Above: The distribution of wildfire smoke, current as of 2:09 p.m. MDT August 3, 2017.
(Originally published at 2:50 p.m. MDT August 3, 2017)
Smoke from wildfires in the United States Northwest and southern British Columbia is accumulating in those areas causing, in some areas, significant degradations in air quality. In British Columbia many massive fires combined with light winds has resulted in the smoke not being transported out of the area.
Air quality August 3, 2017 for western Canada and parts of Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
Some areas in BC, western Montana, and the western portions of Washington and Oregon have “unhealthy” air quality today, according to Air Now.
Above: Satellite photo taken August 2, 2017 showing smoke from some of the wildfires in British Columbia. The red dots represent heat detected by a sensor on the satellite
(Originally published at 9:50 p.m. MDT August 2, 2017)
Firefighters in British Columbia are dealing with over 100 wildfires that are larger than 0.01 hectare. The location for four of the largest can be seen on the map below which shows heat detected by a satellite on Wednesday.
Map showing heat from fires in British Columbia detected by a satellite at 3:12 p.m. MDT August 2, 2017. Click to enlarge.
Here are very brief of summaries of four of the largest fires:
Hanceville-Riske Creek, 60 kilometers southwest of Williams Lake. The Hanceville and the Riske Creek Fires are being managed as one. Together they have burned 134,000 hectares (331,000 acres).
Quesnel West, 4 km north of the Baezaeko River. 36,000 HA (88,000 acres).
Tautri Complex, 85 km northwest of Williams Lake. 64,000 HA (84,000 acres).
Elephant Hill, near Ashcroft. 84,000 HA. (207,000 acres).
The weather forecast for Ashcroft near the Elephant Hill fire looks grim for firefighters — over 100F every day for the next week with the relative humidity around 20 percent or below. It looks better for Williams Lake with highs in the high 80’s and low 90’s with the relative humidity in the mid-20’s.
The fire has been burning near Cache Creek, BC since July 6, 2017.
Above: Satellite photo showing the location wildfires in British Columbia and Alberta, July 31, 2017. The red dots represent heat detected by the satellite.
(Originally published at 7:32 p.m. MDT July 31, 2017)
Currently there are many wildfires burning in British Columbia and Alberta. One of them is a megafire just east of Clinton, north and south of Cache Creek, and about 50 miles northwest of Kamloops. I’m not sure if it’s the Mother of All Fires, for this year anyway, but so far it has covered 78,548 hectares (194,096 acres). The BC Wildfire Service says that number is probably low, since the visibility has prevented them from conducting mapping flights for a day or two.
(More recent information about the Elephant Hill Fire and other fires in British Columbia was posted August 2, 2017.)
The recent warmer and drier weather has contributed to increased growth in recent days. On Sunday most of the spread was on the north and west sides. The objective on the west flank is to remove excess fuel ahead of the fire, keep it south of the Bonaparte River, and slow the aggressive fire behavior. Night shift crews are working from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. to reinforce firelines.
Structure protection personnel, engines, and equipment are assigned 24 hours a day. They are working across the fire to conduct property assessments, establish sprinkler systems on structures, and protect values where needed.
Satellite photo showing smoke on the Elephant Hill Fire northwest of Kamloops, July 31, 2017. The red dots represent heat detected by the satellite.
The community of Clinton and areas to the northeast including Green Lake have been evacuated.
Resources assigned to the fire include 20 helicopters and 69 pieces of heavy equipment for a total of 359 firefighters.
Greer Fire, June 22, 2010. Photo by B.C. Wildfire Service.
A British Columbia Supreme Court judge has ruled that the Greer Fire, a 2010 wildfire southeast of Vanderhoof, started from lightning, not a timber harvesting company’s feller buncher as claimed by the government. The Province sued two companies including Canfor, which then countersued, alleging that the B.C. government “did not take sufficient action to suppress or extinguish” the wildfire.
The fire burned 6,100 hectares (15,073 acres), required 30 households to evacuate, and cost $5.5 million including suppression, reforestation, and lost wood taxes.
Below are excerpts from an article at straight.com:
“Canfor has not established the Province’s conduct in fighting the Fire constituted a substantial departure from the basic principles of firefighting,” Greyall wrote in his decision.
According to the ruling, “a one-hour fire watch was not conducted as required”.
“The Province argues a fire watcher, properly conducting his or her duties under theRegulation, would have been able to utilize Barlow’s resources to extinguish or at least control the Fire on the afternoon of June 18 and to report it to the Ministry such that it would been actioned earlier and would not have spread,” Greyall wrote.
However, the judge concluded that the province failed to prove that the fire would have been discovered and reported “prior to the expiry of the fire watch period” had a fire watch taken place.
In court, the province maintained there was “strong circumstantial evidence” that the fire was started by the use of a fire buncher and that the operator failed to remain with his equipment after turning off the engine.
The province also claimed that “sawdust or other flammable forest debris” were dislodged from the machine into the forest floor, causing the fire.
The defendants pointed to lightning as the likely cause, with Barlow employees saying they saw a bolt during heavy rainfall around 5 p.m.
“I find the evidence of the Barlow and Canfor employees to be consistent and credible,” Greyall wrote. “The issue of lightning on the Cut Block was reported to Ministry investigators during the course of their investigation within days of the Fire.”
The article does not mention any physical evidence of a lightning-struck object or data from an electronic lightning detection system.
British Columbia wildland fire personnel are coming back to work for the season and one of the first things Type 1 firefighters do is take the Canadian fitness test. The WFX-FIT, which first saw widespread use in 2012, is described as “a valid job-related physical performance standard used to determine whether an individual possesses the physical capabilities necessary to meet the rigorous demands encountered while fighting wildland fires.”
The components of the WFX-FIT, after pre-participation screening are:
Firefighters must complete all of the tasks within 14:20 or 17:15 minutes, depending on the province and the location (in or out of the province) of the assignment.
The range of Western Larch, Larix occidentalis, sometimes called Western tamarack. From Natural Resources Canada.
Warming caused by climate change is moving the suitable habitat for some plant species farther north in the northern hemisphere. A plant that was once comfortable in one location may be finding it is becoming too warm for it to thrive.
British Columbia, unlike the other Canadian provinces, has changed their rules about replanting forests, hoping to ensure that adapted tree varieties can keep up with the moving habitats. Critics say assisted migration, as it is called, has sometimes produced disastrous results in the past when species were placed in new environments.
Western Larch, a deciduous conifer. Photo from Montana Outdoors.
Vice’s Motherboard web site has a fascinating article by Stephen Buranyi on the subject. Here is an excerpt:
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“The Western Larch can live for hundreds of years and grow to over 200 feet, but the oldest Larch trees in northern British Columbia’s Bulkley Valley are only about four feet tall. In fact, the nearest full grown Western Larch is nearly 900 kilometers south by the US border, which has been the Larch’s natural range for thousands of years. These are the first trees of their kind to be planted so far north.
If the disastrous history of invasive species has taught us anything, it’s that it’s often difficult to predict the consequences of such a change. Ecologists and conservationists generally caution against moving a species outside of the areas they naturally live—a process known as assisted migration—and governments generally agree with this take. Across North America there are strict prohibitions against the large scale movement of living populations.
But for the past seven years the province of BC has allowed millions of trees to be planted toward the northernmost reaches of their natural range and beyond. The government is working with scientists who predict that our climate is changing so quickly that, 50 years from now, when the trees are fully grown, the conditions in the trees’ new homes will actually be more like their old ones.
“It restores the tree to the environment for which they are best suited,” said Greg O’Neill, an adaptation and climate change scientist with the BC government, who helped design and implement the province’s assisted migration program. But while BC scientists think that they’ve acted just in time to prepare their forests for the future, no other province appears ready to adopt assisted migration as a strategy anytime soon.
Many trees are what ecologists call foundational species—organisms whose removal would cause enormous disruption in the ecosystem. Trees are a sort of infrastructure for forests; they bind the soil, retain water, and provide food and shelter. Just like the infrastructure unpinning cities, it takes years to establish a tree population, and they are virtually impossible to move.
And yet, because BC’s northern regions are warming at nearly twice the average rate, much of the province’s 55 million hectares of forest may find that their homes have moved north without them. A 2006 paper from the University of British Columbia applied a climate based model to forest ecosystems and showed that some species ranges could shift by up to 100 kilometers each decade.
Rules in BC require that, as trees are cut down, planters use seeds from the same area to re-plant, preserving the genetic character of the forest. O’Neill and his colleagues produced a forestry report in 2008 that drew on the projected range expansions due to climate change, and their own extensive experiments testing various tree species in different climates. They suggested that the province instead expand the distance seeds could be moved uphill, to track with global warming. Later that year the Chief Forester’s Standards for Seed Use were changed for the majority of BC’s commercial tree species to reflect the suggestions in the report.
According to O’Neill, “these were the first policy changes that addressed climate change in forestry.”
Then, in 2010 the standards were changed again, to allow Western Larch to be planted hundreds of kilometres away from its current range. “That had been a long-standing paradigm that no-one dared transgress,” said O’Neill. One ecologist had even called BC’s migration plans “a little scary.”
It’s difficult to overstate how deeply rooted the aversion to moving nature is for many biologists. In 2009 assisted migration was called “planned invasion” in a report that listed our really awful, truly just stupendously bad track record with species that unexpectedly turn invasive…”
