The fire burned 18,430 acres northwest of Santa Barbara, California in July, 2017
Six months after the Whittier Fire stopped spreading the U.S. Forest Service has released the cause of the blaze. The investigation determined that a vehicle driving through tall grass near Camp Whittier ignited the fire.
The Forest Service did not file criminal charges. Due to the age of the driver, the agency will not release any additional details of the investigation.
The Whittier Fire started July 8 on Bureau of Reclamation land and quickly spread onto National Forest System lands northwest of Santa Barbara, California. The fire burned 18,430 acres until it stopped spreading July 20.
The fire has been in the news since a U.S. Forest Service firefighter, Dave Dahlberg, was introduced and honored by President Trump at the January 30 State of the Union Address. Mr. Dahlberg helped rescue 62 children and staff members when the Whittier Fire encircled their camp.
David Dahlberg meets Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Dept. of Agriculture photo. Mr. Dahlberg saved dozens of children and adults that were encircled by the Whittier Fire.
The jobs of some wildland firefighters change dramatically during the winter
These photos were taken over the last couple of days by Shelby Majors during pile burning operations on the Lewis and Clark National Forest west of Augusta, Montana. He said they have been burning landing piles for the past month throughout the Benchmark Corridor that were created during a fuel reduction project started in the winter of 2016-2017.
Anticipating a wind change, 19 household along the Waitangi Wharf – Owhenga Road have been evacuated
Screen grab from a NZDF video of a wildfire on the Chatham Islands.
A wildfire on the Chatham Islands 700 miles east of New Zealand has burned about 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres).
Principal Rural Fire Officer Craig Cottrill says two teams of five specialist rural firefighters and four incident management team specialists will fly via charter aircraft at 3pm on Saturday 3 February with fuel, equipment and supplies for a two-week deployment. Two helicopters with monsoon bucket capacity are also set to arrive on the island.
Chatham Islands Fire. NZDF photo.
They will join eight Fire and Emergency volunteers, four Department of Conservation staff, and three local contractors working to contain the fire. It has started to burn into conservation land, however the true extent of the fire will be determined once additional crews are on the ground.While the fire is currently burning towards the southern coast, a wind change to the north is in the forecast overnight. Accordingly, 19 households along the Waitangi Wharf – Owhenga Road have been evacuated to a welfare center operated by the Chatham Council Civil Defence as a precaution overnight.
The Chatham Islands are about 700 miles east of New Zealand. Google Earth.Smoke from a wildfire on the Chatham Islands can be seen blowing to the southeast February 1, 2018. NASA.
Above: wildfire potential for February, 2018, issued February 1, 2018.
(Originally published at 1:41 p.m. MDT February 1, 2018)
On February 1 the Predictive Services section at the National Interagency Fire Center issued their Wildland Fire Potential Outlook for February through May. The data represents the cumulative forecasts of the ten Geographic Area Predictive Services Units and the National Predictive Services Unit.
If the prediction is accurate, the wildfire potential in Southern California and the Southern Plains will remain above normal for the entire four-month period and will increase in the Southwest and Northwestern Great Plains in Montana and North Dakota. The Eastern U.S. should expect normal or below normal potential.
Below are:
The highlights of the NIFC narrative report for the next several months;
NIFC’s monthly graphical outlooks;
NOAA’s three-month temperature and precipitation forecasts; and
Drought Monitor.
“The significant wildland fire potential forecasts included in this outlook represent the cumulative forecasts of the ten Geographic Area Predictive Services units and the National Predictive Services unit.
“Wildfire activity is likely to begin to increase in February as would be seasonally expected. During the early portions of the year it is typical for significant fires to begin to occur across the southern tier of the U.S. Currently it appears the highest likelihood for above normal significant wildland fire potential will be in place across portion of the southern plains and Florida and Georgia. Across the southern plains the last years precipitation totals have brought about a somewhat robust fine fuel crop, which will provide an elevated baseline of fire activity. When this elevated fuel condition is exacerbated by a period of dry and windy conditions it will provide opportunities for any ignitions to become significant fires.
“These incidents will be difficult to predict, but extra attention should be paid to this area when dry and windy conditions are forecasted. In Florida and Georgia the significant drought that led to amplified fire activity in the fall across the south has not improved. Moisture deficits in these fuel types are significant because they not only make ignition significantly more likely but they also make fires much more difficult to fight. Both conditions make the need for fire suppression resources higher. Both of these significant areas of above normal potential are likely continue through March and probably return to normal in April or May.
“At the end of the Outlook period significant fire potential across portions of Alaska will being to increase. This is also generally seasonally anticipated, however, the potential for above normal significant fire activity in the south central portion of the state is likely. Drought conditions indicate that some unusual dryness will be in place in this area as fire season begins. This will likely lead to earlier than usual ignitions and the potential for worse than usual fires. In the shorter term Hawaii is likely to see some elevated activity thanks to some unusual dryness, but this condition is expected to be short lived.
“Additionally, fire activity is expected to be below normal across western portions of Tennessee and Kentucky throughout the Outlook period.”
How you tell a story influences what conclusions people draw from it (think Aesop’s Fables). Over the past decade, the overarching American wildfire narrative has become fairly focused on three dynamics: fuels buildup due to suppression, climate change, and the expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI). But what are these narratives based on?
There is a fair bit of research and debate as to when and where fuel overloading and climate change will have the most influence, in fact too much to be easily citable here. However, according to research for a paper that I’m developing with Matt Thompson of the Rocky Mountain Research Station and Courtney Schultz of Colorado State University, few data support the WUI story. Specifically, only limited data support the arguments for why and how the WUI is contributing to the wildfire problem.
For instance, a commonly cited concern is that 50–95 percent of wildfire suppression costs can be attributed to the protection of private property in the WUI. However, when our team followed the citations for this statement, we found that they all led back to data from a single 2006 Office of Inspector General (OIG) report (PDF, 1.57 MB). Further, the report reached that particular conclusion using data that most social scientists would find problematic at best. Stay tuned for my team’s paper to learn more about that report’s limitations.* We have found a few studies that examine the breakdown of suppression costs in a more rigorous manner, using meaningful metrics (e.g., the number of homes near the fire perimeter and the percent of private land). But, while they do find a positive association between homes being located in the WUI and suppression costs, none demonstrate causality or conclude that the costs of protecting private property come close to the low end of OIG’s estimates. Nor can we find any study that tracks changes in the WUI with changes in suppression costs over time, even though a key perceived “problem” with the WUI is that its expansion will automatically increase wildfire suppression costs.
Similarly, although it is often stated that wildfire-related housing loss is increasing, it is hard to find any data that support or deny this claim, as wildfire-related housing loss hasn’t been tracked consistently until fairly recently. Further, even the existing data are problematic. For instance, the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) claims that 2,638 homes were lost nationally in 2015 (see page 9 of this NICC report, PDF, 830 KB); while CAL FIRE reports that 3,217 homes were destroyed in California alone that same year (see page 10 of this CAL FIRE report, PDF, 1.28 MB). Further, while it is too short of a time span to draw any solid conclusions, it is worth noting that both datasets suggest that higher losses are periodic and due to specific wildfire events. For example, the graph below, which I developed using NICC annual summary reports, illustrates that when excluding the state that lost the most residences in a given year — say Tennessee in 2016, the year of the Gatlinburg fires — home loss (shown in green) is relatively flat.
Inaccurate Stories Are Unlikely to Lead to Effective Solutions
Accepting WUI narratives that lack sufficient supporting data can lead to developing solutions that are less likely to have the desired impact, because they may be targeting the wrong problem. Further, these proposed solutions may have unintended consequences because they don’t take existing data, or lack thereof, or the larger context into account. For instance, a common recommendation based on the WUI narrative is to limit development in fire-prone areas. However, while we do have fairly robust science concerning factors that make an individual home more fire resistant, we don’t have much information on what type of larger scale development is associated with improved wildfire outcomes. There are only a few relevant studies, and they offer conflicting “solutions.” For example, some studies suggest clustered housing would help with decreasing suppression costs, but others suggest clustered housing would lead to more losses.
Another common recommendation based on the WUI narrative is to form a national fire-insurance program similar to the National Flood Insurance Program, which appears to be seen as a means of ensuring that WUI residents bear the cost of living there. This recommendation ignores the significant evidence concluding that the National Flood Insurance Program has done little to shift the cost burden from federal taxpayers (and in fact has probably increased it) or to limit housing development in flood-prone areas. This argument also seems to assume that if individuals can’t obtain or afford insurance, then they will choose to not live in the WUI. However, there is no evidence that this is the case. It’s just as likely that individuals will continue to live there for a variety of reasons (e.g., amenities, affordability in other regards) and just take their chances, essentially making those with fewer resources even more vulnerable.
Further, insurance levers can raise an equity consideration: if insurance did have the desired effect, it is likely that only the wealthy would be able to live in the WUI since only they could afford to pay higher insurance premiums or to self-insure. It is worth asking whether that is an acceptable tradeoff.
Shifting Our Language
Through this process, I have begun to question whether the WUI is still a useful construct. While it may have been useful at one point to draw attention to the increasing intermingling of housing and natural vegetation, it now seems to create an artificial distinction that may be misleading. I doubt many of those who lost their homes in the recent California wildfires, particularly in Santa Rosa, thought of themselves as living in the WUI. Further, a preliminary analysis by the University of Wisconsin shows that regarding the Tubbs Fire, many of the losses were not technically in the WUI. Instead, the largest portions of homes lost were in areas considered either too dense or not dense enough to be classified as the WUI. Forest Schafer’s recent blog post about how Lake Tahoe partners are rethinking their WUI is another example of the limitations of drawing artificial lines when assessing wildfire risk.
And then there is the question of how limiting development in the WUI would work. Beyond equity issues and the fact that we don’t have strong evidence regarding what “better” land-use planning for wildfire looks like, I always wonder, “So, where are people supposed to live then?” As one recent newspaper headline stated: “All Californians Live in Fire Country Now.” Perhaps just thinking about how we can best live in fire-prone landscapes may be a more useful way to frame the discussion, rather than creating artificial distinctions based on housing density and natural vegetation.
*This blog describes initial findings from a paper that Courtney, Matt and I are working on. The articles referenced in this blog post will be identified in that paper, which will be available on Treesearch once it is published.
Photo credit: Sarah McCaffrey
Sarah McCaffrey, Ph.D., is a research forester for the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. Her research focuses on the social aspects of fire management. This work has included projects examining wildfire risk perception, social acceptability of prescribed fire and thinning, characteristics of effective communication programs, and incentives for the creation and maintenance of defensible space. She has also initiated work examining social issues that occur during and after wildfires, including evacuation-decision making, agency-community interactions during fires, public perception of wildfire management overall, views on the Cohesive Strategy, and perceptions about what it means to be a fire adapted community. She received her Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science in 2002 from the University of California at Berkeley.
A U.S. Forest Service firefighter, Dave Dahlberg, was introduced and honored by President Trump at the January 30 State of the Union Address. Mr. Dahlberg helped rescue 62 children and staff members whose camp had been encircled by the Whittier Fire northwest of Santa Barbara, California.
