homeowners paying more than lower-risk, but I doubt that will be enough to discourage people from living in fire zones.
And probably climate change is negatively affecting weather and vegetation patterns as well.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/fire-season/shea-text
Under Fire
From the Rocky Mountains to the coast of California, wildfires are burning bigger, hotter, and closer to home. Why is the West ablaze?
By Neil Shea
Photograph by Mark Thiessen
Both National Geograhic Staff
Excerpts I found interesting...
This is how we deal with fire in America, in small wagers. Fighting fire with fire, trying to prevent the landscape from doing what even firefighters say it wants to do: burn.
Wildfire advances by transforming vegetation into fuel. As plant matter heats, it releases compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and other flammable elements, which react with oxygen to release more energy, starting a chain reaction. Air around the fire warms and rises, sometimes creating winds that fan the flames. Extremely hot fires can manufacture their own weather systems, feeding and driving themselves, covering ground far faster than a sprinting human. Sudden wind shifts have pushed fire onto firefighters who believed they were safe.
The Western wildfire season generally begins in late spring and lasts into fall. Like other seasonal disturbances—hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms—we have learned to fear its approach. Red walls of flame, leaden pillars of smoke. But fire is the one natural event we regularly treat as though it were alive and battle vigorously as if it were an invading host.
More and more, we lose. While fire in densely populated California draws the most attention, forests and rangelands throughout the American West are burning at unprecedented rates. In 2006, wildfires burned 15,000 square miles across the country, a record nearly matched last year. Two-thirds of the burned acreage was in the West. One obvious cause is a decade of drought and warmer temperatures. Mountain snow melts earlier, and winter storms arrive later, extending the fire season in some regions by several weeks. Vast tracts of drought-weakened forest have succumbed to insects and disease, turning trees to tinder. In response, we have bolstered our fighter ranks, padded them with private contractors, provided them more hoses and axes and trucks. Annual federal spending on firefighting has leaped from $1 billion when the recent drought began in 1998 to more than $3 billion last year, with even greater costs forecast for the future. But the drought is only one part of the burn equation.
"The more money we spend, the worse it gets," one fire scientist told me last summer. "If that's not a condemnation of our fire policies, I don't know what is."
Historically, the American approach to wildfire has been to try to suppress it whenever and wherever it appears. This strategy is often traced to the great fires of 1910. That year, massive blazes across the West burned millions of acres and killed dozens of firefighters. Smoke drifted as far as New England, along with tales of tragedy and devastation. Gifford Pinchot, first director of the nascent U.S. Forest Service, was convinced that fire threatened the economic well-being of the nation, and as the man in charge of a huge, federally owned empire of forested land, he was in a position to turn his ideas into policy. He began a campaign to banish fire. "We understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of man," he declared.
Under Pinchot and his successors, firefighting became a courageous struggle. We grew adept at killing fires, especially small ones. But we did not understand that fire, like rain, is necessary. Those firefighting campaigns, combined with a decline in logging and a growing conservation movement, meant vegetation—potential fuel—began to pile up. A study published in 2005 reflects the sort of change seen across the West. Researchers at Northern Arizona University studying two patches of Arizona forest estimated that in the late 1800s they contained about 50 trees for every 2.5 acres. After nearly a century without fire, up to 1,700 trees now crowd the same area.
By stamping out small fires and allowing fuel to stockpile, our policies ensured that when conditions were right, fire would return—bigger, hotter, more destructive than ever. And the right conditions could become routine. Most climate models now strongly suggest that the recent drought is not just a temporary phenomenon but part of a long-term drying trend made worse by global warming. There comes a point where no amount of money, no measure of heroism, is enough. Far from "wholly within the control of man," fire becomes unstoppable.
Idaho's Lucky fire represents the American firefighting world in miniature. Crews from all over the West and beyond have come to fight it and a few other fires nearby. They work dawn to dusk, sleeping in tents or on bare ground. Helicopters costing up to $80,000 a day rattle overhead, dropping water and blood-red fire retardant. In a command tent far from the fire, the bill is tallied. By July 26, nine days after the fire began, it was $1.5 million. July 29: $2.6 million. August 1: $4.5 million. Dozens of fires burn elsewhere in Idaho alone.
He also faces another problem, one that greatly complicates wildland firefighting today. If the fire jumps the river, houses and ranches lie in its path. Since the end of World War II, people have streamed into the West, injecting houses and roads and towns into places they never existed before. In the 1990s, eight million new homes sprouted along the borders of parks and forests, where fires regularly start. The government spends exorbitantly attempting to defend property in these areas. Formally this is known as the wildland-urban interface. Some firefighters call it the stupid zone.
A helicopter passes, its orange bucket sailing overhead like a comet, mist trailing behind. Justin Bone, one of Barrett's lieutenants, watches it go and shakes his head. "We're spending millions on 1,500 acres," he says. "How many city fire departments would that pay for? They might as well be pouring dollars on the fire."
Like Barrett, Bone loves his job. And he shares with many others the belief that trying to fight all fires is a loser's game. Bone favors an alternative strategy called "wildland fire use," in which some wildfires are monitored but allowed to burn, gradually thinning the forests and clearing out fuel. It is not a new approach. Native Americans burned forests and grasslands to create game habitat and clear fields. Many plant species benefit from a periodic purging. Bone stabs a finger toward the forest, heavy with ponderosa pine. With their thick, tough bark, the trees can survive all but the most severe burns. Other pines require fire for reproduction; their seed cones are coated in a waxy resin that must be melted off by heat to free the seeds. As fire burns dead wood and live plants, it also releases nutrients into the soil. This is crucial in arid zones, where decomposition without fire would take decades. Not all fires can be left to run their course, but the ecological argument behind the idea is compelling. "That's the future, man," Bone says. "We need to learn to let things burn."
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The federal government has recently begun using a computer-modeling program he helped develop to try to understand how small fires grow into monsters and how we might fight them. The three most important ingredients driving fire are weather, terrain, and fuel. Finney's program, called Fire Spread Probability (or FSPro), is the latest attempt to make sense of these interacting forces. It can simulate thousands of weather scenarios, based on years of records. It accounts for local topography (fire often moves faster uphill, for example) and the type of fuel: thick stands of trees, grass or chaparral, slash left by loggers. FSPro mathematically synthesizes all of these data on massive computers in Kansas and assigns burn probabilities to individual bits of land. Then it builds a map showing how a fire could advance across a landscape. The amount of data is immense. Modeling can take hours. Eventually the map emerges from Finney's printer covered with multicolored inks. A stand of drought-stricken pine near the fire might have an 80 to 100 percent chance of igniting; it appears red on the map. A wet meadow farther away might have a 5 to 20 percent chance: blue. Fires tend to grow in elliptical shapes, so the maps are blotched with rainbow rings, like tie-dyed T-shirts. FSPro can be used with other powerful programs, such as Google Earth, to create intricate maps showing the location of houses, roads, dams, even wildlife habitat—crucial information for firefighters. As a fire moves, the maps are updated and fed to commanders, helping them decide which areas are most likely to burn, where best to deploy their armies.
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The Jocko Lakes fire burned some 36,000 acres and cost over $30 million. At the time, it seemed large. Then came California. For three weeks last fall, fires swept the southern part of the state. Firefighters arrived in force. They fought and retreated and retreated again. There was little they could do but make sweat-drenched stands outside homes, and hope for the wind to die. More than half a million people were evacuated and over 2,000 homes were destroyed. Images of disaster saturated newspapers and television. Plumes of smoke, visible from space, arced over the Pacific. If the nation was shocked, most experts weren't. "If anyone was surprised, it was because they were young or inexperienced," says Jack Cohen, a federal fire researcher who lived in southern California for a decade and often returns to study the wildland-urban interface. Cohen names other deadly, destructive California fires. Oakland–Berkeley Hills, 1991. Laguna Hills, 1993. Cedar and Old–Grand Prix, 2003—a year even worse than 2007.
The state's fire environment differs in significant ways from the rest of the West. Southern California fires often begin and grow in chaparrals, dry thickets of shrubs and trees, many of them oozing combustible resins, all of them well adapted to fire and ready to burn. Usually the fires are ignited directly or indirectly by humans. A boy playing with matches caused one of 2007's major blazes; arsonists lit others. The fires become fierce because Santa Ana winds—strong seasonal winds unique to California—act as giant bellows. When the Santa Anas blow, California often burns.
The region is also the extreme expression of the trend to place ourselves in fire's way. California is the most populous state, growing by roughly ten million people every 20 years. Much of the south is particularly crowded. Houses clot the furrowed landscape. Factors that once constrained settlement—sparse water and remoteness, for example—no longer apply. Americans have been increasingly freed, even encouraged, to spread out and pick plots based less on logic and more on the view. The government policy on this migration into fire territory has been no policy at all, and Americans generally want it that way.
"The scale of the evacuation was bizarre, quite frankly," he says. "When you evacuate 300,000 houses, to me that's a suggestion that you don't really know what you're doing. With all of our technology, we are obviously incompatible with the environment that we live in."
Cohen is an expert on how houses catch fire. If you examine a neighborhood after a large fire, he says, one of the most striking details is the green, unburned vegetation that often remains between the ashen heaps. It's a sign that what probably ignited the houses was not burning trees or chaparral; instead, the houses touched off one another as embers blew like wind-borne viruses. They landed on the roof or blew under the eaves. They sifted through ceiling vents. In dense neighborhoods, houses replace trees as the primary fuel.
Houses need not serve as tinder, Cohen says; they can be built with fire-resistant roof shingles and siding. "In California there were significant cases of communities that did not burn and did not evacuate because they were fire resistant." Some California communities require fire-resistant construction. Many others do not. "We have the ability to be compatible with fires," Cohen says. "But we mostly choose not to be."
No single action will reduce fires or their damage. Saw-wielding crews may thin the fuel load, but there is simply too much overgrown land. Prescribed burning, fires set on purpose, is a common, if risky, method. It remains to be seen if Americans will voluntarily stop moving into fire-prone areas, or if they will take to the idea of letting natural fires burn unchecked. The best approach would consider all these measures and apply each where appropriate. That would also require a rare symphony of government effort and public will.
And yet, regardless of policy, a basic problem remains: Fire is a force beyond control. Americans in particular have been reluctant to acknowledge that no government or technical solution, no matter how well funded, or brilliant, can halt natural processes or remove their power to affect lives. For this reason, and with an eye toward the increasing costs, many experts believe it is time for a new era of American responsibility, perhaps with policies like those in Australia, another country facing massive wildfires. There the government does not attempt to protect all private property. Responsibility is placed largely on individuals. Citizens are encouraged to evacuate well before wildfires arrive—when weather forecasts indicate danger—and government programs teach methods for making homes less vulnerable.
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