Reports can be customized for every city, county, and state
Homes at risk from wildfire in Yreka, CA. An excerpt from a report by Headquarters Economics.
Headwaters Economics has developed new Wildfire Risk report system for communities. Reports can be customized for every U.S. city, county, and state which provide information about wildfire risk and potentially vulnerable populations. It uses public data from the USDA Forest Service, US Census Bureau, and other sources and is one of several reports available in their Economic Profile System.
Headwaters Economics explains that they created this new report because wildfire risk is more than a physical hazard. Economic, demographic, and social vulnerabilities put some people disproportionately at risk. Information in their reports can help elected officials, land use planners, fire personnel, and community health organizations to:
prioritize and direct resources to the people and places most at-risk;
customize and target outreach and education efforts; and
tailor wildfire response and operational plans.
The graphic at the top of this article is a portion of the 15-page report for Yreka, California, which can be downloaded here.
Arizona Central also has a system for generating data about wildfire risk for individual communities in the Western United States.
A firefighter battles flames at the Camp Fire. Photo by FirePhotoGirl used with permission.
On a brisk November morning in 2018, a fire sparked in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, California, a region nestled against the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Fueled by a sea of tinder created by drought, and propelled by powerful gusts, the flames grew and traveled rapidly. In less than 24 hours, the fire had swept through the town of Paradise and other communities, leaving a charred ruin in its wake.
The Camp Fire was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018 and, having caused 85 deaths and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, it became both the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history, two records the fire still holds today.
What made the Camp Fire so devastating? And what lessons can we learn to prevent another disaster of this scale? Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have begun to answer these questions by investigating the conditions leading up to the fire and meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events describing the first 24 hours of its progression. A new report containing the timeline identifies areas where more research is needed to improve life safety and reduce structural losses. It also offers a detailed look at how a large and deadly fire advances — information that will become increasingly valuable as fire seasons continue to intensify.
“Going forward, there’s no reason to believe that fire activity and severity is going to lessen anytime soon. We’re never going to get rid of wildfires, natural or human-caused. But we can learn how to live with and work together to mitigate them.” —Steven Hawks, CAL FIRE chief and report co-author
“The information we collected on the timeline is extremely powerful by itself, not only for Paradise but for other similar communities, to help them understand what they may encounter and better prepare, whether it is at a community or at the first responder level,” said NIST fire protection engineer Alexander Maranghides, who led the timeline reconstruction.
To piece together the puzzle of the Camp Fire, the team carried out discussions with 157 first responders, local officials and utilities personnel who were present during the fire. The team documented sightings of fire or smoke and efforts to fight the fire or evacuate, as well as insights into community preparedness and weather conditions.
NIST researcher and fire protection engineer Alexander Maranghides views a landscape marred by the Camp Fire during a field data collection deployment. Credit: NIST.
The researchers sought to back up observations made during the fire with additional data sources before adding new puzzle pieces to the timeline. With the help of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), Paradise Police Department and others, the team gained access to and reviewed large data sets, including radio logs, 911 calls, dashboard and body camera recordings, and drone and satellite images. They also looked to images in social and news media to corroborate the sightings of discussion participants.
By the end of the painstaking process, the authors of the report incorporated more than 2,200 observations into the timeline, which is broken up into 15 separate segments to capture concurrent events throughout different sections of Butte County. Continue reading “Researchers conduct detailed case study of the Camp Fire”
File photo, Wolverine Fire, Chelan Complex, Chelan, WA, Okanogan-Wenatchee NF, 2015. Photo by Kari Greer.
A forestry technician whose primary duties were fighting fire resigned in November after a six-year fire management career in the Pacific Northwest, most recently on the Okanogan-Wenachee National Forest.
The person asked us not to reveal their name and wants to be identified only by the initials, “BC”. The forestry tech had a permanent part-time appointment, guaranteed six months of work each year as a GS-5. They said they had good performance ratings from their supervisor who was hoping the person would come back to work the next season.
They sent us a copy what what was described as their resignation letter, saying, “I am sharing this with you in hopes to shine a brighter light on what I saw in my short time with the agency as shortfalls and areas for improvement.”
Reading the eight to ten issues that led the person to a life-changing decision can perhaps shine a light on conditions facing other federal fire personnel.
Here is the letter. Acronyms that have been replaced with text are in [brackets]:
I will be resigning from the U.S. Forest Service effective immediately due to a multitude of factors including but not limited to-
Lack of a living wage: leading to reliance on [hazard] and [overtime] pay and putting firefighters in dangerous situations when risks to environment is low.
Lack of locality pay.
Chronic prolonged exposure to cancer causing smoke and pollutants.
Lengthening fire season/expectation of pay periods worked.
Lack of financial compensation for being on call for over 6 months straight.
Lack of financial incentive or legal backing for EMT’s such as myself working for Type 2 organizations. Apparently EMT’s on type 1 crews are “worthy” while I’m not. If I’m important enough to be put on an [Incident Action Plan] as an EMT then I’m important enough to be backed by a medical director and paid for my skills.
Minimum wage in Washington being higher than take home pay for GS-5 wages.
Lack of off season support from the Agency (mental health, healthcare, employment/job placement).
I thoroughly appreciate the opportunities that this job and organization have afforded me. I have fought fire in places, and environments that I would have otherwise never seen. I have created bonds and memories that will last a lifetime. And for that I am thankful. However, this organization needs to have a serious moment of introspection; the bread and butter of our firefighting operations across this country are seasonal temporary employees — who are overworked and underpaid.
Things need to change, and I can’t risk my physical, mental, and financial well-being waiting for those changes to occur. My four years with the U.S. Forest Service has been very eye opening to say the least. In order to do what’s best for me and my life, I feel it is time for me to hang up the line gear and move on to more stable and financially rewarding work. I appreciate everyone that I worked with, and for, on the Entiat Ranger District.
West Zone Fire Crew, Umpqua Crew 3, Stone Mountain Fire Protection LLC, Wyoming Hotshots
West Zone Fire Crew. Screenshot from their video below.
Fire crews and organizations have produced some excellent videos showing the highlights of their fire activities in 2020. We like to post them each year, and we used to be able to do it with one article, but so far this year we have found 28 — too many for one article. So this year we will do it intermittently over a two-week period.
SDG&E, PG&E, and SCE release their plans for 2021 and 2022
File photo of powerline routed through trees.
Three of the largest power companies in California expect to spend a total of $15 billion over a two-year period, 2021 through 2022, to prevent wildfire ignitions. In state-required updates to their annual wildfire mitigation plans filed with California’s Public Utilities Commission, San Diego Gas and Electric states they will spend $1.3 billion, Pacific Gas and Electric $10.2 billion, and Southern California Edison $3.5 billion.
The power equipment of the three utilities have been responsible for numerous large, disastrous wildfires.
PG&E, for example, expects to make the following improvements to their systems in 2021:
Implement a new Wildfire Risk Model that can comprehensively assess and prioritize its safety work, including system hardening and enhanced vegetation management. This builds upon the previous model and uses advanced software and machine learning for predicting fire ignitions and improving fire spread simulations for determining the potential impacts of a wildfire.
Install 300 additional weather stations to more precisely forecast the weather that could lead to public safety power shutoff events, to complete the long-term goal of 1,300 total stations.
Install more than 260 devices that limit the size of outages;
Install and deploy microgrids that use generators to keep the electricity on;
Deploy more crews for inspection and restoration efforts;
Convert 23 line-miles of overhead powerlines to underground in Butte County;
“Harden” 180 miles of high risk lines;
Conduct “enhanced vegetation management” on 1,800 miles of high risk lines.
The goal of PG&E’s Meteorology and Fire Science team is to advance operational meteorology and operational decision making to reduce wildfire risk. It is comprised of 15 scientists, most with advanced degrees in scientific fields with diverse backgrounds in operational meteorology, utility meteorology, outage prediction, fire science, data science, cloud computing, atmospheric modeling, application development and data systems development. The team is comprised of alumni from the San Jose State University Fire Weather Research Laboratory (https://www.fireweather.org/), former wildland firefighters, former National Weather Service forecasters, and Veterans of the Marine Corps and United States Air Force.
They observe fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape
2010-2020
For the past few decades, scientists have been using satellite- and airplane-based radar instruments to detect damage caused by wildfires and human-caused blazes. Radar instruments can observe by day or night and can see land through clouds and smoke, so they are helpful for observing fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape.
Landscape ecologist Naiara Pinto and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are now taking a longer view. They are trying to decipher where and how well forests and scrublands are recovering in the years after a fire.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments send out pulses of microwaves that bounce off of Earth’s surfaces. The reflected waves are detected and recorded by the instrument and can help map the shape of the land surface (topography) and the land cover—from cities to ice to forests. By comparing changes in the signals between two separate satellite or airplane overpasses, scientists can observe surface changes like land deformation after earthquakes, the extent of flooding, or the exposure of denuded or bare ground after large fires.
One of the aircraft NASA equips with synthetic aperture radar or other sensors. This is a medium-sized UAV-NASA SIERRA. SIERRA medium UAV at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. (Photograph: NASA.) NASA SIERRA Pilot and Range Safety Officer Mark Sumitch shown for scale.
SAR instruments are carried on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, while NASA currently deploys its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) via research aircraft. NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization are planning to launch the NISAR satellite in 2022.
2010-2020
Mounted on the bottom of NASA research planes, UAVSAR has been flown over the same portions of Southern California several times since 2009. Pinto and JPL colleagues Latha Baskaran, Yunling Lou, and David Schimel analyzed that data and developed a mapping technique to show the different stages of removal and regrowth of vegetation (chapparal and forest).
The maps above are essentially mosaics of the observations across a decade. Radar signals bounce off burned, barren terrain differently than they reflect from unburned, brush-covered hillsides or from fresh growth. The colors indicate the relative amount of vegetation observed by different UAVSAR flights at different times. Yellow lines on the maps indicate the extent of several major fires: Station, Colby, San Gabriel (SG) Complex, La Tuna, and Bobcat.
“Overall, the colors are telling us that the Angeles National Forest contains a patchwork of plant communities at different stages of regeneration,” said Pinto, who is a science coordinator for UAVSAR. For instance, areas with more red had more vegetation in 2010 than they do now. Areas with more blue and green shading had more vegetation (regrowth) in recent years. Yellow indicates areas burned in 2020 that had a higher volume of vegetation in 2010 and 2017 (red+green) but lower volume in 2020 (blue).
2010-2020
The image above illustrates how those maps were assembled. Radar data were collected during UAVSAR flights in 2010, 2017, and 2020 over Angeles National Forest and other areas northeast of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The project has been supported by NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters program, which generates maps and other data products for institutional partners as they work to mitigate and recover from natural hazards and disasters. The SAR technique is still being tested and validated, but the intent is to monitor forest regrowth and fire scar change over time, which are important information for forest and fire managers working to manage risks.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using UAVSAR data and imagery courtesy of Anne Marie Peacock, Naiara Pinto, and Yunling Lou and NASA/Caltech UAVSAR. Story by Michael Carlowicz.
