The state’s forest service is fighting multiple fires mainly in the western half of the state, according to the National Interagency Fire Center‘s infrared map. Those fires include:
The Bear Den Fire, which started Saturday morning, has burned an estimated 10,000 acres near the Fort Berthold Reservation as of Sunday afternoon.
The Elkhorn Fire, which started Saturday evening, has burned an estimated 10,000 acres south of Watford City.
The Sprint Creek Fire, which started Saturday afternoon, has burned an estimated 5,000 acres south of Watford City.
Credit: North Dakota Governor’s Office
NIFC’s map indicated numerous other hotspots throughout the state Sunday afternoon, but these have not yet been named or confirmed as active wildfires.
“Several large wildfires were being fought in western North Dakota this evening including near Grassy Butte, near Johnson’s corner along Highway 73 and near Mandaree,” Burgum said late Saturday night. “Evacuation orders were issued in multiple areas and temporary shelters were opened for those displaced.”
The Williams County Sheriff’s Office reported 26-year-old Johannes Nicolaas Van Eeden of South Africa died of fire-related injuries in the Ray area, according to the Bismarck Tribune. The local paper said South Africans often come to the state to work as farmhands. Another unidentified individual was taken to a local medical facility with critical injuries.
The National Weather Service’s Bismarck Office issued a Red Flag Warning, High Wind Warning, and Wind Advisory for much of the state Saturday, when the state’s biggest fires started. Fire conditions were worsened by Extreme to Moderate Drought intensity in the state’s western half, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Critical fire conditions have since subsided.
“Widespread high winds impacted the region yesterday with multiple sites seeing wind gusts above 75 mph. Luckily winds will remain light through this week,” the office tweeted Sunday.
Credit: North Dakota Governor’s Office
The North Dakota Forest Service previously deployed multiple engines and crews to the fires, along with two North Dakota National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and more than two dozen National Guard firefighters, Burgum said. Two heavy air tankers from Montana also dumped fire retardant while bulldozers and motor graders cut fire lines near the community of Mandaree.
The pause in fire-spreading weather will help firefighters get a foothold on the wildfires, according to USFS Dakota Prairie Grasslands.
“On the east side of the fire, near the Little Missouri River, the North Dakota National Guard is utilizing a helicopter to perform water drops to help contain the fire,” forest service officials said Sunday. “Local, state, and federal resources are working together performing suppression activities around the perimeter of the fire. Additionally, two hand crews are en route to the incident.”
The Elk Fire burning throughout Wyoming’s Big Horn National Forest near the town of Dayton triggered evacuations late Tuesday night and expanded evacuation warnings for nearby residents Wednesday.
The fire, which lightning first ignited on Sept. 27, has burned 49,555 acres in North-Central Wyoming along the border of Montana and closed the major roadway of US Highway 14. It sits at 0% containment as of Thursday morning.
“The conditions we’re experiencing on this fire are unprecedented…in these mountains,” Bighorn National Forest Supervisor Andrew Johnson said at a community meeting Wednesday night. “The temperatures we’ve been feeling don’t feel like October. The dryness we have does not feel like October. The relative humidity being so low doesn’t feel like October.”
The area is under a red flag warning with temperatures estimated in the low 70s, wind gusts up to 25 mph, and relative humidity around 20%. Dayton’s average max temperature since 1951 is 59.2 degrees, according to the Western Regional Climate Center.
Johnson also said fire crews are in this for the long haul, as the “unprecedented” weather conditions are expected to promote fire growth.
“Hot, windy weather is anticipated to start Friday afternoon and continue into Saturday. This weather will likely bring increased fire activity and spread,” the Big Horn National Forest’s update Thursday morning said.
USFS Bighorn National Forest
The Sheridan County Sheriff issued evacuations for residents along Pass Creek Road and Twin Creek Road west of Parkman, and Tongue River Canyon west of Dayton. “Set” evacuation warnings were set for residents on the Eagle Ridge Subdivision and those living east of U.S. Highway 14. The town of Parkman and residents north of the town on both sides of Highway 345 up to the Montana state line were put under “Ready” notices.
An evacuation center was set up at the Sheridan County Fairgrounds in the city of Sheridan.
“From when this fire was discovered Friday, it has been a hard fight,” Johnson said. “It has been resistant to control despite a lot of intense effort from the air and the ground.”
Credit: Rocky Mountain Area Complex Incident Management Team 3
A destructive cycle is worsening throughout the world’s arctic regions.
Numerous areas throughout Earth have “permafrost,” or layers of soil and sediment beneath the surface that remain frozen no matter the season. Humans, in their hubris, believed the frost to be “permanent,” but human-driven climate change, through the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, is shaking that stability.
Wildfires have recently burned more and more acres throughout the world’s arctic regions, causing unprecedented permafrost thawing and soil drying, according to a recent study published in Nature Communications. The abrupt drying is causing a subsequent abrupt increase in wildfires, continuing the vicious cycle.
“The abrupt soil drying and intensified atmospheric aridity can facilitate an abrupt increase in fires, related to biomass and peat burning over the permafrost regions,” the researchers said. “The abrupt increase in sensible heat fluxes can intensify the warming of near-surface air temperature and enhance atmospheric aridity, further promoting wildfire intensity.”
Fire in Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska. NPS photo.
Researchers estimate burned acreage throughout arctic areas will more than double after permafrost thaw, while historically fire-prone areas do not see changes. Additionally, once soil moisture is lost, it isn’t regained until after a long recovery period which researchers estimate to be over two years, further prolonging wildfire activity.
The researchers said their hypothesis was confirmed in the study: Soil moisture loss triggers a cascading effect in arctic areas, leading to rapid biomass burning, atmospheric drying, and an abrupt increase in wildfires and emissions.
“The abrupt increase in wildfires over the historical permafrost regions can contribute to changes in net terrestrial carbon uptake,” the researchers said. “Furthermore, the contribution of carbon release from wildfires to the net terrestrial carbon balance in these regions accelerates after the mid-21st century.”
It’s not the first study to link permafrost burning to increased emissions. A NASA study last year looked specifically at how wildfires throughout Alaska’s largest river delta were affecting that area’s permafrost and found clusters of methane “hot spots” where wildfires burned into tundra.
“We find that [methane] hotspots are roughly 29 percent more likely on average in tundra that burned within the last 50 years compared with unburned areas, and that this effect is nearly tripled along burn scar perimeters that are delineated by surface water features,” the researchers said. “Our results indicate that the changes following tundra fire favor the complex environmental conditions needed to generate emission hotspots.”
“The scale … people have to see it to understand just how many acres burned across the state this summer,” ODF Deputy Director for Fire Operations Kyle Williams told KGW. “Just because the smoke wasn’t present in our more populated areas doesn’t mean that (wildfires) weren’t deeply impactful.”
Smoke over La Pine in central Oregon. Photo by Deschutes County Sheriff’s office.
The costs for wildland firefighting alone chokes out the state’s entire emergency budget. ODF is asking the state’s Emergency Board, which allocates additional funding outside of legislative sessions, for $40 million from its general fund, KGW reports. The problem is that the E-Board only has $43 million in its general fund for the remainder of the year, meaning if wildland firefighting gets priority, other emergency needs the state may face will be strained until the legislative sessions starts back up.
On top of that, ODF will probably need much more money this year as wildfires continue to burn. A recent Legislative Fiscal Office analysis found the department won’t be able to pay its debts by November, with an estimated shortfall of $54 million by January.
“I would like to think that future fire seasons won’t be quite at this scale, but I think the statistics tell me that’s probably not going to be accurate,” Williams told KGW. “The conditions we’ve got on the landscape are going to drive us to a place we haven’t been before.”
Climate change, overgrown forests, and people are the top causes for Oregon’s worsening wildfire seasons, according to an Oregon Forest Resources Institute report. The high burned acreage totals aren’t unprecedented; fire experts previously warned massive wildfires in the state were a disaster waiting to happen and part of a larger trend in the Western U.S. Even though the total number of yearly Oregon wildfires have remained steady over the past decade, the total amount of acres burned per year have increased dramatically.
Oregon Department of Forestry
“Factors contributing to this explosion of ‘megafires’ include overgrown forests and the effects of climate change, which have led to extreme weather, drought and insect infestations that weaken and kill trees, making forests more prone to fire damage,” the report said.
“The good news is there are many actions homeowners and landowners can take to reduce the fuels wildfires need to spread … These include clearing flammable vegetation and debris around homes, pruning or thinning trees, and using controlled burns to reduce dry brush and other fuels in forests, rangelands and grasslands adjacent to homes.”
President Joe Biden claimed his administration is working to raise the minimum wage of wildland firefighters to $29 an hour at a press conference Tuesday morning.
“What I’d like to do is…raise the pay of $29 an hour. I’d like to make that permanent for these firefighters,” Biden said at an Oval Office press conference on the ongoing wildfire response. “I look forward to this briefing from key members of my administration, who’ve been working like hell on this, and two frontline governors.”
Biden did not share details on how he’d raise the wage, and ended the press conference right after the statement.
The raise would be significant for the nation’s wildland firefighting force, the members of which usually hired at GS-3/4 with an average base hourly wage at $15.47 an hour.
A wildland firefighter pay raise, albeit not as substantial as Biden’s proposal, has recently neared reality after being rucked inside this year’s Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill, which passed the House and was placed on the Senate’s calendar on Sept. 12, would boost wildland firefighter pay from 1.5% to 42%, with higher percentage increases going to workers lower on the pay scale, according to Boise State Public Radio.
Despite the lack of details, Biden’s statement stands in stark contrast to former President Donald Trump’s recent threat. If re-elected president, Trump said he’d cut all federal wildfire aid from California if Gov. Gavin Newsom did not agree with his policies.
For over half a century, the first line of wildfire defense consisted of humans perched on towers hundreds of feet in the air.
Fire lookout towers played an essential role in detecting wildfires since even before the USFS was founded in 1905. The Great Fire of 1910, also known as the Big Blowup, enshrined the towers as cornerstones of the country’s new, now discredited, full fire suppression regime. The lookouts were largely decommissioned between the 1960s and the 1990s after technological advancements in radio communication, aircraft, and even satellites gained favor over the human eye.
The tech advancements, however, lacked two things fire lookouts excelled at: spotting fires early and when they’re small. Even the most advanced modern satellites can detect wildfires only after they burn around three acres. Acreage burned is also updated only a few times daily with low-resolution images.
“Google Research has been developing FireSat, a purpose-built satellite constellation to provide highly detailed insights, data for ecological intervention, and novel ground truth for the scientists and machine learning experts studying fire propagation and risk,” the company said.
The program, called “FireSat,” is a collaboration between Google, the Earth Fire Alliance, and Muon Space. The program is slated to launch around 52 satellites, starting in early 2025 and continuing through 2026, with the goal of providing global high-resolution images updated every 20 minutes to enable early detection of wildfires roughly the size of a classroom.
The satellites reportedly have an expected lifespan of five to seven years, so researchers predict they’ll have to launch 10 satellites annually to keep the program going once it’s up and running.
“Using AI, FireSat will rapidly compare any 5×5 meter spot on earth with previous imagery, while also combining factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather, to determine if there’s a fire,” Google said. “In addition to supporting emergency response efforts, FireSat’s data will be used to create a global historical record of fire spread, helping Google and scientists to better model and understand wildfire behavior and spread.”
Researchers also committed to offer the data as open source and for free to fire agencies and climate researchers around the world.
Researchers, however, affirmed the healthy aspects fire has on some landscapes. They also stressed this new technology wasn’t made with full suppression in mind, but rather as a means to give fire crews and managers the most up-to-date data in order to make the best decisions for managing fire.
“We really want to focus on reducing the size, frequency, and damage of hot and fast fires, and encouraging, as much as we can, slow and cool fires because we need a lot of slow, cool fire in order for ecosystems to improve,” said former Cal State Fire Marshal and Moore Foundation Senior Advisor Kate Dargan. “FireSat, because it will tell us not just where fires are, but also how hot they’re burning…we can develop new strategies for fire management that isn’t just ‘put it out’.”
Credit: Google Research
It will take multiple years for all the program’s satellites to launch, but it will take longer for the system to be fully operational. The first phase of FireSat will strictly be gathering data and sifting through it so fire managers can actually use it without worrying about false positives.
“In the satellite image of the Earth a lot of things can be mistaken for a fire,” said Earth Fire Alliance Chairman and Google Research Climate & Energy Lead Researcher Chris Van Arsdale. “A glint, a hot roof, smoke from another fire covering something that’s warm in the background. There are a lot more of these than real fires, and so detecting fires becomes a game of looking for needles in a world of haystacks.”
Once the false-positive problem is solved, fire managers and scientists will be able to use the data as a visual history of all fires globally. Wildfires will reportedly be tracked step-by-step from when they start to when they are extinguished, which will help researchers better understand fire behavior on the global scale.
Many departments, counties, states and even international countries, especially in the Global South, often face hurdles to this kind of technology due to financial constraints or lack of technological infrastructure. Google researchers said they’re working with partners throughout the globe to identify which aspects of the data they most need and how to best get it to them.
“For example, in Brazil and Indonesia, those are largely regional partnerships where either a government organization or a conservation organization serves our distributor to make sure the data is actually hitting the ground and being used by the agencies themselves,” Earth Fire Alliance Executive Director Brian Collins said.
Agencies interested in joining the program’s Early Adopter Program can reach out to Earth Fire Alliance Community Organizer Ann Kapusta at ann@earthfirealliance.org or get updates by signing up at the Earth Fire Alliance website.
