The National Weather Service predicts strong winds in areas of Northern California Tuesday and Wednesday, lasting into Thursday in the Bay area.
There are no Red Flag Warnings in effect, but the wildland fire danger for today, February 1, ranges from low in the higher elevations to severe in portions of the Bay and North Bay areas. It will also be very high to severe in some locations between San Francisco and Santa Barbara.
The forecast for Sacramento on Tuesday calls for sunny skies, 58 degrees, 33 percent relative humidity, and afternoon winds of 23 mph winds out of the north-northwest at 23 mph gusting to 32 mph. On Wednesday the wind and temperature will be similar, but the RH will drop to 21 percent. The Thursday forecast has the wind decreasing to 5 mph with 18 percent RH.
Wildland fire danger, Northern California, Feb. 1, 2022.
The map below shows wind gusts at 8:12 a.m. PT, Feb. 1, 2022
Wind gusts at 8:12 a.m. PT, Feb. 1, 2022. NWS.
The Hot-Dry-Windy index on Tuesday for the North Bay area is above the 90th percentile, but it does not take into account the condition of the vegetation, i.e., fuel moisture.
Burned homes in Slave Lake. May 16, 2011. Alberta, Canada. CTV.
Researchers have found that building codes based on lessons learned during the deadly 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills of California can reduce the vulnerability of homes to wildfires.
In a paper titled Mandatory vs. voluntary adaptation to natural disasters: the case of U.S. Wildfires, authors Patrick W. Baylis and Judson Boomhower describe how they scoured property and wildfire records to identify which homes were constructed under building codes requiring enhanced resistance to wildfires.
Chapter 7A of the California Building Code which went into effect in 2008 requires certain fire resistance measures, including exterior construction materials used for roof coverings, vents, exterior walls, and decks. It applies to new construction of residential and commercial buildings in designated fire hazard severity zones.
The researchers discovered that a 2008 or newer home is about 16 percentage points (40%) less likely to be destroyed than a 1990 home experiencing an identical wildfire exposure. There is strong evidence, they concluded, that these effects are due to state and local building code changes – first after the deadly 1991 Oakland Firestorm, and again with the strengthening of wildfire codes in 2008. The observed vintage effects are highly nonlinear, appearing immediately for homes built after building code changes. There are no similar effects in areas of California not subject to these codes or in other states that lack wildfire codes.
Their findings are similar to those in a paper published October 4, 2021 in which researchers analyzed the structures that were destroyed and those that survived the Camp Fire that ran through the city of Paradise, California in 2018. They considered at least four primary characteristics of structures:
Were they built before or after the adoption in 2008 of Chapter 7A of the California Building Code.
Distance to nearest destroyed structure.
Number of structures destroyed within 100 meters.
Pre-fire overstory tree canopy within 100 meters
They found that the last three criteria were the strongest predictors of survival. Homes more than 18 meters (59 feet) from a destroyed structure and with less than 53 percent pre-fire overstory canopy within 30 to 100 meters (98 to 328 feet) survived at a substantially higher rate than homes in closer proximity to a destroyed structure or in areas with higher pre-fire overstory canopy. Most fire damage to surviving homes appeared to result from radiant heat from nearby burning structures or flame impingement from the ignition of near-home combustible materials. The researchers concluded that building and vegetation modifications are possible that would substantially improve outcomes. Among those include improvements to windows and siding in closest proximity to neighboring structures, treatment of wildland fuels, and eliminating near-home combustibles, especially within 1.5 meters of the structure.
(The video below was shot December 31, 2021, the day after the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, Colorado. Notice that most of the surviving homes seen in the video had fewer homes in close proximity.)
The authors noted that while Chapter 7a includes requirements not found in many building codes, a few other codes are more complete incorporating multiple construction classes based on anticipated radiant heat, flame, and ember exposure levels. For example Chapter 7A does not consider the interaction between components such as siding, window, and the under-eave area on an exterior wall.
California is embarking on a pilot project in which owners of vulnerable homes in lower income neighborhoods will be given grants up to $40,000 to retrofit the structures, making them more resistant to wildfires.
The state of California is beginning the initiative in rural San Diego County
Relatively fire-resistant homes can ignite during low-intensity wildfires if a path of combustible material, such as fences, stairs, decks, or support beams lead the fire to the home. Image from Texas Forest Service report about fires in 2011.
Recognizing that the Home Ignition Zone can be the most important factor that determines how vulnerable a residence is to an approaching wildfire, the State of California has embarked on a pilot program that will grant up to $40,000 to homeowners who retrofit their homes to make them more fire resistant.
Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) the funds in the $100-million project will be available in areas that are commonly threatened by fires.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CAL FIRE, chose the communities of Dulzura, Potrero and Campo based largely on their concentration of low-income residents living in older, fire-prone homes. The state is also starting to roll out the pilot in Shasta County [in Northern California]. Residents with higher incomes can still qualify for the retrofits as long as they pay for a percentage of the work on a sliding scale.
There may be additional federal funds becoming available in the future. During a January 21 speech at Del Rosa Fire Station on the San Bernardino National Forest Vice President Kamala Harris spoke about wildland fires and the resilience of communities threatened by fire.
“We are talking with home owners and reaching out to communities,” she said, “to figure out how we can support them to create a community that is less likely to be so significantly damaged if a fire should hit.”
However, she may have been referring to the $100-million from FEMA and California.
Our take
We will never be able to prevent all fires that threaten homes and private property. We have to learn to Live With Fire. The Home Ignition Zone should be an extremely high priority in preventing structures from burning in wildfires.
Grants for homeowners to retrofit homes to make them more fire resistant is the right thing to do. These could be expanded to include modifying the vegetation within 100 feet of the structures. Below is an excerpt from an article posted September 24, 2020 on Wildfire Today:
“Ignition resistant homes, and collectively communities, can be readily created by eliminating and reducing ignition vulnerabilities within the Home Ignition Zone,” said Jack Cohen, a retired U.S. Forest Service Research fire scientist. “This enables the prevention of wildland-urban fire disasters without necessarily controlling extreme wildfires. Ironically, ignition resistant homes and communities can facilitate appropriate ecological fire management using prescribed burning. The potential destruction of homes from escaped prescribed burns is arguably a principal obstacle for restoring fire as an appropriate ecological factor. Therefore, it is unlikely that ecologically significant prescribed burning at landscape scales will occur without ignition resistant homes and communities.”
Here are some suggestions that could be considered for funding along with an enhanced prescribed fire program.
Provide grants to homeowners that are in areas with high risk from wildland fires. Pay a portion of the costs of improvements or retrofits to structures and the nearby vegetation to make the property more fire resistant. This could include the cost of removing some of the trees in order to have the crowns at least 18 feet apart if they are within 30 feet of the structures — many homeowners can’t afford the cost of complete tree removal.
Cities and counties could establish systems and procedures for property owners to easily dispose of the vegetation and debris they remove.
Hire crews that can physically help property owners reduce the fuels near their homes when it would be difficult for them to do it themselves.
Provide grants to cities and counties to improve evacuation capability and planning, to create community safety zones for sheltering as a fire approaches, and to build or improve resilient emergency water supplies to be used by firefighters.
When you have been impacted by a disaster of any kind you are frightened, scared, often very angry and the last thing you need is to fill out forms and answer numerous questions from strangers clamoring to HELP you. So why is it that the majority of our disaster assistance and recovery programs at all levels fail to understand that emotional issues can seldom be resolved by analytical processes?
At a hazards mitigation conference I once attended, one subject kept coming up (albeit often in side conversations): how can we do better with natural hazards preparedness and mitigation? At all levels of government and private industry, the fact that billions of dollars are being spent annually often with very little result is becoming a major concern. That the largest risk companies now estimate that the cost of hazards damage is starting to become incalculable is scaring even the wealthiest countries. The big elephant in the room was the fundamental question of whether it is even possible to understand a subject with massive emotional dynamics through analytical means.
Should this be approached in a very different way? Any victim of a disaster in which their world has imploded in 5 minutes is naturally frightened, upset, and scared. To introduce a program of any kind, no matter how well-intentioned, that does not explicitly recognize this adds additional trauma, leading to complex issues lasting for years.
Two of the presenters at the conference made a huge impact: elders from the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana; and Sallie Clark, a Commissioner for El Paso County, Colorado. Their messages were different, but interconnected. In sum, they both stressed the importance of knowing your community and reacting in both a human and efficient systems way, or as Sallie stated so eloquently “Yes, indeed we need to be efficient in our response to a disaster — but let’s not forget that sometimes they just need a hug.”
The Chitimacha (Sitimaxa, “people of the many waters”) are famous because when the FEMA team got to their reservation three weeks after hurricane Katrina, they had already taken care of most of the damage. Communication in the tribe took place mostly by word of mouth, with CB radio assistance. Within 24 hours after the storm had passed, all 1,100 members of the tribe had been contacted by a tribal council team and all needs, both physical and emotional, were being attended to. Rebuilding had started, and in many cases was complete. A major focus of the tribal council was on emotional support, and this ran consistently throughout everything they were doing.
Sallie Clark, a Commissioner for El Paso County, Colorado
Sallie was doing something similar after the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire devastated her Colorado Springs community. That wildfire was one of the most destructive in Colorado history. It took two lives, destroyed 347 homes, forced tens of thousands to evacuate, and insurance claims topped $450M. Sallie’s response: identify everyone impacted, ensure they have a case officer attending their needs both physical and emotional, and simply make sure they have a shoulder to cry on. She personally drove to evacuation shelters and made sure this was being done and gave anyone a hug who needed it. A truly shining example of “WE CARE!”
When Sophia Huston started working as a hotshot — a specialized wildland firefighter with advanced technical training — she was 19 and didn’t know what she was getting herself into. She was physically fit and worked out regularly, but she wasn’t ready for preseason training, when the U.S. Forest Service, the agency she worked for, weeds out the unprepared with intense and physically demanding drills. “You’re going on hikes with full gear and chainsaws,” she said. “I weigh about 115 pounds and I’m carrying about upwards of 80 pounds of gear up a hill. I’m feeling the stress on my body and joints. I’m waking up in the middle of the night to eat food because I can’t get enough calories in.”
Shortly after the training began, Huston got what would be her last menstrual cycle of the fire season. She’s been working in fire for six years now and hasn’t gotten her period for the past three years, which she speculates is due to lack of sleep, poor quality of food, and the physical strain of the job. She doesn’t know what the long-term repercussions of working in the fire service are on her health and fertility. “I just know it’s not good for you,” she said. “It’s not very conducive to fertility and reproductive health.” New research suggests that Huston’s hunch is spot-on.
Smoke, heat, fire-suppressing chemicals, and the physical exertion required to put out and control fires all have effects on humans, but the body of published research on how firefighting affects health is astonishingly small. Studies have shown that being exposed to smoke in general is linked to lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. But little is known about the cumulative impacts of fighting fires year after year, whether soot and other compounds can get absorbed through the skin and cause health problems, and how, exactly, smoke impacts the body in the long-term.
The ways in which fighting fire, and fire itself, affect women are even less understood. Women make up a tiny fraction of the national fire service, both in structural fire departments — the local departments that put out house fires — and the wildland crews that fight fires that occur in the wilderness and areas where wildland meets urban zones. They operate in a system that was built for and around men. And despite evidence that even short-term smoke exposure can affect pregnancy outcomes, female firefighters receive little to no information from their employers on how fire could impact fertility or pregnancy. “Nobody says, ‘smoke is bad, don’t stand there,’” Megan Saylors, a career wildland firefighter for a federal agency, told Grist. “It’s just such an accepted part of our work environment.”
A recent study published in the journal Environmental Health builds on the slim body of research on how work in the fire service specifically affects the reproductive health of women, and trans and nonbinary people who can get pregnant. By analyzing nearly 2,000 pregnancies in more than 1,000 female firefighters, the study found that self-reported miscarriage was 2.3 times more common among female firefighters than it was among female nurses, a cohort that is exposed to similar chemicals and work strains. Twenty-two percent of female firefighters miscarried, compared to 10 percent of female nurses.
The study found that, overall, volunteer firefighters had increased risk of miscarriage compared to career firefighters. And volunteer wildland firefighters had nearly three times the risk of miscarriage compared to career wildland firefighters. Less than 5 percent of career firefighters are women, and 84 percent of the female firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers, which means a disproportionate percentage of the women who fight fires in the U.S. may be at increased risk of miscarriage.
Alesia Jung, a postdoctoral student at the University of Arizona and the lead author of the study, told Grist that she was surprised by the results of her research. She had initially hypothesized that career firefighters would present with the highest risk of miscarriage, because those women are exposed to fires more often than volunteers. “Generally the assumption is that career firefighters who generally respond to more fires in a year would have greater occupational exposures than volunteer firefighters who typically serve smaller communities and may have a smaller amount of fire responses,” she said. “So it was really interesting to see that volunteer firefighters appeared to have a greater risk of miscarriage, and this did vary by wildland firefighter status.”
Jung said that more research needs to be done on why firefighters face such high rates of miscarriage and what can be done to better protect them. Current and former firefighters agree.
Saylors, who has worked on crews based in Alaska, southern Nevada, southern Utah, California, and Oregon, says she’s never worked for a department that had policies or advisories in place to inform women about the risks of the job to their pregnancies. “I know women who were still working on a fire engine doing wildland stuff eight months pregnant. But then you have other people who, as soon as they find out they’re pregnant, they stop doing operational stuff,” she said. “Structural departments and wildland agencies struggle with, what do we do with those women? When do we no longer go put out the fire? When do we no longer go help with a prescribed fire during pregnancy?” Saylors said federal firefighting agencies should collect and conduct research on fertility and put policies in place to protect employees based on that research.
Zora Thomas, a seasonal wildand firefighter working for the Forest Service, told Grist she wasn’t surprised that wildland firefighters face an increased risk of miscarriage due to the requirements of the job. “Exposure to smoke is so ubiquitous and unavoidable, and wearing a respirator really isn’t practical or even possible due to the intensity and duration of our working days,” she said. “It doesn’t surprise me that the obvious occupational hazards we face would have some impact on health and pregnancy, and I would expect that there are also impacts to male reproductive health.”
There’s some evidence that the fertility of male firefighters is also jeopardized by smoke and other hazards of the job. A 2019 study of Danish male firefighters found full-time firefighters were at greater risk of infertility than a comparison group of men in the military. Another study published in October that tracked male fertility in the general population following 10 days of unprecedented hazardous smoke in Oregon during the 2020 fire season found that semen quality greatly deteriorated following the onset of hazardous air quality. “Among male firefighters, reproductive issues are also a topic of concern,” Jung said. She hopes that future studies will help isolate the factors behind firefighters’ fertility problems and shift the status quo so women, and men, are better protected on the job.
Huston isn’t waiting around for the Forest Service to figure out how to better protect women. In December, she finished her sixth season as a hotshot in California. It’ll be her last. “I’m sad to leave but at the same time, I realized this year that I really care about my health, it’s one of my core values and almost everything we do seems to compromise my health,” she said. “Firefighting is a part of my life that I’m very thankful for, but I’m ready to get out.”
The legislation provides a historic $4.5 billion for federal wildland fire management programs
Firefighters observe a retardant drop by an RJ85 air tanker. DOI photo.
Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service outlined the changes the agency will implement in their fuels management program to reflect the large influx of funding in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill signed by the President November 15, 2021.
This week the Department of the Interior released information about how the funds will affect a range of Interior’s programs. Four agencies in the DOI have significant wildland fire responsibilities: National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The article below was written by Erin McDuff, a public affairs specialist with the DOI’s Office of Wildland Fire.
The law includes $1.2 trillion to rebuild America’s roads, bridges, and railways; expand access to clean drinking water; ensure every American has access to high-speed internet; tackle the climate crisis; advance environmental justice; and invest in communities that have too often been left behind.
A Historic Investment in Wildland Fire Management
The law is a once-in-a-generation investment, but you might be wondering what it has to do with wildfires. As part of the nation’s efforts to address climate change and support resilient, climate-adapted communities, BIL provides a historic $4.5 billion for federal wildland fire management efforts over the next five years.
Within the federal government, the Interior and Agriculture departments both administer wildland fire programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service will receive an additional $3 billion through BIL while the Interior Department will receive approximately $1.5 billion for wildland fire management over the next five years. Both departments will coordinate closely to maximize the benefits of these additional investments.
What It Means
The Interior Department will dramatically expand its efforts to reduce wildfire risk, prepare for and respond to harmful wildfires, and support post-fire recovery, including in communities that have traditionally been overlooked. In 2022 alone, the Interior Department will invest an additional $407 million in wildland fire management.
Over the next five years, the primary investments will include:
Reducing Risk
The Interior Department will improve ecosystem health and remove fuel for wildfires on additional acreage using an additional $878 million.
Wildfire Recovery
With an additional $325 million, the Interior Department will expand burned area restoration activities.
Workforce Improvements
An additional $164 million will enable the Interior Department to improve firefighter classification, compensation, benefits, mental health resources, and training.
Technology and Equipment
With an additional $72 million, the Interior Department will improve the use of technology and equipment to detect and respond to wildfires.
Supporting Science
The Interior Department will invest an additional $10 million in the Joint Fire Science Program to identify and fund high-priority fire science research.
What Happens Next
The Interior Department, in collaboration with the USDA Forest Service, is currently developing plans for the strategic implementation of this historic investment.
We are focused on implementing these significant investments in forest and rangeland restoration, hazardous fuel management, wildfire preparation, and post-wildfire recovery as quickly and efficiently as possible. BIL includes aggressive timelines, which we are prepared to meet, and we will share updates throughout the year as our work progresses.
