Above: A rancher burning his field southeast of Grand Junction, Colorado May 8, 2017. A strong wind was keeping the smoke close to the ground.
Satellite time-lapse of West Mims Fire smoke
The new Goes-16 satellite that is still not fully operational captured stunning imagery of the smoke plume from the West Mims Fire blowing over Florida and the Atlantic Ocean.
Smoke from the West Mims Fire in GA drifts over the Atlantic in this geocolor imagery from #GOES16. See more loops @ https://t.co/4iH0okInn7 pic.twitter.com/gdexB7vo9K
— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) May 8, 2017
And the view from the ground:
#firstalertwx close-up view of #WestMimsFire-jumps Highway 94 in Charlton Co., Ga. just north of Fl state line @WOKVNews @NWSJacksonville pic.twitter.com/WQj5qbVNXC
— Mike Buresh (@MikeFirstAlert) May 9, 2017
German ‘hippy’ sentenced to prison for deadly island wildfire
The 27-year-old German cave-dweller who ignited a deadly wildfire while burning used toilet paper on a Spanish island has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Scott Verdine Stumpf admitted last year to accidentally starting the August fire while burning used toilet paper — Spanish media outlets reported he had been living in a nearby cave for an extended period of time. In addition to prison, he was ordered to pay the equivalent of about $2 million U.S. dollars in restitution, local media outlets reported.
The wildfire blackened about 5,000 acres and forced hundreds of evacuations on La Palma, a landmass that is part of Spain’s Canary Islands. Francisco Jose Santana, a park ranger and married father of five, died during firefighting operations.
Tres años de cárcel para el hippy alemán del incendio forestal de La Palma https://t.co/ukwfZ96u98
— ABC.es (@abc_es) May 6, 2017
West Mims Fire in Georgia sends ash to Jacksonville, Florida
The sprawling West Mims Fire that has been burning since April, largely in a south Georgia swamp, broke containment lines on Saturday and sent ash falling as far away as downtown Jacksonville, Florida.
The lightning-caused fire was reported on April 6 in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and has burned more than 135,000 acres. Crews on Saturday dealt with gusty winds and relative humidity levels around 18 percent, which drove the blaze past containment lines and fanned it farther east.
#WestMimsFire at Okefenokee NWR is now 135,391 acres & 12% contained as of 4 PM yesterday afternoon https://t.co/4WScW8WNZx #GAfire #FLfire pic.twitter.com/HBKEJcTbWD
— USFWS Fire SE (@USFWSFireSE) May 7, 2017
“The fire moved aggressively to the east and southeast against an enhanced air and ground attack today,” officials wrote in a Saturday night InciWeb update.
The fire and a blanket of falling ash on Saturday unnerved some residents near downtown Jacksonville, the Florida Times-Union reported.
Similar conditions were forecast for Sunday, and evacuation orders remained in place. Additional heavy air tankers were expected to arrive on Sunday from California and Montana to assist the approximately 535 personnel assigned to the incident.
The West Mims Fire remains just 12 percent contained. No injuries have been reported. Full containment isn’t expected until Nov. 1.
Crews are actively working to stop the #WestMims #wildfire near St. George in Charlton Co. Unless you are evacuating, please stay off roads. pic.twitter.com/RfG5SgN9G8
— GAForestryCommission (@GaTrees) May 6, 2017
Introducing Jason Pohl
Today we’d like to introduce a new member of the Wildfire Today and Fire Aviation team, Jason Pohl. He will be contributing articles beginning May 7 while I am temporarily tied up on a project.
Jason Pohl reports on law enforcement and public safety issues for the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper, which is part of the USA TODAY Network. A 2012 graduate of journalism and sociology at Colorado State University, Pohl has reported in Colorado newsrooms including The Denver Post, Greeley Tribune, and, since March 2014, the Coloradoan. Most recently, Pohl — who has been trained as an EMT and wildland firefighter — embedded for two weeks with a team of firefighters and first responders conducting refugee rescues on the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Libya. He has also written about wildfire, first responder mental health and other public safety, breaking news and accountability topics.
Pohl in December successfully defended his master’s thesis in sociology at Colorado State University. Through dozens of interviews and extensive fieldwork, Pohl investigated emergency evacuation messaging during natural disasters, specifically the 2013 Colorado Floods that came on the heels of devastating wildfires in the state. Outside of journalism, Pohl is an avid marathon runner who enjoys indulging in a craft beer — or three — and exploring Colorado’s high peaks with his wife and adventure partner.
Adaptive resilience to wildfire
Above: Eiler Fire, northern California, August 6, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
As the climate shifts and fires become larger, more resistant to control, and occur over longer fire seasons, protecting private property and adapting to a new paradigm can become more challenging.
A recently published paper written by 12 authors has some insights to the issue that are rarely seen. The title is Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes. The entire 2.7mb paper can be downloaded here.
Below are some excerpts.
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….In delivering this message, we focus specifically on the distinction between specified, adaptive, and transformative resilience (15, 16). Rigorous definition and critical assessment of resilience to wildfire are needed to develop effective policy and management approaches in the context of climate change. We suggest an approach based on the concept of adaptive resilience, or adjusting to changing fire regimes (e.g., shifts in prevailing fire frequency, severity, and size) to reduce vulnerability and build resilience into social–ecological systems (SESs). Adaptive resilience to wildfire means recognizing the limited impact of past fuels management, acknowledging the important role of wildfire in maintaining many ecosystems and ecosystem services, and embracing new strategies to help human communities live with fire. Our discussion focuses on western North American forests but is relevant to fire-influenced ecosystems across the globe. We emphasize that long-term solutions must integrate relevant natural and social science into policies that successfully foster adaptation to future wildfire.
Fire suppression, in addition to past logging and grazing and invasive species, has led to a build-up of fuels in some ecosystems, increasing their vulnerability to wildfire. For example, drier, historically open coniferous forests in the West (“dry forests”) have experienced gradual fuels build-up in response to decades of fire suppression and other land-use practices (8, 22, 23).
Historically, predominantly frequent, low-severity fires killed smaller, less fire-resistant trees and maintained low-density dry forests of larger, fire-resistant trees. Large, high-severity fires now threaten to convert denser, more structurally homogeneous dry forests to nonforest ecosystems, with attendant loss of ecosystem services (24). However, only forests in the Southwest show a clear trend of increasing fire severity over the last three decades, and only a quarter to a third of the area burned in the western United States experienced high severity during that time (25, 26). Although fuels build-up in dry forests can increase the area burned because of higher contagion, the 462% increase in the frequency of large fires in southwestern forests since the 1970s is also a result of an extension of the fire season by 3.6 mo [the average for the western United States is 2.8 mo (21)]. Overall, dry forests account for about half of the total forest burning in the western United States since 1984.
Management guided by specified resilience often values recent ecological and social dynamics, particularly when the goal is the conservation of particular species or landscapes. Such management is often informed by short temporal windows of HRV, or “recent HRV” (rHRV) (Fig. 3). This approach can be useful for responding to fires in the short term. However, when social and environmental conditions change rapidly, this approach may foster management goals that are unrealistic or unsustainable in the long run (48, 49).
Managing Fuels
Limiting Reliance on Fuels Treatments to Alter Regional Fire Trends. Managing forest fuels is often invoked in policy discussions as a means of minimizing the growing threat of wildfire to ecosystems and WUI communities across the West. However, the effectiveness of this approach at broad scales is limited. Mechanical fuels treatments on US federal lands over the last 15 y (2001–2015) totaled almost 7 million ha (Forests and Rangelands, https://www.forestsandrangelands.gov/), but the annual area burned has continued to set records.
Regionally, the area treated has little relationship to trends in the area burned, which is influenced primarily by patterns of drought and warming (2, 3, 20). Forested areas considerably exceed the area treated, so it is relatively rare that treatments encounter wildfire (73). For example, in agreement with other analyses (74), 10% of the total number of US Forest Service forest fuels treatments completed 2004–2013 in the western United States subsequently burned in the 2005–2014 period (Fig. 6). Therefore, roughly 1% of US Forest Service forest treatments experience wildfire each year, on average.
The effectiveness of forest treatments lasts about 10–20 y (75), suggesting that most treatments have little influence on wildfire. Implementing fuels treatments is challenging and costly (7, 13, 76, 77); funding for US Forest Service hazardous fuels treatments totaled $3.2 billion over the 2006–2015 period (6). Furthermore, forests account for only 40% of the area burned since 1984, with the majority of burning in grasslands and shrublands.
As a consequence of these factors, the prospects for forest fuels treatments to promote adaptive resilience to wildfire at broad scales, by regionally reducing trends in area burned or burn severity, are fairly limited.
Creating Fire-Adapted Communities.
The majority of home building on fire-prone lands occurs in large part because incentives are misaligned, where risks are taken by homeowners and communities but others bear much of the cost if things go wrong. Therefore, getting incentives right is essential, with negative financial consequences for land-management decisions that increase risk and positive financial rewards for decisions that reduce risk. For example, shifting more of the wildfire protection cost and responsibility from federal to state, local, and private jurisdictions would better align wildfire risk with responsibility and provide meaningful incentives to reduce fire hazards and vulnerability before wildfires occur.
Currently, much of the responsibility and financial burden for community protection from wildfire falls on public land-management agencies. This arrangement developed at a time when few residential communities were embedded in fire-prone areas. Land-management agencies cannot continue to protect vulnerable residential communities in a densifying and expanding WUI that faces more wildfire (12).
The US Government Accountability Office questioned the US Forest Service’s prioritizing protection of WUI communities that lie under private and state jurisdictions and has argued for increased financial responsibility for WUI wildfire risk by state and local governments (93). This shift in obligation would enhance adaptive governance and could increase the motivation to pursue adaptive resilience of WUI communities to increasing wildfire (94).
Key aspects of an adaptive resilience approach are:
- recognizing that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends;
- targeting fuels reduction to increase adaptation by some ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fire;
- actively managing more wild and prescribed fires with a range of severities; and
- incentivizing and planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire.
These strategies represent a shift in policy and management from restoring ecosystems based on historical baselines to adapting to changing fire regimes and from unsustainable defense of the wildland– urban interface to developing fire-adapted communities.
The authors of the paper are: Tania Schoennagel, Jennifer K. Balch, Hannah Brenkert-Smith, Philip E. Dennison, Brian J. Harvey, Meg A. Krawchuk, Nathan Mietkiewiczb, Penelope Morgan, Max A. Moritz, Ray Rasker, Monica G. Turner, and Cathy Whitlock.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Ben.
Typos or errors, report them HERE.