Wildfire Today

Maui agencies stall investigators

Kelly AnderssonNovember 29, 2023November 29, 2023WildfireHawaii, Lahaina, Maui2 Comments

The Honolulu Civil Beat has reported that three county agencies on the island of Maui have been subpoenaed by the state attorney general’s office after failing to provide information needed for the state investigation into the August wildfires.

The hurricane-driven Maui firestorm was the worst fire disaster in the U.S. in over a century; the New York Times reported on August 13 that fatalities resulting from the Maui fires had surpassed that of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California; it was the deadliest wildfire since the 1918 Cloquet inferno in Minnesota killed hundreds of people. Both locals and experts were pleading with tourists from the U.S. mainland and elsewhere to cancel vacation plans and spare locals and emergency responders the drain on scarce resources. Hotels and other lodging options on Maui were scrambling to shelter evacuees and the suddenly homeless.

A local CBS affiliate reported that dozens of homes and businesses were destroyed on the western part of the island of Maui, the second largest and third most populated island in the state. HawaiiNewsNow reported that witnesses described apocalyptic scenes; residents said an overwhelmed fire force, fighting flames all day in powerful winds, could do little as flames ripped through and leveled most of the historic district of Lahaina.

Not quite four months later, the state investigation is focused on fire locations and a timeline of events, and it’s still lacking critical facts, according to the Fire Safety Research Institute, which was hired by the state’s attorney general. “Until that happens, this critical process cannot move forward,” said Attorney General Anne Lopez. She said some Maui agencies have cooperated with investigators, but that subpoenas were issued to the Maui Emergency Management Agency, the Maui Department of Public Works and the Maui Department of Water Supply. The Honolulu Civil Beat said it contacted all three agencies and got no response from any of them.

Mahina Martin with Mayor Richard Bissen’s office said the county has “cooperated fully” with the investigation but that the county has not shared everything investigators have requested. She explained that some items were submitted to investigators, about 20 more are pending, and another dozen require federal Department of Homeland Security clearance before they can be produced. She said investigators have finished more than 90 interviews of county personnel.

Civil Beat asked the attorney general’s office what information it is seeking through the subpoenas but they declined. In the aftermath of the historic fires, Civil Beat filed records requests with the Maui Emergency Management Agency — including text messages, emergency operations center activity logs, requests for assistance to the state and its continuity plan, and an outline of who is in charge if top leadership is absent, as was the case on August 8 when the fires started. MEMA has not provided any of these records.

A report by The Hill said the fires damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 structures and burned over 2,000 acres, according to FEMA records. The rebuilding could cost upward of $5 billion.

Other Maui agencies, meanwhile, have handed over requested information to investigators and the AG’s office. “We appreciate the cooperation of the Maui fire and police departments, and while we continue to work through some issues, their leaders and line responders have been transparent and cooperative,” Lopez said.

Wildfire exposure felt unequally among elderly, low-income populations

Hunter BasslerNovember 28, 2023November 29, 2023Researchsocial factors, wildfire vulnerability1 Comment

Around 90 percent of all people exposed to wildfires over the past 23 years lived in either California, Oregon, or Washington. Among those, researchers found a disproportionate number were poor, a racial minority, disabled, or over the age of 65.

A recent study examined the “social vulnerability” of the people exposed to wildfires over the last two decades. Social vulnerability describes how persons with certain social, economic, or demographic traits were more susceptible to harm from hazards including wildfires or other natural disasters.

From 2000 to 2021, the number of people in the western United States who lived in fire-affected areas increased by 185 percent, while structure losses from wildfires increased by 246 percent. The vulnerability of the people living there, however, isn’t well known despite these populations potentially never recovering after a disaster strikes.

Researchers asked whether highly vulnerable people were disproportionately exposed to wildfire, how vulnerability has changed over the past 20 years, whether population changes before a fire alter the vulnerability of the population, and whether social vulnerability of people exposed to fires was equal among states.

Each of the three West Coast states recorded disproportionate wildfire exposure of the socially vulnerable; Oregon and Washington had more than 40 percent of their exposed population being highly vulnerable while California had around 8 percent of of those exposed considered highly vulnerable. The most vulnerable populations were also those with low income, while age, minority status, and disability also affected populations’ ability to cope after wildfire.

The number of highly vulnerable people exposed to fire in the three states also increased by 249 percent over the past two decades. An increase in social vulnerability of populations in burned areas was the main contributor to increased exposure in California, while Oregon and Washington saw wildfires increasingly encroaching on vulnerable population areas.

“Our analysis highlights the need to increase understanding of the social characteristics that affect vulnerability, to inform effective mitigation and adaptation strategies,” the study said. “Particular attention to residents who are older, living with a disability, living in group quarters, and with limited English-speaking skills may be warranted, and cultural differences need to be addressed for effective policy development and response.”

Other research published earlier this year, The Path of Flames: Understanding and Responding to Fatal Wildfires, found unequal access and assistance could also play a role in who survives and who dies during catastrophic wildfires. In the study, researchers found that for many of the Paradise, California residents who died in the 2018 Camp Fire, the inability to evacuate on their own was a major factor in their deaths.

Another

Enviros sue Park Service over planting sequoias

Kelly AnderssonNovember 28, 2023December 1, 2023Wildfirelawsuit, NPS, sequoias1 Comment

The National Park Service plans to replant sequoia groves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, where fires in 2020 and 2021 caused lasting damage to sequoia groves on federal land, but environmentalist groups in California say it would set a legal precedent and be a huge mistake.

Four groups filed suit against the NPS on November 17, saying the agency’s efforts violate the law, because designated wilderness areas prohibit human involvement in the ecosystem — even if it includes planting trees.

Three fires in two years that killed giant sequoia trees. The darker green areas represent groves of giant sequoias.

Surveys of sequoias on NPS land found that in 2020 and 2021, almost 20 percent of all giant sequoias in their natural range that were over 4 feet in diameter or more were killed by fire (and neglect) or were expected to die in the next few years. In 2020, surveyors estimated that 10 to 14 percent of the entire Sierra Nevada population of giant sequoias over 4 feet in diameter were killed in the Castle Fire. The following year, the KNP Complex and the Windy Fire burned between 2200 and 3600 sequoias over 4 feet in diameter; those sequoias were killed or are expected to die within 5 years.

CBS News reported on the project a year ago:

The NPS announced the seedling-planting project and said it was “concerned that natural regeneration may not be sufficient to support self-sustaining groves into the future, particularly as the fires killed an unprecedented number of reproductive sequoia trees in the groves themselves.”

Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, one of the groups that is suing, disputes that conclusion. Sequoias actually “depend on high-intensity fire in order to reproduce effectively,” Hanson told CNN. “Nature doesn’t need our help. We are not supposed to be getting involved with tending it like a garden.”

Advocates at Wilderness Watch, Sequoia Forest Keeper, and the Tule River Conservancy first sued the NPS in September to stop a separate project by the agency to cut and burn trees in the same designated wilderness areas, cutting on about 1000 acres of forest land and designating 20,000 additional acres as available to “manager-ignited fires and associated activity,” according to the complaint.

“Recently burned groves are RESTORING THEMSELVES — as they have done for more than one hundred centuries!” according to the Sequoia Portal, whose mission is to add existing roadless areas of the Sequoia National Park, National Forest, and National Monument to the National Wilderness Preservation System. “Millions of sequoia seedlings carpet these burned groves,” says the Portal. “Do they think the public is stupid enough to think that any agency can replace full-grown 3200-year-old red barked sequoias? ALL the iconic ancient giants started as tiny seedlings, and they are already growing — immediately seeded by their scorched giant sequoia parents! As it has always been in the groves. And the majority of the largest giants are NOT DEAD.”

The John Muir Project, a nonprofit focused on protecting federal forests, joined the lawsuit on November 17, amending it to include the sequoia replanting project as part of the complaint. The groups now jointly accuse the NPS of illegally encroaching on federally protected land in both of the projects.

Firefighter on the Windy Fire applies water on a burning giant sequoia tree. Photo uploaded to InciWeb Oct. 11, 2021. — Firefighter on the 2021 Windy Fire applies water on a burning giant sequoia. InciWeb photo

The complaint in U.S. District Court in Fresno is an addendum to a suit filed earlier this year that challenged the NPS for other work in wilderness areas of Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. Besides planting seedlings, NPS crews have been thinning and burning around sequoia groves to reduce wildfire risk, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Both the fire-prevention work and the tree-replanting project followed in the aftermath of fires that wiped out unprecedented numbers of sequoias.

NPS staff declined to comment on the lawsuit, but confirmed that replanting had already begun in two sequoia groves back in mid-October, before the latter complaint was filed.

“The Park Service has to abide by the 1964 Wilderness Act,” said Kevin Proescholdt, conservation director at Wilderness Watch. “We should still allow these natural ecosystems to respond as they want to the changes brought about by the changing climate. The more that agencies will allow natural fire to burn and perform its role, the better these wilderness forests will be,” he said.

The groups claim the projects were approved after required processes of environmental review and public engagement were circumvented by declaring they were “emergency” projects that would not have to meet those requirements.

The NPS said in its project announcement it would replant only in areas that field surveys showed insufficient natural regeneration to successfully re-establish, as they would if they hadn’t experienced severe fire effects in recent fires.

timber

After 150 years, wolves back in southern California — thanks to wildfire

Hunter BasslerNovember 25, 2023WildfireCalifornia, Windy Fire, wolves6 Comments

Wildfires don’t “destroy” the landscapes they burn through.

Wildfires can kill trees, vegetation, and occasionally wildlife. Flames can burn down homes and businesses in towns and neighborhoods. They can even level entire city blocks.

But wildfires don’t “destroy” acres of land. More often than not, fire paves the way for something new to take root; to grow back.

A new thing has taken root in the burn scar of southern California’s 2021 Windy Fire. The lightning-caused wildfire, which burned just north of the 2016 Cedar Fire east of Porterville, burned nearly 100,000 acres of the Tule River Indian Reservation and the Sequoia National Forest, killing an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the world’s giant sequoia population.

A keystone species — an organism that helps define an entire ecosystem — is calling the fire area home again, 150 years after being hunted and driven out. A pack of gray wolves, one adult female and four cubs, has been seen in the area, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). The pack is officially the state’s southernmost wolf pack and is more than 200 miles from the nearest separate wolf pack.

“CDFW investigated the reported location, found wolf tracks and other signs of wolf presence, and collected 12 scat and hair samples from the immediate area for genetic testing,” according to the agency. “The new pack consists of at least one adult female, who is a direct descendant of California’s first documented wolf in the state in recent history.”

This image is the first photo of the pack’s adult female:

Southern California wolf photo by Michelle Harris, Colibri Ecological Consulting

While the wolves’ return to the area is historically and ecologically significant, wolves finding home in a burn scar is reportedly a common occurrence, according to an article from Scientific American.

A lack of trees allows more sunlight to hit the soil and causes plants to sprout. The plants attract deer and other species, offering wolves ample eating opportunities. Burn scars can also act as prime den sites for wolves, with clear forests offering less obstructed views of their surroundings, intruders, and predators. And wolves aren’t the only animals to take advantage of a post-wildfire landscape.

“Other animals, such as wild turkeys, are attracted to areas soon after fire because they forage on seeds and invertebrates on the ground in the blackened areas,” said Chris Moorman, a professor of fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology at NC State University. Low-intensity prescribed fires can also increase abundance and diversity of certain plant species in forest understories.

west of Kernville

Pre-colonial frequency RxFire needed to save Western forests, study confirms

Hunter BasslerNovember 20, 2023November 20, 2023Prescribed FireNative Americans, prescribed fire, prevention14 Comments

In 1993, District Manager John Koehler was in the midst of a shift in popular fire management practices. In his position with the Florida Forest Service (then the Division of Forestry) he’d noticed a new trend developing among the country’s wildfire managers, but he found there was little data to support their claims. So he decided to conduct a study to either verify or debunk the usefulness of prescribed burns.

Koehler wasn’t the first to gain interest in whether the historical practice of prescribed burning was as effective as people claimed. Fire Scientist Robert Martin, in his 1988 study, found that prescribed burning reduced the number of acres burned per wildfire, but said the practice’s effect on wildfire occurrence was “at best, speculative.” Forester James Kerr Brown, in his 1989 study, said a prescribed burning program would not have prevented the disastrous Yellowstone fires that had burned the year before.

Koehler was less than impressed by either study. He wanted to learn whether prescribed fires held quantifiable, tangible benefits – which neither study supplied. To compile hard data, Koehler used nine years’ worth of Florida Forest Service fire statistics to determine whether prescribed burns were affecting the frequency and size of wildfires at all. His study would go on to produce the hard data he was looking for, concluding that in every area where prescribed burns occurred, decreases were recorded in the total number of wildfires, the number of acres burned, and the average number of acres burned per wildfire.

“Prescribed burning will not eliminate wildfires, but this practice does reduce the threat posed from wildfires,” Koehler said.

At the end of his study, he recommended more research focused on quantifying benefits of prescribed burning as a prevention tool. Fast-forward 30 years, and Koehler would get his wish after a team of researchers on the other side of the country completed one of the most comprehensive examinations of prescribed burns’ effect on future wildfires.

The new research, “Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests,” was published in the journal Science by Biostatistician Xiao Wu from Columbia University and a team of Stanford researchers. In the study, the team analyzed 20 years of satellite data on fire activity across more than 62,000 miles of California forests to determine whether intentional low-intensity burns mitigate the consequences of the increasing frequency of severe wildfires.

Their conclusions were the same that Koehler had heard wildfire managers espousing decades before: prescribed
burns help prevent future wildfires.

In conifer forests, they found, areas that have recently burned at low intensity are 64 percent less likely to burn at high intensity in the following year relative to unburned synthetic control areas – and this protective effect against high-intensity fires persists for at least 6 years.

The study not only found prescribed burns widely successful in California, but also showed that they’re a necessary practice vital to conifer forests’ health, something Native American tradition has known for centuries.

The study does not shy away from referencing previous case studies that indicate frequent and low-intensity fires were the norm before the forceful removal of numerous Native American tribes from California. Previous research from Ecologist Alan Taylor shows that fire regime changes over the past 400 years likely resulted from socioecological changes rather than climate changes. Fire Scientist Scott Stephens found around 4.4 million acres of California had burned annually before 1800, in part helped by Native American cultural burning. Geographer Clarke Knight determined that indigenous burning practices promoted long-term forest stability in the forests of California’s Klamath Mountains for at least one millennium.

“The resilience of western North American forests depends critically on the presence of fire at intervals and at intensities that approximate presuppression and precolonial conditions that existed prior to the extirpation of Native Americans from ancestral territories in California,” Wu wrote.

RxFire training, Grand Canyon National Park ~ NPS photo

The research led the study’s authors to recommend a continuation of the policy transition from fire suppression to restoration – through the usage of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. The maximum benefits a prescribed fire program can yield, however, are dependent on whether the practice becomes a sustained tradition. If sustained, prescribed burning could have an ongoing protective effect on nearly 4,000 square miles of California’s forests.

Getting to that point would require many more resources. As pointed out in Fire Scientist Crystal Kolden’s 2018 research, management practices in the West have still failed to wholeheartedly adopt and increase prescribed burning despite calls from scientists and policy experts, including the 30-year-old call from Koehler.

The result is the continual compounding
of the ongoing fire deficit.

“Federal funding for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction activities has been drastically depleted over the past two decades as large wildfires force federal agencies to expend allocated funds on suppression rather than prevention,” said Kolden.

She also gave a well-deserved shoutout to fire managers in the Southeast U.S., crediting them with accomplishing double the number of prescribed burns compared with the entire rest of the U.S. between 1998 and 2018. “This may be one of many reasons the Southeastern states have experienced far fewer wildfire disasters relative to the Western U.S. in recent years,” Kolden said.

Even as the USFS and other federal agencies continue to tout prescribed burns in their national strategies, it won’t be until the agencies collectively create policy changes and budgetary allocations sufficient that prescribed burning is used at a scale in which it can create meaningful prevention. Without those meaningful changes, the wealth of prescribed burn research clearly shows that more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.

Lomakatsi summit at Sun River focused on fire

Kelly AnderssonNovember 18, 2023Prescribed FireLomakatsi, Paiute, rxfire

Inside the Homestead Conference Hall at Sunriver Resort in central Oregon last week, six Native Americans sang, danced, and drummed with volume enough to rattle windows. The powerful performance by the Mountain Top Singers of the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe kicked off two days of panel discussions, networking events, and cultural celebration for tribal and nontribal guests at a Lomakatsi fire learning summit.

Leaders and youth representatives from 17 tribes in the Pacific Northwest were involved in the event, according to a Bend Bulletin report. Participants focused on improving ecological health of Pacific Northwest forests, mainly with the knowledgeable and responsible use of fire.

For more than a century, immediate suppression of wildfire was the go-to solution enacted by the Forest Service and other agencies after lightning ignitions or human-caused starts. Wildland officials and scientists now agree that over-suppression has caused forest health to decline and has set the stage for the megafires that now rage across the West, killing humans and destroying homes and burning huge swaths of land from Mexico to northern Canada.

Jefferson Public Radio recently reported that even people who disagree vehemently about the details of the best ways to manage forests can always find some ground on managing wildlands to be more fire resilient.

The Lomakatsi Restoration Project’s Tribal Ecological Forestry Training Program focuses on collaboration with tribes and tribal communities through ecological restoration initiatives. The Program is heavily involved in the restoration work required to make forests fire resilient, using both modern technology and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) from the region’s tribes, who for millennia used fire to manage the forests where they lived.

Lomakatsi film: Tribal Hands on the Land

Lomakatsi Founder and Executive Director Marko Bey and Tribal Partnerships Director Belinda Brown talked to Jefferson Public Radio about training and a film about it, and their expanding efforts to bring more indigenous people into the fold. Lomakatsi welcomes a new cohort of young tribal adults this fall, and is especially grateful to videographer Ammon Cluff for bringing this video to life.

Crew members also contributed to collaborative landscape-scale restoration projects across southern Oregon, including the West Bear All-Lands Restoration Project, Rogue Forest Restoration Initiative, Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project, and post-fire restoration Bear Creek, as part of the Ashland Creek Ponds Riparian and Ecocultural Restoration Project.

Lomakatsi operates programs across the ancestral lands of aboriginal peoples who lived and live in the watersheds of the Willamette River, Rogue River, Klamath River, Umpqua River, and Pit River, in what is now called Oregon and California. From sagebrush hillsides and mixed conifer forests, to oak woodlands and riverine systems, they offer respect, recognition, and gratitude to the past, present, and future inhabitants of these landscapes, to whom they dedicate this work.

“Tribes have for time immemorial carefully managed these landscapes with carefully applied fire, with Indigenous practices. The agencies have a real interest in that at this time,” said Marko Bey, founder and executive director of Lomakatsi, the nonprofit group that organized the event in Sunriver.

Bey said the summit was an opportunity to bring tribal members together to share different skills, traditions, and adaptive management strategies. He believes that tribes can play a central role in national management of forest health.

Representatives from all nine federally recognized tribes of Oregon attended the summit. Eight additional tribes with ancestral lands in and adjacent to Oregon were also present.

Myra Johnson-Orange, 74, an elder from the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, said she was pleased the conference brought together Native and non-Native people for joint learning panels.

“Sometimes, non-Native people need to understand better where we are coming from as Native people,” she said, “and how we understand the land and how we have taken care of it since time immemorial. We learn from agencies, but they are learning from Natives, too, how we need to be considered and consulted.”

Lomakatsi operates programs across the ancestral lands of aboriginal peoples who lived and live in the watersheds of the Willamette River, Rogue River, Klamath River, Umpqua River, and Pit River, in what is now called Oregon and California. From sagebrush hillsides and mixed conifer forests, to oak woodlands and riverine systems, they offer respect, recognition, and gratitude to the past, present, and future inhabitants of these landscapes, to whom they dedicate this work.

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