Last week in this space, we looked back on a 2013 piece about climate change—and shared recent studies showing that Reno today is warming at a faster pace than any other U.S. city.
Well, with more heat comes more fire.
A decade ago this week, the RN&R‘s cover story, by Alastair Bland, explained how climate change, a century of aggressive and efficient firefighting (leading to denser forests) and “outward development from urban areas (that) continues to plant new homes deep in the dry woods” were all leading to record-setting fire seasons.
Here’s the first portion of the story:
A plume of smoke rose from the woods early in the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 9, last year. Gary Rose was on his way home to his rural house in Mountain Ranch, Calaveras County, California, about three hours southwest of Reno. His wife, Monika, called to ask if he could see the fire.
“He told me it was over the ridge, on the Amador side, and that it wasn’t coming our way,” she recalled
By the next day, however, the plume had grown larger and closer, smearing the sky a rusty, smoky brown. That afternoon, the Roses, along with two of their three adult children, packed their belongings. Their unease grew into a frantic rush as the fire moved closer and closer.
In the morning hours before sunrise, they piled into the truck as, behind them, the flames soared 150 to 200 feet above the ground. Rose said propane tanks could be heard exploding as the inferno claimed each new home in its path.
“I could hear the fire breathing,” she said. “It was like a dragon coming down the mountain, and if it wanted something it took it.”
The Butte Fire eventually burned 70,000 acres, destroyed hundreds of homes and took two human lives. The Roses were allowed to return after nine days. They were lucky. Their home, and their small herd of cattle, survived the fire. A team of firefighters had, it turned out, camped on the property, using it as a base to try to defend the surrounding region. Their success was only middling. Within a half mile of the Rose property, 11 neighbors’ homes were destroyed—about a 50 percent rate of loss.
Rose said the devastation was almost surreal.
“They were totally gone,” she said. “It was eerie, like a war zone. The trees were all blackened and standing like a charred cathedral, and where the houses had been, there was nothing left at all—nothing, not even pieces of metal.”
2015 was one of the most destructive fire years ever. A record-setting 10 million acres of the United States—mostly in Alaska and other Western regions—went up in flames.
“We no longer have fire seasons—it’s more of a fire year now,” said Mike Lopez, a veteran firefighter with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection who currently serves as president of Cal Fire’s Sacramento-based firefighters’ labor union.
To Lopez and many others, it’s clear that climate change is driving longer droughts and warmer conditions that are pushing the West into a new era of bigger, hotter fires.
“The forecast is that this is the new normal,” Lopez said.
Demographic trends are also troubling. Millions of Americans now live in areas prone to catching fire, and outward development from urban areas continues to plant new homes deep in the dry woods.
Now, after nearly five dry years, the West’s forests are perhaps as likely to catch fire as they’ve ever been. Tens of millions of trees killed by the drought are ready to burn. Decades of fire suppression practices have also contributed to the woodland fuel load, allowing underbrush to build like kindling in a campfire ring.
“California has always been a flammable place,” said Jens Stevens, a post-doc plant ecologist at the University of California, Davis’ John Muir Institute of the Environment. “What’s different today is there’s evidence the forests are denser than ever before. This is going to create bigger, hotter fires.”
Thinning out that fuel load is a top priority for forest managers hoping to avert disastrous fires—but there may not be time. Already, record-setting heat baked the West in June, and it’s likely the summer will see furnace-like conditions in the months to come. With large fires already burning, fire officials are already facing what could very well blow into the worst fire season in regional history.
Later in the piece, Bland wrote: “Eventually, so much biomass had accumulated in the West’s forests that even the advanced fire extinguishing strategies and technology of the 20th century could not subdue the force of fire anymore. Fire suppression programs had, in effect, backfired.”
In the decade since this story graced our cover, climate change has intensified, and there’s been a lot more human development in and around forests. The West has endured some of the deadliest and costliest wildfires ever.
However, the U.S. did continue making forward progress in one area: Our firefighting policies evolved. Using a more science-driven approach, not all fires were fought aggressively. Controlled burns were used to reduce the danger of out-of-control blases.
Then came Trump 2.0—and myriad new federal policies that raise a figurative middle finger toward science.
A recent piece from The Associated Press, via Oregon Public Broadcasting, is headlined “Trump administration seeks to stomp out all fires quickly, reviving policy that has been discredited.”
Details:
The deaths of three U.S. government firefighters in a Colorado wildfire are casting a spotlight on the Trump administration’s creation of a new federal fire service and its revival of a previously discredited policy to stomp out all wildfires quickly.
One of the killed firefighters worked for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, established this year without customary congressional approval by drawing personnel from four agencies within the Interior Department. The victims were part of an elite, helicopter-based crew that got trapped Saturday in a fast-growing wildfire near the Utah border as they attacked the blaze on the ground.
Five firefighters, including the ones who died, tried to shield themselves by deploying tentlike emergency shelters as flames overran their position. The two survivors were hospitalized with burn injuries.
The consolidation of thousands of personnel into the fire service has sown confusion among some firefighters about who their bosses are and what their responsibilities should be, according to former government officials.
And the administration’s focus on “full suppression” of new fires marks a sharp reversal from a decades-long trend toward embracing flames as a tool—to burn off old vegetation and growth that acts like fuel and lessen the risk of catastrophic blazes being stoked by a warming planet.
The changes benefit private fire aviation companies that are key to hitting blazes fast. …
“The question is, why were they attacking that fire in the first place?” asked Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter and cofounder of the advocacy group Firefighters United For Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “What was actually at risk? If it was a bunch of shrubs on remote mountaintops, what was the real risk that justified putting those firefighters at risk?”
The changes benefit private fire aviation companies that are key to hitting blazes fast.
Ugh.
—Jimmy Boegle
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