A team from Japan’s Hokkaido University’s research study recently uncovered worrying findings for residents across East Asia. The team looked into the increasing frequency of wildfires in Siberia, and the growing threat of smoke that Japan and other areas downwind of Siberia are forced to breathe.
Previous studies have confirmed wildfires are becoming more common in Arctic biomes across the globe, including Siberia. A 2022 USFS study found wildfires in Siberia tripled from the 2001 – 2010 period to the 2011 – 2020 period. The area burned by wildfires in Siberia also increased by a factor of 2.6 during the same period.
“We found that annual fire frequency and the extent of burnt areas were related to various combinations of seasonal air temperature, precipitation, ground moisture, and lightning frequency,” the 2022 study said. “Increased wildfire and loss of permafrost may threaten ongoing settlement and industrialization, particularly for western Siberia.”
But the wildfires have implications for residents in numerous areas other than Siberia. The Hokkaido University researchers used global climate simulation models to evaluate how the expected increase in wildfires, and wildfire smoke, will affect people downwind of Siberia.
The researchers found smoke from Siberia’s wildfires releases aerosols, or air pollution particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth’s surface, which greatly degrades air quality, leading to a drastic increase in air pollution, possibly thousands of deaths, and billions of dollars in economic losses, including upwards of:
70,000 deaths and $80 billion in losses across China
32,000 deaths and $100 billion in losses in Japan
4,000 deaths and $20 billion in losses in South Korea
“Despite the limitations of our study, our findings provide readers with a critical message on the effect of increased particulate matter caused by Siberian wildfires on climate and air quality as well as mortality and the economy under present and future atmospheric conditions,” the researchers said. “Future studies must aim to prevent air pollution emissions from Siberian wildfires and take further preventive measures in the future under ongoing and future climate changes.”
A team from Japan’s Hokkaido University’s research study recently uncovered worrying findings for residents across East Asia. The team looked into the increasing frequency of wildfires in Siberia, and the growing threat of smoke that Japan and other areas downwind of Siberia are forced to breathe.
Fires not fully suppressed but herded around and allowed to burn have allegedly been an unofficial USFS practice since the 1970s. A new study challenges whether that practice is as common as many believe.
The naming convention for the practice has reportedly changed repeatedly. They were originally called “let burn” fires, but forest managers soon dropped the term because a pervasive misunderstanding quickly arose that wildland firefighters were ignoring fires and letting them run amok. Even though other terms like “Natural Wildland Fires” and “Managed Fire” took the “let burn” term’s place, the incorrect view of the practice has persisted, being referenced as recently as in 2021’s Tamarack Fire.
That lightning-caused fire forced the evacuation of nearly 2,000 residents, destroyed 25 structures, and burned 67,000 acres in California and Nevada. Many members of the public blamed the fire’s negative outcomes on the supposed “let burn” practice, despite the policy’s not formally existing.
Researchers from the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station wanted to put the “let burn” narrative to the test — by quantifying the damage from consequential lightning-caused fires such as the Tamarack Fire.
The study, published in SpringerOpen Fire Ecology scientific journal, used multiple sources of fire-reporting data to identify numerous USFS fires from 2009 to 2020 using management strategies similar to those used during the Tamarack Fire. Of the 940 wildfires that burned within that time, the researchers found only 32 fires with characteristics similar to the Tamarack, nearly half of which ignited within wilderness areas.
The Superstition Wilderness inside the perimeter of the Woodbury Fire, June 22, 2019. InciWeb.
The researchers found that firefighter hazard mitigation was the primary driver on 26 of the 32 wildfires, with only six of the fires managed for “resource objectives” like the reported “let burn” fires. Risks posed to firefighters from terrain, snags, or inaccessibility were by and large what fire managers are concerned about during a wildfire — not how they can let the fire burn for potential ecological gains, or for the oft-alleged “treatment acreage quota.”
“Our results suggest that a ‘let burn’ strategy is not a predominant USFS management approach,” the researchers concluded. “A limited palette of strategic reporting categories may be partially responsible for the falsely premised ‘let burn’ narrative.”
Researchers theorized that a large reason for the pervasiveness of the “let burn” misconception is how fire managers fill out ICS-209 forms post-fire. Managers select one of four categories to classify the intent behind their decisions, including “monitoring,” “confine,” “point or zone protection,” or “full suppression.” The subtlety that’s lost on which option is chosen — any option other than full suppression — may be responsible for the spread of misinformation on the fire’s management.
“These categories may not capture enough of the nuance and complexity of the decision environments in which they are made,” said the Rocky Mountain Research Station. “In turn, this information gap may permit inaccurate explanations to dominate the conversation.”
The little community of Blue River, upstream in the McKenzie River valley from Eugene, Oregon, has a brand-new fire station up and running — almost four years after the Holiday Farm Fire in 2020 burned their station to the ground.
Station 2 in Blue River is part of the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District, featured in another of a series of stellar reports on KEZI by Noah Chavez. Christiana Rainbow Plews, the well-known and well-loved fire chief called “Chief Rainbow” by the locals, worked with the district both before and after the Holiday Farm Fire. She decided to retire as the chief, but only after the new fire station was fully operational.
Chief Rainbow on NBC News
She says the new station compared with the old one is just the difference between night and day. “It’s bigger and the building we had prior to the fire was really just a garage to house the trucks and equipment. It was not like a fire station,” she said. “It was really just a storage building, and the fact that we were able to build something as beautiful as this building with a day room and a kitchen and a chief’s office is just super exciting.”
The new Station 2 is designed to be both fire-resistant and earthquake-resistant, unlike the old building that didn’t survive the fire. Mike Godfrey, board chair for the Upper McKenzie RFPD, said the building is extremely fire-resistant. “This thing is going to be here until after the apocalypse.”
Taylor Wickizer is one of the newest volunteers at Station 2. Born in Blue River, she and her family moved to Iowa, but Taylor returned after the Holiday Farm Fire. She said everyone in her family felt like they needed to come back to help the community and she has since become devoted to being a firefighter for the district — because of what the community has been through together, they are more than just neighbors.
“Up here it is not even like a community, it is like a family — I mean everybody is here for the people and especially the fire and emergency services,” she said.
The little community of Blue River, upstream in the McKenzie River valley from Eugene, Oregon, has a brand-new fire station up and running — almost four years after the Holiday Farm Fire in 2020 burned their station to the ground.
Station 2 in Blue River is part of the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District, featured in another of a series of stellar reports on KEZI by Noah Chavez.
I have no idea where this came from,
I just found it in the bushes outside my house this morning.
Firefighter and public safety are our top priorities during a wildfire.
The Forest Service uses all available strategies and tools to manage wildfires.
Our fire managers make sound, science-based, risk-informed decisions.
Flying drones near wildfires is dangerous for pilots and firefighters and can bring wildfire suppression efforts to a halt. Know before you fly. If you fly, we can’t.
Wildfires create smoke, which can impact communities. Check www.fire.airnow.gov for updates.
The Forest Service is committed to a strong firefighting response this year.
We are providing 900 engines, up to 29 airtankers, more than 200 helicopters and many other fixed wing support aircraft (lead planes, multi-engine water scoopers and smokejumper aircraft). We can also mobilize eight C-130s equipped with Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS) and a limited number of other airtankers through agreements with Canada and Australia.
We will have more than 80 Forest Service Hotshot crews available. Contracted crews include 40 Type 2 IA and more than 400 Type 2 crews Forty-four interagency complex incident management teams are available, as well as significant logistical support services under contract including mobile food and shower units.
Our goal is to have 11,300 wildland firefighters onboard before the peak of the fire year. These men and women will be highly trained in emergency response and quickly adapting to changing situations. Our goal is to minimize the number of devastating, destructive large wildland fires.
Forest Service firefighters and managers make informed decisions based on science and risk assessments to safely deploy firefighting resources to suppress fires that threaten lives or property.
Federal, state, tribal and local resources, supported by available airtankers and helicopters, collaborate to contain fires.
That’s why about 98% of wildland fires are contained within 24 hours of the initial response and fewer than 2% grow into the larger fires we often see in the media.
Wildland firefighters play a crucial role on the frontlines of the wildfire crisis,
and we must take better care of them.
Firefighter Pay, Benefits and Housing:
Our focus is on increased pay and benefits, better housing, increased access to mental and physical health resources, and improved work-life balance.
Agency leaders are fighting for a permanent pay fix for wildland firefighters that more accurately reflects the difficult and dangerous work they do for the American people.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has provided wildland firefighters with a pay supplement since FY2022 that equals an extra $20,000 per year or 50% of their base pay, whichever is less.
Although FY2024 Forest Service appropriations continues the firefighter pay supplement, Congress must pass legislation to make a permanent pay solution a reality. If base pay returns to previous levels (sometimes as low as $15 per hour), the National Federation of Federal Employees Forest Service Council expects 30-50% of Forest Service wildland firefighters to seek higher-paying jobs.
The President’s FY2025 budget provides $216 million to implement a permanent pay increase for the wildland firefighter workforce, providing a more equitable wage, enhancing recruitment, and stabilizing retention.
In addition, the President’s budget proposes $25 million to address the urgent need for suitable employee housing through needed maintenance and repairs of Forest Service housing units.
Forest Service 2024 Fire Key Messages:
Firefighter Mental and Physical Health
Long, extreme fire years and the difficult and dangerous nature of wildland firefighting requires investing in mental health and wellbeing tools and services to ensure wildland firefighters can successfully confront and manage the mental and physical aspects of their mission.
The Forest Service has several reforms underway to provide better support to wildland firefighters, including an improved Employee Assistance Program that includes more trauma-trained and rural-based support, telehealth options, a smartphone app for quick access to services, and expanded proactive and preventive mental health and wellness and family services.
Working alongside the Department of the Interior, we continue to implement the Joint Federal Wildland Firefighter Health and Wellbeing Program to specifically address the unique experiences and mental and physical health challenges of wildland firefighters. This relatively new program will establish year-round prevention and mental health training, provide post-traumatic stress care, and enhance capacity for critical incident stress management — and create a new system of trauma support services with an emphasis on early intervention.
The Forest Service takes the challenge of hiring and retaining firefighters very seriously.
The DOI and the USDA together employ over 17,000 operational federal wildland firefighters each year. We can deploy more than 32,000 firefighters and support personnel when we include international, state, tribal, and local partners, plus contract and administratively determined (AD) emergency hires.
The President’s FY2025 budget proposes $136 million for additional federal firefighting capacity (570 more permanent firefighters — and continued transition to a more fulltime workforce) to enable the Forest Service to meet the demands of the increasingly long fire year more effectively and improve the work/life balance of firefighters and support personnel.
These investments will help us recruit and retain the best wildland firefighters, who play a vital role in tackling today’s wildfire challenges.
Although we struggle to hire and retain firefighters in areas such as the Pacific Northwest and California, where the labor pool is limited and pay isn’t competitive, we have added more permanent positions in some regions through our firefighting resource modernization efforts and funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Sustaining and restoring healthy, resilient fire-adapted ecosystems will help communities reduce wildfire risk. Communities and residents also must prepare for wildfires.
Over a century of scientific data confirms that strategically designed fuels reduction treatments, such as mechanical thinning and prescribed fire, can reduce fire behavior and wildfire risks.
The Forest Service’s 10-year “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” is fueled by Congressional funding and informed by scientific research. It aims to dramatically increase forest health treatments over the next decade.
To be fully accountable to the “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” objectives, the Forest Service is using metrics to quantify specific outcomes of our work. We are measuring wildfire risk and landscape conditions before and after treatment to understand how our work, and other naturally occurring landscape disturbances like wildfires and insect outbreaks, is changing risk and resilience over time.
Knowing the outcomes of our fuel treatments and landscape disturbances will allow the Forest Service to:
know whether we are doing the right work in the right places;
communicate clearly about our “Wildfire Crisis Strategy” landscape accomplishments and
ensure we are spending Congressional funding wisely.
Working with states, tribes, and other partners, the agency is focusing on protecting communities and critical infrastructure and enhancing forest resilience in areas facing the most immediate wildfire threats.
“The Forest Service has no authority to let fires burn millions of acres — misappropriating tax dollars and recklessly destroying our natural resources. It’s an inverse condemnation of private property and wanton destruction of public resources, pure and simple.” ~ Frank Carroll
Agitator Frank Carroll, whom Dana Tibbitts with the Nevada Globe refers to as a “Chief Forester,” is an active part of this “discussion” in the Tahoe Basin and in New Mexico and other states, advising forest owners who hire him and assisting people in suing the Forest Service over losses resulting from escaped prescribed fires or managed fires that burned more acreage than Carroll thinks they should have. In her report, Tibbitts quotes anonymous sources to claim that FS Chief Randy Moore’s “Burn Back Better” letter (the annual fire-related “letter of intent”) has “caused a firestorm among firefighters and Forest Service veterans nationwide.”
Some of Tibbitts’ anonymous sources are associated with the “National Wildfire Institute,” founded by Bruce Courtright (retired FS Deputy Chief for Management Improvement) and Michael Rains — who at one time directed the USFS Forest Products Lab. Char Miller in the Los Angeles Times refers to the group as “a suppression-friendly bloc of retired Forest Service officials,” but they don’t seem to have a website or any publicly visible managers or founders besides Rains and Courtright.
Some other more widely respected retired fire experts disagree, and they’ve written here before on this topic, citing the founder of the U.S. Forest Service Gifford Pinchot. “The debate within the agency defies permanent resolution,” writes Char Miller,”not least because deference to political exigencies is baked into the Forest Service’s DNA. For that, we can thank, or blame, Pinchot.”
Miller is a senior fellow of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, and a fellow with the Forest History Society. “In an 1899 article in NationalGeographic,” he explains, “Pinchot clearly detailed wildfire’s essential role in regenerating forests in the South and mountainous West. But despite this robust ecological evidence, it would be fire’s bad optics that drove his pitch for establishing the Forest Service.” As per the agency’s first manual: “Probably the greatest single benefit derived by the community and the nation from forest reserves is insurance against destruction of property, timber resources, and water supply by fire.”
Carroll and his cohorts, though, claim that the USFS “just gave firefighters license to burn millions of acres of forest and rangelands with zero commitment to putting the fires out.”
Tahoe-Douglas Fire Chief and head of the Northern Nevada Fire Chiefs Association Scott Lindgren said, “The latest forecast and guidance from the Chief is so unhinged from firefighting realities on the ground as to defy rational analysis or practical guidance.”
“It’s caused a firestorm among firefighters and Forest Service veterans nationwide.” ~ Dana Tibbitts
Fire Chief Scott Lindgren, Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District
According to Tibbitts and the NevadaGlobe, USFS Regional Foresters are supposedly enacting a new policy now, calling for all fires in the Tahoe Basin to be risk-assessed and monitored by those same Regional Foresters, “who alone would determine the appropriate response to new fire ignitions.”
Chief Lindgren says allowing fires to burn is criminal and claims that allowing fires to burn means the USFS can count those acres as “treated” in burn quotas ordained by administrators in Washington DC. “These are not treated acres,” he says, “they are destroyed acres!”
Frank Carroll says USFS fire commanders and administrators are using firefighter safety as a false flag to justify wildfire use, even at the expense of civilian lives and devastated communities.
“Firefighter safety is an excuse that is neither safe nor supportable — a feature of the persistent failure to build informed consent and to analyze environmental impacts before letting wildfires burn and then expand them on purpose,” Carroll said. “They’re unilaterally implementing giant prescribed wildfires — consequences be damned.”
According to the anti-managed-fire crowd, the Biden-Harris administration’s plan to Burn Back Better is detailed in Confronting the Wildfire Crisis and lays out a 10-year program to treat 20 million acres of National Forest System lands and 30 million acres of other federal, state, tribal, and private lands.
Randy Moore Letter of Intent 04/24/24 — click to read
More than 2,000 applicants wanted to be a part of the British Columbia Wildfire Service in 2024, the highest number of applicants the service has seen in the past decade. The agency told WildfireToday that the application boost was linked to feedback received from the Expert Task Force on Emergencies established last October by BC Premier David Eby after the province’s historic 2023 wildfire season. The task force issued 31 recommendations, some of which were enacted swiftly ahead of the 2024 wildfire season.
Fire management made numerous enhancements to the Service’s wildland firefighter recruitment and hiring process as a result of the recommendations. Upgrades included expanding First Nations boot camps, extending the hiring period for new recruits, and encouraging applicants to indicate their work location preference.
The Service directly attributed the improvements to their having a full staff of 162 Initial Attack Crews and 30 Unit Crews in 2024, compared with the 149 Initial Attack Crews and 30 Unit Crews in 2023. Approximately 1,300 fire crew positions are employed directly with the Service, including an additional 500 permanent staff and 300 seasonal positions; 250 new recruits were invited by the Service from its New Recruit Boot Camps and First Nations Boot Camps this spring. The provincial 2024 budget provided $38 million to support stable, year-round staffing, including fire crew leaders and frontline staff who work in structure protection, prevention, risk reduction, and wildfire land-based recovery.
“People living in First Nations, along with rural and remote communities bear a disproportionate impact from the rising threat of wildfires,” said Wayne Schnitzler, task force member and executive director of First Nations’ Emergency Services Society. “I’m pleased to see the Province is boosting recruitment initiatives, including expanding First Nations boot camps as recommended by the Premier’s expert task force on emergencies. These initiatives break down barriers and pave the way for increased participation of Indigenous peoples as wildland firefighters.”
Apart from hiring, the Service said it will continue to implement numerous task force recommendations through 2024, including:
Launching a wildfire training and education center at Thompson Rivers University
Increasing new technology use to predict wildfire movement and growth
Increasing community evacuee support funding
Increasing the volunteer pool to support evacuees
Boosting wildland firefighting fleet and equipment
Enhancing wildfire recruitment tactics
BC Wildfire Service airtankers, meanwhile, are conducting practice flights from Kamloops and Penticton airports in the afternoons. The BCWS said airtankers out of Kamloops are flying the east side of Adams Lake, and the Penticton aircraft will conduct practice about 40 nautical miles east of Penticton.
CastanetKamloops.net reported that BCWS noted the exact location and timing of tanker practices are subject to change depending on weather and other conditions; the practices don’t involve active fire. After six days with no flying activity, practices are run to make sure aviation teams are ready to respond. “It is important for air attack officers and pilots to practice, as it allows them to remain proficient and prepared to respond to active wildfires,” BCWS said. “Practices also ensure the aircraft are mechanically sound and ready to respond.”
