Red Flag warnings, Central Plains. Map shows wind gusts at 10:45 a.m. CST Feb. 8, 2022. NWS.
A Red Flag Warning is in effect February 8 for low humidity and strong winds in parts of the Central Plains Tuesday, affecting areas in South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The warnings expire around sunset.
The forecast from the National Weather Service calls for increasing winds in the morning, tapering off in the late afternoon:
South Dakota: 20 to 25 percent RH with 20 to 45 mph winds gusting at 50 to 65 mph.
Nebraska: 15 to 25 percent RH with 20 to 30 mph winds gusting to 45 mph.
Kansas: 17 percent RH with 20 to 25 mph winds gusting to 40 mph.
Smoke column from the Williams Fork Fire southwest of Fraser, Colorado, Aug. 15, 2020. USFS photo by Lauren Demos.
The Guardian has an excellent long-form article about wildland fires, titled ‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder. Author Daniel Immerwahr writes that in banishing fire from sight, we have made its dangers stranger and less predictable. He writes about fires around the world, pyrophobia, indigenous fire, and how hundreds of thousands die each year from such smoke-related maladies as strokes, heart failure and asthma.
Toward the end of the article he writes about fires in Indonesia where forests have been drained, burned, or clear cut, then summarizes.
Here is an excerpt:
…No single one of Indonesia’s many fires in recent decades has been especially noteworthy. But altogether they’ve been cataclysmic. In 1997, a dense haze of airborne particulates from Indonesia’s fires was perceptible as far as the Philippines and Thailand. That year, on Sumatra – centre of Indonesia’s fires – a commercial plane crashed due to poor visibility and killed all 234 aboard. The next day, two ships collided off the coast of Malaysia for the same reason, and 29 crew members died.
The economist Maria Lo Bue found that Indonesians who were toddlers during the 1997 haze grew less tall, entered school six months later and completed almost a year less of education than their peers. Another economist, Seema Jayachandran, found that the fires “led to over 15,600 child, infant and fetal deaths”, hitting the poor especially hard.
Picture a dangerous fire and you’re likely to imagine a thicket of tall trees blazing in a drought-stricken climate. But a more accurate image is smoldering peat or scrub burning by a tropical logging road. The real threat isn’t catching fire, but the slow violence of breathing bad air. You’ve got a hacking cough, your father suffers a stroke and you watch your daughter – short for her age – leave school a year early.
—
Fire is not in itself a bad thing. Many landscapes, built to burn, simply couldn’t exist without regular fires, either natural or intentional. Though foresters once sought to tamp blazes out everywhere, we now recognise that as a grave mistake. A fireproof planet isn’t something we can get, or should even want.
We badly need a healthier relationship to combustion. Rather than erratic, runaway fires, we need regular, restorative ones, like we used to have. Our forebears didn’t shun flame – they were relentless fire-setters. But they adhered to two important limits. First, they fed their fires with living vegetation, which reclaims lost carbon as it regrows. Second, they were guided by long-acquired experience with fire’s complex paths and consequences.
We’ve blasted far past both of those limits. We’re now burning fossilized vegetation, which sends carbon on a one-way trip to the warming atmosphere. And we’re kindling fires that bear little resemblance to the ones we’re used to. There’s no generational wisdom telling us what to do when we drain the peatlands of Central Kalimantan or let dry fuel pile up precariously in the California countryside, all while raising the temperature to hitherto unrecorded heights.
Booksaboutfire typically end with prescriptions: we must invest in science, reclaim lost cultural knowledge, burn intentionally, build resiliently, and power our grids renewably. All that is true, surely. But given how complex fire is, and how unprecedented nearly everything we’re doing with it is, the best advice would seem to be: slow down. We have scrambled our landscape, changed our energy diet, altered the climate and revised our relationship to flame, all in a very short time. It’s not a surprise that fire, once a useful if obstinate companion to our species, has now slipped our grasp.
The world won’t burn up, as we sometimes imagine. But the fires of tomorrow will be different from those of yesterday, and we’re racing headlong into that unsettling future, burning tankfuls of gas as we go.
A wildland firefighter will be competing in the Winter Olympics in China. Robby Burns grew up near Mount Shasta, California and has been a professional snowboarder for the last five years. He was a lead firefighter on the Shasta Lake Interagency Hotshots from 2013 to 2015. This past summer, he worked on an engine crew assigned to the Dixie Fire, Salmon River Complex, Corral Complex, Forks Complex, Mad River Complex, and Gasquet Complex. According to the US Forest Service, Mr. Burns recently accepted a position on the Shasta Lake Interagency Hotshot Crew.
“Robby was an integral part of the success of the crew,” said Joe Bogdan, Shasta Lake IHC superintendent. “We deeply respect the sacrifices he has made and his discipline to achieve his goals. We created lifelong and battled-tested relationships through our time working together.”
On his website he describes himself as “snowboarder, firefighter, speaker.”
The 31-year old will be competing in the Parallel Giant Slalom event February 7th PT. Qualifications begin at 7 p.m. PT with the subsequent races continuing through the night, U.S. time. (Update Monday Feb, 7: NBC is showing the event starts Monday at 9:40 p.m. ET, 6:40 p.m. PT. Times are subject to change due to weather and other factors.)
When he leaves the starting gate in Beijing, he will be wearing his Shasta Lake IHC buckle, which he earned after completing his third season on the crew.
In January of 2020 Mr. Burns finished first in the Nor-Am Cup Parallel Giant Slalom race in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
In November he sustained a leg injury after falling when he was training in Northern Canada. It put him on crutches and resulted in him missing the first stop of the World Cup tour in Russia.
On November 30, 2021 he wrote on his Facebook page, “Yesterday I made it from two crutches to one! Feels like I just graduated kindergarten! While it was a scary injury to my knee, the pictures say all the real important stuff still works good. With 2 weeks of intense PT the doc says he thinks I’ll be right as rain. So, while the “ship” isn’t moving at full speed, I’ll be moving full speed at this snail pace for a little while. But I’m in the best place to do this work. And sometimes life has a way of telling us to slow down.”
About 16 days after writing he was on one crutch, he competed in a World Cup snowboarding event in Carezza, Italy finishing 42nd of the 70 who qualified. Mr. Burns appeared in two more races in Europe in January finishing 43rd and 53rd. Currently he is ranked 30th in the FIS Snowboard Points List.
Robby Burns, photo, posted Jan. 21, 2022.Robby Burns at the Olympics Opening Ceremonies. Robby Burns photo, posted Feb. 4, 2022.
In 2014 another member of the Shasta Lake Hotshots was mentioned on the pages of Wildfire Today when Steven Woodlief bought a $2 ticket in the California state lottery and won $1.3 million, $1,000 a week for life. At the time Mr. Woodlief said he would buy a new truck.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Jim and Kevin.
It seems like in the last year there has been more wildfire-related legislation introduced in Congress than in previous years. It’s hard to say why, but it could be related to a growing number of megafires, more communities destroyed, and increased activism in the wildland firefighter community.
Of course simply introducing legislation accomplishes nothing if it does not become law, except perhaps providing a talking point for the politician’s next reelection campaign. A cynic might suggest that some bills are introduced and press releases issued by members of Congress with no hope or expectation that they will pass. But it is difficult to tell which are real and which are vaporware.
With that in the back of our minds, here is a partial list of 15 bills and the dates they were introduced which have not passed in this 117th United States Congress (2021-2022). Only a few have made it to the committee hearing stage, and none have progressed beyond that.
H.R. 5631 — Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. October 19, 2021. (Rep. Joe Neguse). This bill has numerous provisions, including raising firefighter pay, creating a wildland firefighter job series, providing health care and mental health services to temporary and permanent wildland firefighters, housing stipends, and other items. (More details are in the Wildfire Today article from October 19, 2021.)
H.R.5010 — FIRE Act. August 13, 2021. (Rep. Mike Garcia) This bill directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in collaboration with the U.S. weather industry and and academic partners, to establish a program within NOAA to improve wildfire forecasting and detection.
H.R.2585 — FIRE Act of 2021. April 1,5 2021 (Rep. Dusty Johnson) Timber salvage sales. No later than 60 days after a wildfire is contained on such lands (1) the Forest Service, to the maximum extent practicable, shall complete a survey of the lands that were impacted by such wildfire; and (2) the Department of Agriculture (USDA) shall convert the timber sales applicable to such lands that were impacted by such wildfire to salvage sales. The bill designates a categorical exclusion for forest management activities where the primary purpose of the activity is for roadside salvage activities that allow for the removal of hazard trees that are within 200 feet of a roadway center line. Activities carried out pursuant to this bill shall be subject to judicial review in the same manner as authorized hazardous fuels reduction projects. A court may not order a preliminary injunction enjoining the USDA from proceeding with timber sales authorized under this bill.
S.3092 — FIRE Act. October 27, 2021. (Sen. Alex Padilla) The bill would, according to Senator Padilla, update the Stafford Act that governs FEMA—which was written when the agency primarily focused on hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods—to improve FEMA’s response to wildfires, including by accounting for “melted infrastructure” and burned trees as well as allowing FEMA to pre-deploy assets during times of highest wildfire risk and red flag warnings. The bill would also ensure cultural competency for FEMA’s counseling and case management services, help to ensure relocation assistance is accessible to public infrastructure in fire prone areas, prioritize survivors’ housing needs after disasters, ensure equity of assistance for tribal communities and tribal governments, and examine ways to speed up the federal assistance process and improve the availability of fire insurance. More info.
S.1734 — National Prescribed Fire Act of 2021. May 20, 2021. (Sen. Ron Wyden). The bill would appropriate $300 million each to the Departments of the Interior (DOI) and Agriculture (DOA) to increase the pace and scale of controlled burns on state, county, and federally managed lands. It sets an annual target of at least one million acres treated with prescribed fire by federal agencies, but not to exceed 20 million. It requires the two departments to hire additional employees. Overtime payments for prescribed fire could be paid out of wildfire suppression accounts. More info.
S.138 — Wildland Firefighter Pay Act. January 28, 2021. (Sen. Dianne Feinstein.) It would raise the maximum limit on overtime pay for federal firefighters. The current limit affects higher level employees at the GS-12 and above level, and some GS-11s depending on if they are exempt from the provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Under the existing provisions if they work hundreds of hours of overtime they may reach the cap after which they earn no more money. In some cases later in the fire season employees who spent a lot of time fighting fires have been told they earned too much and were forced to pay some of it back. More info.
S.1116 — Federal Firefighters Fairness Act of 2021. April 14, 2021 (Sen. Thomas Carper.) Establishes for federal workers certain medical conditions as presumptive illnesses. Specifically, the bill provides that (1) heart disease, lung disease, and specified cancers of federal employees employed in fire protection activities for at least 5 years are presumed to be proximately caused by such employment if the employee is diagnosed with the disease within 10 years of employment; and (2) the disability or death of the employee due to such disease is presumed to result from personal injury sustained in the performance of duty. These presumptions also apply to fire protection employees (regardless of the length of employment) who contract any communicable disease at the center of a designated pandemic or any chronic infectious disease that the Department of Labor determines is related to job-related hazards.
H.R.6336 — Western Wildfire Support Act of 2021. December 20, 2021. (Joe Neguse.) Establishes a program to train and certify citizens who wish to be able to volunteer to assist USDA or Interior during a wildland fire incident, and a program to award grants to eligible states or units of local government to acquire slip-on tank and pump units for a surge capacity of resources for fire suppression. It requires the Joint Fire Science Program to carry out research and development of unmanned aircraft system fire applications.
S.2419 — Wildfire Smoke Emergency Declaration Act of 2021. (Sen. Jeff Merkley.) This bill authorizes the President to declare a smoke emergency and provide emergency assistance to affected communities under specified circumstances. Specifically, the President, upon determining that there is, or anticipating that there will be, a significant decrease in air quality due to wildland fire smoke in one or more states, may declare a smoke emergency. The governor or other agency of a state that is or will be affected may request such a declaration. If the President declares a smoke emergency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies may provide emergency assistance to states and local communities that are or will be affected by the emergency, including grants, equipment, supplies, and personnel and resources for establishing smoke shelters, air purifiers, and additional air monitoring sites. The Small Business Administration may provide grants to any small business concern that loses a significant amount of revenue due to wildland fire smoke in an area in which the President has declared a smoke emergency.
S.2661 — Smoke-Ready Communities Act of 2021. August 5, 2021. (Sen. Jeff Merkley) Provides funding for infrastructure upgrades to public buildings to filter out wildfire smoke. It would also assist with local efforts to provide health information about wildfire smoke.
S.2421 — Smoke Planning and Research Act. July 21, 2021. (Sen. Jeff Merkley.) It would make available each year $80 million to fund research on the public health impacts of wildfire smoke and create a grant program for local community planning relating to wildfire smoke.
H.R.4614 — Resilient Federal Forests Act. (Rep. Bruce Westerman) Primarily related to the logging industry, it streamlines or avoids compliance with some requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act by establishing numerous categorical exclusions for projects on National Forest System and public lands. It does away with many of the environment regulations a logging company must satisfy before a timber sale takes place.
S.487 — 21st Century Conservation Corps Act. (Sen. Ron Wyden.) The bill would provide funds to support a natural resource management and conservation workforce and bolster wildfire prevention and preparedness. Establishes a $9 billion fund for qualified land and conservation corps to increase job training and hiring specifically for jobs in the woods, helping to restore public lands and provide jobs in a time of need. Provides an additional $3.5 billion for the U.S. Forest Service and $2 billion for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to support science-based projects aimed at improving forest health and reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Establishes a $2 billion fund to provide economic relief for outfitters and guides holding U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior special use permits. Provides $2 billion for the National Fire Capacity program, which helps the Forest Service implement FireWise, to prevent, mitigate, and respond to wildfire around homes and businesses on private land. Provides $2 billion for the FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program to improve resiliency for communities impacted by wildfire. Provides $6 billion for U.S. Forest Service, $6 billion for the National Park Service, and $2 billion for the Bureau of Land Management maintenance accounts to create jobs, reduce the maintenance backlog, and expand access to recreation. More information.
S.2650 — Wildfire Resilient Communities Act. August 5, 2021. (Sen. Jeff Merkley.) Sets aside $30 billion for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to boost catastrophic wildfire reduction projects. Provides financial and technical assistance to at-risk communities adjacent to Federal land, including through States, to assist the at-risk communities in planning and preparing for wildfire, including cosponsoring and supporting the expansion of the Firewise USA program, the Ready, Set, Go program, and the Living with Wildfire program.
Spearfish Canyon pile burning January, 2022, Black Hills National Forest, South Dakota. Credit: USFS.
The Black Hills National Forest has produced a two-minute video about the process of cleaning up the dead vegetation resulting from two South Dakota tornadoes in recent years. We first posted a series of photos about the project last week, but in this video John Snyder, an acting District Fuels Assistant Fire Management Officer, gives us the details.
The forecast for wildland fire potential issued February 1 by the National Interagency Fire Center predicts that for the next four months the potential for wildfires will be higher than average at times in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, parts of New Mexico and Arizona, and the central and southern plains.
The data from NIFC shown here represents the cumulative forecasts of the ten Geographic Area Predictive Services Units and the National Predictive Services Unit.
Below:
An excerpt from the NIFC narrative report for the next four months;
Additional NIFC monthly graphical outlooks;
NOAA’s three-month temperature and precipitation forecasts;
Drought Monitor;
Keetch-Byram Drought Index.
“Nearly 90% of the West remains in drought, with most of the Plains and Texas also in drought. Most of Texas and the Lower Mississippi Valley saw an expansion or exacerbation of drought as well. Much of the West had a dry January, but snowpack is mostly 75% to 125% of average. Above average precipitation across the Carolinas and Virginia reduced drought and fire potential concerns, while most of the Plains and Great Lakes observed below average precipitation.
“Climate outlooks through spring indicate near to below normal temperatures and near to above normal precipitation are likely across the northern half of the West into the western Great Lakes. Above normal precipitation is also likely across the Mid-Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and through much of the Great Lakes and Northeast into the Mid-Atlantic. However, drier than normal conditions are expected for the southern half of the West, southern and central Plains, and portions of the Southeast, with near to above normal temperatures likely as well across these areas. Guidance also indicates this could be a potentially busy severe weather season east of the Plains, which usually portends to periods of critical fire weather conditions on the Plains behind the severe weather.
“Above normal significant fire potential is forecast for much of the central and southern Plains through March while persisting on the High Plains and eastern slopes of the Front Range through April into May. Above normal potential is forecast in portions of south Texas and the Hill Country during February then spreading across far southwest Texas, much of New Mexico, and southern Arizona by May. The westward retreat of above normal significant fire potential in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas is following the expected green-up procession.
“Due to the recent widespread and in places, heavy precipitation across the Carolinas and Virginia, forecast above normal significant fire potential was removed in February. However, above normal significant fire potential is forecast in portions of the Florida Peninsular into southeast Georgia in February and likely persisting through the spring. Additionally, above normal potential is likely to expand across Florida and into the Carolinas during March and April. Lingering above normal potential is forecast to remain across Florida in May. Areas of south and east Texas into the Lower Mississippi Valley will continue to be monitored for above normal potential.”
