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UK unprepared for increasingly frequent wildfires, framework warns

Author Hunter BasslerPosted on Categories UncategorizedLeave a comment on UK unprepared for increasingly frequent wildfires, framework warns

On a hot July day in 2022, London firefighters had their busiest day since World War Two.

Multiple wildfires burned throughout the United Kingdom on July 19, the most destructive of which destroyed 40 properties in the village of Wennington near England’s capital. The firefighting conditions were “absolute hell,” in part due to the historic heatwave suffocating the region.

Before the 2022 fire outbreak, UK officials didn’t see wildfires as something that happened at home, despite a growing body of research signaling an increase in fire-weather days throughout the country in the near future. The nation currently has no entity responsible for governing wildfire risk reduction and the majority of residents have a fire-averse attitude akin to the United States’ pre-1971 no-burn policy.

The increasing frequency of wildfires gives local advocates both hope and anxiety about the future of disaster preparation within the UK. While the problem is becoming more obvious, continuing inaction has left some believing nothing tangible will happen until the nation experiences massive loss of life or property.

Wennington wildfire. Credit: Harrison Healy via Wikimedia Commons.

Victoria Amato was, in many ways, the perfect person to bridge the UK and US wildfire movement. The Britain native has been developing community wildfire protection plans in the US for the past 18 years with SWCA Environmental Consultants. A presentation to UK officials in the wake of the 2022 wildfires showed her how the nation needed to develop a resilience program soon.

“It quickly became evident that there’s so much of what we do here in the US that would translate to some of the needs that the UK is facing,” Amato told Wildfire Today. “We wanted to create a conduit for some of that information sharing.”

The UK Community Wildfire Resilience Framework for Property Protection became that conduit. The paper acts as an entry point for both officials and community residents on how, and why, to safeguard the nation’s infrastructure against wildfire using case studies from the US and Canada.

The researchers believed that focusing specifically on property protection would incentivize government officials to take the growing threat seriously. Local communities have largely been the only entities safeguarding against wildfire danger, with multiple rural areas establishing Fire Operation Groups (FOGs). However, the groups are largely comprised of multiple agencies and are guided by different priorities and objectives.

“We had to show the UK government that we were focused on something that will protect life and property, since that’s what’s going to get attention politically,” Amato said. “They could also point to data and show most that most wildfires in the UK are associated within those rural-urban interface areas, and that’s where they could actually get some traction.”

Wennington wildfire. Credit: Harrison Healy via Wikimedia Commons.

The in-depth nature of the framework provides numerous achievable actions officials can take now to protect communities. However, Amato said she and the other researchers she worked with believe they’ll face many hurdles before substantive changes are made, including too few economic and personnel resources, residential lack of engagement, code-adoption resistance, a lack of unified governance and messaging, and little relevant science and baseline data.

Despite the potential hurdles, Amato believes the framework’s best practices will act as a spark to further change.

“We presented it with the intent of introducing the paper (to wildfire stakeholders in the UK),” Amato said. “Now we need to get it out with a wider distribution.”

The UK Community Wildfire Resilience Framework was presented to the UK Wildfire Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland in November last year. Amato spoke to the framework with fellow authors Linda Kettley from Firewise UK and Fiona Newman Thacker from Wageningen University and Research.

Click here to read the full framework. 

Lessons from LA – what do we do now?

Author David BrucePosted on Categories California, Evacuations, Fire behavior, Prescribed Fire, Prevention, Research5 Comments on Lessons from LA – what do we do now?
Fire map at 14 January 2025. Cal Fire.
Fire map at 14 January 2025. Cal Fire.

Many of the fires in southern California remain active but there is no shortage of views on what went wrong or right, what could or couldn’t be done, who is to blame and what do we all do now?


Wildfire Today is keen to find the most important lessons to be learnt from these fires.

Terms like “unprecedented” and “unpredicted” are not helpful – especially when we have seen it before and knew it could happen again. Those term take away responsibility and action. They excuse the fact that things could have been done, by many.

Dr Marty Alexander, long time Canadian wildland fire researcher, has reminded Wildfire Today of the 1974 publication by Clive M. Countryman, “Can Southern California Wildland Conflagrations be Stopped?”.

Countryman was at the time of writing a wildland fire behavior scientist with the USDA Forest Service in southern California. His paper was a reflection of the 1970 fire season in California where 16 people died and more than 200 000 hectares of land burned, and around 700 homes lost.

 

His statement on The Fire Problem barely differs from today:

    • Climate, fuels, topography and people create fire problems
  • Relatively few fires become conflagrations
  • Conflagrations are most frequent during Santa Ana winds
  • Suppression of Santa Ana fires is difficult

His other conclusions include:

  • Fire prevention has limited value
  • Firefighting techniques and equipment and not adequate

His solutions then rely on a range of fuel modification measures.

For more nostalgia, watch these 1971 newsreels – on the same topic, same problem:

Deign for Disaster

Countdown to Calamity

Having looked back to see what we already know, Wildfire Today now turns to finding a way through new wildfire challenges.

 

Here are some tough questions for starters:

 

Evacuations

To have a large fire in such a heavily populated area with so few deaths or injuries is extraordinary. This suggests the evacuation process was largely successful – people were moved out of harms way. And yet we saw those abandoned vehicles on narrow mountainous roads that funnelled people onto Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard , panicked residents fleeing on foot, bulldozers shunting cars off the road to gain access for fire fighting vehicles – that’s not how an orderly evacuation is meant to work, that is last-minute, panicked fleeing. There are many international examples of disorderly evacuations going horribly wrong.

Is there are better way to get thousands of people out of the way of a fast moving wildfire? If evacuations occur well before the flames arrive that would help. But how early do you do early evacuations? When is it too late to leave? Where do 100,000 people evacuate to?

 

Suppression

As Carpenter noted in 1971 we need to all understand that once a fire gets to this size under these conditions all attempts to simply put it out are futile. The focus is on protecting people and strategic assets. The fire fighters on the ground and in the air understand this. Does the wider community understand this?? Does this explain all the anger that “someone should have done something”, and the thinking that if it wasn’t for a few empty hydrants and grounded aircraft (due to high winds) the fire would have been suppressed?

 

Fuel management

Many, many others since Carpenter have said you have got to better manage the fuels if you want to have any chance of managing the fire. What does good fuel management look like in southern California and when do we know that we have done enough? Would have it made a difference for these fires when it looks more like an urban conflagration with house to house burning?

 

Built environment

Are we living in the wrong places? If we know that wildfires are inevitable, why do we build homes in the middle of the highest wildfire risk areas? Any other day, it is clearly a wonderful place to live. But on days like 7 January 2025, this place was hell on earth. Do we place faith in the development of “fireproof” structures, or do we just accept that homes will burn?

 

Recovery

Once the emergency response phase settles and the debris is cleared, what does long term recovery look like? How do we build back better without just repeating the same mistakes? How does a community put aside the blame and divisions to work together on building long term resilience, and be ready for the next, inevitable, big fire?

 

There have been many articulate voices in the last few days with this Los Angeles Times article one of the better ones. It draws on wildfire researcher Jack Cohen, who encourages us to abandon our thoughts that this was a wildland fire and see it more as an urban fire that leapt from house to house, and fire historian Stephen Pyne who places today’s fire within a century of fires across a whole continent:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-11/fire-experts-asses-los-angeles-blazes-amid-changing-times

High-severity wildfires the ‘main risk’ to threatened Canada Lynx, researchers say

Author Hunter BasslerPosted on Categories Research, Uncategorized, United States, WildfireLeave a comment on High-severity wildfires the ‘main risk’ to threatened Canada Lynx, researchers say

A now-rare forest carnivore faces numerous hurdles to continue living in its usual habitat, wildfire chiefly among them.

Canadian Lynx numbers have declined throughout most of their range in the United States, according to the Endangered Species Coalition. Causes for their decline include habitat loss, urbanization, and genetic isolation from populations in Canada due to the fragmentation of their environment.

Now, the remaining morsels of the species’ habitat is facing additional threats, straining the animals even further. A recent study used GPS data and scientific modeling to identify the remaining lynx habitat in the forests of western Colorado, southern Wyoming, and northern New Mexico, and considered over 40 habitat or environmental characteristics to identify the area’s biggest risks.

The maps found that lynx habitat in these areas is now sparse, patchy, and poorly connected, existing only in narrow bands due to Colorado’s complex mountainous terrain. Researchers also said that around one-third of the likely habitat overlapped with multiple disturbances between the study’s timeframe of 1990 and 2022, including forest insect outbreaks (31%), wildfires (5%), and forest management activities like tree harvest and prescribed burning (3%).

“Although fire disturbance from 1990-2022 overlapped only 5% of likely lynx habitat in this area, we believe that frequent, high-severity fire is the main risk to lynx in high-elevation forests moving forward,”  Dr. John Squires, the study’s principal investigator and a Rocky Mountain Research Station research wildlife biologist, told Phys.org.

Credit: Keith Williams via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Researchers predicted wildfire would be a primary disturbance factor for the animal’s critical habitat, shaped by the fact that the state’s three largest wildfires in recorded history, including the 94,545-hectare Cameron Peak Fire, the 78,433-hectare East Troublesome Fire, and the 56,254-hectare Pine Gulch Fire, all burned during the 2020 fire season.

Despite the low overlap percentage the study eventually found, the scientists still considered wildfire to be the highest threat to lynx habitat, in part due to projected increasing trends in wildfire frequency and severity. Some fire threats have already demonstrated the fire vulnerability of lynx habitat.

“The West Fork Fire Complex…burned at high severity across 442 km2 of the San Juan Mountains in 2013, impacting one of the most important patches of lynx habitat in the Southern Rockies,” the study said. “In general, lynx avoid fire-impacted landscapes for at least ~ 25 yrs, likely because stand-replacing fires of high severity that are common in subalpine systems reset much of the impacted area to a stand initiation stage.”

For example, fires in Washington’s North Cascades Ecosystem in 2o13 and 2020 burned an estimated 32% of lynx habitat and reduced the species’ carrying capacity between 66% and 73%, the researchers said. Ultimately, how much fires affect lynx landscape depends on the extent, frequency, and severity of the fires.

“Therefore, despite low current overlap, a central conservation issue for lynx and forest management in the Southern Rockies is how to “defend” Likely, in situ habitat from frequent fire disturbance with climate change,” the researchers said.

Click here to read the full study.

Historic Los Angeles wildfires are anything but ‘unprecedented’

Author Hunter BasslerPosted on Categories California, United States, Wildfire3 Comments on Historic Los Angeles wildfires are anything but ‘unprecedented’

The Palisades Fire may well turn out to be the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles history, even while today it remains uncontained and growing.

The wildfire was 0% contained and had destroyed more than 1,000 structures in and around the city’s Pacific Palisades Neighborhood less than 24 hours after igniting, officials confirmed at a press conference.

Whatever the cause of ignition, a combination of hurricane-force winds, drought, and an abundance of newly-grown vegetation that had quickly dried, created the perfect storm for rapid and destructive wildfire spread.

The Palisades Fire, and at least four other fires that ignited on the same day, were often called “unprecedented” by officials and the media, but they were anything but.

These fires may well be the most destructive for L.A., but are only considered unprecedented by those who have forgotten the past history of fire in the area – or forgotten the precedents of the Camp Fire of 2018 or the Australian Black Summer Fires of 2019-20 or Greece of 2023, and others.

The wildfire risks for these parts of L.A. have been well documented over many years, and a similar conflagration happened in the city less than two decades earlier. One of the most read articles on Wildfire Today this week – possibly mistakenly due to their similarities – is a round-up of the 2019 fires around L.A.

Palisades Fire via Cal Fire

L.A.’s previous most-destructive wildlife was 2008’s Sayre Fire, which destroyed more than 600 homes in the city’s Sylmar Neighborhood, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times. It spread at the same time as two other fires and left more than 20,000 acres burned.

The Sayre Fire’s destruction was largely driven by 50 to 80 mile-per-hour gusts from the Santa Ana Winds, a phenomenon the National Weather Service (NWS) said happens yearly from September through May. The extreme winds occur when a region of high pressure over the desert Southwest flows toward low pressure near the Californian coast, which drastically increases wildfire risk due to their speed and dryness.

The same hurricane-force winds fanned the Palisades Fire’s flames.

“A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm is expected Tue afternoon-Weds morning across much of Ventura/LA Co,” NWS said a day before the wildfire started. “Stay indoors, away from windows, expect power outages….The strongest wind areas of LA and Ventura Counties will see widespread N-NE wind gusts of 50-80 mph, with isolated gusts up to 80-100 mph in the mountains and foothills.”

Drought and an abundance of dry vegetation also fueled both the Palisades Fire and the Sayre Fire, and many other not-so-record breaking wildfires of recent times.

The United States Forest Service reported the Sayre Fire consumed 95% of all vegetative cover across 5,500 acres of the Angeles National Forest right after California saw its driest 8-month stretch, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Similarly, Los Angeles has now experienced its second-driest period in almost 150 years of record keeping. Ample vegetation, which grew and thrived during record-breaking rain seasons in the city during 2023 and 2022, dried up and was ready to burn.

Palisades Fire via Cal Fire

Apart from the “perfect storm” scenarios of the Palisades and Sayre, experts have known for decades that much of California’s land is dependent on fire.

Nearly 10 years ago, researchers concluded that weather (mostly the Santa Ana winds) and the spatial distribution of built property were the key determinants of risk in the southern California landscape: “adequate planning of the changes in the built environment…is going to be vital for managing risk from fire under future climates.”

Almost 20 years ago, experts drew on studies from the early 1970s on ways to specifically stop conflagrations from burning in Southern California, saying “Through strategic fuel management planning, we could influence the total number and size of the (conflagration) occurrences as well as their geographic distribution and thereby mitigate the impacts of too much of the ‘wrong kind of fire'”.

Wildfire Today will hold off on any deep dive into the causes of the current fires out of respect to all those still being impacted by active fires today.

Longer and more intense periods of wildfire weather are expected across the nation in the near future, especially, but not solely, in Southern California. Let’s take this “opportunity” to work out what we know, what we can learn, and what we need to do to make meaningful change.

LA wildfires fanned by high winds as fire, snow and ice compete for headlines around the world

Author David BrucePosted on Categories Australia, California, United States3 Comments on LA wildfires fanned by high winds as fire, snow and ice compete for headlines around the world

As if we didn’t need more evidence of overlapping wildfire seasons, fire activity is competing for headlines with snow and ice warnings in both northern and southern hemispheres around the globe.

Today a fast-moving fire is threatening residents in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles and has closed parts of the Pacific Coast Highway between Malibu and Santa Monica. The situation is developing fast with the Los Angeles Fire Department issuing mandatory evacuation orders and traffic alerts:

Palisades fire 7 Jan 2025
Palisades fire 7 Jan 2025, Los Angeles Fire Department

 

Wildfires in January are not unprecedented in southern California and only last month the Franklin Fire burned more than 4000 acres around Malibu.

The National Weather Service warned on 7 January of Extremely Critical Fire Weather in Southern California with high winds around the mountains and foothills:

High winds and low relative humidity will produce critical to extremely critical fire weather in southern California through Thursday.

Critical fire weather conditions and damaging downslope winds expected through Thursday across portions of Southern California with extremely critical fire weather likely for parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties on Wednesday…

 


California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Monday that these could be some of the worst fire conditions the region had seen for many years with the wind forecast combined with the extremely dry conditions with low humidity.

Meanwhile after three weeks and a disrupted Christmas, the long-running bushfire in the Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park in Victoria Australia is now contained. The fire began on 17 December after dry lightning started multiple fires in the southern part of the national park.

With a fire footprint circumference of 262 miles (422 kms), more than 188,000 acres (76,000 hectares) of national park and agricultural land was burned with smoke covering most of south-west Victoria and parts of Melbourne.

With most of fire in dense forest property losses were relatively small and there were no serious personal injuries. Early data indicates livestock losses include 775 sheep, one horse, one beef cattle and 1,285 beehives, plus 335 miles (540 kms) of fencing.

New South Wales this week contended with more than 70 fire outbreaks across the state, many started by lightning strikes as summer storms passed over. The firegrounds are now seeing welcome rain. Earlier, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service showed how to get the water to a dry fireground:

 

 

How do people actually use a fire map? Researchers are finding out.

Author David BrucePosted on Categories Australia, Fire behavior, ResearchLeave a comment on How do people actually use a fire map? Researchers are finding out.

How well do you understand public wildfire prediction maps?

And does the average member of the public understand these maps?

A research team in Australia is looking at a range of maps available to the public during fire emergencies to determine if the public understand them enough to take the right action to protect their lives and their communities.

Researchers from four universities are collaborating with all fire agencies in Australia for a national view on bushfire prediction maps. The Black Summer fires of 2019/20 prompted the need to better understand the potential of these maps. At the height of the fires, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service was concerned that many residents and holiday-makers did not fully appreciate the risk. So, they began publishing detailed predictive maps in the hope that more information would lead to better household decisions. But did more detailed maps better help the public? Hence, the need for this research.

Predictive maps display critical information, but knowledge is limited on the best design or how maps are actually used during active fires. As Dr Erica Kuligowski, Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University and Natural Hazards Research Australia explains:

“Maps are an important way to communicate spatial information and they are increasingly being used in natural hazards like bushfires. However, no evidence base exists on how these maps should be designed and communicated as well as how they should be disseminated to the public.”

Bushfire prediction maps used in Australia
A range of bushfire and weather prediction maps used in Australia

The researchers surveyed more than 3,000 people across all Australian states and territories in 2022 and 2023 to see if and how the public understood maps differently from the fire agencies.

They were shown mocked-up maps with varied levels of detail and asked the following questions:

  • Do you understand the purpose of this map?
  • What action is it prompting you to take?
  • How risky do you see the situation?
  • What emotions are you feeling?
  • What actions are you going to take?

They were also invited to provide open feedback, which provided a deeper level of insight for the researchers, particularly on whether it was the visuals, the text, or a combination of both that were seen as more important.

Public responses to uses of bushfire prediction maps
Public responses on uses of bushfire prediction maps in Australia.

The survey participants used a range of maps during bushfires, including local fire agency maps, the Bureau of Meteorology, Google Maps, and third-party weather or hazard mapping platforms, like Windy app, Digital Earth Australia (DEA) hotspots map, and bushfire.io.

Maps were checked more often at certain times during the bushfire, especially for early information (when the fire had not yet spread to participants’ immediate areas) or when the fire was moving quickly. Many participants used maps frequently, between 20 to 50 times each day.

A combination of information sources was used by participants to get a broader picture of their bushfire situation, with maps only one tool in their information toolbox. Community meetings were particularly useful in increasing understanding of fire spread prediction maps, as fire agency experts were on hand to explain the maps in more detail and answer questions.

Responses identified a wide range of uses for the maps, with different purposes more important to some than others, including to:

  • identify where they were in relation to the bushfire
  • gather information about the bushfire and what to do next
  • monitor the extent or rate of spread using the burnt areas shown on the map
  • cross-reference map information with other sources
  • confirm or explain the physical cues that they were seeing around them (for example, smoke or emergency response crews and vehicles responding to the fire)
  • make judgments about how the fire might spread and the level of risk
  • inform or warn others who may be at risk
  • monitor the impact of the fire on their or others’ properties, especially after evacuation.

The research is ongoing to provide guidelines on good structure to be translated into agency policies from 2025. In brief, the study found that bushfire maps must be updated promptly, clearly display their time and date of issue, and include relevant information, with an understanding that including too much or complex information may be problematic for comprehension.

For more resources on this study, including two webinars, go to:

Hazardous Webinar – Community perceptions and understanding of predictive maps 

The research is published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire

Understanding the challenges in bushfire map use and effective decision-making amongst the Australian public.

How does this compare with maps used elsewhere around the world? Are the challenges the same? Show Wildfire Today some of the better examples you have seen.