Wildfires and other fire incidents

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Study of wildfires in the US over 30 years shows number of houses burned has grown substantially
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-wildfires ... ially.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of forestry management researchers at the University of Wisconsin, working with a colleague from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, and another from the U.S. Geological Survey, Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center, has found that the number of houses burned by wildfires in the U.S. over the past 30 years has grown substantially.

In their project, published in the journal Science, the group studied records showing the degree of expansion of houses into wildland urban interface areas compared with wildfires in the U.S. Judson Boomhower with the University of California, San Diego, has published a Policy Forum piece in the same journal issue outlining the work and the results.

Wildfires in the U.S. have become a staple of the news cycle as ever-larger fires burn huge swaths of grasslands and forests in many parts of the U.S. Prior research has suggested fires are becoming more intense due to drier conditions related to climate change and, in some cases, poor forestry management. For this new study, the researchers looked at associations between the number of houses burned by wildfires and the reasons for it.

The researchers looked at statistics for all the known wildfires in the U.S. over the years 1990 to 2020. They also looked at statistics for homes that exist or were built in wildland urban interface (WUI) areas—where homes are built next to natural areas—over the same time period.

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No surprise here (see below) but it is always good to confirm previously arrived at conclusions. Also, this will add more detail to the analysis.

New Study Shows Controlled Burns Can Provide Years of Protection Against Wildfires
November 10, 2023

Introduction:

(Grist) When data scientist Xaio Wu arrived at Stanford University for his postdoctoral fellowship, California was coming off a record-breaking wildfire season. In 2020, nearly 9,900 fires had burned more than 4.3 million acres of land in the state, killing dozens of people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage.

That spurred Wu and his colleagues to figure out how they could use their skills to help prevent future disasters. One area they wanted to look more closely at was prescribed burning, which is the intentional use of controlled fires to help clear out natural debris, vegetation and other fuel. If allowed to accumulate unchecked in forests, this debris could propel bigger, out-of-control blazes, like the devastating Camp Fire, which incinerated the town of Paradise, California, in 2018.

Prescribed burning is not a new tool. Indigenous peoples have been utilizing the forest management technique for centuries, and it has seen a resurgence in recent years, as climate change has made wildfires more frequent and intense and state-led policies of “total fire suppression” have been called into question. In order to better quantify the effects that small fires can have on preventing large ones, Wu and his colleagues compiled and analyzed 20 years of California wildfire data.

The researchers categorized thousands of fires based on the amount of energy they released, which can be gleaned from satellite data. And, in a study published Friday in the academic journal Science Advances, they are publishing some of the most robust evidence yet that low-intensity fires can significantly reduce the risk of the high-intensity fires that are often most destructive.

“This research is at a larger scale than most previous research,” said Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

Read more here: https://grist.org/wildfires/controlled ... ifornia/

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Reforms Needed to Expand Prescribed Burns
November 15, 2023
Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Prescribed fire, which mimics natural fire regimes, can help improve forest health and reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire. But this management tool is underused in the fire-prone U.S. West and Baja California, Mexico, due to several barriers.

A paper from the University of California, Davis, pinpoints those obstacles and suggests four key strategies that policymakers and land managers can take to get more “good fire” on the ground in North America’s fire-adapted ecosystems. The paper also provides examples of how people are surmounting some of these obstacles.

“Prescribed fire is one of the most important tools we have for restoring natural fire regimes and undoing the effects of a century of fire suppression,” said lead author John Williams, a project scientist with the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy. “But there are a number top-down barriers at the upper levels of management that keep us from growing the workforce and getting burns done at the scale and extent needed. We point out some of the big ways that agency leaders and policymakers can dismantle those barriers and empower the full range of people capable of doing this work, from burn bosses and citizen-prescribed burn associations to nonprofits and tribal groups.”
The paper, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, centers on the North American Mediterranean climate zone, which includes most of California, southwestern Oregon, western Nevada and northern Baja California in Mexico.

A natural process

Fire is a natural process that has helped shape this region, but the area has experienced a spike in destructive, high-severity wildfires over the past decade. In fact, three of the five largest wildfires in continental U.S. history occurred in this region in just the past five years. This is due to a combination of climate change and fuel accumulation driven by a century of policies that encouraged fire suppression, curtailed Indigenous cultural burning, and favored harvest of the largest, most fire-tolerant trees, the study notes.

Read moreof the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1008242

To read the paper that was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wile ... 002/fee.2

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The Logjam in Biden’s $50 Billion Dollar Wildfire Plan
by Paul Koberstein & Jessica Applegate
November 23, 2023

Introduction:

(Undark) ON MAUI, A SOLITARY BEACHFRONT home, unscorched by the wildfire that devastated the town of Lahaina in August, stands amid the ashes of dozens of incinerated homes. And in Northern California, a large, mostly unscathed forest mysteriously surrounds the devastated town of Paradise, lost five years ago to another wildfire.

These puzzling scenes illustrate a difficult truth about wildfires. Many structures in these towns were destroyed by firebrands — hot burning embers that can be carried by strong winds over many miles — not by flames from the original fires. Nearly 200 people perished in the Lahaina and Paradise fires combined. Several other communities in the American West have been lost this same way.

The scenes also point to an obvious way to protect people from wildfire. The Lahaina home was recently remodeled, which unintentionally hardened the structure — making it resilient to fire.

Wildfires are a yearly threat to anyone living near a forest, grassland, or chaparral, which includes about half of all U.S. addresses. President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced an ambitious 10-year, $50 billion plan it claims will protect those homes, to be funded partly with taxpayer dollars and other sources yet to be determined. The administration’s plan focuses on a massive increase in logging across the country in order to reduce fuels in bone-dry forests. Very little will likely be spent on making homes near forests more fire resilient. But the fires in Paradise and Maui show that the administration is on the wrong course.

Reducing fuels usually means thinning, or partially logging, a forest, and later setting it on fire in a controlled burn. This strategy may make a fire less likely to spread but won’t always protect the public from one, according to John Winn, a U.S. Forest Service press officer. “There are no absolute guarantees,” he told us in an email, “particularly under extreme weather and fuel conditions.”

Read more here: https://undark.org/2023/11/23/opinion-wildfire-plan/