Colorado hit by increasingly dire wildfire-driven insurance exit

Insurance isn’t the sexiest topic to either write or read about, but an extreme weather-driven downtrend of insurance agency availability is tightening the noose on an already suffocating national housing market.

The U.S. had its highest number — 28 — of annual billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023,  including the Lahaina wildfire, California flooding, and Tropical Cyclone Idalia in Florida, according to a NOAA report. Homeowner insurance agencies’ response to the continually rising costs has either been to drastically increase their insurance rates or to back out from certain areas entirely.

The dire situation first made national headlines last year when numerous agencies, including State Farm, Allstate and Farmers, either paused or placed heavy restrictions on policyholders in wildfire-prone areas in California. Seven of the state’s top 12 insurance agencies have put the restrictions into effect as of November, ABC News reported.

Colorado appears to be the next state to face extremely tight, or nonexistent, homeowner insurance policies caused by increasing wildfire threats. The Durango Herald recently reported the average homeowner insurance premium in the state increased 51.7 percent between January 2019 and October 2022. Meanwhile, some new homeowners in the state are having trouble getting policies at all.

“A State Farm insurance agent in Durango wrote a couple a quote for homeowners insurance. But six days before closing, the State Farm office called to inform the Bowmans that it could not write them a policy,” said the Herald’s story on a couple who recently moved to Durango. “Geico, Travelers, other State Farm agents – all of them turned him down.”

Local insurance businesses in Durango reportedly have “plummeted” by 20 to 30 percent since insurers changed their policies sometime last September. Agents in Colorado expect the insurance issues to keep piling up in the years to come. A Climate Change in Colorado Assessment report for 2024 found climate change and increased atmospheric warming will lessen streamflows and make the state drier, leading to more and worse wildfires.

“Studies have uniformly indicated substantially worsened wildfire risk for Colorado by the mid-21st century compared with the late 20th-century, as additional warming further increases fuel dryness and enhances fire ignition and spread,” the report from the Colorado Climate Center said.

Climate change info -- by Colorado State University
Climate change info — by Colorado State University

In some parts of Canada, the 2023 fires never ended

Wildfire seasons have been getting longer since the 1970s, according to (among others) the USDA Climate Hubs.

“The wildfire season in Western states has extended from 5 months to over 7 months in length,” the department said. Since the 1980s, the annual number of large fires and area burned has significantly increased  (according to a report by Anthony Westerling, Hugo Hidalgo, Daniel Cayan, and Thomas Swetnam in the journal Science). The average burn time of individual fires has grown from 6 days (between 1973 and 1982) to 52 days (between 2003 and 2012).

The increase in another wildfire phenomenon may spell the end of wildfire seasons altogether and turn wildland firefighting into a year-round effort, more than it already is.

“Zombie fires,” or wildfires that smolder underground during the winter before reemerging in the spring, are becoming more common in Arctic forests, according to a 2021 study published in Scientific American. The most likely cause was attributed to climate change.

“Contrary to the hypothesis that overwinter fires sustain themselves in carbon-rich, organic soil layers known as peat, the researchers learned that most of them had burned in drier, upland sites with dense tree populations; the find suggested fires had instead smoldered underground in woody tree roots,” another Scientific American article on the subject said.

The woody tree roots in British Columbia’s boreal forests are feared to be the next place where a zombie fire could emerge, continuing Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season of last year. As of January 18, the BC Wildfire Service map shows that around 100 active wildfires are still burning in the province, some of which are still smoldering underground and threaten to kick off yet another disastrous wildfire season this year.

It wouldn’t be the first time zombie fires foretold a bad fire season. At the beginning of 2023, British Columbia recorded 16 “carryover” fires, according to the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, and BC Wildfire Service data shows that in most years since 2014, only five or fewer  carryover fires were reported.

“A lot of people have talked about the 2023 fire season being over, but it’s not over,” said Sonja Leverkus, a BC wildland fire crew leader. “It is not over in northeast British Columbia. Our fires did not stop burning.”

911 calls: the stranded and missing in Maui’s wildfires

“The flames came back … they’re in the trees and the grass.”

“We slept on the street.”

“We’re dying out here.”

The Associated Press has compiled numerous 911 calls from the barrage that Maui operators received the day after wildfires swept through Lahaina. The operator answers were the same each time; emergency responders weren’t able to help find missing people because they were still trying to get people to safety, still working hotspots and responding to fires.

The 911 recordings from the morning and early afternoon of August 9, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, were the third batch of calls released by the Maui Police Department in response to a public records request. The recordings demonstrate that dispatchers and first responders were limited by diminished staffing and communications failures.

Some callers ask where their family members are, some report disastrous fire damage, and others plead with dispatch  to tell them where to go to be safe. People were trapped in their homes or hotel rooms, many with no food or water. With each desperate call, operators had relatively the same response: they had no answers.

Read the full story here.

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USFS: Throwing money at fuels treatments won’t stop communities from burning

Large communities destroyed by wildfire has become a yearly occurrence as of late. Lahaina last year, Colorado communities in the 2021 Marshall Fire, Oregon communities in the 2020 Labor Day firestorms including the  Almeda Drive Fire, and Paradise, California — leveled by the 2018 Camp Fire — all these communities were devastated by wildfire.

And the economic cost is incalculable — the Denver Post reported last year that the Marshall Fire was Colorado’s costliest ever; it destroyed $2 billion in property and killed two people.
USFS researchers are using the stories of these destroyed communities to try to find commonality — and possibly a solution to the growing threat of fast-spreading wildland/urban interface fires. Each of these fires was human-caused or ignited near or inside communities — and all of them occurred during extreme wind events — and they immediately overwhelmed both wildland and structural firefighting efforts. The most important, and arguably most overlooked, commonality is that none of the above fires were technically “wildfires” at all, but were “conflagrations,” or fires that spread past built barriers.

“These problem fires were defined as an issue of wildfires that involved houses,” researchers said. “In reality, they are urban fires initiated by wildfires. That’s an important distinction — and one that has big repercussions for how we prepare for future fires.”

… none of the above fires were technically “wildfires” at all, but were “conflagrations,” or fires that spread past built barriers.

The importance of the distinction laid out by the researchers lies in what people believe the solution might be. Recent federal investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act address fire risk and prioritize fuel treatments on public lands.

Environmental/Community conditios, urban fires

But fuels reduction on federal lands would not have prevented any of the above fires. As wildfire suppression costs have increased, so have disastrous interface fires. Most wildfires are started by humans on private lands, and those fires destroy a majority of western U.S. structures.

“Wildland fires do not per se encroach on communities,” the report says.  “Rather, it’s communities that have impinged on wildlands, where fires play an important ecological role.”

If the goal of wildfire management is to stop the destruction of human communities, then communities and local governments must accept that wildland fires are a necessary and inevitable ecological aspect of the land they are living on. The change in mindset from wildfire suppression to adaptive living will require a shift at all levels of society. But the destruction and long recovery aftermath of each of the burned communities mentioned above shows that the rewards may outweigh the risks.

Paradise aftermath

The California community of Paradise, leveled in 2018 by the Camp Fire, has been rebuilding partly with that idea in mind.

A few of the homes were rebuilt with a World War II-era military design, which is very resistant to ignition. The needed shift will take more than the transition of a few community homes, but it’s a start. Other changes, such as new construction siting, design, construction materials, and landscaping requirements will also need to be part of the new paradigm.

“We have to live with wildland fire, says the report. “We don’t have to live with fire in our communities.”

Canada’s record-breaking wildfires have widespread logging partly to blame

Quebec and Ontario’s environmentally crucial boreal forests had a tough wildfire season in 2023. The provinces had 12.8 million and 1.1 million acres burn, respectively.

The 44 million acres burned by wildfires across Canada have been attributed mainly to abnormal drought and high temperatures,  but a new study is pointing to another possible factor: the planting of millions of acres of immature trees after widespread logging. A recent study published by researchers at Australia’s Griffith University found more than 35 million acres of Canada’s forests have been lost to logging since 1976, including 20 million acres in Quebec and 14 million acres in Ontario.

The “loss” wasn’t caused by deforestation, which is “land that has been cleared of trees and permanently converted to another use” under Canada’s definition. Rather, the forest has been lost to forest degradation, or the conversion of naturally regenerating forest to plantations of planted trees.

“The Canadian Government claims that its forests have been managed according to the principles of sustainable forest management for many years,” the researchers said, “yet this notion of sustainability is tied mainly to maximizing wood production and ensuring the regeneration of commercially desirable tree species following logging,”

The decrease in the land area of older, more resilient forests across both Quebec and Ontario — and their subsequent replacement with immature trees — both lowered overall forest biodiversity and increased the prevalence of disturbances (wildfire, insect infestations, disease spread) over time.

“Logging has significantly increased the rate of disturbances in this region,” the report said. “This decrease in older forests when compared with historical natural conditions is accompanied by the resulting decline in structural attributes — such as large live and dead standing trees and coarse woody debris associated with older forests — which negatively affects biodiversity.”

The full study is online [HERE].

Quebec and Ontario’s environmentally crucial boreal forests had a tough wildfire season in 2023. The provinces had 12.8 million and 1.1 million acres burn, respectively.

The 44 million acres burned by wildfires across Canada have been attributed mainly to abnormal drought and high temperatures,  but a new study is pointing to another possible factor: the planting of millions of acres of immature trees after widespread logging. A recent study published by researchers at Australia’s Griffith University found more than 35 million acres of Canada’s forests have been lost to logging since 1976, including 20 million acres in Quebec and 14 million acres in Ontario.

Smoke reduced life expectancy across Washington

Most of Washington State’s hazardous air pollution comes from wildfire smoke, burdening already over-burdened populations in the state and lowering the average number of years people in those communities are expected to live.

A new report from the state’s Department of Ecology looked into air pollution across Washington and found that the largest contributor to air pollution in over-burdened communities was from wildfire smoke. The DOE is working to improve air quality in 16 places, representing numerous communities, neighborhoods, and towns across Washington that are overburdened and highly impacted by criteria air pollution.

The federal Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six common air pollutants. The DOE monitors these pollutants and acts if levels become unhealthy. These  pollutants are:

During the cold season, the largest contributor to air pollution was usually smoke from wood-burning stoves or furnaces.

Residents of the studied overburdened communities, on average, live 2.4 years shorter lives than the state average and also have higher numbers of deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Satellite photo, Bolt Creek (on the north) and Cedar Creek fires Sept. 10, 2022. Processed by Pierre Markuse.
Satellite photo, Bolt Creek (north) and Cedar Creek fires Sept. 2022. Processed by Pierre Markuse.

“Long-term exposure to air pollution may contribute to development of disease — for example, asthma development in children or chronic cardiovascular conditions in adults,” the department’s report says. “Further, short-term exposure to air pollution is associated with exacerbations in existing conditions such as asthma or COPD.”

The overburdened communities included:

        • Spokane and Spokane Valley
        • Tri-Cities to Wallula
        • East Yakima
        • Lower Yakima Valley
        • Moxee Valley
        • George and West Grant County
        • Mattawa
        • Ellensburg
        • Wenatchee and East Wenatchee
        • Everett
        • North Seattle and Shoreline
        • South Seattle
        • South King County
        • Northeast Puyallup
        • South and East Tacoma
        • Vancouver

The report also warns that life expectancies in these communities may drop even further as the frequency of wildfire smoke events has been rising. The worry is in line with USDA research that points to wildfire seasons in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho that are projected to last longer with increased wildfire frequency, size, and total acres burned as a result of climate change.

“In Northwest forests, a warming climate coupled with more frequent wildfires will lead to a shift away from shade-tolerant, thin-barked, or fire-intolerant species such as western hemlock, subalpine fir, and Engelmann spruce,” the report said. “With warmer and drier conditions and more frequent disturbance, some locations will likely shift from forest to shrubland or grassland.”

Nearly double the usual winter wildfires, triple the acreage burned in northern India

India’s Forest Service has reported 1,006 wildfire alerts to the northern state of Uttarakhand since November 1, according to the Times of India. That number is up from the 556 wildfire alerts the service reported during the same time last year.

The increase is part of a worrying and destructive cycle that has escalated in the area for the past six years. Uttarakhand has had triple the acres burned by wildfires since 2017, worsened by its first-ever repeated occurrence of winter wildfires, or wildfires outside of the state’s usual fire season of February 15 to June 15.

“The unusual shift in the fire season may be linked to different reasons including climate change, the lockdown, or too much human intervention in the forests,” Arti Chaudhary, the head of Silviculture and Forest Resource Management Division at the Forest Research Institute, told the Times. “A five-year study across 15 states of the country that witness forest fires, including Uttarakhand, has been initiated to thoroughly understand the actual reasons behind this shift, as it has been recorded all over the country.”

The winter wildfires also contributed to the state’s above-average wildfire carbon emissions in 2021. Uttarakhand’s wildfires emitted an estimated 0.2 megatonnes of carbon in March 2021 alone, breaking a record set in 2003, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service scientist Mark Parrington.

Northern India’s skies took on a hazy hue in November caused in part by the unusual wildfire shift, NASA satellites show. The haze is reportedly a seasonal occurrence caused by urban pollution entering the atmosphere when seasonal weather patterns trap air pollution near the ground, but smoke from the unseasonal wildfires made the air quality even worse.

“The World Health Organization considers 15 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) to be a safe limit,” said NASA. “But ground-based air quality monitors routinely measured levels that exceeded 300 and, at times, 500 micrograms per cubic meter in November.”

Photos tell story of Maui wildfires’ destruction, aftermath and recovery

It’s been nearly five months since wildfires devastated Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Since then, images of the destruction have captivated the nation.

Honolulu Civil Beat has compiled collections of photos from each month of the aftermath, cataloging the desperation and the assistance that has flooded the area since the wildfires were controlled.

“We have thousands of images in our growing media database, of Lahaina and Upcountry, the victims and the landscape that were left in ash and ruin,” wrote for the Civil Beat. “In the past nearly five months, we’ve photographed numerous community gatherings, resource fairs, public officials in various settings from press conferences to legislative hearings. We’ve picked a smattering that we think represents the story that is continuing to unfold and we’ll publish these galleries at the end of each month.”

See the Maui fires in the photo series here:

2023 Fire season: smallest number of acres in 25 years

Noxious smoke, zombie fires and the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history.

Wildfires made headlines numerous times throughout 2023, with the Lahaina wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui taking center stage in national media for months. For thousands of residents, recovery is still ongoing, with no end in sight.

Despite that, the year’s wildfire season was one of the quietest in decades. The National Interagency Fire Center estimated that 54,273 wildfires burned about 2.6 million acres. That’s the lowest yearly U.S. acreage burned by wildfire since 1998, when 81,043 wildfires burned 1.3 million acres.

The year is a relief for the wildland firefighters who are coming off  multiple high-burn years in a row, with 2015, 2017, and 2020 each  exceeding 10 million acres burned. The last time wildfires burned under 4 million acres was a decade ago when 63,312 fires in 2014 burned 3.6 million acres.

The reason for the low burn acreage could be attributed partly to 2023’s wet West. While the Eastern U.S. often has more wildfires, Western states see more acreage burned during the season. Thanks to above-average —  and some record-breaking — snowfall in states including California, Arizona, and Nevada, wildfires couldn’t find a foothold.

“Nine atmospheric rivers over a three-week period fueled the record-breaking snowfall,”  according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “The snow brought much-needed relief to the drought-stricken West, with the exception of the Pacific Northwest, where rapid snowmelt and early melt contributed to moderate drought conditions in late spring.”

While the U.S. saw relief, its northern neighbor dealt with a nightmare. Canada burned a record-breaking 18 million hectares (more than 44 million acres, roughly the size of North Dakota) during its 2023 fire season. The total blows the nation’s previous most-burned year out of the water, according to the Canadian National Fire Database. The country’s previous record year was 1980, when nearly 8 million hectares burned.

In contrast to the Western U.S. record-setting snowfall, much of Canada’s forests experienced drought and high temperatures heading into its wildfire season, Canada’s Drought Monitor shows. Severe drought was seen throughout the year, while extreme drought was seen in every month after April.

Canadian fire years
Canadian fire years

As the world kicks off 2024, wildland firefighters across the West are hoping for another record-setting snowfall.

August ‘pyrotornado’ in Canada validated by researchers

A video that claimed to show a rarely-seen wildfire phenomenon went viral in August. Now, researchers have confirmed its legitimacy.

An “extensive investigation” led by researchers at Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project in Ontario started after the video of a vortex above British Columbia’s Gun Lake was shared by numerous news outlets after it was recorded on August 18.

“The Northern Tornadoes Project has been investigating this event since that time — very carefully, given this was potentially the first fire-generated tornado that we have recorded,” researchers said.

Researchers first confirmed the location and date of the video, then had to determine whether the vortex shown in the video met the definition of a tornado. The project was able to determine the tornado’s validity through multiple visual indications from the recording, including the presence of a spray vortex at the base of the tornado, how the vortex formed and the position of the vortex over the fire, all of which matched the scientific research related to fire-generated tornadoes.

“Though the terminology in this area of science is still developing, it should be pointed out that this intense vortex was not a brief, fire-filled ‘fire whirl‘ but an actual tornado that is sometimes referred to as a pyrotornado,” the researchers said. “This is the first such fire-generated tornado recorded by [the Northern Tornadoes Project], and appears to be the most thoroughly documented fire-generated tornado so far in Canada.”

The researchers confirmed that, yes, the event is classified as a tornado. The full extent of the damage from the tornado isn’t yet known, but the project says evidence is trickling in slowly.

The pyrotornado isn’t the only one that’s been thoroughly studied. The “world’s first wildfire tornado” was captured on video in 2003 during a wildfire outside of Canberra, Australia. The fire destroyed 500 homes and killed four people. The damage was worsened when the pyrotornado emerged.

“The Canberra fire tornado of 2003 was rated an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with horizontal winds of 160 miles per hour, roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane,” an article from Smithsonian Magazine reads. “As the first documented example of its kind, it was a milestone — another harbinger of 21st-century fire.”

A similar event was recorded during the 2018 Carr Fire in Redding, California, dubbed “the most destructive fire in National Park System history.” The fire destroyed 1,614 structures, killed seven people, and burned 229,651 acres. The fire also has a place in history for the pyrotornado it generated, which has since helped forecasters’ and scientists’ ability to identify future fire-generated tornadoes. NOAA researchers studied the pyrotornado, which had many similarities to the Gun Lake tornado.

“A key factor in the vortex formation was the development of a fire-generated ice-topped cloud (i.e., a pyrocumulonimbus), which reached as high as 12 km aloft,” NOAA said. “These observations will help forecasters and scientists identify, and potentially warn for, future destructive fire-generated vortices.”

A video that claimed to show a rarely-seen wildfire phenomenon went viral in August. Now, researchers have confirmed its legitimacy.

An “extensive investigation” led by researchers at Western University’s Northern Tornadoes Project in Ontario started after the video of a vortex above British Columbia’s Gun Lake was shared by numerous news outlets after it was recorded on August 18.