There’s only one way in and out of the Canadian municipality of Whistler.
The Coast Mountains surround the forested British Columbia town north of Vancouver, giving Whistler its world-renowned trait of being North America’s largest ski resort community. The rocky slopes, however, occasionally cause transportation problems for Whistler’s residents. Highway 99, the only passage through the southern parts of the mountain range, stands as residents’ only escape route during times of emergency.
Whistler firefighters reflect on the 2023 wildfire season
The frequently suffocated roadway and recent devastating wildfires in the nearby communities of West Kelowna and Kelowna pushed the perennially snow-focused municipality to begin serious planning for a potential fire disaster. Most Whistler neighborhoods are classified as “interface,” but the wildland and ornamental fuel load between residences have characteristics of an “intermix,” or homes being within a forest community. Because of this, Whistler scores high in the plan’s “overall fire risk” category.
Whistler’s pervasive forest primarily drove town officials to take a more proactive approach to wildfire defense in its creation of a community wildfire defense plan.
Whistler firefighters reflect on the 2023 wildfire season
“Typically when a wildfire is approaching a community, these defense plans are done at the time as it’s approaching,” Whistler Fire Chief Thomas Doherty told Global News journalists for a recent article. “Obviously wildfire specialists will come in and assist with doing these neighborhood defense plans. We’ve done that in advance. We believe we’re one of the first municipalities to do this type of plan, to have this information readily available ahead of time.”
Whistler firefighters reflect on the 2023 wildfire season
The approach Doherty references includes increasing FireSmart education for residents and visitors, changing municipal legislation and community planning with a wildfire resiliency focus, increasing interagency and firefighters’ wildfire response, and continuing strategic vegetation management efforts.
Global News, in their conversation with Doherty, reports that one of the tools created from this plan includes 19 tactical sheets and GIS maps for various critical infrastructure and water source locations, identifying which neighborhoods have a one-way-in and one-way-out access, and safe zones for responders during times of emergency. All this information will reportedly be available to fire personnel through scannable QR codes.
“Extremely critical to have all this information done in advance,” Doherty said. “It’s just unfortunate when an event does occur. At least we’re that much more prepared. And we have all that information readily available.”
You can read the full Whistler Community Wildfire Defense Plan [HERE].
The Coast Mountains surround the forested British Columbia town north of Vancouver, giving Whistler its world-renowned trait of being North America’s largest ski resort community. The rocky slopes, however, occasionally cause transportation problems for Whistler’s residents. Highway 99, the only passage through the southern parts of the mountain range, stands as residents’ only escape route during times of emergency.
A fire-focused NPR article had a concise central theme: Trees are not always good, fire is not always bad, and prescribed burning can bring a community together.
The article, written and beautifully photographed in 2022 by journalist Andria Hautamaki, told the story of the Loess Canyon Rangeland Alliance to paint a larger picture of the quick growth prescribed burn associations (PBAs) have had across the country, particularly in states without huge extents of government-owned land.
The Great Plains Fire Science Exchange estimated in 2022 that there were 113 PBAs throughout the United States. That exchange now estimates 135 PBAs, an 83 percent increase in under two years.
PBAs got their start in California and are now found throughout the state. Despite this, California is an outlier in the average states with PBAs: nearly half of California’s land is federally owned. Other states with numerous PBAs (including Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas) have less than 2 percent of their land owned by the federal government.
Instead of the USFS burning on federal land, stakeholders in non-West states must convince and collaborate with landowners to spread the gospel of prescribed fire.
“The only way you’re ever going to get fire on the ground is through the landowners, especially in states with a lot of private land,” John Weir, an Oklahoma State University extension specialist for prescribed fire, told Hautamaki during the story. “This is landowner helping landowner. Agencies are important; they help provide technical assistance. But it’s all about grassroots. Landowners can burn safely and effectively because they’re out there managing their own land.”
An abundance of privately owned land isn’t the only thing driving PBA popularity in non-West states. The negative perception fire has gained from numerous disastrous wildfires in recent years has hampered Rx burn efforts in the West. Midwest and Southern states, which don’t have that same negative association with burning, have seen a rise in a grassroots-led fire efforts rather than an agency push.
Previous data have also shown the community-prescribed fire drive to be safe and effective in overcoming common burn limitations related to expertise, equipment, and personnel. A 2012 survey of PBAs found the majority were effective at developing burn plans, working within burn windows, and limiting liability.
“The safety record of PBAs indicates they provide a safe and viable option for landowners and managers who use or would like to use prescribed fire on their lands,” the survey said.
In the northwest portion of Lake Superior is a chunk of land of about 132,000 acres that is both a geographic novelty and an International Biosphere Reserve. The Isle Royale National Park is 56 miles off Michigan’s shore and 18 miles from Minnesota’s mainland. Congress designated the 50-mile-long island as a national park in 1931, but even before that it was apparent the island’s boreal forests had a close history with fire.
“Official fire record keeping began in 1847, when the first General Land Office survey of Isle Royale was conducted,” according to the park’s website. “These records show 31 fires between 1847 and 1898. Data suggests fire was more frequent and/or severe in the boreal forest of the island’s northeast end, compared with the northern hardwoods of the southwest end.”
The island’s dense concentration of high-flammability trees, e.g. balsam fir, black spruce, and jack pine, heightened the risk of wildfires igniting when lightning struck. A zoologist in 1931 recognized the important role fire played in the island’s unique ecosystem, but his ideas were discarded in favor of the system-wide preference toward fire suppression.
Flammable species on Isle Royale
“In planning for improvements and facilities on Isle Royale, the National Park Service consulted with University of Michigan Zoologist Adolph Murie,” the park said. “Murie visited Isle Royale in June 1935 and recommended that no new trails be cleared by the CCC and all efforts be made to ‘guard against any sort of development which will reduce space or increase travel.’ He also recommended that forest fires be allowed to occur on Isle Royale, but this idea was rejected, and instead, an aggressive anti-forest-fire point of view was adopted.”
Officials would soon come to regret dismissing Murie’s ideas. Park historians describe the summer of 1936 as hot and dry. Hundreds of CCC enrollees arrived at the heavily logged and mined island to establish the park. On July 25, a fire started near the Consolidated Paper Company and, while a cause was never determined, the “Fire of 1936” would have the most profound effect on the natural and human history of Isle Royale compared with any other historical event.
Around 200 CCC members and loggers tried in vain to fight the fire as it grew from 200 to 5,000 acres over 10 days. The fire was reported as contained on August 4, but two spot fires that had ignited on August 2 would become much larger problems. By August 18, the three fires burned 27,000 acres before they were officially declared out after heavy rainfall.
Multiple factors contributed to the high number of acres burned in the fire, park historians said. The island’s ground was, at the time, mostly covered in highly flammable mosses. In-fighting between the park system and CCC members, including a short CCC strike when tobacco supplies ran out, likely made matters worse.
The island wouldn’t see significant wildfires again until the 2021 Horne Fire and the 2022 Mount Franklin Fire, which burned 335 acres and 6 acres respectively. In the fires’ wake, scientists and researchers hope to use the burned areas to learn more about the dynamics between fire and the island’s life.
“The area may look different, but wildfire is an agent of necessary change,” the park said. “At the site of the Horne Fire, Isle Royale ecologists now have a living laboratory, and these researchers can begin to study the relationships between fire, living things, and an island environment.”
Stories about the land the park exists on, located at the convergence of the Great Plains, Great Basin, and Columbia Plateau, were originally seen as tall tales because they were too fantastical to be true, according to park nonprofit Yellowstone Forever. Eventually, however, formal expeditions verified that the land was indeed covered in multicolored hot springs and spouting geysers, paving the way for the area’s federal protection and park designation.
The people who originally pushed Congress to protect the area were crafting their own tall tale, unbeknownst to themselves. The park’s first leaders told Congress that the park could be protected and run without any funding from the federal government. That idea was soon disproven.
Yellowstone’s first superintendent, Nathaniel Langford, was unpaid, and he and others quickly saw how the lack of funding made protecting the park’s wildlife and natural resources extremely difficult.
Essex County Herald, Vermont. September 02, 1920
Langford’s first annual park report to the federal government was filled with stories of squatters, poachers, and vandals creating problems throughout the area.
“A few months before … creating the park, several persons had located upon land at some of the points of greatest interest, with a view to establish squatter’s right of preemption,” Langford’s report said. “The reality of the land should be held alone by the Government, and be subject to such rules and regulations as may, from time to time, be adopted by the Department of the Interior.”
Langford’s report also marked a step toward the first national park’s first fire policy.
“It is especially recommended that a law be passed, punishing, by fine and imprisonment, all persons who leave any fire they may have made, for convenience or otherwise, unextinguished,” the report said. “Nothing less than a stringent law punishing negligence and carelessness can save the extensive pine timber fields of the park from destruction.”
The policy would soon become a reality not just for the park but for the nation as a whole. U.S. law mandates that anyone who starts a fire on federal lands and doesn’t extinguish it could face imprisonment for up to six months (on USFS lands) and no more than 12 months if on BLM lands.
It’s been four years since a near-perfect storm hit the U.S. West. COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, just months before the worst wildfire season in recorded history.
The interactions between wildfire and COVID-19 were large and sweeping, research in the years since has shown. The 2020 season left lasting impacts on the wildland firefighting force, both systemically and personally.
Wildland firefighters are at high risk for both COVID-19 infection and, when infected, experiencing severe illness from the virus, research published in the National Library of Medicine and Science academic journals found. Researchers in one study examined potential health and workforce capacity impacts by modeling the movement of suppression resources across the country over a season and the corresponding potential for disease spread and cascading outbreaks across wildfire incidents.
The increased risk stems primarily from firefighters’ exposure to wildfire smoke, limited access to hygiene supplies, and constantly being physically near other wildland firefighters and the public.
IHC superintendents were surveyed by USFS researchers a year after the fires burned. At the beginning of the pandemic, the agency launched a wide range of new practices for hotshot crews to limit the spread of COVID-19 while also, it was hoped, improving operational efficiency. New practices included changes in pre-fire preparation, using virtual paperwork and briefings, and reformatting traditional fire camps to a more widespread layout. The USFS also created a COVID-19 Incident Risk Assessment Tool for fire managers; it measured numerous factors including camp size, mitigation techniques, and number of positive cases to estimate how at-risk each crew was.
The researchers wanted to know if superintendents were interested in maintaining any of those practices in daily hotshot crew use in the years after 2020, regardless of COVID-19. The survey found that the majority of practices contributed positively to operational efficiency in addition to crewmember safety and well-being. Most respondents preferred the ease of virtual vs. in-person paperwork and briefings, they liked having crews spike on or near the line with the full-scale ICP camp away from the fire, and they felt better physically and mentally as a result of these changes.
Wildland firefighter well-being — and proper pay — are still a major focus for the USFS post-2020 as retention becomes an increasingly worrying issue. Research conducted this year on retention found that highly skilled wildland firefighters with a high number of assigned days, payment of additional annual earnings, and gained experience throughout the firefighter’s career all had positive effects on retention. Local wages of alternative occupations in a firefighter’s local area had no significant effect on retention.
The future of wildland firefighter physical health may also see improvements thanks to technological developments stemming from COVID-19. Respiratory illnesses like coronavirus, and other long-term health risks firefighters face such as lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, may be seen in firefighters less and less as mobile respirators proceed further in development.
California fitted wildland firefighters with a mobile respirator prototype last October while they dug firelines or cut down trees with chainsaws. The results were mixed.
“Plenty broke. Hoses popped out of sockets. Straps snapped. Masks slid down sweating faces. Filters became dislodged,” Julie Johnson wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.
During this event, firefighters from Cal Fire, L.A. County and the USFS took turns trying out several types of mask. They hiked down a slope and then back up, then pulled off their masks, sweating and breathing hard in triple-digit temps. Each round took only about ten minutes.
Firefighters shared their impressions with observers: Felt like a muzzle. Was too bulky. Too tight. It slipped off my face once I began to sweat.
Hearing one of her colleagues say “it’s better than nothing,” Cal Fire’s Sol Espinoza spoke up. “I’d rather take nothing,” she said.
The test is one of many completed or planned throughout the country as the fire agencies look to lower firefighter mortality from diseases increasingly found to be worsened through wildfire smoke inhalation. Experts have hedged their bets on technology frequently used to keep COVID-19 patients hospitalized with severe cases alive. Adaptations in the technology are still under development as researchers figure out which version might be best suited to meet the dynamic needs of firefighters in the field.
Espinoza, a firefighter with Cal Fire in San Bernardino. Espinoza said she could never imagine wearing a constrictive device that makes it harder to breathe.
The “beating heart of the American wine industry” has had to reckon with this question since 2017 when numerous wildfires spread across northern California’s famed wine country. The Tubbs, Atlas, and Nuns fires burned hundreds of thousands of acres, caused numerous deaths, and destroyed multiple wineries and vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties.
The total acreage burned and widespread property damage caused the 2017 wildfire season to be the most destructive in California’s history. That record-breaking year was quickly surpassed by the 2018 and 2020 fire seasons. The 2020 season, in particular, also broke burn records in the other top American wine-producing states of Oregon and Washington, and even Canada in 2021. Wildfires in the years following impacted international wine markets as well, including Italy, France, and Australia.
Intense flames aren’t the only threat wildfires bring to vineyards; it’s also the smoke they produce. A condition called “smoke taint” causes wine grapes exposed to smoke to acquire “unmarketable smoky, burnt, ashy, or medicinal sensory characteristics,” according to the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI).
Agriculture-based technological developments, however, can only do so much to keep a fire-sensitive crop alive after it’s planted on fire-dependent lands. Grapes, while not technically invasive, have invaded portions of the Western United States’ lands and have largely usurped once highly forested regions where fire played an important ecological role. As prescribed fire establishes a larger role in modern Western land management practices, how long can an industry based on fruit that needs a smokeless environment survive and thrive?
What’s not well-recorded is how agricultural land conversions cleared millions of acres of conifer and oak forests throughout the state to make way for vineyards and other crop fields. In Napa and Sonoma counties specifically, areas now known as the pinnacle of “wine country,” modern vineyards sit on land that once supported massive oak forests culturally maintained by the area’s various Indigenous tribes.
“While almost all of the valley oaks are gone from Napa — the savannas were largely cleared to make way for intensive agriculture in the late 19th century — a few pockets remain,” a New York Times article on the Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas said. “The oldest trees, dating back more than 300 years, were alive when the Caymus, Napa, Canijolmano and Mayacma tribes managed the valley to produce abundant acorns, deer, salmon, and other staples.”
The clearing of these woodlands was coupled with a government-mandated suppression of cultural burning, a kind of prescribed burning Native Americans used to promote culturally significant foods and resources within a landscape. After a century of fire suppression, the USFS has begun to understand how significant cultural fire is to promoting biodiversity and creating healthy landscapes.
“Colonization and subsequent governmental fire policy mandates have disrupted the cultural use of fire, which in turn has disrupted ecological functions where those fires are absent,” USFS research said. “As society grapples with the devastating impacts of wildfires and the loss of biological diversity, many Indigenous people see traditional fire use as a key to mitigation of devastating losses while retaining traditional livelihoods associated with burning.”
In hopes of preventing future megafires, California increases prescribed burns throughout the state, including wine country. Even though research shows smoke from prescribed burns tends to be less harmful and toxic compared with smoke from wildfires, the grapes themselves don’t seem to care.
“Studies have shown that grapes need to be exposed to only a single smoke event, irrespective of the source, to become ‘tainted,’” AWRI said. “Bushfires, forest fires, planned burns, grassfires, and agricultural burns can all cause smoke taint if smoke from those fires is present in a vineyard at a high enough level for a period of time. Current research suggests fresh smoke presents the greatest risk for smoke taint, but smoke that has drifted hundreds of kilometers has also resulted in smoke taint.”
Efforts have been made for fire planners and wine producers to work together to minimize smoke’s negative effects on wine grapes, but thus far have mostly been in vain. AWRI and other wine industry researchers recommend the best time to conduct prescribed burns to limit smoke taint is during the height of wildfire season between May and October; before grapevine flowering and after grape harvest. The “usual” best times to set prescribed burns, mid-spring or in the fall, are the most at-risk times for smoke taint in grapes.
The contradiction is clear: Grapes, at least those that winemakers don’t want smoke-tainted, can’t exist in an area with regularly prescribed burns, e.g. California.
Grapes themselves are partly to blame for this. A concept called “terroir” has been used for centuries to describe the deep ecology behind why grapes grown in different places and in different ways acquire different qualities. Everything including temperature, soil, geology, elevation, water quality, wind direction, farming practices, and the winemaking process influences grapes and, by extension, the wine made from them. Even if researchers could 100 percent prevent smoke-taint issues in wine grapes, the grapes themselves would still be affected by the inevitable changes the fire-dependent landscape will experience in years to come.
The irony is that California does have native grapes, which thrived in the state’s pre-colonized and fire-dependent forests. In fact, the global wine industry wouldn’t exist today without California Wild Grapevines, as the species was used to save the European wine industry between 1870 and 1900 when most wine grapes were killed by leaf- and root-attacking aphids. Winemakers, in a last-resort desperate bid, used Califonia Wild Grapevine roots and grafted them onto European grape varieties. The result was a plant with the root resilience of a wild grape and the desirable taste of a European grape.
California wild grapes themselves, however, were originally discredited by European colonists for being too “foxy” and not containing enough sugar. But in a state destined to have more smoke, the more fire-resilient California Wild Grape, whose burnt vines can resprout, may soon be the California wine industry’s only option. One farmer in Sonoma County agrees and is experimenting with more than 30 different native grape hybrids in response to climate change.
The global wine industry is one of stubborn tradition. The industry’s desire to find easy “solutions” to existential problems without systemic change paints a worrying picture of the role California’s vineyards play in the state’s fight against future wildfires. Winemakers can only hide behind the industry’s $70 billion price tag for so long.
There comes a point at which economic benefit is outweighed by potential ecological destruction, and the industry will soon have to decide whether it will play a role in California’s solutions to megafires or actively hamper efforts to help make the state’s landscape healthy. Winemakers in California may soon have to answer the question of “when should this industry die?”
Researchers are still learning the full impact of the Australian brushfires that burned nearly 60 million acres, or 24 million hectares, between 2019 and 2020.
The most recent report on the bushfires focused on how they affected the nation’s tourism industry, specifically how previous reports underestimated the financial losses.
“Our novel research into the losses from the tourism shutdown resulting from Australia’s 2019-20 fires found that flowing on from direct impacts of AU $1.7 billion, indirect impacts along supply chains resulted in $2.8 billion in total output losses and $1.6 billion in reduced consumption,” the University of Sydney researchers’ report said. “We calculated significant spill-over costs, with total output losses being an increase of 61 percent on top of the direct damages identified.”
The study was reportedly the first time researchers documented changes throughout Australia’s entire supply chain, rather than focusing on specific parts of the Australian economy. Researchers said the ability to fully quantify disasters’ effects on a nation’s economy will become more important as climate change intensifies natural disasters.
“Natural hazards may increase economic inequalities, with the burden of climate adaptation and mitigation adding to the costs of governments already struggling under business-as-usual,” the report says. “Australia’s reputation as a pristine destination could become permanently damaged in the longer term under global warming, with fewer people traveling in Australia in our peak summer holiday season; similarly, people may start to avoid other countries and regions that are increasingly in the media for their wildfires and other natural hazards.”
Researchers are still learning the full impact of the Australian brushfires that burned nearly 60 million acres, or 24 million hectares, between 2019 and 2020.
Numerous reports have looked into different facets of the disastrous season, including the massive loss of plant life and firefighter experiences during the bushfires.
A group of foresters, district rangers, and air operators assembled in Atlanta during the summer of 1962. There they laid the groundwork for the Appalachian Airtanker Project, which helped pave the way for the service to be the most frequent user of airtankers in the country.
The history of airtanker wildland firefighting in the Eastern United States has largely been lost to time, with most documents focusing on Western wildland fires. The first time an airtanker was used to fight wildfires is attributed to California’s Willows Flying Service at the request of the Mendocino National Forest’s FCO in 1955. Four years later, the California Division of Forestry would produce the first in-depth study on the efficacy of airtankers on forest fires. The study found airtanker effectiveness depended on fast dispatching action, reaching the fire while it was small, and good communication between ground and air forces.
Apart from a single-sentence mention of the Appalachian Airtanker Project on the NPS Wildland Fire Timeline, there is no mention of the project online. The only related documents that remain are newspaper clippings and letters found in the Cherokee National Forest and the Great Smokey Mountains National Park’s archives.
“This year, the Park Service and the Forest Service have a weapon new to this area — a firefighting airplane,” a 1962 archived clipping from the Knoxville News-Sentinel said. “The value of air attack on forest fires has been proved in the West. This spring, the U.S. Forest Service is conducting tests in this area.”
The project was the first use of airtankers for fire suppression in the nation’s Eastern states, according to USFS documents.
The project was created to lay the groundwork and study the feasibility of using a converted Navy TBM in fighting wildfires in the Appalachian mountain area.
The plane was based out of the McGhee-Tyson Air Force Base in Knoxville and cost $159 per flying hour, a pilot’s salary of $4.07 per hour, and around $50 per load of retardant. The project was managed by a fire control aide and regional air officer, and was staffed by a pilot and two laborers who were tasked with mixing and loading the retardants.
Specific guidelines were required to be met for every retardant drop. The TBM could not be used on the head of a hot, rolling brush or timber fire, or when winds exceeded 30 mph, or when visibility was less than one mile. Initial attack was authorized for fires that would cost over $700 to suppress or mop up without airtanker usage or in heavy-fuel fires with a medium to high rate of spread.
The project began on January 25, 1962 and continued through May 17 of the same year. Within that window, the Chestnut Ridge Fire ignited and burned in an extremely inaccessible area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Airtanker usage was credited for stopping the fire at only a third of its potential burned acreage. Park Superintendent Fred Overly would use the fire as a specific example for the project’s continuation and future airtanker usage in the Eastern U.S.
“Having seen what the airtanker can do in reducing burned areas to a minimum, we consider the continuation of this project amply justified,” Overly said in a letter to USFS Southern Region Fire Control Chief John Spring. “Without the three extremely effective drops made by Pilot Art Murray, this fire which finally burned 71.5 acres would most likely have burned 200 or more acres. The fire was contained very well by the air drops, and the use of the tanker was well justified.”
The “most important law in the creation of eastern national forests” was established on this day 113 years ago.
The Weeks Act, signed into law by President William Howard Taft on March 1, 1911, allowed the federal government to purchase private land to protect the headwaters of rivers and watersheds in the eastern United States. The act nationalized the U.S. Forest Service, as neither federal nor state governments owned substantial forested lands east of the Mississippi River before the act’s passage.
According to the Forest History Society, in just 10 years Congress had rejected more than 40 bills calling for the establishment of eastern national forests.
Senators and congressmen opposed these measures for various reasons; some western representatives (and conservation groups) who supported national forests in principle resented the possible loss of funding to their eastern counterparts. Many fiscal conservatives agreed with House Speaker Joe Cannon when he declared “not one cent for scenery.”
Leadership on the issue came from a surprise source. Congressman John Weeks, a Republican from Massachusetts, was a former naval officer and a successful banker. Weeks was elected to the House in 1905, and two years later he was appointed to the House Committee on Agriculture by Speaker Cannon.
Congressman John Wingate Weeks
At first Weeks didn’t understand why — he had few farmers in his district, and he had little interest in agricultural issues in Congress. He was concerned, though, about the damage logging had caused in the White Mountains, near where he had grown up and where he now summered with his family. Speaker Cannon told Weeks that if he, as a businessman, could put together a forestry bill that he supported, then Cannon would get it considered in the House. The man who had once declared “not one cent for scenery” had changed his mind.
The Weeks Act not only paved the way for the National Forest System, but also established the nation’s first interagency wildland firefighting effort, an effort that continued and worsened the settler colonial practice of fire suppression through bans of cultural fire usage.
There were multiple reasons for prioritizing USFS fire control for the new forests, according to a system article published on the act’s centennial. A 1902 report described the biggest threats to Appalachian forests as being fires and logging. In 1910, a series of catastrophic wildfires now known as the “Big Blowup” devastated Idaho and Montana, killing more than 100 firefighters and destroying several towns. Forest reserve advocates used these and other fire events to convince Congress to establish an agency that would primarily focus on wildfire suppression.
“Fire lookout towers and trails were built and ‘forest guards’ were hired at a salary of $50 a month,” the USFS article said. “Because the Weeks Act provided matching federal funding for state wildfire management spending, state divisions of forestry also upgraded their fire control organizations.”
What wildland firefighters now affirm as an uninformed suppression effort was worsened through fear-based short-sighted decisionmaking, along with xenophobic attitudes toward the people who had long lived on the land.
The Karuk Tribe in California views the passage of the Weeks Act and the increasing catastrophic fires across the country as having a direct connection.
“The passage of the Weeks Act in 1911 following the Big Burn of 1910 made cultural uses of fire essentially illegal, and for the many decades following, less and less burning occurred while more and more vegetation grew,” the tribe’s website said. “Over a century of policies of fire suppression has created the conditions for the catastrophic, high-intensity wildfires we are seeing today. Warming temperatures and summer droughts further exacerbate these conditions.”
The USFS wildland firefighting system now largely understands the benefit of managed fire and makes an effort to include tribes in its decisionmaking. There is more work to be done, however, as climate change further exacerbates the cracks in the system that firefighters and managers are trying to mend. For better or for worse, it all started with the Weeks Act.
Kansas’ recognition as a top fire state has long been overdue.
The state experiences at least 5,000 wildfires annually, which ranks it among the top five states for number of wildfire incidents in the country among the likes of Texas, Oregon, and Montana. Kansas is also a top prescribed burning state in acreage, with well over one million acres burned yearly, according to the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils.
Despite this, Kansas is far from the first state many think of when wildfires are mentioned. A large reason for this, according to Kansas Forest Service Interim Fire Management Officer Eric Ward, is that wildfires have been chronically underreported throughout the state.
“The lack of reporting has been identified for years as a problem,” Ward said. “The problem is that, unlike many states, wildfires are nearly 100 percent a local responsibility.”
The Kansas Governor’s Wildfire Task Force final report of 2023 estimated that around 30 percent of the state’s wildfires go unreported annually. Ward attributed the underreporting to two aspects of the state: the lack of federally-owned land and the state’s designation as a “Home Rule” state.
In the nation, Kansas has the third-least amount of federally owned land compared with privately owned land, according to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report. Only 253,919 acres of Kansas’ total 52,510,720 acreage, or 0.5 percent, is federally owned. The only other states with such a low federal land ownership are Connecticut and Iowa, both at 0.3 percent.
Additionally, Kansas has been a Home Rule state since 1961 by constitutional amendment, meaning that local jurisdictions, to an extent, have greater autonomy — and state interference in local affairs is limited. Kansas is also a “Dillon’s Rule” state, meaning that local governments only have powers that are explicitly assigned to them.
Because of this combination, the duty of reporting usually falls to local jurisdictions, some of which fail to file the proper paperwork.
“[Kansas Forest Service] supports local fire departments as requested on major incidents, but as a home rule state, the local jurisdiction is still in charge, and responsible for reporting,” Ward said.
“With the vast majority of departments being small volunteer departments, some simply ignore the state law that requires reporting. And no one at any level of government wants to prosecute a local volunteer fire chief for not doing paperwork. So, many simply never get reported.”
Research suggests Kansas and other wildfire-prone states are projected to have 30 more days per year of extreme wildfire risk in the near future. To meet the current and future wildfire challenges, the state appointed a new State Fire Marshal last November and released a new wildfire risk tool last October. However, until wildfires are accurately reported in the state, Kansas won’t be getting the recognition of a top wildfire state that it deserves.
Kansas’ recognition as a top fire state has long been overdue.
The state experiences at least 5,000 wildfires annually, which ranks it among the top five states for number of wildfire incidents in the country among the likes of Texas, Oregon, and Montana. Kansas is also a top prescribed burning state in acreage, with well over one million acres burned yearly, according to the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils.
Global News, in their conversation with Doherty, reports that one of the tools created from this plan includes 19 tactical sheets and GIS maps for various critical infrastructure and water source locations, identifying which neighborhoods have a one-way-in and one-way-out access, and safe zones for responders during times of emergency. All this information will reportedly be available to fire personnel through scannable QR codes.
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