New strategy needed for extreme wildfires

This article first appeared in Wildfire magazine.

The author, Rick McRae, argues that the impacts of climate change must be better included in wildfire management strategies. McRae is an adjunct professor with the Bushfire Research Group at UNSW Canberra.

After a career as an ecologist, senior emergency manager, and bushfire scientist I have a particular view of where climate change is taking us; it is fundamentally based on Australian conditions, but I have an international perspective that is both operational and scientific. A lot of people say a lot about this problem, but too many are saying different things. Who does one listen to, especially if you enjoy your comfort zone? You may disagree with my views, but rather than dismiss them, start a conversation with your colleagues and think about how what I am saying might affect both them and your collective goals. My career and my research has all been aimed at reducing wildfire risks. Here I simplify some topics, and omit a lot of necessary technical detail, but I completely support the outline that I present.

The global collective of fire management wisdom is clearly focused on a fuel-oriented path forward in the face of climate change. The Landscape Fire Governance Framework that arose from the 8th International Wildland Fire Conference in Oporto in May 2023 is the latest element of a global framework. The framework states that fires are getting worse due to a combination of too much wildfire suppression, a lack of investment in fire management, and changes to how communities handle fire on the landscape. A common theme in discussions is the need for more fuel management, either through more fuel reduction burning or a switch to Indigenous practices.

To this end, planning typically includes a focus on risk reduction through hazard reduction via fuel management. Training, equipment, and systems are focused on this system, matched by budget allocations. Satellites show that certain countries produce a lot of smoke from this risk-reduction effort. For normal wildfires, fire services and their communities do a very good job mitigating the risk. (Can this ever be enough?) Climate change is increasing fire danger as the world warms up, and fire services and land managers are correctly adapting to the heightened risks.

At the same time, the world is being severely affected by what are called extreme wildfires, which dangerously couple with the atmosphere above.

It is critical to correctly use the terms normal and extreme: normal fires spread by quasi steady state fire behaviour – if you know the fuel and the terrain, then you largely know what the fire will do; extreme wildfires have one or more blow-up fire events (BUFEs), where the fire couples with the atmosphere and exhibits dynamic fire behaviour, which often involves feedback loops and so the details are largely unpredictable. Figure 1 shows their relationship.

For BUFEs, there is no explicit role for fuel load (beyond the need for a prior fire), indicating that fuel management – central to the framework – is unlikely to be an effective preventative action. We do, however, need to explore how fuel management can be targeted to prevent future dynamic fire escalation. Extreme wildfires do not occur in flashy fuels such as most grasslands: they are mainly a problem in forests and woodlands and they have, in recent years, occurred in new ecosystems (discussed below). (See figure 2.)

When an extreme wildfire couples with the atmosphere after being triggered by dynamic fire behaviour, a BUFE occurs, lasting up to three hours, and typically burning 50 to 100 square kilometres (20 to 40 square miles). With little opportunity for fire suppression the only real incident objective is to save lives. Saving structures may put fire crews at risk for little return. This minority of fires cause the majority of damage.

Figure 1. The relationship between the fire drivers for normal wildfires with quasi-steady state behaviour and the fire drivers for extreme wildfires with dynamic behaviour. The left is quasi-deterministic while the right involves unpredictable feedback loops.

The incident action plan for affected sectors and divisions during a BUFE looks very different to that for a normal fire. Locally appropriate strategies and tactics need to be formulated to help save lives.

There is an archive of decades of high-quality satellite data that is informing many aspects of the challenges associated with extreme fires; it will become increasingly important that we get the full leverage off the datasets involved. The complexity of the changes already underway can be overwhelming. It will be important for end users to make clear what their needs are, and for them to accept the answers produced.

While many authors have used forward-looking climate models to anticipate how climate change will impact fire risks, observations are now showing a far more alarming picture overall.

Fire thunderstorms, called pyroCbs, are the most obvious manifestation of extreme wildfires. A recent study found that there has been no recent global trend in the frequency of pyroCbs. Global pyroCb activity has always been dominated by fires in and around Boreal forests. However, areas such as Australia, South Africa, South America, and the Mediterranean have only recently started having problems with extreme wildfire. Canada, in 2023, experienced the most protracted ever season for extreme wildfires, globally. Australia’s Black Summer was just as prominent with record breaking intensities.

Figure 2. The drivers of fire risk. The “depleted” column is where dynamic fires usually occur.

An important step must follow on from recognition of the wildfire-type dichotomy: operational doctrine must be revisited. As an example, in Australia, the national doctrine for operations in the urban interface lacks any dynamic fire behaviour elements. This document is founded on decades or experience during fire fighting and is state of the art – for normal fires only. What is different? When a BUFE arrives at the urban interface, it is characterised by: (1) a lack of a headfire, with a switch to dense spotting, and a high chance of loss of overall situational awareness; (2) an ember storm (a sea of flowing pea-sized embers flowing over the ground), which is very different to typical ember attack (which is more like a mortar attack); (3) strong turbulence; (4) a darkened sky; and (5) much deeper penetration of the urban edge. Air ops are likely to be impeded.

Also, standard doctrine is often founded on past damaging fires, but key lessons from previous events may need revisiting if, as is often the case, those fires were driven by processes subsequently discovered, such as the key elements of dynamic fire behaviour.

Several past landmark fires have featured descriptions of the fire spreading sideways on the lee face of a ridge. We have seen this in news footage, with chief officers waving their hands sideways during media briefings, or even in official post incident reports. After being identified in 2003 in the Canberra fires, a scientifically validated concept called Vorticity-driven Lateral Spread (VLS) is now known to be the cause. VLS is by far the main cause of forest fire damage in rugged landscapes, globally. Fire service operations based on key lessons learned need to adapt to this. A lookout at a fire where VLS might occur has to be trained to look to the rear at certain landform elements, as opposed to the prior practice of focusing on the headfire. To avoid VLS-driven BUFEs, it may sometimes be an option to burn-out VLS prone areas ahead of the main fire when fuels are too damp to support spotting. Another key instance of the need to rethink is that dynamic fire behaviour is often associated with large air tanker accidents. Climate change is leading to large aircraft flying out of aviation weather into fire weather while climate change is turbo-charging weather close to the ground.

It used to be that different countries had different types of fire, and therefore different operational approaches. Climate change is reducing these differences. I identified a fire near Canberra in 2004 as being foehn-wind driven. Some time after that my collaborators and I wrote a paper on this, introducing Australian firefighters to an idea that has long been a mainstay of training in North America and the Mediterranean Basin. Over the following decade we found only a few good cases of local foehn-wind driven fires. Then during Black Summer, with hundreds of BUFEs, perhaps 50 per cent of those were of this type. That is a massive escalation.

These changes clearly suggest that the world needs a multi-pronged adaptation strategy to climate change’s impacts on wildfire risk. The strategy for normal fire is well understood and must be implemented and continually improved upon. The strategy works better than is acknowledged, because the metrics for success were developed using data from both types of fire. The inclusion of dynamic events with bad outcomes biases the outlook.

In passing, a serious issue arising from lumping all fires together is the mis-training of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems being developed to help mitigate bushfire risks. Just because a fire was attributed as something in a database 25 years ago does not mean that that is correct in today’s thinking. Climate change will not be forgiving to field crews using poor intelligence.

A new strategy is required for rapid adaptation to extreme wildfires. The ongoing escalation suggests a need for the multi-pronged approach to be created as quickly as possible. I have developed a framework for predicting dynamic fire events in the forests of south-east Australia, which aims to show the potential for new thinking (Figure 3). The framework seeks to predict BUFE events using hydrology, remote sensing, and fire ground data in a multi-scaled way.

For the adaptation strategy to work it is necessary to define the following: ownership (by a global body); working membership; protocols; data and accounting needs; professional development protocols; and dissemination channels.

The mandate for climate change adaptation for wildfires might include:

  • Focussing on extreme wildfires (to complement on-going collaboration on normal wildfires);
  • Defining, owning, and disseminating research goals;
  • Providing a hub for research outcomes;
  • Providing a forum for international exchange of relevant operational lessons;
  • Maintaining a global overview of wildfire problems and tracking the overview’s evolution;
  • Rapidly disseminating new information or certified lessons from major fire events.

Figure 3. Two decades of predictive analysis on the potential for pyroCbs in the forests of southeast Australia. PyroCbs (red bars) occur when alerts are generated by the system, either due to temperature anomolies (green bars) or landscape hydrology (blue bars). The orange line clearly shows the impacts of climate change on air temperatures in Canberra, while the purple line shows a more worrying trend for offshore sea-surface temperatures. The difference between the two sets of 12-month average anomalies – the Canberra Dipole (black line) – is critical for BUFE potential. At the peak of Black Summer, Canberra had an extraordinary 12-month average temperature anomaly of 3C. Similar frameworks could work elsewhere.

Students of the evolution of wildfire can look at the references cited in many new wildfire papers and see – from the references alone – where the paper was written and what technical specialty it is from (for both the authors and the journal). However, this Fire Tower of Babel situation is not good enough. In a similar vein, if we are to collaborate on these problems, we must standardise the terminology. The use of alternative terms, and the widespread misuse of others does nothing to aid adaptation –foundation terms such as pyroCb or megafire are key examples – and surely reinforces the previously mentioned issue with the training of machine learning systems.

The wildland fire sector needs to stop being overly distracted by fuel loads, otherwise we will all be affected by extreme wildfires and their impacts on ecosystems, communities, soils, hydrology, biodiversity, traditional practices, and the upper atmosphere – including the ozone layer.

Rick McRae served as a headquarters technical specialist in what evolved to become the ACT Emergency Services Agency in Canberra from 1989 until his recent retirement. He worked in business planning, arson investigation, multi-hazard risk assessment, as planning officer for major incidents, weather specialist, and as a research scientist focusing on extreme wildfires, and especially pyroCbs. McRae has conducted case studies, described new phenomena, and developed predictive tools. He maintains a website that aims to present operationally useful material on extreme wildfires: https://www.highfirerisk.com.au/.

McRae is an adjunct professor with the Bushfire Research Group at University of New South Wales Canberra.

NIFC: When all the West is on fire at once, this is who deals with it

A command center in Boise is responsible for deploying America’s strained firefighting resources as more than 100 wildfires burn across the country.

By Joshua Partlow
July 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Republished with permission by the Washington Post


BOISE, Idaho — As Sean Peterson took his seat Friday morning in the nation’s nerve center for fighting wildfires, 104 large fires raged uncontained across the United States.

The federal government’s firefighting resources were already fully committed, but requests from regional coordination centers kept pouring in.

The day before, his office had turned away requests for 37 aircraft, 40  engines, and hundreds of specialists from dispatchers to heavy equipment bosses. Six hundred more requests had landed that morning. The Park Fire in northern California was exploding at a pace that horrified and amazed even the hardened veterans here. A firefighter injured by a tree had been evacuated to an Idaho hospital. And an aircraft had gone missing overnight amid the smoke billowing from Oregon’s Malheur National Forest.

Peterson, with his can of Liquid Death on the conference table, scanned the room before the morning briefing.

“Ready to rock and roll?” he asked.

When all the West is on fire at once, this is who deals with it.

National Interagency Coordination Center
Staff work beneath a giant screen showing current fire conditions at the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise. (Kyle Green for The Washington Post)

Peterson manages the 32 employees at the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC), a key part of the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) on the fenced-in federal government campus abutting the Boise Airport. The staff, including personnel with the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other agencies, must constantly weigh the threats of multiple rapidly changing fires and deploy their limited resources where they can do the most good.

After weeks of extreme heat and waves of lightning storms, there is so much fire burning now that the U.S. has reached Preparedness Level 5 (PL5), something that has happened this early in the summer only four times in the past 20 years, according to staff here.

At times like this, there’s never enough help.

“No fires are going to get everything that they want,” Peterson said.

The vibe here is not Situation Room suits and ties. It’s looser and more outdoorsy: short sleeves and jeans, sandals and tattoos. But it’s serious work.

On the video conference, Jeff Walther, a representative from the Pacific Northwest region, informed the group that a single-engine airtanker had gone down the night before while fighting a new blaze near the Falls Fire on  the Malheur National Forest.

“Ground crews are out there this morning trying to locate,” Walther said. “Pretty difficult terrain. Smoke’s still hampering the area.”

“Thanks Jeff, and definitely, our thoughts from here, along with everyone in the dispatch coordination community, hoping for the best,” Derrek Hartman, the center’s deputy manager, told him. “I feel terrible for the situation going on.”

The Forest Service and the Grant County Sheriff’s office later confirmed that the pilot had died.

The staff at the coordination center are familiar with these risks. Nearly all of them worked as firefighters. And many have worked together for years or decades, building a camaraderie and rapport that helps them navigate the logistical maelstrom on any given day.

Peterson, a third-generation firefighter with a scar on his right cheek from one of his close calls, grew up in California and took his first firefighting job two weeks out of high school. He was raised partially in Paradise, the mountain town that was demolished by the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history. Both of his childhood homes there went up in flames.

Over his three-decade career, he has watched as fires have grown in scope and intensity. He’s lived to see a winter fire that burned more than 1,000 homes. Forests hit by repeated fires that have transformed into quick-burning grasslands. When he started, he said, a 50,000-acre fire was a very rare occurrence.

“Now that’s the norm,” he said. “Right now we have six fires burning over 100,000 acres. And we haven’t even got to August yet.”

Peterson acknowledges that warming temperatures from climate change are part of the story but he also believes the decline of the logging industry — including clearcuts that helped thin the forest and gave firefighters anchor points from which to work — is to blame for the country’s worsening fire problem.

This summer’s quick explosion has followed two relatively light fire years, as abundant winter rain and snow has nourished the West. To fire experts, wet winters mean more grass, which eventually dries out and turns to kindling when the heat cranks up.

“We can turn good news into bad news like nobody’s business here,” said Steve Larrabee, a Bureau of Indian Affairs official who is the center’s fire and fuels analyst.

This year got off to an ominous start when wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma burned more than a million acres. “We just don’t get million-acre fires in February,” Larrabee said. In the past several weeks, there have been many major fires in the Pacific Northwest and California. Now, the Great Basin and Northern Rockies are lighting up, too. About 3.8 million acres have burned in the U.S. so far this year, above the average over the past 10 years of 3.4 million acres.

Larrabee tracks metrics of the dryness of dead trees and vegetation. He is concerned that the numbers seem okay but aren’t really corresponding with the “spectacular fire behavior” now showing up in parts of the West.

“These things that are usually fire barriers, like green vegetation, they’re not working like fire barriers like they normally do,” he said.

The biggest crisis right now is northern California’s Park Fire, near Chico, which has burned more than 300,000 acres in less than three days. Officials suspect an arsonist started the inferno that now threatens thousands of homes. Evacuation orders are in place for several communities, including  what’s rebuilt of Peterson’s hometown of Paradise.

“It will be one of the largest — if not the largest — and one of the most devastating fires on record in the country when it is all said and done in the fall,” Peterson said on Saturday.

Amid all of this, the coordination center must steer desperately needed firefighting resources around a constantly shifting map.

On Friday, fire managers from the Great Basin, with 26 new fires ignited the day before, said they needed all types of crews and aviation support. Meanwhile, the Northern Rockies, battling 77 new fires, wanted smokejumpers and rappellers.

Shortages at such a time become more glaring. All 27 contracted caterers who feed fire camps have already been committed, so beyond that, teams  will have to buy meals from whatever local providers they can find.

The day before had reached a high-water mark for demand this year for infrared flights to map fire perimeters and work new fires, with 81 requests. And the federal government’s 91 single-engine airtankers were also all spoken for, staff here reported.

There are 26,020 firefighters deployed just on large fires, the most this year. More help is needed.

Peterson met on Thursday with officials from Australia and New Zealand, longtime firefighting partners of the United States. Those countries agreed to send 80 people, including personnel in sorely needed middle management positions such as division supervisors and task force leaders. The most critical shortage, Peterson said, was in local fire dispatch centers, where there are more than 100 vacancies. People in these grueling jobs field 911 calls and coordinate the response to new and growing fires.

“Nobody wants to do it anymore because they’re just burned out,” he said. “It never stops.”

And there’s no respite ahead. Red flag warnings were peppered across the West with wind gusts expected up to 45 mph. Smoke from Canada’s fires, also raging, had finally reached Europe, one staffer noted, just as the Olympics were starting. Outside the nation’s firefighting command center, yellow smoke hung low over Boise.

At the end of the morning briefing, Peterson reminded his staff to take care of themselves.

“This is going to be a marathon,” he said.

Joshua Partlow, Washington Post

Burning Weather Island

by Michael Hill
This feature originally ran in Wildfire Magazine
.

The peatland ecosystems of Central Kalimantan are transitioning from wildfire resistant to wildfire prone; with the potential huge release of carbon from burning peat stocks, it’s time for local and global actions to better protect these lands and communities.

As someone who has visited and observed wildfires in Indonesia for more than 20 years, I’ve witnessed the increasing loss of forest ecosystems and I recognize the potential for constructive international assistance.

Sebangau National Park
Sebangau National Park firefighters moving fire equipment on the fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

In the Indonesian language, Kalimantan refers to the whole island of Borneo (the third largest in the world), while in English it describes just the 73 percent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 percent of the island’s population.

Kalimantan covers 554,150 kilometers divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei, and East Malaysia.

The meaning of the name Kalimantan — originally Kalamanthana — is burning weather island, referring to the very hot and humid climate.

Kalimantan is home to many cultures; the Dayak, or people of the interior, are Indigenous and have long used landscape fire in their agricultural practices to clean up land for slash-and-burn farming.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured during times of wildfires as air pollution.

A volunteer firefighter with firefighting patrol boats on a fire in the Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. District level volunteer firefighting brigades in Central Kalimantan are locally known as Masyarakat Peduli Api, or MPA firefighters.

This system of using fire to clear farming plots in the rotating system of land use allows for conservation; preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they’re allowed to go back to nature to recover fertility, while another field is cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until its fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared, and the small scale of slash-and-burn continues as the land recovers after farming.

This system of rotating agriculture and wildfires to clear land has been culturally important. The Dayak use of fire for cleaning and clearing was extremely controlled historically, with organized groups using pre-constructed fire breaks and advance planning to consider predicted winds and fuel conditions.

The Dayak have been masters of using fire as their tool to clear their forest lands. However, cultural, modernizing, and competitive economic forces have brought changes which, during a severe dry season, can quickly transform some areas of the Indonesian part of this island into a thick smoke-filled hazard, lasting months and impacting the surrounding islands and even the cities of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Recent changes in vegetation and culture have swung the Dayaks’ historic mastery of fire in Kalimantan out of balance. The Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan, where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Also, within Dayak culture, changes are taking place as the people join the wave of progress brought by globalism sweeping the world which, as a byproduct, disconnects us from the natural world and our hands-on, sustainable practices. The landscape is being modified and fire use has fallen outside of its traditional Dayak checks and balances.

While most of the fires in Kalimantan are human-caused, the fire origins are complex. Many past fires arose from the fact that land ownership claims in Kalimantan historically have been legally proven with the use of applying fire to land for clearing, thus establishing legal usage. Other blazes are ignited by accident — or by fishermen to attract more fish or drive away mosquitos — or fires are lit by hunters to attract wildlife, and myriad other reasons.

Sebangau National Park firefighter moving hose across fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park

But in recent years, during extra hot and dry seasons, when fires do get started in what may now be often lighter fuels, they can spread quicker and carry flames into forest areas, or even into the swamp peat forests. And once the peat layer below ground is lit, it will burn underground down to the water table and then move laterally beneath the surface, consuming important thick layers of organic decaying peat matter.

These burns can become huge subsurface peat fires with their flames not visible until they occasionally climb up to the surface to consume vegetation. But the heavy smoke from these peat fires, referred to locally as smog/haze, will have local, regional, and global impacts. The Dayak historically did not apply fire to the forest where there were peat layers beneath it, as they were burning for their agricultural fields and they knew their crops would not grow in the peat region.

Peat swamp fires on Borneo are unique for wildfires because the peat itself, created from countless generations of falling and then decaying organic forest matter, has been built up into massive locked-up carbon stores —  and these peat stores burn underground as a slow smolder, releasing heat and smoke to the surface. The thick carbon stockpiles begin to release their carbon when the peat swamplands they are part of are dried by drainage canals created to open lands for timber harvest, home building, and other uses. If this dried peat is then consumed by fires, the huge pool of stored carbon that had been safely locked away will be released into the atmosphere, causing global concerns for air pollution and climate change.

The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured as air pollution during times of wildfires.

Kalimantan fires became an international concern in 1997 when a massive man-made ecological disaster burned in the peat forests, and since then, because of that disaster’s compounding effects, additional new dryseason peat fires have created an accelerating cycle of fires, peat loss, and flooding.

Peat’s organic matter, lying below the surface in a swamp forest, has long functioned as a natural sponge; the small percent of its decaying matter is able to soak up as much as nine times its volume in water. This layer of peat acts as an absorber to dampen the effects of seasonal flooding river systems. However, now with large areas of peat lost to wildfire seasons in 1997, 2015 and 2019, the summer dry seasons are followed by rainy seasons and large flows of water are draining from the burned peat lands into Borneo’s river systems and to the sea, leading to much human property loss and misery along the way.

Protecting the remaining peat beneath the swamp forests has become a priority in Central Kalimantan for those understanding the issue, and over the last 20 years, people have been adapting to the situation. Groups of people in Central Kalimantan have been organizing into both volunteer fire militia and paid fire forces, ready during dry seasons to fight fire. With the help of Japanese, Indonesian, and English scientists, new tactics and techniques are explored, and in 2015, there arose an international effort to assist in fighting wildfires. Indonesian law enforcement has also been activated to target illegal burners with stiff penalties of up to 15 years in prison and 15 million Indonesian Rupiah (about $930 USD) in fines.

Internationally, an agreement among Southeast Asian nations has been developed to assist during times of high fire activity, though there are still very real needs for which international assistance would be greatly appreciated and valued globally — by reducing the peat fires and their massive carbon releases.

Indonesia is still adapting to the emerging wildfire issues in Kalimantan, and as such, has so far developed only limited capabilities, with a particular need for shared technology in fire detection and wildfire response equipment. Many other fire-prone areas of the world have developed and routinely share these types of technologies, and Indonesia should be added to this group. Indonesia has unique firefighting technology advances to share, such as locally developed fire response systems and cloud seeding.

Aircraft dropping water on vegetation has been found to have limited effectiveness on peat fires, and therefore the fires are fought from beneath the ground. The priority is to find a water source on a peat bed nearby; this water source must be safely away from the fire to prevent its burning, and it’s usually found by drilling down as if through the ice on a frozen lake.

Using an augur to bore beneath the peat to find the water table, crews will tap into the water with a firefighting water pump and install a series of pipes and hose to carry water to firefighters, who spray it where needed to cool the flames. These firefighting pumps and their draft drill holes are strategically laid out and are manned with crews across the path of wildfire or in its wake, depending on the responding agency to act as anchor points,  working outward with the cooling water while supporting each other. This is hard work, Kalimantan style, but necessary.

Indonesians are also experimenting with Japanese-developed soap agents that can be injected underground into the peat to extinguish flames, and the Air Force is using weather modification by cloud seeding to create rain. It is truly a fascinating time of change and adaptation for wildfires in Kalimantan.

While these changes are internal, the funding and support for Indonesia’s efforts can come from beyond the region’s borders. Indonesia’s emerging wildfire issues are global issues, considering the potential climate impacts of the massive carbon releases from the peat.

Better protection of the peat reserves could be accomplished by a change of local land ownership laws to allow for proof of ownership to be legally established in new ways, thereby supporting long-term management, conservation, and restoration. Instead of the historic local use of fire to clean property, incentives could be created toward fire prevention. Tree planting instead of clearing could be transformed into legal proof of land ownership. Indonesia has huge stockpiles of reforestation funds at the government level, and some of these funds could be invested into bank loans to assist in these efforts and for program development (and local hiring and training for landowners).

Water-canal damming is undertaken to allow the saturation of dried-out peat soils; these efforts could be greatly assisted by the international community, and as an essential byproduct of healing these soils could begin to return more of Kalimantan’s fire-resistant blanket of forest with the added benefit of assisting in the fire protection of its peat lands.

The damage to the peat lands over the past 20-some years is immense; however, to protect the remaining peat lands and their carbon sinks would require only strategic forest replanting above the damaged areas, such as along waterways after the area’s water levels are again raised from canal damming.

Kalimantan’s El Niño dry season fires, especially in the peat swamp areas, have the potential to affect the world’s climate with their associated huge carbon releases. For this reason alone, Kalimantan and Indonesia should be offered more support internationally in their efforts to help to protect the remaining peat swamp forests.

Kalimantan may be an island that seems isolated and far away, yet when the peat fires burn they impact us all with carbon releases, whether we can see the smog or not.

Learn more about Kalimantan’s wildfires, nature, and the Dayak culture on Michael Hill’s YouTube channel, Talking Wildfires with Michael Hill.

 

Michael Hill

 

Michael Hill began this journey in the 1980s as an American wildland firefighter, and across his career worked as a hotshot and smokejumper. For many years Hill has been, and still is, deeply interested in Indonesia’s and Australia’s wildfires. He serves as an associate editor for WIldfire magazine.

ON THIS DAY … 1994 and 2014

A little note and a little request — by Patrick Carnahan
 ~~ July 5, 2014
Still can’t believe we are only hours away from marking the 20-year anniversary of the fire on Storm King Mountain. I’m now 12 miles away from the parking lot I was in when Paul Harvey told us we’d just lost 14 firefighters on the mountain.
Patrick Carnahan photo
Patrick Carnahan photo

Our strike team had orders to go to that fire and we got stopped leaving camp and re-routed to another fire. We drove 3 times as long to fight another fire as it would’ve taken us to be on the South  Canyon Fire. We reached our assignment just as the flames were crossing the road into a remote community and we fought fire for the next 14 hours. Lost a wooden deck but no structures.

I remember everything in sight that night was on fire; it looked like hell, and there was no place else any of us would choose to be. Had about 4 hours of sleep and the first hot meal in 6 days when we got the news. Nobody really said anything at the time. We all understood we should’ve been on that mountain. Spent the next 5 days in a haze of smoke and flames before we were demobed. I have lost a couple of friends since then and many more I never had the opportunity to share the line with. Glad that the ignorance of youth was not wasted on me and I’m still here.

Asking that you all take a moment out of your day tomorrow and recognize those who never came off the line. Fire will always be a part of our reality and it will never be a job free of risk. When the next report hits the news about a wildland firefighter losing his or her life on a fire, please go here and make a difference:  The Wildland Firefighter Foundation.

Keep one foot in the black and stay safe out there. For those who have gone on, save me some line to work when the time comes.
P.C.

And a revisit from a few years ago of one of Bill Gabbert’s best pieces:

WILDLAND FIRE CANADA: Conference registration now open

Posted on Categories SmokeTags , ,

Registration is open for the 2024 Wildland Fire Canada Conference, a biennial conference scheduled for October 28 to November 1 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. It will bring together wildland fire management agencies, indigenous fire experts, scientists, and collaborators from across Canada and other countries.

Wildland Fire Canada Conference

The theme of this year’s conference is Transforming Wildland Fire Management, i.e. taking a collective and inclusive approach to wildland fire management in which Canadians at all levels of government work together to co-exist with wildland fire — including prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Registration rates (CAD):

Early registration (until 8/15) — $600
Registration (8/16 – 10/14) — $750
Late registration (10/14 – 10/28) — $800
Student registration — $250
One-day rate — $375
Virtual Registration — $300

Group registration available for virtual tickets:

            • $300/ticket for fewer than 5 tickets
            • $250/ticket for 6-10 tickets
            • $200/ticket for 11-20 tickets
            • $150/ticket for 20+ tickets

In-person registration: This includes access to all sessions and social activities. Registrants can access to the virtual conference platform to watch recorded presentations and network with remote attendees.

Virtual registration: This includes access to all sessions and online networking activities. Sessions will be recorded and made available for at least 6 months after the conference. You will receive access details about a week before the conference.

Join us in late October either in New Brunswick or online — or both — for this exciting collaboration with Canadian professionals and other international wildland fire experts!

Retired La Grande hotshot dies

By Lance Gomez  
It is with profound sadness that I write to announce the passing of a beloved community staple, coworker, friend, partner and father, Mark Gomez, 67.

Mark Gomez
Mark Anthony Gomez, November 19, 1956 — March 19, 2024

He passed away after a brief, yet fierce, battle with a respiratory illness. A light to all those who knew him, Mark “GoGo” Gomez was fittingly born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, known as the land of Enchantment, on Nov. 19, 1956. The middle child of Hilario and Emily Gomez, he learned from an early age how to become the glue that holds people together through laughter, storytelling and love. His early years were spent hunting and fishing in New Mexico, with some time spent in San Diego, where he honed his love of surfing and baseball. Both locations molded my father into the avid outdoorsman he was for the rest of his life.

After graduating from Pojoaque High School in 1974, this same love for the outdoors led him and his first wife, Wendy Friedman, to La Grande, Oregon, nestled deep among the forests and rivers he called home for the rest of his life. After two beautiful children, Sari and Lance, Wendy and my father parted ways. He settled into his careers at Blue Mountain Sports and on the Union/La Grande Interagency Hot Shot crews, where he forged his lifelong friendships and met my mother, Trish Wallace, his forever partner.

The next 37 years for them were filled with adventure, from backpacking across Mexico and mountain biking through Moab to skiing the mountains of the Northwest, hiking in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and firefighting during the summers on the La Grande and Union interagency crews. From fire to fisheries and recreation to engineering, my dad got to live out his passions in his work alongside his La Grande Ranger District family up until his retirement in 2019.

If I had to describe my dad in one word, it would be “fire.” Fire, for the job he cherished and the coworkers-turned-friends-turned family. Fire for his passion of fishing, exploring, and all things outdoors that fueled his career and lifestyle. Fire, for the one he lit under you when he saw your potential and pushed you toward it. Fire, because though sometimes it will burn you, it will always keep you warm and help you find your way.

In his last days, Dad’s doctor told us that “love cannot be divided, it only can multiply.”

Anyone who was lucky enough to know my dad knows this to be true. To know him is to feel infinite bounds of love. Whether he was yelling at you or for you, he was always in your corner, and I like to think we were all better people for being a part of his life. I dream he is at peace now, fishing and exploring on the great river of life. When the wind blows hard through the trees or thunder rolls in the distance, know that is my dad, sharing a bit of himself with you from above.

After many years apart, he joins his mother and father, and his oldest and youngest brothers in the afterlife. He is survived by his spouse, Trish; his sister, Cheryl; his brother, Jeff; his nieces and nephews, who adore him; his children, Sari, Lance and Logan; and his grandchildren, Tuko and Tule.

A celebration of his life will take place on May 11 starting at 1 p.m. at the Hot Lake RV Park at 65182 Hot Lake Lane, La Grande. Bring a potluck side dish and some stories. Hawaiian shirts are most certainly encouraged. Online condolences may be made to the family at lovelandfuneralchapel.com