At 6:17 p.m. Saturday CAL FIRE revised the reported size of the Estrada Fire, increasing it from 83 acres to 148, saying the new number was the result of “accurate ground truthing and mapping.”
Firefighters will again work through the night Saturday to establish strong control lines.
11:09 a.m. PDT Oct. 16, 2021
Estrada Fire map. The red dots represent heat detected by a satellite at 2 a.m. PDT Oct. 16, 2021.
A prescribed fire intended to treat 20 acres grew out of control Friday, prompting evacuations in Central California.
The project was initiated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection near the intersection of Hazel Dell and Hidden Canyon Road six miles northeast of Watsonville, California. After escaping the planned burn unit boundary it spread quickly, growing to 83 acres by Friday evening, when CAL FIRE said aircraft had established a line of fire retardant around the perimeter.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time these things go off without a hitch,” said Ian Larkin, CAL FIRE Chief for the San Mateo Santa Cruz unit. “No problems, they don’t get out of control, they don’t jump our containment line…The reason we did this yesterday was we had a prescription level of good weather, it was in prescription, and it was an ideal situation for us to be able to get good consumption of the fuel, and we just had this mishap. It was about 80 to 100 feet of tying it all in and we had a spot take off across the line.”
At 7:17 Saturday morning CAL FIRE said crews made significant progress overnight.
Estrada Fire, seen by the Mt. Madonna camera at 4:10 p.m. Oct. 15, 2021, looking southeast.
Evacuation orders were still in effect at 10:48 a.m. PDT October 16. (Evacuation map)
The video below, at 0:50, shows a fire whirl that is persistent, in spite of the water being applied from a fire hose.
Victoria Prescribed Fire, Black Hills National Forest. South Dakota. USFS photo by Matt Daigle. March, 2021.
In recent weeks there have been discussions online about whether or not fuel reduction projects can aid firefighters by reducing the intensity of wildfires. These rumblings are heard from agenda driven advocacy groups including the John Muir Project.
There is no question that properly executed and followed up fuels treatments — mechanical, or prescribed fires — can modify subsequent fire behavior and reduce a wildfire’s intensity. Despite the attention getting efforts of these groups, this has been a settled issue for a very, very long time. Indigenous people no doubt knew this, and in recent decades wildland firefighters do as well.
Scientists say climate change has made the American West much warmer and drier and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, accelerating the need for more large-scale forest treatments.
Critics say forest thinning operations are essentially logging projects in disguise.
Opening up the forest canopy and leaving more distance between trees reduces the natural humidity and cooling shade of dense forests and allows unimpeded winds to push fire faster, said Chad Hanson, forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project.
Such reasoning defies the laws of physics, said other experts: Less fuel means less severe fire. Fewer trees means it’s more difficult for fires to leap from treetop to treetop.
In a tweet that linked to the Associated Press article, British Columbia-based fire ecologist Robert W. Gray wrote:
Another case of false equivalency: weight of published, peer-reviewed fact vs one or two counter factuals published in a single journal known for pushing pseudoscience.
During extreme weather and fuel conditions, such as strong winds and very low fuel moisture, fires can spread very quickly with a great deal of resistance to control igniting spot fires a mile ahead, and in some cases may burn rapidly through or jump across fuel reduction sites, possibly igniting structures. This can illustrate the importance of homeowners making structures fire resistant and reducing flammable material in the Home Ignition Zone.
But in less than extreme conditions, a fire that spreads into a recently completed fuels project will slow, be less intense, and will offer less resistance to control. A recent example of this was when the Caldor Fire in Northern California began to reach the South Lake Tahoe area, allowing firefighters to attack the fire more directly. In a live briefing on September 3, 2021 East Side Incident Commander Rocky Opliger complimented the agencies for the fuel treatments that had been accomplished over the years. He said the 150-foot flame lengths dropped to about 15-feet when the fire entered the treated areas. This allowed hand crews and engines to take an aggressive approach to suppress the fire and prevent structure loss. The video of the briefing is on Facebook; Mr. Oplinger’s comments about the fuel treatments begin at 34:10.
“Science” funded by agenda driven advocacy groups that has not been peer-reviewed should always be suspect. Settled science that has been proven for decades or even centuries, should be respected.
The release of a 438-page study by the US Environmental Protection Agency to compare the smoke impacts from prescribed vs. wildfire is not a ground-breaking event that will change fire management.
Titled, “Comparative Assessment of the Impacts of Prescribed Fire Versus Wildfire (CAIF): A Case Study in the Western U.S.”, the large 28MB .pdf file can be downloaded here.
In January 2020, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, an intergovernmental committee formed to support the implementation and coordination of Federal Fire Management Policy and chaired by senior leadership in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior, requested and paid for the EPA to lead an assessment to characterize and compare the smoke impacts of prescribed fire and wildfire under different fire management strategies, including prescribed fire.
They evaluated two fires, the 3,000-acre Timber Crater 6 Fire that occurred in Oregon in 2018 and the 150,000-acre Rough Fire of 2015 in the Sierra NF, Kings Canyon National Park, and Sequoia NF of California. I could not find any indication that the researchers studied a prescribed fire, which usually burn with different fire behaviors than a wildfire.
The poorly edited report is not light reading and is a slog to wade through the hundreds of pages.
Many of the report’s “key insights” will not be a surprise to land managers (or anyone with a little common sense and exposure to fire management). Here are samples from Chapter 9, “Integrated Synthesis”:
Smaller wildfires produce fewer public health impacts than larger wildfires.
Convincing the public to evacuate or use air cleaners or HVAC filters to decrease exposure to PM2.5 can decrease public health impacts from smoke.
If a wildfire spreads into an area previously treated with prescribed fire it can reduce additional spread of the wildfire.
Smoke plumes that do not intersect with high population areas or last only a few days are less likely to have substantial health impacts than fires affecting larger populations for longer periods.
“We stress that there is now more than 1,000 hr of ground‐based data from Missoula, suggesting that a typical PM2.5/CO value for aged wildfire smoke at the surface is about half the value in fresh to moderately aged well‐lofted wildfire plumes (Collier et al., 2016; Garofalo et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2017). One airborne wildfire study by Forrister et al. (2015) at lower latitudes and sampling elevations than the other airborne studies is consistent with the downwind net evaporation we apparently observe in Missoula.
“We also stress that, despite the evidence for PM evaporation during aging, there are strong data discussed next, supporting the idea that wildfires produce more PM than spring or fall prescribed fires on a per fuel burned or per area burned basis. Liu et al. (2017) reported that EFs for PM1.0 (gPM1.0/kg fuel burned) are almost four times higher in wildfires (27.1 ± 6.1) than spring and fall prescribed fires (7.3 ± 4.2; May et al., 2014). Our 2 year average ΔPM2.5/ΔCO ratio in aged wildfire smoke (~0.117) is ~1.7 times higher than implied for aged, fall western montane prescribed fire smoke (~0.07) based on May et al. (2014, 2015), suggesting that a remnant of the difference in initial PM emissions can survive aging. Fuel consumption in spring/fall prescribed fires at the national level is typically 7.2 ± 2.7 Mg ha−1 (Yokelson et al., 1999, 2013) as opposed to 34.6 ± 9.9 Mg ha−1 on wildfires (Campbell et al., 2007; Santín et al., 2015).
Combining the emissions and fuel consumption differences implies that wildfires emit 18 ± 14 times more PM per area burned. Although prescribed fires cannot simply replace all wildfires (Schoennagel et al., 2017; Turner et al., 2019), their potential to reduce the level of wildfire impacts deserves more attention. In addition, incorporating higher wildfire initial emissions and temperature‐dependent, post emission OA evaporation may improve models of wildfire smoke impacts (Nergui et al., 2017).”
Citation: Selimovic, V., Yokelson, R. J., McMeeking, G. R., & Coefield, S. (2020). Aerosol mass and optical properties, smoke influence on O3, and high NO3 production rates in a western U.S. city impacted by wildfires. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125, e2020JD032791. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD032791
Prescribed fire in Yosemite National Park. Merced River and moon. NPS photo by Isaiah Hirschfield.
By Steve Pyne
The Pleistocene epoch that began 2.6 million years ago sent ice in waves through Yosemite.
Glaciers gouged out great valleys along the Merced and Tuolumne rivers, ice sheets rounded granite domes, cirques sculpted the High Sierra. John Muir traced virtually every landscape feature of Yosemite to its legacy of ice.
Now the residual ice is melting, the streams and waterfalls are drying and the living landscape is burning. In 1990, the A-Rock fire closed the park for the only time in its history, so far. The 2013 Rim fire burned around the Hetch Hetchy reservoir; the 2018 Ferguson fire burned along the park’s Wawona Road. Where the fires didn’t spread, their smoke did.
Add in the industrial combustion of fossil fuels, with its climatic impacts, and virtually every management issue of Yosemite today traces back to fire.
~
Humans have always used fire: It’s our ecological signature.
The end of the last glaciation allowed us, a fire-wielding species, to interact with an increasingly fire-receptive planet. Our pact with fire was mutual. Fire allowed us to flourish; in return, we have taken fire everywhere, even to Antarctica.
The pact had to operate within boundaries set by living landscapes. After all, fire was a creation of life, which furnished its oxygen and fuel and established ecological barriers. Then we discovered an immense reservoir of combustibles buried in geologic time. It was as though we had found a new world –- a fossilized, “lithic” landscape –we could work the way we did living landscapes. The only constraints were those people chose to impose on themselves.
Add up all the burning that people now do in living, and it would seem we are refashioning the Earth with the fire-informed equivalent of an Ice Age, complete with a change in climate, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, major shifts in biogeography and smoke palls. Little on Earth is unaffected.
Fire is driving off the last vestiges of the Pleistocene, from its ice to its mammoths. We have been creating a Pyrocene for millennia, but binge-burning fossil fuels put the process on afterburners.
Fifty years ago Yosemite recognized that its fire scene was out of whack. The problem then was not too much of the wrong kind of fire but too little of the right kind. The park sought to restore pre-settlement fire regimes. Among targeted sites was Illilouette Creek, an elevated basin southeast of Glacier Point.
The park recognized that suppressing fire had stockpiled fuels from the foothills to the crestline, caused Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove to overflow with invasive conifers that blocked views, and prevented the fabled sequoias from regenerating. The park introduced prescribed fire and learned to loose-herd wildfires. The Illilouette basin shuffled toward something like its former fire regime.
No place has the fire program it wants, but Yosemite seems better positioned than the national forests and private lands around it to cope. The issue is no longer to restore natural fire but to find the right mix of fires suppressed and prescribed, and of wildfires managed, to ward off the megafires that are plaguing everyplace else.
Yosemite deals with fires that can threaten small and not-so-small villages. Its specialty is working with wildland fire.
By Aug. 20 of this year the park had coped with 54 fires, 43 from lightning and 11 from people. Some were put out. Some were confined within natural barriers. And a few burning in Illilouette Basin were tweaked as nature’s invisible hand massaged them into five decades of layered burning. The legacy of past fires had altered the conditions for the fires that followed, softening the shock of tougher, meaner burns.
Yosemite has long been celebrated for distilling into near-crystalline state the magnificence of the Western landscape. As it moves from ice to fire, it is showing that it may also serve as a proxy for some of what the Earth needs to do to survive our deepening fire age. There is no way we can’t not manage fire.
Despite widespread recognition that treating forests and grasslands with prescribed fire can be a major step toward reducing the negative impacts of wildfires, only one primary Federal land management agency made a substantial increase in the number of hectares accomplished from 1988 to 2018 — the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A higher proportion of tribal lands managed by the BIA have been subject to prescribed fire than for any other agency, with a mean of 7.5% of tribal lands burned each year.
This conclusion was expressed in a paper written by Crystal A. Kolden of the University of Idaho, titled, “We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Fire in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk.” The last section of the document, the Discussion, is below. It begins with the statement that many may disagree with — the Southeastern states have fewer wildfire disasters than the rest of the country because they accomplished over twice the amount of prescribed fire as the entire rest of the US combined between 1998 and 2018. However, later she writes about the West, “[T]he topography is more complex and inaccessible, burn windows are narrow, and fuels have built up throughout decades of fire exclusion.” There are also challenges in the West in dealing with restrictions imposed by air quality agencies, more so than in the Southeast.
The paper also points out another rarely mentioned factor that limits the use of prescribed fire on Federal lands. “[Agencies] have not made sufficient policy changes or budgetary allocations to carry out the Cohesive Strategy.” Which, she writes, “…specifically identified prescribed fire as the most cost-effective solution over the largest potential area of the US, as compared to managed wildfire and non-fire vegetation treatment.”
Below is the Discussion section of the paper.
Discussion
The Southeastern US accomplished over twice the amount of prescribed fire as the entire rest of the US combined between 1998 and 2018. This may be one of many reasons why the Southeastern states have experienced far fewer wildfire disasters relative to the Western US in recent years. The amount of prescribed fire reported in the Southeastern US is also likely underreported, as the Southeastern states have purportedly accomplished millions of hectares of prescribed fire annually for decades. However, until 1998 there was no central prescribed fire reporting in the US. Even after 1998, non-federal entities did not necessarily report the full scope of their accomplishments in the federal reporting system.
The dramatic difference in prescribed fire completed between east and west reflects both a broad socio-cultural divide over fire and a problematic dichotomy between federal and non-federal fire management. Biophysical conditions have often been highlighted as a challenge to prescribed burning in the Western US; the topography is more complex and inaccessible, burn windows are narrow, and fuels have built up throughout decades of fire exclusion. By contrast, the Southeastern states have both the most extensive Wildland–Urban Interface in the US and some of the worst air quality challenges associated with prescribed fire due to higher humidity (e.g., increased smog formation). That agencies are able to accomplish so much prescribed fire in such a populated region likely also reflects social acceptance in addition to more conducive conditions. It is also telling that no single Southern state is driving the regional trend. State summaries in the Historical Wildland Fire Summary reports indicate that Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas all completed an average of over 40,000 ha per year each from 2002 to 2017.
Prescribed fire is widely accepted as a tool in the Southeastern states, where residents are more accustomed to using controlled fire to enhance timber production, control the rapidly growing vegetation, and enhance game species habitat. Some states, such as Florida, even have laws that recognize prescribed fire as being in the public interest and protect landowner rights to utilize it. Although studies throughout the US have shown that residents in all regions broadly support the concept of prescribed fire, they fear the potential for escaped fires and they are also highly concerned about smoke impacts [41]. However, Engebretson et al. found significantly higher tolerance of prescribed fire smoke from Southern-state residents than those in Western states, which suggests that this tolerance may translate into less opposition to using prescribed fire in the Southern GACC. This is true for either federal or non-federal agencies in the region; the Historical Summaries indicate that much of the USFS annual prescribed fire accomplishment occurs in the Southern GACC states (particularly along the Gulf Coast) rather than in the Western states where the greatest proportion of USFS land lies.
By contrast, fire managers in the Western US face considerable social barriers to using prescribed fire, including negative public perceptions of risk of escapes and smoke. This high perception of risk has been cemented by the occasional escaped prescribed fire, but it has likely also become entrenched due to the absence of prescribed fire demonstrated here. Fire managers, particularly federal fire managers, receive insufficient incentive to use prescribed fire under current agency policies that incentivize fire suppression (e.g., with overtime pay and promotion) but penalize risk-taking, particularly when escaped prescribed fires occur. Additionally, 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.
Of the federal agencies reporting individually (i.e., separate from the ST/OT class), only the BIA has been able to substantially increase the relative use of prescribed fire. This increase is particularly striking because a higher proportion of tribal lands managed by BIA have been subject to prescribed fire than for any other agency, with a mean of 7.5% of tribal lands burned each year. This may reflect the more recent efforts of tribes seeking to reclaim sovereignty on their ancestral lands through increased self-governance and drawing upon TEK to re-introduce extensive intentional fire in these landscapes, particularly following the 2004 Tribal Forest Protection Act. The push for more prescribed fire among tribes is also reflected in the BIA budget for prescribed fire, particularly compared with the fire suppression budget. BIA devotes the second-highest budget of the five primary land management agencies to prescribed fire (behind USFS), but the prescribed fire budget is between 50% and 80% of its fire suppression budget, while no other agency’s prescribed fire budget has exceeded 25% of its fire suppression budget in the last five years. It is also worth noting that the more detailed Historical Wildland Fire Summary reports suggest that the strong positive trend in the Eastern GACC region is potentially partially a function of increased tribal burning in that region.
Despite changes in federal fire management policy meant to increase prescribed fire use, only one region of the US has considerably increased the amount of prescribed fire completed, and credit for much of this increase goes to non-federal agencies. Given the evidence that federal agencies have not accomplished more prescribed fire across the US over the past two decades, this suggests that while the Cohesive Strategy incorporates the best available science in a top-level holistic management framework, federal agencies have not made sufficient policy changes or budgetary allocations to carry out the Strategy.
There is considerable evidence in the scientific literature that prescribed fire is the most effective means of reducing the risk of wildfire disasters and increasing ecosystem resilience across much of the US. However, only one primary federal land management agency has substantially increased prescribed fire use, and the only widespread use and acceptance of prescribed fire is in the Southeastern states. Federal and non-federal entities have used the prescribed fire expertise of the Southeastern region as a training ground for fire and fuel managers across the US, but this has not translated to increased prescribed fire use. This suggests that a larger cultural shift in public sociocultural perceptions of prescribed fire is needed to truly capitalize upon the utility of prescribed fire and more aggressively reduce wildfire risk. Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.
The graphics are from the paper written by Crystal A. Kolden.
Fire 2019, 2(2), 30; https://doi.org/10.3390/fire2020030
Prescribed fire, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore near Ogden Dunes in northwest Indiana in 2013. NPS photo.
Legislation that did not pass in Congress last year to promote prescribed fire was reintroduced yesterday by four Senators. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2021 would appropriate $300 million each to the Departments of the Interior (DOI) and Agriculture (DOA) to increase the pace and scale of controlled burns on state, county, and federally managed lands. Companion legislation with four sponsors was introduced in the House of Representatives.
Of the total of eight sponsors and co-sponsors, seven are Democrats and one is Republican. The legislation did not stand a chance in 2020 but it could fare better this year.
Senators have issued press releases promising that if the bill is passed it “would help prevent the blistering and destructive infernos from destroying homes, businesses and livelihoods.” ?
The legislation:
Establishes a $10 million collaborative program, based on the successful Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, to implement controlled burns on county, state and private land at high risk of burning in a wildfire.
Establishes an incentive program to provide funding to state, county, and federal agencies for any large-scale controlled burn.S tates and counties could receive up to $100,000 for prescribed fire projects.
Establishes a workforce development program at the Forest Service and DOI to develop, train, and hire prescribed fire practitioners, and establishes employment programs for Tribes, veterans, women, and those formerly incarcerated.
Directs the DOI and DOA to hire additional personnel and procure equipment, including unmanned aerial systems equipped with aerial ignitions systems, in order to implement a greater number of prescribed fires.
Encourages large cross-boundary prescribed fires exceeding 50,000 acres.
Sets an annual target of at least one million acres treated with prescribed fire by federal agencies, but not to exceed 20 million.
Requires that by September 30, 2023 a minimum of one prescribed fire to be conducted on each unit of the National Forest System, unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System, unit of the National Park System, and Bureau of Land Management district under the jurisdiction of the two Departments. The intent is to increase familiarity with prescribed fire in local units.
The two Departments shall hire additional employees and provide training and development activities, including through partnerships with community colleges, to increase the number of skilled and qualified prescribed fire practitioners in the DOI, DOA, Indian Tribes, and other qualified organizations, including training in smoke management practices.
The Office of Personnel Management shall give the two Departments new authority to hire temporary personnel to perform work related to prescribed fire, including training, implementation, and post-prescribed burning activities. The workers could begin three days before the project and work through three days after “the prescribed fire has stopped burning.”
Overtime payments for prescribed fire could be paid out of wildfire suppression accounts.
Each Department shall create at least one crew for implementing prescribed fires. After a person works on the crew for five seasons they would become eligible for noncompetitive conversion to a permanent position.
The Departments may spend up to $1 million in working with the National Governors’ Association to host a conference to discuss the benefits of addressing liability protection related to prescribed fires, and possible incentives for States to enact a covered law.
“In the simplest terms, the National Prescribed Fire Act offers a legislative solution to increase the use of prescribed fire,” said National Association of State Foresters President, Arkansas State Forester, Joe Fox. “With this bill, state foresters would be able to maximize their utilization of controlled burns to enhance forest health while minimizing damages and mega smoke emissions from catastrophic wildfires. It is a win-win-win for forests, wildland fire management, and public health.”
