A firefighter on the Squires Fire in Pender County, North Carolina. NCFS photo.
From the North Carolina Forest Service:
Mop-up efforts on the Squires Timber Fire in Pender County concluded this week and it’s now in monitor status. NCFS rangers are keeping an eye on this to make sure it stays out. About three acres of the wildfire were in a Carolina bay with heavy organic soils which made for challenging control as the fire burned as much as two feet deep. The 8-acre wildfire began April 29 but flared back up after long, hot, and dry days. The initial cause was an escaped debris burn.
A firefighter works on the Squires Fire in Pender County, North Carolina while wearing wildland firefighter personal protective equipment. NCFS photo.A dozer puts in a fireline on the Squires Fire in Pender County, North Carolina. NCFS photo.
Map showing heat detected on the Ranch and River Fires at 3:31 a.m. PDT July 28, 2018, about 15 hours after they started. Click to enlarge.
Investigators for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, CAL FIRE, determined that the Ranch Fire that started east of Ukiah, California July 27, 2018 began when a man used a hammer to drive a 24-inch metal stake into the ground.
An hour after the Ranch Fire began during Red Flag Warning conditions, the River Fire started about 13 miles to the south, west of Clear Lake. The two fires were later managed as the Mendocino Complex, named after the county in which they started. The Ranch Fire consumed 410,203 acres and damaged or destroyed 280 structures.
The investigators talked with a property owner who explained that he was installing a shade cover over a water tank when he agitated an underground yellow jacket’s nest. Being allergic to bees, he retreated until after they stopped swarming, then using a claw hammer he drove the metal stake 10 to 12 inches into the ground to plug the hole. He smelled smoke and saw a fire that was about two feet by two feet. His efforts to put it out with a shovel and two different water lines were not successful.
While he was riding his four-wheeler to try to get out ahead of the fire, the vehicle rolled downhill, lodging itself between the water tank and a cut bank.
The investigator said that at the time of the interview the man appeared to be suffering from smoke inhalation and heat exhaustion but he refused an ambulance and medical treatment.
The recently released investigator’s report was written March 28, 2019.
The red line on the map was the perimeter of the Ranch Fire at 9:15 p.m. PDT August 26, 2016, a month after the fires started. The white line was the perimeter on August 14. The red and yellow dots represent heat detected by a satellite in the 24 hour period ending at 2:31 a.m. PDT August 27, 2018. Click to enlarge.
Hearing about technology for wildland fire, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee June 5, 2019.
This week the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing in Washington about new technologies that can aid wildland firefighters. The Committee invited companies to describe new systems that can help firefighters communicate and improve their situational awareness. Legislation signed by the President in March requires the federal land management agencies to adopt within 6 to 24 months systems that can track in real time both the advancing edge of a wildfire and all of the firefighting resources working on the incident. Firefighters have been killed when these important facts about a dangerous fire were not known, due to smoke, darkness, or terrain.
In the video below we see interviews with the representatives of six companies describing their systems that may improve the situational awareness of firefighters.
Only three of the 20 Senators that are members of the committee attended the hearing, Cory Gardner (CO), Maria Cantwell (WA), and Martin Heinrich (NM). Approximately 20 Senators sent one or more members of their staff to observe.
In addition to the six companies that appear in the video, other organizations that had exhibits and made presentations in the hearing were the National Weather Service, Rave Mobile Safety, Vulcan Fire, and Simtable.
After assessing the exposure to wildfire of communities across the Pacific Northwest Region, Oregon and Washington, the 50 most-threatened communities in each state were identified.
In the broadest sense, wildfire exposure encompasses the likelihood of wildfire burning a given location on the landscape, and the potential intensity of a wildfire if one were to occur. For this assessment the researchers focused only on wildfire likelihood because the effect of fire intensity on home loss rate is not well studied, and because the inclusion of intensity for this and similar assessments did not influence the conclusions. Wildfire likelihood is measured by annual burn probability, a measure generated by comprehensive simulation of wildfire occurrence and spread (see section below on Wildfire hazard simulations).
The 10 communities in Washington with greatest cumulative housing-unit exposure to wildfire. The “mean of exposed housing units” rank indicates the mean (typical) burn probability of housing units within each community.The 10 communities in Oregon with greatest cumulative housing-unit exposure to wildfire. The “mean of exposed housing units” rank indicates the mean (typical) burn probability of housing units within each community.
The research was commissioned by the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest Region.
More details, including lists of the 50 most threatened communities in both Oregon and Washington, can be found here.
Therefore, prescribed fires to protect communities can protect residents in more ways than one
Prescribed fire at Wolf Trap National Park, April, 2018. NPS photo by Nathan King.
Researchers studying the effects of smoke on children found prescribed fire smoke to be less harmful than smoke from wildfires. The Stanford University study looked at three groups of children:
Those who were exposed to smoke from a prescribed fire;
Children exposed to smoke from a wildfire in which no structures burned; and,
Children that were not exposed to smoke.
Sometimes fire personnel refer to a prescribed fire as “good fire”. Now they may call smoke from a planned burn as “good smoke”. A way to look at this research is that removing hazardous fuels near a community is a way to reduce the threat of a wildfire spreading into the town and burning structures or entrapping and killing people. And, removing the fuels with good fire rather than allowing a wildfire to burn the same area, exposes residents to less harmful smoke. For fire-prone areas, it is not IF it burns, it’s WHEN. Do you want your smoke now under controlled conditions or later, possibly under extreme conditions?
From Stanford University:
…The study was published May 30 in the European Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. It was conducted in Fresno, California, a city with high air pollution levels due to its topography and other sources, including traffic and agriculture.
“This study suggests that exposure to wildfire smoke is detrimental above and beyond poor air quality,” said the lead author, Mary Prunicki, MD, PhD, an instructor of medicine.
The study’s senior author is Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and of pediatrics and director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research at Stanford.
Native Americans traditionally used controlled burns to manage California’s forests, but throughout the early 20thcentury, wildfires were widely suppressed. This began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when scientists recognized fire as a normal part of forest ecology. Recent wildfires have brought more attention to the possible benefits of prescribed burns as a way to reduce fuel levels and wildfire risk, but not everyone is enthusiastic.
Opposition to controlled burns
“We know that there’s some public opposition to doing prescribed burning,” Prunicki said. “It’s our feeling that prescribed burning, because it’s so controlled, may expose people to fewer health effects than wildfires.” Prescribed burns are of lower intensity and are permitted only when weather conditions allow the fire to be contained.
In the study, the researchers compared blood samples from three groups of children, all of whom were 7 or 8 years old. One group of 32 children had been exposed to smoke from a 553-acre prescribed burn that occurred in March 2015; a second group of 36 children had been exposed to smoke from a 415-acre wildfire in September 2015. Both fires were about 70 miles away from Fresno, and blood samples were collected from the children within three months of each fire.
The study also included blood samples from a control group of 18 children who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and had not been exposed to wildfire or prescribed-burn smoke.
The researchers measured air pollution levels recorded at four monitoring stations in Fresno and estimated pollution levels at the children’s homes during the fires based on how far they lived from the stations.
Pollutant exposures were higher in the wildfire group compared to the prescribed-burn group. The air pollutants measured included nitrogen dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, elemental carbon, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.
Wildfire smoke exposure was associated with lower blood levels of type-1 T helper cells, a group of immune cells that are involved in the immune response. Among children exposed to wildfire smoke, the researchers also saw increased methylation of the Foxp3 gene, indicating reduced activity of this gene, which is broadly involved in modulating allergic and other immune responses. The finding of greater Foxp3 methylation is congruent with earlier studies of the effects of air pollution on the immune system, Prunicki noted.
Significance of particulate matter
One important aspect of the study was that the September 2015 wildfire was confined to forested areas and did not burn any structures.
“Particulate matter from wildfires is different from region to region and depends on what is burning,” Prunicki said. “When a wildfire is going through a town, there are a lot of concerns about what happens to the chemicals in people’s homes and cars when they go up in flames.” Smoke from wildfires that burn inhabited areas almost certainly has worse health effects than those found in the current study, she said.
The researchers plan to conduct larger, more detailed studies of the effects of wildfire smoke on health. They will be enrolling healthy people in a trial at Stanford later this summer to collect baseline data from blood samples. When future wildfires affect Bay Area air quality, the participants will be asked to provide follow-up blood samples.
The scientists also plan to research the health effects of using home air purifiers during wildfires, as well as measure the protection offered by N95 masks, with the aim of developing recommendations for when masks should be used by different populations, such as healthy adults, elderly people, children and people with chronic illnesses.
The study’s other Stanford co-authors are biostatistician Justin Lee; life science researcher Xiaoying Zhou, PhD; Francois Haddad, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine; and Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and of radiology.
Combining aerial and terrestrial LIDAR data with new 3D field sampling
By Diane Banegas, Research and Development, U.S. Forest Service
Land managers have a new tool in their firefighting arsenals that models forest fuels in three dimensions. These 3D fuel models have the potential to make firefighting and the management of controlled burns safer and less costly while helping to protect valuable natural resources.
The 3D fuels modeling technique will benefit land managers by allowing firefighters to develop better strategies and helping predict future fire behavior. It was recently tested at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
New 3D fuel modeling techniques help land managers predict future fire behavior. Here, Louise Loudermilk (right) and Christie Hawley (left) collect 3D fuels in the field. Photo courtesy: Susan Prichard, University of Washington.
Managers will be able to input 3D fuels from this research into next-generation fire behavior models. This will allow them to test different ignition patterns for a prescribed burn to see how the resulting fire behaves in 3D.
Running 3D simulations can help firefighting teams develop strategies to manage or extinguish future fires as safely and economically as possible.
“These fire models can output various scenarios of fire behavior that help inform quick management decision making,” said Louise Loudermilk, a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service’s Southern Research Station. The model can also give “burn bosses” choices on selecting the safest approach to meet management and ecological controlled burning objectives while better predicting smoke conditions.
“This work represents a new era in fuels research because it links fuel ecology with fire behavior. In fire behavior models, fuels traditionally are overgeneralized and have been unable to represent how fuels predict fire behavior. Now fuels can be represented dynamically in three dimensions,” Loudermilk said. “This advancement, which has taken over 10 years to achieve, is like going from a board game to a realistic video game.”
Louise Loudermilk ignited a prescribed fire with a drip torch for management and ecological objectives. A new 3D fuel model can help make the management of controlled burns safer and less costly. USDA Forest Service photo by Christie Hawley.
The modeling technique combines aerial and terrestrial LIDAR data with new 3D field sampling, historical data about when an area last burned and simulation modeling to provide 3D fuel characterization at multiple scales. Data collected from a landscape of interest includes vegetation type, fuel mass and fuel volume, all represented in 3D.
Loudermilk co-authored a research paper about a new method of field sampling used for this modeling technique. “The method works equally well across small or large landscapes,” she said. “Our goal is to provide big data collections that will one day be downloadable for anyone to use.” She also contributed to a book chapter about the 3D modeling technique and the importance of fuels research. A related paper in Forest Ecology and Management explains how the status and trends of plant diversity can be monitored at a landscape-scale, information valuable for 3D fuels monitoring.
Ultimately, extensive 3D data collected on fuels will be available for landscapes across the United States. Any land manager will be able to select the data for their area and run 3D fire simulations for educational or fire management purposes.
The success of these projects has been dependent on Loudermilk’s extensive network of federal, state and private organization collaborator
Output from processing of terrestrial laser scanning data, representing an important fuel characteristic “surface area” as illustrated by the different colors. This is input to next-generation fire behavior models. Image courtesy Eric Rowell, Tall Timbers Research Station.