Wildfire Today

News and opinion about wildland fire

Wildfire Today

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire.

Forest Service announces 10-year initiative to increase fuel treatment

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , , 18 Comments on Forest Service announces 10-year initiative to increase fuel treatment

It will use $2.42 billion authorized by the infrastructure bill for fiscal years 2022 through 2026 for fuels-related projects

Geronimo Hotshots
Geronimo Hotshots on the Big Windy Complex, Oregon, 2013. USFS photo by Lance Cheung.

On Tuesday the U.S. Forest Service announced a 10-year strategy to address what they call the wildfire crisis which poses immediate threats to communities. The initiative, called “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests,” combines the recent large investment funded by congress  with years of research and planning into a national effort that is intended to significantly increase the scale of forest health treatments over the next decade.

The Forest Service will work with other federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior, and with Tribes, states, local communities, private landowners, and other partners to focus fuels and forest health treatments more strategically and at a larger scale.

Funding was approved in November

The Bipartisan Infrastructure bill signed by the President November 15, 2021 authorized about $2.42 billion for fiscal years 2022 through 2026 for fuels-related projects. (M = million)

  • $100M, Pre-fire planning, and training personnel for wildland firefighting and vegetation treatments
  • $20M, Data management for fuels projects and large fires
  • $100M, Planning & implementing projects under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program
  • $500M, Mechanical thinning, timber harvesting, pre-commercial thinning
  • $500M, Wildfire defense grants for at risk communities
  • $500M, Prescribed fires
  • $500M, Constructing fuelbreaks
  • $200M, Remove fuels, produce biochar and other innovative wood products

Previous testimony about fuel management before congressional committees

During testimony June 17, 2021  before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources former US Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen said the agency treats fuels on about three million acres each year but said they need to treat two to four times that amount. She repeatedly called for a “paradigm shift” for treating hazardous fuels. Senator Ron Wyden (OR) got Ms. Christiansen to confirm that the agency’s latest estimate is that it would take $20 billion over a 10-year period  to “get in front of the hazardous fuel challenge”.

On September 29, 2021 in a hearing before the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry, new USFS Chief Randy Moore said, “We will never hire enough firefighters, we will never buy enough engines or aircraft to fight these fires. We must actively treat forests. That’s what it takes to turn this situation around. We must shift from small scale treatments to strategic science-based treatments across boundaries. It must start with those places most critically at risk. We must treat 20 million acres over 10 years. Done right in the right places, treatments make a difference.”

On October 27, 2021 Jaelith Hall-Rivera, Deputy Forest Service Chief for State and Private Forestry told the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Natural Resources, “We need to treat an additional 20 million acres over the next decade and that could cost up to $20 billion or more.”

What is now planned

The plan released Tuesday by the Forest Service calls for:

  1. Treating up to an additional 20 million acres on the National Forest System lands in the West, over and above current treatment levels;
  2. Treating up to an additional 30 million acres on other Federal, State, Tribal, and private lands in the West;

The current level of treatment in recent years has been 2-3 million acres per year for fuels and forest health, the new document stated.

The plan calls for an unprecedented “paradigm shift” in land management to increase fuels and forest health treatments across jurisdictions to match the actual scale of wildfire risk to people, communities, and natural resources, especially in the Western United States.

The Forest Service is developing staffing plans and will be increasing capacity in not only field personnel specializing in prescribed fire to complete the work but also key administrative positions like contracting officers, human resources professionals, collaboration and partnership coordinators, communications, and grants and agreements specialists who will assist in connecting with partners.

Marshall Fire, Louisville, Colorado, by WxChasing/Brandon Clement
Marshall Fire, Louisville, Colorado. Photo by WxChasing/Brandon Clement, Dec. 31, 2021.

In 2022 and 2023

During the first two years of the initiative, the agency will be looking for large landscape-scale projects that are ready to go, up until now lacking only the necessary funding.

They will be seeking projects that are:

  • Designed to reduce wildfire risk to communities, water supplies, or critical infrastructure (including utility lines, roads, and national security sites);
  • Critical ecological values (including watersheds, wildlife habitat, and old growth stands) and ecosystem services (including carbon storage);
  • Economic values (including outdoor recreation, timber, and grazing areas);
  • Areas of cultural and historic significance (including areas important to Tribes); and,
  • Areas of social importance to communities (including for access and subsistence use).

Reforestation

The new initiative also strives for increased rates of reforestation following forest fires.

“We currently address only 6 percent of post-wildfire replanting needs per year, resulting in a rapidly expanding list of reforestation needs,” the new plan states. “We have plans for the reforestation of more than 1.3 million acres of National Forest System land. However, these plans only address one-third of National Forest System reforestation needs, estimated to be 4 million acres and growing. As we work to recover from wildfire, we are emphasizing planting the right species, in the right place, under the right conditions, so forests will remain healthy and resilient over time.”

Our take

The testimony before congressional committees said that in order  to “get in front of the hazardous fuel challenge” and “turn this situation around” the Forest Service needs an additional $2 billion a year for the next 10 years, over and above what is currently being spent. What was appropriated for the next five years was about $0.48 billion per year, less than one-fourth of the additional funds the agency said was needed.

The growth of the climate crisis which has contributed to the “wildfire crisis” appears to be exceeding the estimates of scientists. Changes are occurring even more quickly than previously expected. So low-balling the funding for protecting our homeland will mean we will fall even further behind in treating fuels and attempting to keep fires from wiping out more communities.

The heads of the five federal land management agencies need to be honest with congress and continue to point out the scope of the fuels problem and the increasing risk of fiddling while the forests and subdivisions burn. Congress must accept the facts and pass legislation adequate to address the threats to our ecosystems and communities.

Analysis of how weather affected the spread of the Marshall Fire in Colorado

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories WildfireTags , 4 Comments on Analysis of how weather affected the spread of the Marshall Fire in Colorado

It burned over 6,000 acres and nearly 1,100 homes northwest of Denver, December 30, 2021

Mountain wave, Colorado
Conceptual model of a mountain wave. NWS.

The Denver office of the National Weather Service has released an analysis of the weather that created the conditions on December 30, 2021 that allowed the Marshall Fire southeast of Boulder, Colorado to be turned into a blast furnace that within a few hours ran five miles to the east burning 6,000 acres and destroying nearly 1,100 homes with a total value of more than $500 million.

The NWS described the winds the day of the fire:

High winds developed in the mid morning hours on Thursday, December 30th, 2021, the result of a mountain wave that developed as very strong westerly winds raced over the Front Range Mountains and Foothills and crashed down onto the plains.  The mountain wave remained nearly unchanged through the rest of the day, resulting in very persistent and extremely high winds. Mountain waves are usually focused very close to the base of the foothills and adjacent plains. On this day, sustained winds of 50 to 60 mph with gusts of 80 to 100 mph were felt along Highway 93 and points east to around Superior and at times, Louisville.

On the map below, the final fire perimeter is outlined by light purple (upper center of the plot images), while the city of Boulder is located in the northwest corner. The black numbers are temperature (F), red numbers are wind gusts, and the wind barbs point to the direction the wind was from.

wind gusts weather Marshall Fire
Wind gusts (in red), temperatures (in black) at noon, Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall Fire, NWS.

The surface plot for 12 PM MST above shows some of the strongest winds from this wind event. A peak gust of 115 mph was reported at the base of the foothills, just east of the intersection of Highway 93 and Highway 72. Note the 85 mph gust in south Boulder, and a 100 mph gust along Highway 93 (very bottom of the image below) at about noon.

Precipitation in the Denver area, 6 months before Marshall Fire
Precipitation in the Denver area, 6 months before Marshall Fire, compared to previous dry periods. NWS.

After a very wet first half of the year that resulted in a lush, tall crop of grass, the six months leading up to the fire in late December were the driest in recorded history, by far. Drought affects moisture in the vegetation — the fuel moisture. The lower is it, the more easily and more intensely it burns in a wildfire. There were many areas in the fire with light vegetation, such as grass, that in December after it has cured would be more affected by recent rain (or the lack thereof) and relative humidity than long term drought. The relative humidity was in the mid-20s that day. But the National Weather Service said larger fuels such as shrubs and trees were plentiful in and around the affected subdivisions. Those fuels would be heavily affected by the historic drought and would have low fuel moistures in the live and dead vegetation.

Drought can also affect the home ignition zone. If gutters on homes are not kept clean of leaves, they can be ignited during an ember shower even if the fire is thousands of feet away. If the gutters have leaves during normal weather, especially in December near Boulder, they could also have water that is trapped by the leaves keeping them wet for weeks or months. But with historic drought, it is possible the water evaporated, making them susceptible for ignition by embers. A fire in a gutter can spread to the structure.

The lawns that in late December would often be covered by snow, were most likely brown and dry, making it possible for an ember to ignite the grass which could spread to homes. Mulch, such as bark or wood chips placed around ornamental plants and near structures would also be much drier than normal, making that fuel available. And remember, the winds were 50 to 60 mph with gusts of 80 to 100 mph.

As structures burned, millions of additional burning embers were lofted into the air with many of them igniting susceptible fuels out in front of the main fire. A burning home that in many cases was only 15 to 20 feet away from other houses could easily ignite through convective or radiant heat the neighboring residence.

Hunga Tonga volcano triggered nearly 400,000 lightning strikes

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 1 Comment on Hunga Tonga volcano triggered nearly 400,000 lightning strikes

C-130 aircraft to parachute drop drinking water and other emergency supplies for Tonga residents

Lightning Hunga Tonga volcano
Lightning at the Hunga Tonga volcano. Still image from video by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga.

The massive underwater Hunga Tonga volcano that erupted near Tonga in the South Pacific on January 14 triggered almost 7 hours of lightning as well as a tsunami. A ground-based lightning detection system recorded nearly 400,000 strikes with 200,000 occurring in a one-hour period. For comparison, a severe lightning bust in northern California might have hundreds or a few thousand strikes. The ash cloud reached at least 60,000 feet with some reports saying the initial plume reached 100,000 feet, three times the altitude of commercial airliners.

Below is a video showing part of the eruption recorded by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga. A lightning strike or two can be seen at 29 seconds. Most of the lightning was probably inside the ash plume or higher in the column.

The nearby island of Tonga was heavily affected by a four-foot tsunami followed by deposits of ash, which at least temporarily contaminated water supplies and shut off most utilities. A C-130 from New Zealand was scheduled to drop supplies by parachute.

The volcano is part of the highly active Tonga–Kermadec Islands volcanic arc, a subduction zone extending from New Zealand north-northeast to Fiji.

OPM creates timeline for developing a Wildland Firefighter job series

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 118 Comments on OPM creates timeline for developing a Wildland Firefighter job series

May, 2022 is the target date to issue the final policy for federal employees

OPM's timeline for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series
OPM’s timeline for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has created an action plan for the development of a job series to more accurately reflect the work that is now being done by wildland firefighters (WLFF) employed by five federal agencies. For the last 50 or more years WLFFs working for the Departments of Agriculture (DoA) and Interior (DoI) have been pigeonholed into Forestry or Range Technician positions. Their pay is very different from firefighters who work for private industry, municipal departments, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and private contractors who fight wildland fires for the DoA and DoI.

The timeline created by the OPM is very ambitious for a task to be completed by half a dozen federal agencies. It establishes May of this year as a target for issuing the final policy.

During those five months the OPM expects to:

  • Review the current situation and compare work done by firefighters inside and outside the agencies;
  • Survey the federal agencies for what work they need accomplished;
  • Create groups and subgroups to meet regularly for job classification;
  • Hold focus groups;
  • Obtain input from leadership of the agencies;
  • Meet with human resources subject matter experts and the leadership of the agencies to discuss findings and recommendations;
  • Draft policy, guidance, and/or tools for Wildland Firefighter (WLFF) work in the Federal government;
  • Receive comments and feedback from the agencies;
  • Issue the final policy in May, 2022.
OPM's action plan for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series
OPM’s action plan for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.

After the new WLFF job series is developed, then the five agencies have to actually adopt it and convert their firefighters into Firefighter positions. If the series requires higher pay, that could become a stumbling block. But if there are as many vacant positions now as there were last May they probably have enough unspent salary money to take care of the difference. But I would be surprised if there are many working in the new series before the start of the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2022 at the very earliest.

In a perfect world the development of the WLFF job series would have been initiated decades ago by leadership of the five federal agencies that employ a total of about 15,000 of these firefighters (if all positions were filled): Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Forest Service. Instead, they and the OPM are being forced to do the right thing by bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed by Congress in November, 2021.

Federal WLFFs have been recommending a realistic job series for decades, but within the last year their voices have been louder than ever and members of Congress have noticed. A fairly new non-profit organization, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, has been one of those voices helping to raise awareness with the public and legislators.

Two other bills have been introduced in the last few months that address pay issues for federal WLFFs,  H.R. 4274 Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act, and H.R. 5631 Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. Brief descriptions of the bills are in the article we published October 26. The legislation has been introduced, referred to five committees, and one hearing was held by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

 

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Ben and Matt.

Proposal for combining Type 1 and Type 2 incident management qualifications into a single level

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 23 Comments on Proposal for combining Type 1 and Type 2 incident management qualifications into a single level

Teams would be called “Complex Incident Management Teams”

Southern California Incident Management Team 3
File photo. Southern California Incident Management Team 3.

A decade after a similar concept was proposed, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) is being asked again to change the way Incident Management Teams (IMT) are configured. Currently there are three levels, Types 1, 2 and 3, with Type 1 IMTs being the highest qualified. The idea is to combine Types 1 and 2 into just one type, which will be called Complex Incident Management Teams (CIMT).

The Incident Workforce Development Group (IWDG), a working group of IMT practitioners and subject matter experts jointly chartered by the Fire Management Board (FMB), crafted a memo to the FMB asking for the change, in order to address the following:

  • Reduced number of IMT participants to fill IMT rosters, impacting the total number of IMTs available nationally;
  • Inconsistent use of IMTs due to lack of national IMT rotation management and commitment approval;
  • Reliance on Administratively Determined (AD) employees, retirees, and cooperators to staff IMTs without commensurate trainee use; and
  • Standardization of the IMT mobilization processes and other criteria across Geographic Areas.

In 2010, recognizing that the workforce management and succession planning for wildfire response was not sustainable, the NWCG chartered an interagency team to develop a new organizational model for incident management. In October, 2011 the NWCG released a 51-page document, Evolving Incident Management — A Recommendation for the Future. (If they issued a companion report, a Recommendation for the Past, we were unable to find it.) The suggestion was to merge all federally sponsored type 1 and type 2 teams into one type of IMT. There would three response levels: Initial attack (type 4 and 5 incidents), extended attack (type 3 incidents managed by type 3 IMTs), and complex incidents managed by Complex IMTs. Wildfire Today’s last update on that proposal was in 2015.

Below is a copy of the memo about the current suggestion. It was signed January 10, 2022 by the two top fire guys in the US Forest Service and the Department of the Interior and sent to the Fire Management Board, NWCG, and the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group.

(Click on the document above to see at bottom-left how to zoom in or scroll to pages two and three.)

[pdf-embedder url=”https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/CIMT_12-13-21.pdf” title=”Complex Incident Management Teams”]

The recently released report about the 2020 fatality on the El Dorado Fire addressed many issues the investigators felt were related to the management of that incident, including the current system for configuring IMTs:

“The same concerns exist for Incident Management Teams (IMT). With the reduction of 39 percent of the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce since 2000, the “militia” available to assist in IMT duties is rapidly being reduced to a mythical entity, often spoken of but rarely seen. The 2020 fire year was simply the latest in a long string of years where we did not have enough IMTs, let alone general resources, to address suppressing fire in our current paradigm. On the El Dorado Fire, Region 5 took a creative approach to ensure Type 1 oversight by grafting a Type 1 incident commander onto a Type 2 team, when no Type 1 teams were available. While this met the need and policy requirements, one cannot help but wonder what the difference really is between a Type 1 and Type 2 team. Why not just create one national team typing system, and why not ensure that it is staffed to a holistic fire management response (see Theme 2) and not just a direct perimeter control response.”

 

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Al.

Five common denominators on tragedy fires

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 8 Comments on Five common denominators on tragedy fires

And updated data

Entrapment Time of day wildland firefighters
Figure 1 from the research paper. Distribution of 166 US wildland firefighter entrapments that occurred within CONUS (1981–2017) by time of day (local time) and month of the year.

A reminder:

Five common denominators of fire behavior on fatal and near-fatal fires have been identified through studies of tragedy fires. It is important for firefighters to readily recognize them to prevent future disasters.

Such fires often occur:

  1. On relatively small fires or deceptively quiet areas of large fires.
  2. In relatively light fuels, such as grass, herbs, and light brush.
  3. When there is an unexpected shift in wind direction or in wind speed.
  4. When fire responds to topographic conditions and runs uphill.
  5. Critical burn period between 1400 and 1700.

Alignment of topography and wind during the critical burning period should be considered a trigger point to reevaluate tactics.

Blowup to burnover conditions generally occur in less than 60 minutes and can be as little as 5 minutes.

Updated research

On October 9, 2019 a document was published that summarized the work of four researchers who sought to find commonalities that led to the entrapments of firefighters on wildland fires. The paper is titled, “A Classification of US Wildland Firefighter Entrapments Based on Coincident Fuels, Weather, and Topography.” Apparently they were hoping to confirm, fine tune, revise, or update the “Common Denominators of Fire Behavior on Tragedy Fires” defined by Carl C. Wilson after the 1976 Battlement Creek Fire where three firefighters were killed near Parachute, Colorado.

The researchers conducted an analysis of the environmental conditions at the times and locations of 166 firefighter entrapments involving 1,202 people and 117 fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2017 in the conterminous United States. They identified one characteristic that was common for 91 percent of the entrapments — high fire danger — specifically, when the Energy Release Component and Burning Index are both above their historical 80th percentile.

They also generated an update of the time of day the entrapments occurred as seen in the figure at the top of this article. This has been done before, but it’s worthwhile to get an update. And, this version includes the month.

You can read the entire open access article here. If you’re thinking of quickly skimming it, the 7,000 words and the dozens of abbreviations and acronyms make that a challenge. There is no appendix which lists and defines the abbreviations and acronyms.

The authors of the paper are Wesley G. Page, Patrick H. Freeborn, Bret W. Butler, and W. Matt Jolly.

Below are excerpts from their research:

…Given the findings of this study and previously published firefighter safety guidelines, we have identified a few key practical implications for wildland firefighters:

  1. The fire environment conditions or subsequent fire behavior, particularly rate of spread, at the time of the entrapment does not need to be extreme or unusual for an entrapment to occur; it only needs to be unexpected in the sense that the firefighters involved did not anticipate or could not adapt to the observed fire behavior in enough time to reach an adequate safety zone;
  2. The site and regional-specific environmental conditions at the time and location of the entrapment are important; in other words, the set of environmental conditions common to firefighter entrapments in one region do not necessarily translate to other locations;
  3. As noted by several authors, human factors or human behavior are a critical component of firefighter entrapments, so much so that while an analysis of the common environmental conditions associated with entrapments will yield a better understanding of the conditions that increase the likelihood of an entrapment, it will not produce models or define characteristics that predict where and when entrapments are likely to occur.

The factor that was common for the majority of entrapments (~91%) was high fire danger. As a general guideline, regardless of location, the data suggest that entrapment potential is highest when the fire danger indices (Energy Release Component and Burning Index) are both above their historical 80th percentile.

More information about this research.

Recent burnovers in the United States that resulted in fatalities; with time and date:

Looking forward

One thing that will be interesting to watch is if the historical three-hour window from 1 to 4 p.m. when many of the fatalities have occurred is going to be stretched as the earth warms and extreme fire behavior becomes more frequent.

Hey! Let’s be careful out there.