An arsonist in the midst of setting over a half-dozen fires in dry vegetation during a “red flag” condition in California. Photo courtesy of Jeff Zimmerman
By Joe Konefal and Ed Nordskog
The one criminal who possesses the power of a nuclear weapon at his fingertips is the wildland arsonist.In certain areas of the world, if the weather and fuel conditions are favorable, a wildland arsonist has the instant ability to burn an entire community to the ground, and kill scores of people, their pets, livestock, and the wildlife in the area.All of this carnage for the mere price of a match, a lighter or a road flare.
The good news is that there aren’t that many people intentionally setting arson fires in the wildlands, as yearly statistics prove that the overwhelming number of wildfires are not acts of arson.The less good news is that historically, many of the actual wildland arson cases go “unsolved”.The reasons for this are many, but one important reason is that compared to their urban counterparts, wildland arson investigators working for public agencies get very little money for resources and investigative training.Wildland arson cases have two distinct phases; the scene work, and then the follow-up criminal investigation.Many wildland investigators have a high degree of skill when conducting the “Origin and Cause” investigation at the scene, but they often lack the years of experience and ongoing certified training to pursue the criminal investigation portion of the case.There are currently very few schools, books, or online sources out there dedicated specifically toward conducting an arson investigation in the wildlands.
That’s too bad.Analysis of case histories shows that a significant portion of wildland arsons are committed by a small number of persons…the serial arsonists.The majority of arson series are eventually solved, provided that the arsonist continues setting fires.It is not unusual for investigators to learn that a single serial arsonist in the wildlands had set twenty to one hundred fires (or more) prior to the arrest.
Threat Assessment
Traditionally, the fire service (urban and wildland) rates arson fires by their damage (dollar loss) or their size in acreage.This may greatly affect how much attention, manpower, and resources are devoted to an investigation.But, to an investigator, the size of the fire has very little to do with assessing the threat level of an arsonist, as the size of the fire event is completely out of the hands of the arsonist.The below factors are much more important to consider when conducting any threat assessment during a wildland arson investigation of an unknown subject.These factors are important when considering the intent of the arsonist.
-Large number (more than three) of suspicious or arson fires in an area
-Rapid frequency of suspicious or arson fires in an area
-Arson fires purposely set in extreme fire conditions
-The use of an incendiary device by the arsonist
If any of these four factors are present, then even small fires or failed arson events (all serial arson cases have these) are to be considered high threat.If an investigator determines that an offender is high threat, then the investigator must take immediate steps to approach this investigation as a major case investigation, and employ an arson task force approach to the case.
It is well known among modern criminal investigators that if you dedicate enough resources on any case, you can probably solve it fairly quickly.The real issue is that public agencies seldom have the luxury to focus on any one case until it gets media attention.This causes “small” fires set by arsonists to be classified as a “nuisance”, and put on the back burner for weeks or months until the arsonist sets a much larger or more destructive fire.
Our position is that through training, and a proper threat assessment after every arson event, (small or large), investigators will more quickly focus resources on an emerging problem before the disastrous arson attack takes place.
Arson Task Force Approach and Investigative Mindset
Task Force: Federal and local investigators team up to work a serial arson case. The suspect was convicted for nine fires and had three prior serial arson convictions dating back thirty years. Courtesy Ed Nordskog’s case files.
This investigative mindset simply means treating the case as a major case from the beginning and using sufficient resources to solve the problem.A task force can be as few as three to four investigators, or up to hundreds of investigators and support personnel.The key to every task force is simple:Bring the right people to the team, not the most.
Josh Baker just got home from a 50-day deployment to three California wildfires. Although his job wasn’t dangerous — he worked on a support team, making calls to track down equipment such as port-a-potties and bulldozers — the hours were long, the stakes were high and the work was exhausting.
He’s still feeling tense. “I’m anxious, nerves are kind of frayed, things that would normally not be a big deal — kind of water off a duck’s back — hit a little harder,” said Baker, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) fire captain who spoke to Stateline as a member of the agency’s union, Local 2881.
Being a wildland firefighter has always involved long hours, personal risk and weeks away from home. But this year has been something else: More than 4 million acres burned in California alone. Entire towns were torched in Washington and Oregon. Smoke was so thick the sky turned orange over West Coast cities.
Now state and federal officials and mental health experts are bracing for firefighters to come home and start processing what they’ve been through. It’s not uncommon for wildland firefighters, even in a less-intense year, to develop depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, unhealthy substance use or suicidal thoughts.
“When you almost die on a wildfire, away from your family and kids — that doesn’t go away,” said a U.S. Forest Service smokejumper who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from his employer. “I know people who wake up in the middle of the night, and in their dreams they’re getting burned over by a fire, because they almost did.”
This year feels like a breaking point for many firefighters, said Mike West, who resigned as a fire dispatcher for the U.S. Forest Service this summer after 17 years working various fire-related jobs for the agency. His resignation letter, which detailed his struggles with post-traumatic stress, has been widely shared online.
“People are burned out,” West said. “They’re incredibly tired. And I think it’s been building for several years, and this is the year people are finally being more open [about mental health].”
State and federal agencies are trying to connect employees with counselors, chaplains and tools for managing trauma. But union officials and mental health experts say state and federal lawmakers must also fund more firefighter jobs and improve pay and mental health benefits, with severe fire seasons set to increase because of climate change.
“We can’t even get relief for our guys on these major fires,” said Tim Edwards, president of Local 2881. He wants the California legislature to hire hundreds more full-time firefighters to give people like Baker more time off to decompress. But state budgets are tight because of the pandemic and face many competing priorities.
The Forest Service smokejumper has started an online petition asking Congress to pay for a psychologist at every National Forest headquarters, mental health paid leave, better salaries for entry-level firefighters and better benefits for temporary employees. Federal firefighter salaries start at about $26,000 a year, not including hazard pay.
“The whole thing, to me, is mental health,” he said of his proposals. “To me [hiring] the psychologist is treating the problem. It’s not preventing it.”
The petition has collected more than 30,000 signatures in two months.
Some firefighters are heading home with memories of crew members who died in a fire. Others have lost their homes to wildfire or are returning to damaged communities. And like everyone else, they’re contending with the coronavirus pandemic.
Baker had been home with his wife and young daughter for less than an hour when he learned that a firefighter he’d worked with had COVID-19. Baker cloistered himself in a spare room for a few days until his own test results came back negative.
Some forestry experts say the pressure on firefighters will subside only when policymakers and the public invest more money in reducing wildfire risk, such as by clearing brush from around homes. Western states such as California have been ramping up investment in such projects.
“Ultimately, that’s what’s going to make it safer for fighters, is a healthy, restored, resilient ecosystem,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a wildland fire ecologist and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a Eugene, Oregon-based nonprofit.
An Increasingly Stressful Job
Tens of thousands of Americans are involved in fighting wildfires, from full-time federal and state employees to seasonal hires, private contractors, prison inmate crews and local fire department volunteers. Cal Fire alone employs 6,100 full-time fire professionals and 2,600 seasonal firefighters.
Unlike their city counterparts, wildland firefighters typically deploy for weeks or months, working long hours and usually sleeping in tents or catching quick naps in the dirt. When employees go home at the end of a fire season, it can be tough to readjust to normal life.
“That’s when the post-traumatic stress takes its toll on the wildland guys, the off-season,” said Burk Minor, director of the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, a Boise, Idaho-based group that raises money to help injured firefighters and the families of firefighters who died on the job.
West said that for years, he suppressed feelings about two close calls escaping wildfires in his early 20s. Going home became a struggle, particularly after his kids were born. “I was really hyper-vigilant, you know,” he said. He startled easily and would grow impatient and irritable when, for instance, a line at a restaurant buffet moved slowly.
The job has become more dangerous in recent years, largely because of climate change. Dry conditions and high winds in California are fueling fire behavior that firefighters have never seen before, Baker said.
“I hate to say it, because it sounds cliché, but every time we have these large-scale fires we say, ‘This is a career fire,’ or, ‘You’ll never see this again in your career,’” he said. “And every year, you’re topping that.”
In a farewell letter posted online this spring, Aaron Humphrey, a California hotshot crew supervisor (hotshots are on the front lines of fighting fire) explained that the 2018 Carr Fire — a blaze so intense it spawned a terrifying tornado — was his breaking point, reached after years of suppressing the strain of managing a fire crew.
“The day the fire tornado came and everyone did the best they could I lost the mental fight. … I felt dead inside that night,” he wrote. He spiraled into angry outbursts, heavy drinking and depression.
And as fires grow and more people move to forested areas, firefighters are both facing more pressure to protect communities and witnessing more human suffering.
“Now if you even lose one acre, that could be several people’s homes,” said Nelda St. Clair, a retired U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administrator who now manages crisis stress management training for wildland firefighters for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“The suicide rate in wildland fire is much higher than it is in municipal fire departments, or the general population,” said St. Clair, who keeps an informal tally of wildland firefighter suicides.
She said many wildland firefighters who die by suicide have experienced a traumatic event on the job, which can later fuel stress disorders, relationship problems and unhealthy substance use.
West said that after a close friend of his died on the fire line in 2013, the negative thoughts and emotions he’d been battling for years intensified. By 2017, he said, “I was having nightmares, I was having anxiety memory loss.” He had suicidal thoughts, too.
A Changing Culture
State and federal agencies have for decades conducted mental health training for wildland firefighters after catastrophic events, such as the death of a fire crew member. More recently, agency leaders have ramped up efforts to prepare firefighters for stressful and traumatic experiences and to encourage them to reach out for help.
“What we’ve been very successful at is changing the culture,” said Ted Mason, fire and aviation national safety program manager for the BLM. He said the profession is shifting away from the traditional, suck-it-up stoicism of first responders.
Cal Fire now has about 20 staff members who work full time with struggling employees and recommend counseling services and other resources, said Mike Ming, staff chief of Cal Fire’s behavioral health and wellness program. The agency also has trained staff all over the state to serve as peer support personnel who can offer colleagues a friendly ear.
Ming’s team sometimes sets up trailers at fire base camps that firefighters can duck into for a confidential discussion with a trained peer. Sometimes, he said, firefighters will walk into a trailer and just start crying.
The agency also is training firefighters to recognize the signs of stress and trauma and combat them with techniques such as deep breathing, Ming said. “Over time, if they don’t have the positive coping tools and skills … oftentimes people find themselves on their knees reaching out for help.”
But more needs to be done, St. Clair said. Although the culture of wildland firefighting is changing, “we’re not there yet.”
It’s difficult for anyone to reach out and ask for help, she said. “It’s more difficult for a wildland firefighter. They’re terrified that if anybody knows about it they’ll lose their jobs. They’re terrified that the people they depend on won’t trust them.”
And some employees still slip through the cracks. State and federal jobs generally offer an employee assistance program that includes access to a handful of free counseling sessions, for instance. But temporary workers lose access to that benefit when they’re laid off at the end of fire season.
People experiencing post-traumatic stress can need more specific help than general counseling. After initially being referred to a local marriage counselor by the Forest Service’s employee assistance program, West, who lives in a rural area that has few mental health providers, decided instead to drive 90 miles to see a trauma specialist.
“The guy was very nice,” West said of the marriage counselor. “But he didn’t really understand firefighting or what I was dealing with.”
It can also be difficult for firefighters to claim workers compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly at the federal level.
California lawmakers last year approved legislation that will make it easier for certain state and local firefighters and law enforcement officers to make such claims from 2020 to 2025. As of last March, Florida and Minnesota had similar laws on the books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a Denver and Washington, D.C.-based group that advises state lawmakers.
Next Steps
This fire season has been so bad that agency officials and union leaders are calling for more mental health support for wildland firefighters and other public lands employees.
The Oregon State Department of Forestry has hired an outside contractor to connect employees with mental health professionals and chaplains. “These fires hit home for a lot of our employees,” said Patricia Kershaw, human resources manager for the agency. “It’s communities where they live, some lost their homes, some had families that lost their homes.”
U.S. Forest Service management and union leaders are discussing how to better support workers in Western states, said Randy Meyer, safety committee chair for the Forest Service Council of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
“There’s been a lot of talk about trying to delve into critical stress management,” Meyer said, “and possible or even probable PTSD issues with firefighters in particular, but our Forest Service employees in general.” Some employees have watched decades of work on public lands go up in smoke, he said.
Meyer said there’s also talk of expanding the agency’s employee assistance program to temporary workers after they’ve been laid off. But that might require an act of Congress.
“It’s not just a fiscal issue,” Meyer said. “We can’t spend money on people that aren’t employed by the agency.”
Baker agreed with Edwards, the Local 2881 president, that while it’s vital for firefighters to have mental health support they also need more time to go home and unwind between deployments.
“While having those resources is great,” he said, “it’s putting a Band-Aid on a bigger issue, which is the amount of personnel.”
The recession caused by the pandemic has squeezed state budgets and made new investments difficult, however. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in January proposed spending $120 million this year and $150 million in future years to hire 677 more full-time Cal Fire firefighters and staff.
The legislature instead approved — and the governor in June enacted — $85.6 million to hire 172 new full-time firefighters and staff, as well as seasonal workers. Newsom later used emergency funds to hire over 850 more seasonal firefighters.
The Forest Service smokejumper said anecdotally he’s hearing wildland firefighter jobs are getting harder to fill, perhaps because of the low pay, tough schedule and risk. “There are less and less people who want to do that,” he said.
West is now working as an eighth-grade teacher, fulfilling a longtime dream and spending more time with his wife and two young kids. He said he no longer feels ashamed or embarrassed by his mental health struggles. “Hearing other people talk about it helped me talk about it,” he said.
This article first appeared in Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
We must abandon our expectation that we can suppress 100% of wildfires and reject the false narrative that community protection requires wildfire control. Community wildfire disasters have only occurred during extreme conditions when high wind speed, low relative humidity, and flammable vegetation result in high fire intensities, rapid fire growth rates, and showers of burning embers (firebrands) starting new fires. Fire agencies primarily use wildfire suppression tactics for protecting communities from wildfires. But as we see from current extreme wildfire conditions in California, Oregon, and Washington, fire suppression can quickly become overwhelmed and ineffective.
Wildfires, and thus extreme wildfires, are inevitable. Does that mean wildland-urban (WU) fire disasters are inevitable as well? Absolutely not! WU fire research has shown that homeowners can create ignition resistant homes to prevent community wildfire disasters. How can that be possible?
Paradise, California, off Herb Lane near Skyway in Paradise. From Butte County drone mapping project. November, 2018.
Recall the destruction in Paradise, CA, during the extreme 2018 Camp Fire. Most of the totally destroyed homes in Paradise were surrounded by unconsumed tree canopies. Although many journalists and public officials believe this outcome was unusual, the pattern of unconsumed vegetation adjacent to and surrounding total home destruction is typical of WU fire disasters. In 2020 we see the same patterns of home destruction and adjacent unconsumed vegetation in photos from Malden, WA, and Phoenix, Talent, Blue River, and Mill City OR. Home destruction with adjacent unconsumed shrub and tree vegetation indicates the following:
U.S. Forest Service photo.
High intensity wildfire does not continuously spread through a residential area as a tsunami or flood of flame.
Unconsumed shrub and tree canopies adjacent to homes do not produce high intensity flames that ignite the homes; ignitions can be only from burning embers and low intensity surface fires.
The “big flames” of high intensity wildfires are not causing total home destruction.
The Almeda Drive Fire in the area of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Image by Jackson County, September 8, 2020.
Surprisingly, research has shown that home ignitions during extreme wildfires result from conditions local to a home. A home’s ignition vulnerabilities in relation to nearby burning materials within 100 feet principally determine home ignitions. This area of a home and its immediate surroundings is called the home ignition zone (HIZ). Typically, lofted burning embers initiate ignitions within the HIZ – to homes directly and nearby flammables leading to homes. Although an intense wildfire can loft firebrands more than one-half mile to start fires, the minuscule local conditions where the burning embers land and accumulate determine ignitions. Importantly, most home destruction during extreme wildfires occurs hours after the wildfire has ceased intense burning near the community; the residential fuels – homes, other structures, and vegetation – continue fire spread within the community.
Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable; however, by reducing home ignition potential within the HIZ we can create ignition resistant homes and communities. Thus, community wildfire risk should be defined as a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem. Unfortunately, protecting communities from wildfire by reducing home ignition potential runs counter to established orthodoxy.
There are good reasons to do “fuel treatments” for ecological and commercial objectives. But the greatest fuel treatment effect on wildfire behavior is within the fuel treatment area; fuel treatments do not stop extreme wildfires. So let’s call a spade a spade and not pretend that many, or even most fuel treatment projects actually reduce home ignition potential during extreme wildfires. Because local conditions determine home ignitions, the most effective “fuel treatment” addressing community wildfire risk reduces home ignition potential within HIZs and the community. Wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, will occur. Community destruction during extreme wildfires will continue as long as wildfire suppression remains the primary approach for community protection. Conducting the same ineffective strategy and tactics expecting different results will continue to be a recipe for disaster when it comes to protecting homes from extreme wildfire.
To make this shift, land managers, elected officials, and members of the public must question some of our most deeply ingrained assumptions regarding fire. For the sake of fiscal responsibility, scientific integrity, and effective outcomes, it’s high time we abandon the tired and disingenuous policies of our century-old all-out war on wildfire and fuel treatments conducted under the guise of protecting communities. Instead, let’s focus on mitigating WU fire risk where ignitions are determined – within the home ignition zone.
Jack Cohen, PhD, retired US Forest Service Research fire scientist determined how structures ignite during extreme wildfires, created the home ignition zone concept, and co-developed NFPA Firewise USA.
Dave Strohmaier is Missoula County Commissioner. He previously worked for both the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service in fire management, and has published two books on the subject of wildfire in the West.
I recently became aware of an article that appeared in the Spring, 1998 edition of “Ranger”, a publication of the Association of National Park Rangers. It was written by Jennifer Blake, the daughter of Bill Blake who when he retired was the Chief Ranger of the National Park Service’s Midwest Region. Bill and I have spent much time together on incident management team assignments and ridden thousands of miles on multi-week motorcycle trips.
Jennifer’s piece describes what it is like for a child to grow up in a National Park Service family. When she wrote it as a 21-year-old majoring in journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, her parents worked at New River Gorge National River in West Virginia where he was the park’s Chief Ranger and she worked in payroll.
Her experiences are probably similar to other children whose parents work for land management agencies.
I asked Jennifer if I could republish the article she wrote 22 years ago, and I didn’t leave it at that — I encouraged her to write an epilog as an update. She said yes, and both are below.
Bill Gabbert
Childhood in NPS Packs Many Memories
By Jennifer Blake
My father is Yogi Bear’s worst enemy. He’s Smokey Bear and Woodsy Owl wrapped into one. My father is a park ranger. And while he never worked at Jellystone Park, his career moved our family across the country three times and gave me the memories and images that defined my childhood.
I can’t think of my father without thinking of his uniform. The forest green pants and famous Smokey Bear hat are as intrinsic to his appearance in my mind as are the color of his eyes. To this day, I feel strangely at home whenever I see someone wearing one.
Memorable Adventures
That uniform came to represent the small adventures that punctuate and color the lives of young children. I remember visits to ranger stations, drives through apple orchards to spy on bear cubs stranded in trees, and trips to mountain lookouts to spy on forest fires the same way most kids remember learning how to ride their bikes. What strikes me most about these memories is the security I felt knowing that my father and all his powers as a park ranger, which in the mind of a young child were numerous and mighty, were never far behind.
Being a ranger was — and still is — more than just my father’s job; it was part of his identity. I was enthralled with that identity and tried to imbibe as much of it as I could. I was born in Fredricksburg. Va., when my father worked at the national battlefield there. His early tales of my ancestors’ feats on the very grounds on which he worked sparked a passion for history I still carry. I’m probably one of the few people who visited just about every major Civil War battle site before the age of 15.
The stories my father would tell me on hikes through the woods were more interesting than any children’s story. If he had any doubts about the attention I gave his words, they were erased when my kindergarten teacher sent home a note telling my parents that I had interrupted a story she was telling to the class: “Bears don’t simply sleep in the winter,” I proudly informed my classmates. “They hibernate.” I pronounced the word as if it were a special secret that had been passed from my father to me — and, in a way, it was.
That same class later went on a field trip to my father’s ranger station. We lived in Elkton, Va., at the time and the station was located in the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains amid the painting of fall foliage. I’ll never forget how proud I was that day. Actually, I don’t know if I, as a 5-year-old, had any real notion of pride. But I do know that the feeling of being special I had on that day — because I was the kid whom all the rangers knew, because I was the one who donned an oversized, yellow fireman’s hat and tried to aim the hose, because it was my father who got down on all fours and growled like a grizzly during the bear-trap demonstration — still strikes me as significant.
The Park Service, in the fashion of the military, creates a surrogate family. Rangers are transferred to different parks across the United States — I’ve lived in Virginia (twice), New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia. Pennsylvania, California (twice), and West Virginia — and each new park presents a new group of friends. I’ve spent many a Thanksgiving and Christmas with other rangers and their families and it never failed to feel like anything but home. Once, my brother and I were in a school production that called for us to run into the audience and return with our fathers in tow. We were living in Yosemite, Calif., and my father had been called out on an emergency — but my brother and I didn’t hesitate to grab our “Uncle Jim,” who followed us obligingly. My father’s office is still one of the first places I visit when I go home. I’m greeted with excited hugs that most people only receive when they visit distant grandparents.
Moving Not Easy
Not that moving around often was always easy. Starting new schools is right up there with root canals and major surgery on my list of fun. The culture shock I experienced moving from California to West Virginia was worse than when I left Boston to live in London.
I left the beautiful surroundings of northern California and a four-room, 65-person school to arrive in the rundown, economically depressed southern West Virginia. I was only interesting to the other kids as an object of torture. (I distinctly remember an episode that involved a greasy, unwashed junior high boy grabbing my book and sticking it down his pants.) Beckley didn’t exactly welcome outsiders with open arms. I cried so hard and so often my first three months that my eyes were always bloodshot and a guidance counselor once pulled me aside to ask if I was on drugs.
Many Benefits
But I know the benefits of “growing up Park Service” have far outweighed the detriments. For one, when I left for college I had few qualms at the prospect of being thrown in with hundreds of new kids. And I still proudly demonstrate the knowledge I gained from my father and our countless trips though his many parks: I got a curious look from a few of my friends the other day when one of them picked up a stone off the street and said it looked like an arrowhead: I quickly pronounced it the wrong material for a true Indian arrowhead.
My father’s career had taken him in many directions — park rangers actually do a lot more than secure visitor’s picnic baskets from pesky bears. He’s taught defensive driving at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (a fact that became all too clear when he tried to teach me how to drive); he’s served on presidential protection teams—teams of park rangers assembled whenever a president visits a national park — for Ford, Carter, Nixon and Clinton; he was chosen to work at the bicentennial celebration for the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, where he held the door open for Queen Elizabeth; and he served a 30-day detail on the ’88 Yellowstone fires, which ravaged what my father calls “the Mother Park.”
A few years after the fire, my family visited Yellowstone. The park was still badly scarred from the fires and my father seemed to have a tale about every singed tree. The force of nature was displayed in the strips of green grass and lush forest that stood untouched and juxtaposed to the fire-ravaged portions. I remember my father telling us that while the fires were burning, it seemed as if the sun never set because the force of the fires produced such an enormous glow.
The sight reminded me of a song about Smokey the Bear my brother and I were taught as children.
Smokey the Bear, Smokey the Bear*. Prowlin’ and a growlin’ and a sniffin’ the air. He can find a fire before it starts to flame. That’s why they call him Smokey, That was how he got his name.
In ninth grade I attended a youth-in-conservation conference and the leaders taught us that song as a joke. Everyone laughed because I already knew it, but I sang it with pride.
The Park Service celebrates America’s heritage; I celebrate the Park Service as my heritage. My childhood is wound tightly around it — inseparable. I’ve migrated to the city, but I still have a fondness for those famous hats. There’s a Park Service visitor center in downtown Boston. Occasionally, I drag an unsuspecting friend there because it reminds me of home. The paint in that visitor center is the same color brown as in every other Park Service visitor center (my mother has dubbed this particularly drab shade “Park Service Brown’’); it also has the same books, the same signs for the bathroom and the same donation box next to the cash register.
I know if I asked enough of the rangers, one of them would at least know someone who knows my father. And because of that, they know an intrinsic part of me.
Epilog, August, 2020
It has been more years than I care to admit (ok – 26 years) since I lived with my family in a national park. And yet, national parks across the country still feel like home to me.
I recently drove 13 hours to hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. We never lived there, but it still felt like sort of a homecoming the minute I saw an arrowhead. It’s the gift I was given as the kid of a park ranger and I will always cherish and keep it. My brother must feel the same way because he’s a proud park ranger himself now.
A few years ago I was working in San Francisco. I was at a bar and seated next to a party who had just come back from Yosemite National Park (where I was lucky enough to live from the time I was 7 until I turned 13). I couldn’t help but listen to them as they spoke in awe of what they’d seen. And then one of the women mentioned the small schoolhouse in the valley (my old schoolhouse!) and said she’d love to talk to a someone that had attended school there. I was proud to turn around and introduce myself.
National parks are one of the most constant things in my life. I’ve continued to move around as an adult and my career path is nothing like I thought it would be when I wrote the original article so many years ago. But I still smile whenever I see someone wearing a green and grey uniform with a Smokey Bear hat. I’ve pretty much been a city girl since I moved to Boston for college, but national parks will always be one of my touchstones.
*From Bill: When the Smokey Bear fire prevention campaign began in 1944 he was known as just that, “Smokey Bear” without “the” in the name. But in 1952 Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins wrote what became a successful song named “Smokey the Bear”. They said adding “the” enhanced the song’s rhythm. A Little Golden Book published about the bear in 1955 followed the songwriters lead and also used the incorrect “the” version of the name. All this created confusion, but the name of the fire prevention icon is and always has been Smokey Bear. A new version of the song has been written correcting the name.
FWS firefighter Reynaldo Navarro and a Victoria Rural Fire Service firefighter attack a spot fire. BLM photo by David Carrera.
BY KARI COBB
Although Australia is no stranger to wildfires, the 2019-2020 season was one of the worst fire seasons on record. Major bushfires began in spring 2019 (June), and by September were stronger, more intense, and more frequent. The fire situation continued to worsen, and by November, Australia requested international assistance to suppress the thousands of fires on the landscape.
Over a span of four months, the United States responded to Australia’s request for firefighters by providing personnel from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, and National Park Service. In total, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) provided 11 individuals to assist in suppression efforts.
FWS employees filled important roles, including engine captain, situation officer, aircraft officer, task force leader, fire behavior analyst, division supervisor, planning section chief, operations section chief, air support group supervisor, and public information officer.
“Our mission was to support the Australian government in suppressing the bushfires and keeping the Australian people and communities safe,” said Reynaldo Navarro, Assistant Fire Management Officer, South Texas Refuge Complex. “Our tasks included firing operations, engine support, mopping up or blacking out, hand line construction, hazard tree felling, and structure triage and protection.”
“Being in Australia was a great, yet very humbling experience,” said Kyle Bonham, Engine Captain at Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex, of his time in Australia.
Although the Australia bushfires brought great destruction and impacts to the country, FWS personnel were welcomed with cheer and open arms.
“What stands out to me are the Australian people,” said Richard Sterry, Fire Management Specialist, Lakewood, Colorado. “I was assigned to a more rural area, and the Australian people were wonderful to work with. They always had smiles on their faces and were constantly going out of their way help us learn their system.”
By mid-February, more than 46 million acres (72,000 square miles) burned since the first fires in June, 2019. Overall, 80 percent of the Blue Mountains World Heritage area in New South Whales, and 53 percent of the Gondwana World Heritage rainforests in Queensland burned.
Fighting bushfires in Australia provided a unique opportunity for FWS firefighters to learn new firefighting skills, as well as hone the skills required to fight fire in the United States. Due to Australia’s location in the southern hemisphere, fire season occurs at a time when much of the U.S. is out of danger of wildfire. Firefighters helping with suppression efforts in Australia were afforded a unique opportunity to polish firefighting skills needed during wildfire season in the U.S.
Kari Cobb is the acting public affairs officer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Interagency Fire Center.
Estimated Live Fuel Moisture Content for the first 15-day periods of June, August, and October of 2019. Grey pixels indicate LFMC estimates were unavailable. LFMC estimates were unavailable when Sentinel-1 or Landsat-8 cloud- and snow-free surface reflectance were unavailable in the 3 months prior to time of estimation or when the land cover class of a pixel was absent from the training data.
BY JOSIE GARTHWAITE
As California and the American West head into fire season amid the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are harnessing artificial intelligence and new satellite data to help predict blazes across the region.
Anticipating where a fire is likely to ignite and how it might spread requires information about how much burnable plant material exists on the landscape and its dryness. Yet this information is surprisingly difficult to gather at the scale and speed necessary to aid wildfire management.
Now, a team of experts in hydrology, remote sensing and environmental engineering have developed a deep-learning model that maps fuel moisture levels in fine detail across 12 western states, from Colorado, Montana, Texas and Wyoming to the Pacific Coast.
The researchers describe their technique in the August 2020 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment. According to the senior author of the paper, Stanford University ecohydrologist Alexandra Konings, the new dataset produced by the model could “massively improve fire studies.”
According to the paper’s lead author, Krishna Rao, a PhD student in Earth system science at Stanford, the model needs more testing to figure into fire management decisions that put lives and homes on the line. But it’s already illuminating previously invisible patterns. Just being able to see forest dryness unfold pixel by pixel over time, he said, can help reveal areas at greatest risk and “chart out candidate locations for prescribed burns.”
The work comes at a time of growing urgency for this kind of insight, as climate change extends and intensifies the wildfire season – and as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic complicates efforts to prevent large fires through controlled burns, prepare for mass evacuations and mobilize first responders.
Getting a read on parched landscapes
Fire agencies today typically gauge the amount of dried-out, flammable vegetation in an area based on samples from a small number of trees. Researchers chop and weigh tree branches, dry them out in an oven and then weigh them again. “You look at how much mass was lost in the oven, and that’s all the water that was in there,” said Konings, an assistant professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “That’s obviously really laborious, and you can only do that in a couple of different places, for only some of the species in a landscape.”
The U.S. Forest Service painstakingly collects this plant water content data at hundreds of sites nationwide and adds them to the National Fuel Moisture Database, which has amassed some 200,000 such measurements since the 1970s. Known as live fuel moisture content, the metric is well established as a factor that influences wildfire risk. Yet little is known about how it varies over time from one plant to another – or from one ecosystem to another.
For decades, scientists have estimated fuel moisture content indirectly, from informed but unproven guesses about relationships between temperature, precipitation, water in dead plants and the dryness of living ones. According to Rao, “Now, we are in a position where we can go back and test what we’ve been assuming for so long – the link between weather and live fuel moisture – in different ecosystems of the western United States.”
AI with a human assist
The new model uses what’s called a recurrent neural network, an artificial intelligence system that can learn to recognize patterns in vast mountains of data. The scientists trained their model using field data from the National Fuel Moisture Database, then put it to work estimating fuel moisture from two types of measurements collected by spaceborne sensors. One involves measurements of visible light bouncing off Earth. The other, known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR), measures the return of microwave radar signals, which can penetrate through leafy branches all the way to the ground surface.
Conceptual model linking Live Fuel Moisture Content to inputs variables. The physical process representation is for illustrative purposes only; the empirical model estimates LFMC directly from the inputs. Thicker arrows from the physical process representation to the output represent relatively greater sensitivity. For example, microwave backscatter, due to microwave attenuation, has relatively higher sensitivity to vegetation water as compared to optical and IR reflection.
“One of our big breakthroughs was to look at a newer set of satellites that are using much longer wavelengths, which allows the observations to be sensitive to water much deeper into the forest canopy and be directly representative of the fuel moisture content,” said Konings, who is also a center fellow, by courtesy, at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
To train and validate the model, the researchers fed it three years of data for 239 sites across the American west starting in 2015, when SAR data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites became available. They checked its fuel moisture predictions in six common types of land cover, including broadleaf deciduous forests, needleleaf evergreen forests, shrublands, grasslands and sparse vegetation, and found they were most accurate – meaning the AI predictions most closely matched field measurements in the National Fuel Moisture Database – in shrublands.
Rich with aromatic herbs like rosemary and oregano, and often marked by short trees and steep, rocky slopes, shrublands occupy as much as 45 percent of the American West. They’re not only the region’s biggest ecosystem, Rao said, “they are also extremely susceptible to frequent fires since they grow back rapidly.” In California, fires whipped to enormous size by Santa Ana winds burn in a type of shrubland known as chaparral. “This has led fire agencies to monitor them intensively,” he said.
The model’s estimates feed into an interactive map that fire agencies may eventually be able to use to identify patterns and prioritize control measures. For now, the map offers a dive through history, showing fuel moisture content from 2016 to 2019, but the same method could be used to display current estimates. “Creating these maps was the first step in understanding how this new fuel moisture data might affect fire risk and predictions,” Konings said. “Now we’re trying to really pin down the best ways to use it for improved fire prediction.”
Konings is also Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Geophysics in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Co-author A. Park Williams is affiliated with Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Co-author Jacqueline Fortin Flefil, MS ’18, is now an engineer at Xylem, Inc.
The research was supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Credits for Research, the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, the UPS Endowment Fund at Stanford, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Zegar Family Foundation.
