Prevention Archives - Wildfire Today

Humans are by far the main cause of wildfires

Hunter BasslerApril 14, 2024Prevention, Researchhuman-caused fire, risk reduction, USFS strategy8 Comments

Every year in the U.S., billions of dollars are spent on wildfire suppression and risk reduction. The five federal fire agencies — Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Fish & Wildlife Service — spent a combined $4.4 billion (2021) and $3.5 billion (2022) in wildfire suppression alone, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). The USFS announced in February that it would be investing nearly $500 million more in its “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis” 10-year strategy focusing on 21 priority landscapes across the West.

Despite the numerous projects and strategies billions in taxpayer monies have funded, one thing hasn’t changed over the past decade: Humans are still the main cause of wildfires — and numbers have worsened since 2014.

Air quality publication HouseFresh analyzed NIFC data from 2023 and ranked the causes of wildfires by number of occurrences. Of the recorded fires, 72.6 percent were directly caused by humans.

The bulk of last year’s wildfires were caused by debris burning and open burning, resulting in 1,302 wildfires. That is an increase from the 1,120 fires started by debris and open burning in 2022. Equipment and vehicle use, power generation/transmission/distribution, and arson were the next listed causes of wildfires in 2023 at 507, 390, and 364 respectively.

“The balance between human and natural fires has almost reversed since 2014, although the trend has not been smooth,” the HouseFresh report said. “The proportion of human-caused wildfires grew significantly in 2015, 2016 and 2020, peaking at 77.2 percent in 2020.”

How People Start Wildfires — This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License ::: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

To no one’s surprise, California leads the nation in number of acres burned by wildfires. The state totaled 344,878 acres burned, followed by Alaska at 295,105 acres and Arizona at 218,286 acres. Arizona led the nation, however, in the biggest increase in acres from 147,553 acres in 2022 to 218,286 acres in 2023. Southeast Fairbanks County in Alaska was the leading county in acres burned in 2023 at 141,399 acres.

“Alaska suffered the second-most land damage in 2023, despite the largest annual reduction in acres — down 2,818,744 acres from 3,113,849 in the previous, record-breaking year,” the report says. “Unfortunately, many places where fires burn are hard to reach; at the same time, permafrost and surface fuels make Alaska’s wildfires particularly pollutive.”

~ The full report’s posted on the HouseFresh website.

North America’s largest ski town prepares for wildfires

Hunter BasslerApril 8, 2024PreventionCanada, planning, preparation, ski resortLeave a comment

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.

“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.”

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].

Texas hearings live

Kelly AnderssonApril 3, 2024April 3, 2024Insurance, Prevention, WildfireOsmose, Smokehouse Creek, Texas House investigationLeave a comment

Here’s a tip from Michael Archer’s “Wildfire News of the Day”

ABC 7 in Amarillo is livestreaming the Texas House Committee that’s investigating the deadly Panhandle wildfires; it resumes testimony today in Pampa.Before testimony began, Chairman Ken King, R-Canadian, said Osmose decided the company does not need to participate in the investigation. Osmose is a third-party contractor that inspects power poles for Xcel Energy. The company is named in some of the wildfire related lawsuits.

According to one of the lawsuits, the pole determined to be the ignition source of the Smokehouse Creek Fire should have been removed after it was inspected by Osmose earlier this year.

Day 2 of testimony in legislative hearings on deadly Panhandle wildfires:

One of the witnesses is explaining that without the many loads of water and retardant dumped on the Smokehouse Fire, his town would have completely burned to the ground. (Remember as you listen that the references to the “Forest Service” is not the federal USDA agency — it’s Texas A&M Forest Service.)

Here’s Day 1 of testimony, with a transcript:

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

Hunter BasslerJanuary 18, 2024January 18, 2024Preventioncommunity fires, community hardening, wildland/urban interface4 Comments

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.

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.

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.”

Is that risk map current? Depends on the state.

Kelly AnderssonJanuary 9, 2024PreventionColorado, fire risk, Kansas, mapping

Colorado’s wildfire risk map was so inaccurate that state officials just about ignored it — for many years. The map was outdated, especially in western Colorado, where 3+ million acres of forest was covered in beetle-killed pines.

Carolina Manriquez, a lead forester with the state’s forest service, said they were supposed to use the state risk map, but they knew it was not accurate and therefore couldn’t rely on it. As the E&E News recently reported, an infusion of $480,000 in state funds resulted in a new Colorado map with updates including pine beetle damage and densely populated mountain towns.

Including 2017 and 2020, when annual wildfires burned more than 10 million acres, the last decade has marked some of the worst fire seasons in history. The risk is compounded by both climate change and growing wildland/urban interface areas, particularly in the West. Some states — including Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Texas — have moved toward ensuring their fire risk information and maps are updated and more accurate, displaying areas of highest risk and most in need of prevention and mitigation.

“There is a slowly growing push among different states to do this,” said Joe Scott, founder of Pyrologix in Missoula. The firm provides utility wildfire risk assessment, catastrophe modeling, fuels treatment prioritization and management, and exposure analysis.

To improve wildfire risk maps, many states are partnering with firms such as Pyrologix that can build public-access display of fire risk data and conditions. Using satellite imagery, census information, and other data, advanced tools can determine locations and ranges of ignition probability and fire intensity, along with threatened resource types. Gregory Dillon, director of the USFS fire modeling institute, says the state-specific maps are not a duplication of federal fire maps, but rather a more refined product.

The Kansas Forest Service unveiled in September its new wildfire risk explorer, a digital interactive map that provides a detailed look at statewide fire risk. The effort began in 2018 after several major wildfires including the 2017 Starbuck Fire, which burned some 500,000 acres and destroyed or damaged more than $50 million worth of livestock, fencing, and other resources.

“A lot of state-led efforts are trying to communicate to communities and residents about the risk to private property or municipalities,” said Jolie Pollet, wildfire risk reduction program coordinator at the Department of the Interior.

That’s slightly different from federal mapping efforts focused on protecting federal lands, Pollet said. State-focused mapping can assess evacuation routes, encourage homeowners to reduce their risk, and improve prepared applications for federal grants. State improvements such as those in Kansas also help forestry and fire officials allocate limited resources to focus on the highest priority areas.

Growing bananas can lower fire intensity in urban areas

Hunter BasslerNovember 8, 2023Preventionfire buffer, firebreak3 Comments

Reducing fuels, increasing wildland firefighter resources, and building more firebreaks are all techniques used in tandem to reduce wildfire risk. Still, they often come with high up-front prices and uncertain long-term payoffs. A new study claims to have found a new mitigation strategy that sidesteps both issues: growing and maintaining banana trees with recycled water.

Some regions have considered building physical buffers out of concrete or metal to reduce fire risk, but those have high installation costs, require annual maintenance, and provide no additional revenue or benefits. So this study’s researchers focused on potential “edible fire buffers,” or specific vegetation that could be grown in wildfire-prone areas that would also produce a crop — and help add to the area’s economy.

To find the best candidate, the team modeled edible fire buffers by examining how the conditions of a historic fire would have changed if the crop had been present. The study used specifically the 2017 Tubbs Fire, since it fit the requirements of burning in a semi-arid region, originated in wildland, was spread by high winds, and then caused significant loss of life and property. The fire burned three California counties in October and was at the time the most destructive fire in the state. The research team used satellite, census, and fuel-type data from Santa Rosa at the time of the fire.

The study found that bananas were the most viable crop among its choices after testing multiple other possibilities. Vineyards, the most common high-value crop in Mediterranean climates, were too flammable to be considered viable for the study. Ginger is a low-flammability crop, but requires mechanical harvesting that could eat into potential revenue. Carob trees are low-flammability, high-yield, and high-value — but are better suited for areas where irrigation is unavailable or too costly.

The banana trees’ high water content, minimal management needs, and suitability for semi-arid and Mediterranean locations such as like California, Mexico, Chile, Australia, and South Africa drove researchers to and in-depth study the crop’s suitability.

“A medium-sized (633 m) banana buffer decreases fireline intensity by 96 percent, similar to the combination of prescribed burns and mechanical thinning, and delays the fire by 316 min, enabling safer and more effective firefighting,” the study said. “We also find that banana buffers with average yield could produce a profit of $56k USD/hectare through fruit sales, in addition to fire mitigation.”

The study found that not only would banana trees mitigate fire under current conditions, but the the trees would still have a protective effect as fires worsen and the climate changes.

Here is the full study:

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