Wildfire Today

News and opinion about wildland fire

Wildfire Today

Researchers estimate global mortality from smoke

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,

Wildfire Today recently reported on a study that linked wildfire smoke with increased physician visits. Now other researchers claim they can estimate the number of people that die each year as a result of breathing smoke particulates, PM2.5. Their principal estimate for the world-wide average mortality attributable to smoke exposure for 1997-2006 is 339,000 deaths annually. According to the researchers, the mortality could be substantially reduced by curtailing burning of tropical rainforests, which rarely burn naturally.

Wildfire smoke affected areas
Spatial locations of the 14 terrestrial Global Fire Emission Database (GFED) regions used in global fire emissions modeling. The warm colors (red, orange, pink) represent the fire-affected area. (from the study)

HERE is a link to “supplemental material” which explains the researchers’ methodology. Below, is the abstract from the paper.
Continue reading “Researchers estimate global mortality from smoke”

Poll update: most significant wildfire stories of 2011

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized

The early results from our Wildfire Today poll in which our readers selected the most significant wildfire stories of 2011 show that the fires in Texas is in the lead. Coming in second is the Wallow fire, and tied for third place are Aero Union closing down their air tanker operation and the U.S. Forest Service’s management of the large air tanker fleet.

You can still cast your vote. Check it out HERE.

Poll 2011 significant wildfire stories

Some presidential candidates want the federal government to divest itself of some land

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized

Rocky Barker, a writer for the Idaho Statesman and author of Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America, co-wrote an article on the newspaper’s web site about the land management platforms of some of the candidates for President. Rick Santorum, for example, thinks the federal government should sell or transfer much of their land, and Ron Paul wants to eliminate the Department of Interior.

Check out Mr. Barker’s article, but here are a few excerpts:

–GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s call to sell or transfer federally owned public lands Tuesday night in Boise earned him several rounds of applause.

–“We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector,” Santorum told an overflow crowd at Boise’s Capital High School. “And we can make money doing it.”

–Santorum said Tuesday the nation could not afford to manage its federal estate. “The federal government doesn’t care about it, they don’t care about this land,” he said. “They don’t live here, they don’t care about it, we don’t care about it in Washington. It’s just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”

–Rep. Ron Paul has called for eliminating the Department of Interior, which manages more than 500 million acres of public land and a big chunk of Idaho, almost two-thirds of which is owned by the federal government. “I’d rather see the land owned and controlled by the states,” Paul told a crowd in Elko, Nev., earlier this month.

–Earlier this month, Romney told the Reno-Gazette Journal that he didn’t know why the federal government owned all the land and that he hadn’t studied the transfer issue. “But where government ownership of land is designed to satisfy, let’s say, the most extreme environmentalists, from keeping a population from developing their coal, their gold, their other resources for the benefit of the state, I would find that to be unacceptable,” Romney said.

“Fatal flaws” in Aussie Stay-or-Go bushfire strategy

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , ,

Some of the 172 people that died in the Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria in 2009 made a conscious decision to stay at home, rather than evacuate. The Stay-or-Go option that has been used in Victoria for years did not turn out well during the extreme fire behavior on Black Saturday.

Here is an excerpt from an article in The Australian:

…According to geographers Saffron O’Neill of Melbourne University and John Handmer with RMIT University, the state’s fire preparedness strategies must be “transformed” or the next “complex” bushfire will cost far more than Black Saturday’s 172 lives and $3.5 billion in damage.

According to Professor Handmer and Dr O’Neill, most people who died in the fires left the decision to leave their homes too late or had fire plans containing “fatal flaws” — such as sheltering in a bathroom or other small room — where they were unaware of what was happening to the rest of the house and had no way to escape when the house caught fire.

“This is not a small step or a small change,” said Professor Handmer of the vulnerabilities he and Dr O’Neill detail today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

“We are the victims of our own success,” said Dr Handmer, noting that strategies for preparing for and coping with ordinary bushfires were totally inadequate in the face of hot, fast-moving wildfires.

The researchers recommend policymakers focus on four areas: diminishing the hazard — for instance, by altering electrical power distribution systems; reducing the exposure of infrastructure and buildings by prohibiting housing in high-hazard areas; reducing the vulnerability of people — by, for example, identifying disabled people; and boosting the adaptive capacity of institutions such as insurers and firefighters.

Thanks go out to Dick

Researchers quantify effects of wildfire smoke on residents

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , ,

Researchers in British Columbia took advantage of smoky conditions from wildfires near Kelowna (map) and other areas in southeastern B.C. in 2003 to study the effects of smoke on the residents. The fires that year burned over 67,000 acres, destroyed 238 homes, and forced 33,000 people to evacuate.

The study not only evaluated the particulate data from air quality monitoring stations, but also the human health impacts, especially in urban settings.

Smoke effects, British Columbia 2003
Difference in weekly asthma visits for 2003 versus the average of 2002 and 2004 (when there were few fires in the study area) plotted against the difference in average weekly total PM10 measurements for Kelowna, the largest city in the study area. Bars indicate the weekly sum of 2003 asthma-specific visits minus the averages of the 2002 and 2004 weekly sums of asthma visits. The black line indicates the average weekly TEOM-measured PM10 in 2003 minus the average of weekly measurements in 2002 and 2004. (From the referenced study.)

The researchers found that increases in smoke particulates, PM10, were associated with increased odds of respiratory physician visits and hospital admissions, but not with cardiovascular health outcomes. Residents in Kelowna experienced an increase of 100 micrograms of particulate per cubic meter of air, which resulted in an 80 percent increase in respiratory hospital admissions and a six percent increase in the odds of an asthma-specific physician visit.

Thankfully, the University of British Columbia authors, Sarah B. Henderson, Michael Brauer1, Ying C. MacNab, and Susan M. Kennedy, made the entire paper freely available to the public, honoring the principles of Open Access.

Our fire deficit

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,

Researchers have determined that we have a “fire deficit” in the western United States. Since the late 1800s, they say, human activities, grazing, climate change, and fire suppression caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the Little Ice Age (which was between 1400 and 1700), leading to a buildup of fuel, or biomass. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.

We owe the ecosystem some fire, and the debt collector has come to visit.

Their key findings:

  • Comparing charcoal records and climate data, as expected, showed warm, dry intervals, such as the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” between 1,000 and 700 years ago, which had more burning, and cool, moist intervals, such as the “Little Ice Age” between 500 and 300 years ago, had fewer fires. Short-term peaks in fires were associated with abrupt climate changes — warming or cooling.
  • Wildfires during most of the 20th century were almost as infrequent as they were during the Little Ice Age, about 400 years ago. However, only a century ago, fires were as frequent as they were about 800 years ago, during the warm and dry Medieval Climate Anomaly. “In other words, humans caused fires to shift from their 1,000-year maximum to their 1,000-year minimum in less than 100 years,” Gavin said.
  • Climate and humans acted synergistically — by the end of the 18th century and early 19th century — to increase fire events that were often sparked by agricultural practices, clearing of forests, logging activity and railroading.

The authors of the paper, especially lead author Jennifer R. Marlon, are to be commended for publishing this as Open Access, which means that the results from this taxpayer funded research are freely available to the people who paid for it (unlike other research by the U.S. Forest Service that we wrote about earlier today).

The figure below made my head hurt as I figured it out, never having seen anything like this. It is a portion of a chart in the referenced paper.

Fire Deficit Charts
From the research paper: "Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western USA"

The paper, titled Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western United States can be found HERE, and a summary is HERE. The authors are Jennifer R. Marlon, Patrick J. Bartlein, Daniel G. Gavin, Colin J. Long, R. Scott Anderson, Christy E. Briles, Kendrick J. Brown, Daniele Colombaroli, Douglas J. Hallett, Mitchell J. Power, Elizabeth A. Scharf, and Megan K. Walsh.

 

Thanks go out to Dick