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.
They observe fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape
2010-2020
For the past few decades, scientists have been using satellite- and airplane-based radar instruments to detect damage caused by wildfires and human-caused blazes. Radar instruments can observe by day or night and can see land through clouds and smoke, so they are helpful for observing fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape.
Landscape ecologist Naiara Pinto and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are now taking a longer view. They are trying to decipher where and how well forests and scrublands are recovering in the years after a fire.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments send out pulses of microwaves that bounce off of Earth’s surfaces. The reflected waves are detected and recorded by the instrument and can help map the shape of the land surface (topography) and the land cover—from cities to ice to forests. By comparing changes in the signals between two separate satellite or airplane overpasses, scientists can observe surface changes like land deformation after earthquakes, the extent of flooding, or the exposure of denuded or bare ground after large fires.
One of the aircraft NASA equips with synthetic aperture radar or other sensors. This is a medium-sized UAV-NASA SIERRA. SIERRA medium UAV at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. (Photograph: NASA.) NASA SIERRA Pilot and Range Safety Officer Mark Sumitch shown for scale.
SAR instruments are carried on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, while NASA currently deploys its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) via research aircraft. NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization are planning to launch the NISAR satellite in 2022.
2010-2020
Mounted on the bottom of NASA research planes, UAVSAR has been flown over the same portions of Southern California several times since 2009. Pinto and JPL colleagues Latha Baskaran, Yunling Lou, and David Schimel analyzed that data and developed a mapping technique to show the different stages of removal and regrowth of vegetation (chapparal and forest).
The maps above are essentially mosaics of the observations across a decade. Radar signals bounce off burned, barren terrain differently than they reflect from unburned, brush-covered hillsides or from fresh growth. The colors indicate the relative amount of vegetation observed by different UAVSAR flights at different times. Yellow lines on the maps indicate the extent of several major fires: Station, Colby, San Gabriel (SG) Complex, La Tuna, and Bobcat.
“Overall, the colors are telling us that the Angeles National Forest contains a patchwork of plant communities at different stages of regeneration,” said Pinto, who is a science coordinator for UAVSAR. For instance, areas with more red had more vegetation in 2010 than they do now. Areas with more blue and green shading had more vegetation (regrowth) in recent years. Yellow indicates areas burned in 2020 that had a higher volume of vegetation in 2010 and 2017 (red+green) but lower volume in 2020 (blue).
2010-2020
The image above illustrates how those maps were assembled. Radar data were collected during UAVSAR flights in 2010, 2017, and 2020 over Angeles National Forest and other areas northeast of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The project has been supported by NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters program, which generates maps and other data products for institutional partners as they work to mitigate and recover from natural hazards and disasters. The SAR technique is still being tested and validated, but the intent is to monitor forest regrowth and fire scar change over time, which are important information for forest and fire managers working to manage risks.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using UAVSAR data and imagery courtesy of Anne Marie Peacock, Naiara Pinto, and Yunling Lou and NASA/Caltech UAVSAR. Story by Michael Carlowicz.
Former firefighter becomes a combat medic, following in the footsteps of her grandfather
Tessa Morris was a ski patrol director when she enlisted to be a combat medic in the U.S. Army. Her grandfather, Robert Harris, was a combat medic for the Army’s 10th Mountain Division during World War II. (Courtesy photo)
This article published by the U.S. Army tells the story of Tessa Morris who served on Wenatchee helitack and Entiat Hotshots. She was the first woman to serve as Ski Patrol director at Mission Ridge Ski Area near Wenatchee, Washington and became Director of the Ski Patrol at age 23.
By Jason Schaap
USAREC Public Affairs
FORT KNOX, Ky., Jan. 29, 2021 —Foxholes, chocolate and cigarettes. That is what Tessa Morris remembers about her first Army conversation with her grandpa.
She was in the sixth grade, and her homework assignment was to interview a veteran. Her mother’s father, Robert Harris, was a medic with the 10th Mountain Division during World War II, nearly a half-century before Morris was born.
Harris told his granddaughter about being a ski trooper in Italy. All the training he did before he got there, and how the foxhole rations of his generation included a bar of chocolate and a pack of cigarettes. What he didn’t mention was his Purple Heart, or getting shot.
“He didn’t really talk about what happened to him over there,” Morris said in mid-January, less than a week before she left for Army basic training.
Harris went to war on skis when it was still a “wild idea,” and he was in the Italian campaign that made the 10th Mountain Division famous for getting the job done. He played a big part in why his generation came to be known as the greatest.
There’s so much more to why he was the greatest to Morris.
Ski Boot Baby
Harris was the grandfather that returned from the war and only wanted something better for his children and his children’s children.
Harris was the one who, with his wife, Madeline, while in their 70s, took Morris on a hike near a waterfall when she was 4. It’s her earliest memory of him. She remembers asking for a treat. She remembers “he always had these pretty funny remarks” for such an occasion.
“Oh,” her grandfather said to her, “here’s a nut, for a little nut.”
Harris was there when Morris was 6 and the family went skiing in Idaho. There was a brand new ski lift there named Stella.
“I just wanted to go on Stella all day,” Morris said. “So that is what my grandfather and I did.”
Harris died in 2009. He won’t be there in April when Morris graduates basic combat training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and begins following in his bootsteps as a combat medic. Harris’ 97-year-old widow, however, knows her granddaughter will be caring for Soldiers and carrying her late husband’s torch.
Morris also told Madeline that she will start her medic tour at Fort Polk, Louisiana, home of a 10th Mountain Division combat team.
“She actually lit up pretty big,” Morris said, the mention of 10th Mountain reversing Madeline’s visible gloom at the thoughts of swamps and alligators in Louisiana.
Morris will report to Polk with an advanced promotion to the rank of specialist because she enlisted under a program that rewards Future Soldiers for bringing needed skills into the Army. She qualified for it because of the emergency care credentials she carried as a ski patrol director when she enlisted.
In fact, she said the Army Civilian Acquired Skills Program is a big reason she chose the Army over the other services, because “it’s pretty cool” that she could be guaranteed to be a medic like her grandfather. “Even better if (it) gets (her) on with the 10th Mountain Division,” she added with careful optimism.
Morris’ ski patrol adventure started in high school. She was 16 when she heard her sister’s friend talk about volunteering to patrol on weekends just outside of Wenatchee, Washington.
“I want to do that,” she emphatically said to herself.
Morris wasn’t just born to ski. She practically arrived in the world with ski boots fastened and ready. Skiing is so in the Morris blood that her mother and older sister wanted in when she readied for patrol training after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
“Well, if you do that, I want to do it,” Morris’ sister insisted to her and her mother.
So the seed that was planted on an Italian mountain range, and nurtured on Stella’s mechanical arms in Idaho, began to bloom as Morris was finishing high school. She continued patrolling after graduation.
Fire in the Snow
By 21, Morris was carrying dynamite up a mountain and blowing up the snow, a little-known patroller responsibility referred to as “avalanche mitigation.”
By mid-September, there was no one left to call. The West, with its thousands of federal, state, and local fire engines and crews, had been tapped out.
Wildfires across the West had consumed the labor of all available wildland firefighters, and though there were fewer fires burning, those fires were larger and more difficult to contain. They consumed 13 million acres — an area almost the size of West Virginia.
In the midst of the 2020 wildfire season, John Phipps, the Forest Service’s deputy chief, told Congress that this “was an extraordinary year and it broke the system. The system was not designed to handle this.”
Draining the national wildland firefighting pool was why my fire crew and I had to work longer and harder than usual on the Idaho-Oregon border. We were fighting the Woodhead fire, which had peaked at 85,000 acres and threatened to burn the developed areas around the towns of Cambridge and Council, Idaho.
With only three crews to try to contain a fire that required probably ten crews, it meant day and night shifts for 14 days. Each crew found itself with miles of fire line to construct and hold. With not enough person-power, we were always trying to do more with less, and it was no comfort to know that what we faced was not unique.
Across the nation, the large fires meant working in hazardous conditions that called for far more workers than were available. For those of us on the line, it came down to little sleep and a heavy workload, combined with insufficient calories and emotional and physical exhaustion.
Fighting wildfires week after week takes a toll on the body. Smoke contains carcinogens, and firefighters spend days exerting themselves immersed in air thick with ash. We all figure that the long-term health effects cannot be good.
One of my co-workers confessed that he goes to sleep “with pain in my knees and hands,” and added, “I wake up with pain in my lungs and head.” Over a six-to-eight month fire season, minor injuries can become chronic pain.
Wildland firefighters are also vulnerable to suicide due to job-related stress and the lack of resources outside of the fire season. Long assignments put a strain on firefighters’ families and can damage relationships. A 2018 psychological study, conducted by Florida State University, reported that 55% of wildland firefighters experienced “clinically significant suicidal symptoms,” compared to 32% for structural firefighters.
Wildland firefighters who work for federal agencies, such as the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management, are classified as “Range” Technicians” or “Forestry Technicians” — a title more suitable for golf course workers than people wearing heavy packs and working a fire line.
Calling them “technicians” negates the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to work with wildfire. Most firefighters sign contracts as seasonal “1039s,” agreeing to work 1,039 base hours for $12-$16 an hour. This is one hour short of being defined as a temporary worker who is eligible for benefits such as retirement and year-round health care.
Overtime work is what allows “technicians” to pay the bills, but once they reach 1,039 base hours some firefighters are laid off even while the fire season continues and their regions continue to burn.
There is a remedy in sight: the Wildland Firefighter Recognition Act, which formally identifies wildland firefighters as exactly that, tossing out the technician term and recognizing the “unusual physical hardship of the position.”
Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines introduced the bill last year, and recently, California Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa introduced the bill in the House. Co-sponsored by California Democratic Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, the bill currently sits with the House Oversight and Reform Committee. This is a nonpartisan bill that deserves support from every Westerner.
We all know fires will continue to burn throughout the West, but right now many of the men and women who fight those fires on our behalf are suffering from burnout. Addressing wildfires as a national priority starts with recognition of the profession fighting them.
From Writers on the Range.
Harrison Raine has been a wildland firefighter since 2016.
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.
