Bob Eisele sent us this map of the North Fire — the “Carmegeddon” fire that trapped scores of vehicles on Interstate 15 in southern California July 17, burning 22 of them. His data points out that much of the vegetation had not burned in a very long time — for southern California, anyway.
Mr. Eisele said:
We all “know” the Cajon Pass burns “all the time”. But it doesn’t all burn all the time. The North fire area last burned in 1945. It takes old fuel, not drought, to make big fires in SoCal. See map attached.
3-D map of the Sleepy Hollow Fire in Wenatchee, Washington, looking west, 1 a.m. PT, June 30, 2015. Note the spot fire near the river that is 1.2 miles east of the main fire. (click to enlarge)
The map above is a 3-D rendering of the perimeter of the Sleepy Hollow Fire that burned into Wenatchee in central Washington Sunday, June 28. The map is looking west, and was produced after a mapping flight at 1 a.m. PT, July 1. The fire burned 24 residences and several commercial structures.
One interesting thing is the spot fire that caused several businesses to burn near the river 1.2 miles away from the main fire. It is believed that a burning ember landed in some bales of cardboard that were to be recycled. While firefighters were engaged miles away trying to save homes, the fire spread from the cardboard to several nearby commercial structures, some of which were warehouses and fruit packing plants. Monday morning, June 29, smoke was still coming from the facilities of Michelsen Packaging Company, Northwest Wholesale, and Blue Bird Inc.
This is not unheard of, for a burning ember to travel that far and ignite a new fire, and has happened over greater distances. A recent example was on the King Fire in northern California in 2014, where a spot fire occurred 2 miles in front of the main fire.
Tony Shafer and Shea Broussard have developed a fire simulator or model they say can predict the spread of a brush fire. With their “FlameMapper” program they have focused primarily on the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the Malibu Times:
…Shafer, who retired after 43 years with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, has two master’s degrees and is a longtime Malibu resident. He has extensively studied the wildfires of the Santa Monica Mountains from 1900 to today.
“Virtually every stick between the 101 and the Pacific Ocean has burned at least once or twice in the last 50 years,” Shafer said. “Some areas have burned six or seven times.”
Local wildfires tend to start at or near the 101 Freeway and strong Santa Ana wind conditions drive the flames toward the coast. FlameMapper software incorporates data from the burn paths of every major wildfire in the last 115 years, including many variables, and is now able to simulate the probable paths and speed a fire could take, based on location, wind, humidity, etc.
In detailed studies of the most common paths that fires have taken through the mountains over the years, Shafer noticed something interesting. “I noticed that oak trees next to a structure protected that structure,” he said.
He began building computer simulations of oak tree plantings at various areas on fire paths. The results showed that “the spread of the fire is vastly reduced by oak trees that have the understory (flammable plants growing underneath the tree) removed.”
Shafer noticed while running simulations of past fires that came down Malibu Canyon that there is a narrow “choke point” or “corridor” near Piuma and Malibu Canyon roads that a fire beginning at the 101 has to get through in order to make it all the way into Malibu. He feels that if oak trees were planted at that particular site, it would stop fires on that route from getting into Malibu…
Gov. John Hickenlooper traveled to an Arvada fire station to sign the bill that will implement a wildfire prediction system. Dr. Janice Coen, one of the developers of the system, is on the left. Photo provided by COHOUSEDEMS.
The Governor of Colorado signed a bill Wednesday that authorizes the state to spend $1.2 million over the next two years on a “revolutionary” wildfire prediction system that uses weather data, groundbreaking computer modeling, and high resolution satellite imagery to predict the spread of fires up to 18 hours in advance.
Below is an excerpt from an article at the (Colorado Springs) Gazette:
…”This bill will predict the intensity and the direction of fires 12 to 18 hours ahead of time. That is really important so we know where to direct our planes, the aircraft we had a bill for last year, and our firefighters,” said Rep. Tracy Kraft-Tharp, D-Arvada, who introduced the bill. “This is really revolutionary.”
Under the new law, the Division of Fire Prevention and Control will contract with a nonprofit Colorado-based research organization with expertise in atmospheric science to predict wildfire behavior. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded program headquartered in Boulder, is the only state agency that meets that criteria. NCAR has used modeling to accurately recreate the behavior of historic fires, including the Yarnell Hill fire that killed 19 Arizona firefighters in 2013.
She said the new technology could be in place by next spring and will work with the state’s new aerial fire fleet, a multimillion-dollar investment into wildfire detecting and fighting aircraft lawmakers made in 2013…
Janice Coen at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is one of the scientists working on this program. We have written about her work previously:
The U.S. Forest Service has produced another graphic about wildfires. The new one, like the one we showed you on March 5 and later analyzed here, has an interesting choice of words. This time it is “largest fire seasons since the 1950s”.
Scientists continue to develop evidence showing that pine beetle outbreaks do not lead to catastrophic wildfires. This should not be a shocking development to those who have been keeping abreast of the studies on the subject, including one that Wildfire Today first covered in 2010 (Firefighters should calm down about beetle-killed forests).
In a soon to be published paper, University of Colorado Boulder researcher Sarah Hart determined, “The bottom line is that forests infested by the mountain pine beetle are not more likely to burn at a regional scale. We found that alterations in the forest infested by the mountain pine beetle are not as important in fires as overriding drivers like climate and topography.”
The CU-Boulder study authors looked at the three peak years of Western wildfires since 2002, using maps produced by federal land management agencies. The researchers superimposed maps of areas burned in the West in 2006, 2007 and 2012 on maps of areas identified as infested by mountain pine beetles.
Western U.S. forests killed by the mountain pine beetle epidemic are no more at risk to burn than healthy Western forests, she found. Results that fly in the face of both public perception and policy.
The area of forests burned during those three years combined were responsible for 46 percent of the total area burned in the West from 2002 to 2013.
Co-authors on the new study include CU-Boulder Research Scientist Tania Schoennagel of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen and CU-Boulder doctoral student Teresa Chapman.
Sarah Hart
The impetus for the study was in part the severe and extensive native bark beetle outbreaks in response to warming temperatures and drought over the past 15 years that have caused dramatic tree mortality from Alaska to the American Southwest, said Hart. Mountain pine beetles killed more than 24,700 square miles of forest across the Western U.S. in that time period, an area nearly as large as Lake Superior.
“The question was still out there about whether bark beetle outbreaks really have affected subsequent fires,” Hart said. “We wanted to take a broad-scale, top-down approach and look at all of the fires across the Western U.S. and see the emergent effects of bark beetle kill on fires.”
Previous studies examining the effect of bark beetles on wildfire activity have been much smaller in scale, assessing the impact of the insects on one or only a few fires, said Hart. This is the first study to look at trends from multiple years across the entire Western U.S. While several of the small studies indicated bark beetle activity was not a significant factor, some computer modeling studies conclude the opposite.
The CU-Boulder team used ground, airplane and satellite data from the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey to produce maps of both beetle infestation and the extent of wildfire burns across the West.
The two factors that appear to play the most important roles in larger Western forest fires include climate change — temperatures in the West have risen by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970 as a result of increasing greenhouse gases — and a prolonged Western drought, which has been ongoing since 2002.
“What we are seeing in this study is that at broad scales, fire does not necessarily follow mountain pine beetles,” said Schoennagel. “It’s well known, however, that fire does follow drought.”
The 2014 Farm Bill allocated $200 million to reduce the risk of insect outbreak, disease and subsequent wildfire across roughly 70,000 square miles of National Forest land in the West, said Hart. “We believe the government needs to be smart about how these funds are spent based on what the science is telling us,” she said. “If the money is spent on increasing the safety of firefighters, for example, or protecting homes at risk of burning from forest fires, we think that makes sense.”
Firefighting in forests that have been killed by mountain pine beetles will continue to be a big challenge, said Schoennagel. But thinning such forests in an attempt to mitigate the chance of burning is probably not an effective strategy.
“I think what is really powerful about our study is its broad scale,” said Hart. “It is pretty conclusive that we are not seeing an increase in areas burned even as we see an increase in the mountain pine beetle outbreaks,” she said.
“These results refute the assumption that increased bark beetle activity has increased area burned,” wrote the researchers in PNAS. “Therefore, policy discussions should focus on societal adaptation to the effect of the underlying drivers: warmer temperatures and increased drought.”
Bob Eisele sent us this map of the North Fire — the “Carmegeddon” fire that trapped scores of vehicles on Interstate 15 in southern California July 17, burning 22 of them. His data points out that much of the vegetation had not burned in a very long time — for southern California, anyway.
