On January 8 this year a film crew was on the ground in the LA firestorm capturing footage that is, in the aftermath of the tragedy, helping to explain the fire behavior and sheer destruction of the event.
Their work is now ready for viewing as an hour documentary on PBS. The program has interviews with fire officials who were there on the day, scientists, residents, and a volunteer fire brigade, who discuss the challenges of urban firestorms and the need to better protect communities.
Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm is out of filmmaker Trip Jennings and Balance Media, who produced Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire two years ago.
Camera operator, Josh Finbow films the aftermath of the Eaton Fire from a fire helicopter, Altadena, CA. Photo: Connor Nelson
Watch the television premiere of Weathered- Inside the LA Firestorm on Wednesday, March 19 and online thereafter:
Television broadcast PBS Member Stations – 10PM Pacific and Eastern/9PM Central, online at that link from 5.30pm Pacific.
PBS Terra YouTube – Join director Trip Jennings, PBS host Maiya May and crew for a live chat at 5:30 PM Pacific Time
PBS host Maiya May surveys the destruction of a home in the Eaton Fire, Altadena, CA. Photo: Josh Finbow
Produced as a special edition of PBS Weathered, host Maiya May explains a play-by-play of the fires with first-person footage, cinematic fire footage, and animations created in collaboration with NASA.
The show will be available after the premiere at the link above so please share with anyone you believe would be interested in this program.
But please note – for those outside of the United States access to PBS may be denied, but the YouTube links should work everywhere.
Connor Nelson, while filming the Palisades Fire. Photo: Josh Finbow
More carbon is stored in boreal forests than any other type of forest, but that’s changing with increasingly frequent and severe wildfires.
More than four years after a wildfire burned more than ten times the annual mean of land in Sweden, a burnt boreal forest’s soil has yet to recover, a group of researchers recently found. Vegetation within the slow-growing forests had shown no signs of recovery, in part due to decomposition and carbon releases, or soil respiration, in the forest’s soil being significantly impacted by high-intensity fire.
“As forest floor respiration is tightly coupled to tree root activity, it is likely to take many more years before it reaches the levels observed at an unburnt control stand,” the researchers said in their recently published Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Journal paper.
Forest burnt by 2018 Wildfires in Sweden. Credit: Moralist – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The researchers affirmed that a decline in carbon releases from soil may sound like a positive change in the context of global, greenhouse gas-driven climate change, but the fact misses the forest for the trees. In reality, a lack of soil respiration means fewer trees and other vegetation can grow, turning a once carbon-sink forest into a long-term carbon emitter.
Which trees were logged after the fire also played a large role in the forest’s recovery, the researchers said. The logging of living trees after low-severity fire led to “immediate and significant” decreases in soil respiration, while the salvage-logging of dead trees after high-severity fire significantly slowed the regrowth of understory vegetation.
“Our results highlight the significant and persistent changes to forest floor carbon fluxes due to fire and choice of post-fire management strategy,” the paper said. “Future work is needed to investigate the interaction effect between fire severity and salvage-logging and to more closely examine the effects of different site preparation methods on post-fire soil carbon fluxes and vegetation recovery in the boreal context.”
Hawaii officials have released their third and final report on Maui’s deadly Lahaina Fire in 2023, focusing on how each of Hawaii’s counties can prevent a similar tragedy from happening again.
The Fire Safety Research Institute‘s “Lahaina Fire Forward-Looking Report” is phase three of a three-part investigation into the catastrophic wildfire. The group previously released the Lahaina Fire Comprehensive Timeline Report, which presents a chronology of the fire’s events, and the Lahaina Fire Incident Analysis Report, which looked into the systemic causes and response to the fire.
“It is vital to reiterate, as demonstrated throughout this report, that no single factor is, or set of factors are, directly responsible for the tragic outcome,” the Phase Three report said. “The preconditions for these fires have been in the making for decades, stemming from the changing landscape of Maui Nui, more frequent extreme weather events, and the increased frequency of vegetation-fueled fires. It is important to note these same conditions exist across the State of Hawaii, in numerous other locations throughout the United States, and around the globe.”
Maui fire aftermath, photo courtesy Governor Josh Green’s office.
The report identified 10 priorities for enhancing wildfire readiness throughout the state, the top two of which focused on establishing an Office of the State Fire Marshal and creating an action plan for future wildfire events through working with the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization. The eight remaining priorities are focused on how the State Fire Marshal can implement said action plan, including:
Wildfire Education Programming
Communication Systems
Utilities Risk Reduction & Planning
Fire Weather
Evacuation
Codes & Standards
Wildfire Response Preparedness
Vegetation & Land Management
The report also breaks down how wildfire readiness can be enhanced at the county level, specifically through risk assessment and data-driven investment. The priorities were reviewed by each county fire chief, according to the researchers.
“This streamlined approach provides a clear roadmap for the counties to initiate progress and take the critical first steps necessary to establish a solid foundation that supports future meaningful improvements,” the researchers said.
Many of the fires in southern California remain active but there is no shortage of views on what went wrong or right, what could or couldn’t be done, who is to blame and what do we all do now?
Wildfire Today is keen to find the most important lessons to be learnt from these fires.
Terms like “unprecedented” and “unpredicted” are not helpful – especially when we have seen it before and knew it could happen again. Those term take away responsibility and action. They excuse the fact that things could have been done, by many.
Dr Marty Alexander, long time Canadian wildland fire researcher, has reminded Wildfire Today of the 1974 publication by Clive M. Countryman, “Can Southern California Wildland Conflagrations be Stopped?”.
Countryman was at the time of writing a wildland fire behavior scientist with the USDA Forest Service in southern California. His paper was a reflection of the 1970 fire season in California where 16 people died and more than 200 000 hectares of land burned, and around 700 homes lost.
His statement on The Fire Problem barely differs from today:
Climate, fuels, topography and people create fire problems
Relatively few fires become conflagrations
Conflagrations are most frequent during Santa Ana winds
Suppression of Santa Ana fires is difficult
His other conclusions include:
Fire prevention has limited value
Firefighting techniques and equipment and not adequate
His solutions then rely on a range of fuel modification measures.
For more nostalgia, watch these 1971 newsreels – on the same topic, same problem:
Having looked back to see what we already know, Wildfire Today now turns to finding a way through new wildfire challenges.
Here are some tough questions for starters:
Evacuations
To have a large fire in such a heavily populated area with so few deaths or injuries is extraordinary. This suggests the evacuation process was largely successful – people were moved out of harms way. And yet we saw those abandoned vehicles on narrow mountainous roads that funnelled people onto Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard , panicked residents fleeing on foot, bulldozers shunting cars off the road to gain access for fire fighting vehicles – that’s not how an orderly evacuation is meant to work, that is last-minute, panicked fleeing. There are many international examples of disorderly evacuations going horribly wrong.
Is there are better way to get thousands of people out of the way of a fast moving wildfire? If evacuations occur well before the flames arrive that would help. But how early do you do early evacuations? When is it too late to leave? Where do 100,000 people evacuate to?
Suppression
As Carpenter noted in 1971 we need to all understand that once a fire gets to this size under these conditions all attempts to simply put it out are futile. The focus is on protecting people and strategic assets. The fire fighters on the ground and in the air understand this. Does the wider community understand this?? Does this explain all the anger that “someone should have done something”, and the thinking that if it wasn’t for a few empty hydrants and grounded aircraft (due to high winds) the fire would have been suppressed?
Fuel management
Many, many others since Carpenter have said you have got to better manage the fuels if you want to have any chance of managing the fire. What does good fuel management look like in southern California and when do we know that we have done enough? Would have it made a difference for these fires when it looks more like an urban conflagration with house to house burning?
Built environment
Are we living in the wrong places? If we know that wildfires are inevitable, why do we build homes in the middle of the highest wildfire risk areas? Any other day, it is clearly a wonderful place to live. But on days like 7 January 2025, this place was hell on earth. Do we place faith in the development of “fireproof” structures, or do we just accept that homes will burn?
Recovery
Once the emergency response phase settles and the debris is cleared, what does long term recovery look like? How do we build back better without just repeating the same mistakes? How does a community put aside the blame and divisions to work together on building long term resilience, and be ready for the next, inevitable, big fire?
There have been many articulate voices in the last few days with this Los Angeles Times article one of the better ones. It draws on wildfire researcher Jack Cohen, who encourages us to abandon our thoughts that this was a wildland fire and see it more as an urban fire that leapt from house to house, and fire historian Stephen Pyne who places today’s fire within a century of fires across a whole continent:
A now-rare forest carnivore faces numerous hurdles to continue living in its usual habitat, wildfire chiefly among them.
Canadian Lynx numbers have declined throughout most of their range in the United States, according to the Endangered Species Coalition. Causes for their decline include habitat loss, urbanization, and genetic isolation from populations in Canada due to the fragmentation of their environment.
Now, the remaining morsels of the species’ habitat is facing additional threats, straining the animals even further. A recent study used GPS data and scientific modeling to identify the remaining lynx habitat in the forests of western Colorado, southern Wyoming, and northern New Mexico, and considered over 40 habitat or environmental characteristics to identify the area’s biggest risks.
The maps found that lynx habitat in these areas is now sparse, patchy, and poorly connected, existing only in narrow bands due to Colorado’s complex mountainous terrain. Researchers also said that around one-third of the likely habitat overlapped with multiple disturbances between the study’s timeframe of 1990 and 2022, including forest insect outbreaks (31%), wildfires (5%), and forest management activities like tree harvest and prescribed burning (3%).
“Although fire disturbance from 1990-2022 overlapped only 5% of likely lynx habitat in this area, we believe that frequent, high-severity fire is the main risk to lynx in high-elevation forests moving forward,” Dr. John Squires, the study’s principal investigator and a Rocky Mountain Research Station research wildlife biologist, told Phys.org.
Credit: Keith Williams via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Researchers predicted wildfire would be a primary disturbance factor for the animal’s critical habitat. The 94,545-hectare Cameron Peak Fire, the 78,433-hectare East Troublesome Fire, and the 56,254-hectare Pine Gulch Fire, all burned lynx habitat during the 2020 fire season.
Despite the low overlap percentage the study eventually found, the scientists still considered wildfire to be the highest threat to lynx habitat, in part due to projected increasing trends in wildfire frequency and severity. Some fire threats have already demonstrated the fire vulnerability of lynx habitat.
“The West Fork Fire Complex…burned at high severity across 442 km2 of the San Juan Mountains in 2013, impacting one of the most important patches of lynx habitat in the Southern Rockies,” the study said. “In general, lynx avoid fire-impacted landscapes for at least ~ 25 yrs, likely because stand-replacing fires of high severity that are common in subalpine systems reset much of the impacted area to a stand initiation stage.”
For example, fires in Washington’s North Cascades Ecosystem in 2o13 and 2020 burned an estimated 32% of lynx habitat and reduced the species’ carrying capacity between 66% and 73%, the researchers said. Ultimately, how much fires affect lynx landscape depends on the extent, frequency, and severity of the fires.
“Therefore, despite low current overlap, a central conservation issue for lynx and forest management in the Southern Rockies is how to “defend” Likely, in situ habitat from frequent fire disturbance with climate change,” the researchers said.
How well do you understand public wildfire prediction maps?
And does the average member of the public understand these maps?
A research team in Australia is looking at a range of maps available to the public during fire emergencies to determine if the public understand them enough to take the right action to protect their lives and their communities.
Researchers from four universities are collaborating with all fire agencies in Australia for a national view on bushfire prediction maps. The Black Summer fires of 2019/20 prompted the need to better understand the potential of these maps. At the height of the fires, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service was concerned that many residents and holiday-makers did not fully appreciate the risk. So, they began publishing detailed predictive maps in the hope that more information would lead to better household decisions. But did more detailed maps better help the public? Hence, the need for this research.
Predictive maps display critical information, but knowledge is limited on the best design or how maps are actually used during active fires. As Dr Erica Kuligowski, Principal Research Fellow at RMIT University and Natural Hazards Research Australia explains:
“Maps are an important way to communicate spatial information and they are increasingly being used in natural hazards like bushfires. However, no evidence base exists on how these maps should be designed and communicated as well as how they should be disseminated to the public.”
A range of bushfire and weather prediction maps used in Australia
The researchers surveyed more than 3,000 people across all Australian states and territories in 2022 and 2023 to see if and how the public understood maps differently from the fire agencies.
They were shown mocked-up maps with varied levels of detail and asked the following questions:
Do you understand the purpose of this map?
What action is it prompting you to take?
How risky do you see the situation?
What emotions are you feeling?
What actions are you going to take?
They were also invited to provide open feedback, which provided a deeper level of insight for the researchers, particularly on whether it was the visuals, the text, or a combination of both that were seen as more important.
Public responses on uses of bushfire prediction maps in Australia.
The survey participants used a range of maps during bushfires, including local fire agency maps, the Bureau of Meteorology, Google Maps, and third-party weather or hazard mapping platforms, like Windy app, Digital Earth Australia (DEA) hotspots map, and bushfire.io.
Maps were checked more often at certain times during the bushfire, especially for early information (when the fire had not yet spread to participants’ immediate areas) or when the fire was moving quickly. Many participants used maps frequently, between 20 to 50 times each day.
A combination of information sources was used by participants to get a broader picture of their bushfire situation, with maps only one tool in their information toolbox. Community meetings were particularly useful in increasing understanding of fire spread prediction maps, as fire agency experts were on hand to explain the maps in more detail and answer questions.
Responses identified a wide range of uses for the maps, with different purposes more important to some than others, including to:
identify where they were in relation to the bushfire
gather information about the bushfire and what to do next
monitor the extent or rate of spread using the burnt areas shown on the map
cross-reference map information with other sources
confirm or explain the physical cues that they were seeing around them (for example, smoke or emergency response crews and vehicles responding to the fire)
make judgments about how the fire might spread and the level of risk
inform or warn others who may be at risk
monitor the impact of the fire on their or others’ properties, especially after evacuation.
The research is ongoing to provide guidelines on good structure to be translated into agency policies from 2025. In brief, the study found that bushfire maps must be updated promptly, clearly display their time and date of issue, and include relevant information, with an understanding that including too much or complex information may be problematic for comprehension.
For more resources on this study, including two webinars, go to:
How does this compare with maps used elsewhere around the world? Are the challenges the same? Show Wildfire Today some of the better examples you have seen.
