Future Timeline

Philip Higuera, a University of Montana professor of fire ecology (right), and his team examine a lake-sediment core from Chickaree Lake in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. The core is used to reconstruct fire and vegetation history over thousands of years. Credit: Grace Carter

Following 2020's extreme fire season, high-elevation forests in the central Rocky Mountains now are burning more than at any point in the past 2,000 years, according to a new University of Montana study set to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from UM and the University of Wyoming analyzed a unique network of fire-history records to understand how 21st-century fire activity compares to wildfires in the past. The findings highlight that burning in recent decades in high-elevation forests of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming is unprecedented over the past several millennia.

As fire paleoecologists—scientists who study historical ecosystems—the team uses charcoal found in lake sediments to piece together the fire history of forests across the Rocky Mountains. The idea, said lead author and UM professor Philip Higuera, is that understanding the past is key to understanding changes we see today and how forests may change in the future.

(Mother Jones) For 16 years, Ashley Diaz has lived in Happy Camp, a census-designated place with a population of about 1,000 along the Klamath River in Northern California. One evening last September, the seven-months pregnant mom of three was resting when neighbors came by to warn her about a nearby wildfire.

She quickly started evacuating, grabbing sippy cups and formula, her phone, and her dad’s ashes on her way out the door, even as her family told her she was overreacting. And without time to put on a pair of shoes or secure her daughter in a car seat, Diaz drove out of town. When she returned, she had lost everything in the blaze, later named the Slater fire.

“If we were in the house sleeping for about 20 minutes longer, it would have got to us,” Diaz recalls.

“With peak wildfire season approaching during a severe drought in the Western United States, activists and government officials are concerned about what this season may bring. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a record $2 billion wildfire preparedness budget and an expansion of its fleet of aircraft to combat wildfires in a meeting with the head of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in May.

But climate activists are calling for more to be done for neighborhoods at high risk of burning down. In some regions of California, many residents are unable to afford home insurance. Sometimes, companies avoid insuring homeowners living in areas where wildfires are especially damaging. In Happy Camp, after the Slater fire, many residents who lacked insurance—including members of the Karuk tribe—were left homeless.

(Science) The howling hot Santa Ana winds that funnel into Southern California every fall are a fixture of the West Coast experience. Underneath cloudless skies, winds arrive from the high desert mountains to the east, sending temperatures soaring, hollowing out ocean waves, and, so the stories go, turning human behavior erratic. The dry winds also fan the region’s deadliest wildfires, including one of the largest in California’s modern history, burning land nearly equal in size to Los Angeles itself.

Until recently, the future of the Santa Ana winds was thought to be one of the few good-news stories of climate change. Scientists had predicted rapid inland warming would weaken one of the winds’ primary drivers and reduce their frequency. But a new study is casting doubt on that projection, finding that bouts of hot Santa Ana winds are not declining. They could even be increasing.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Southwest U.S. continued to bake Saturday, and weather forecasters kept warnings in effect for excessive heat in Arizona, Nevada and desert areas, at least through the weekend.

High temperature marks didn’t fall Saturday, but Phoenix reached a sweltering high of 115 degrees (46 C) for the day and Las Vegas hit 111 degrees (44 C). Both were 3 degrees shy of records for the date, forecasters said.

Predicted highs on Sunday of 116 degrees (46.6 C) in Phoenix and 113 degrees (45 C) in Las Vegas were expected to fall short of high marks for June 20, the National Weather Service said.

But Phoenix did set a record Saturday for consecutive 115-degree (46 C) days, meteorologist Isaac Smith said, and Sunday could extend the record to six days.

SAN FRANCISCO (Courthouse News) — A trust for paying wildfire victims can’t interfere in a $400 million insurance fight that will determine how much money fire survivors can get for liability claims against former Pacific Gas and Electric leaders, a bankruptcy judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali denied the PG&E Fire Victim Trust’s motion to intervene in an arbitration dispute between PG&E and its insurers.

When PG&E emerged from bankruptcy last year, it assigned the right to pursue breach of fiduciary duty claims against PG&E officers and directors for alleged fire safety shortcomings related the 2017 North Bay fires and 2018 Camp Fire.

To vindicate those claims, the Fire Victim Trust sued 22 former PG&E board members and executives in April. But the maximum fire victims can recover is limited by PG&E’s maximum insurance coverage.

Insurers say that limit is $200 million, based on a cap in PG&E’s 2017 policy. PG&E and the Fire Victim Trust insist the maximum is $400 million because insurance is capped at $200 million in 2017 and 2018, which adds up to $400 million over two years.

Thursday 1 Jul 2021

An entire town in Canada has been evacuated as at least 16 wildfires burn uncontrollably in British Columbia amid its hottest weather ever recorded.

All 250 people who live in the town of Lytton, about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver, were ordered to flee their homes on Wednesday as raging wildfires nearby threaten to burn them to the ground.

The mayor of Lytton, Jan Polderman, said the fire only ‘took about 15 minutes’ to engulf the entire town not long after he issued the evacuation order at 6pm local time.

Meanwhile, in California, a massive 13,000 acre wildfire that’s been named the ‘Lava Fire’ is growing out of control in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, near Redding.

June 30 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday will announce pay raises and bonuses for federal firefighters ahead of a meeting with western state governors who may face a record number of forest blazes this year because of drought and high temperatures.

Wednesday's virtual meeting, to include Cabinet officials, aims to show the White House is treating wildfires - which have grown by at least 100 incidents each year since 2015 - are no less a national emergency than hurricanes, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.

As climate change makes regions like the U.S. western states more arid, wildfires have grown more frequent and ferocious. At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management face staffing shortages accelerated by low pay and competition from state and local fire departments.

The U.S. government employs some 15,000 firefighters to battle wildfires on federal land, including thousands of seasonal workers who start at roughly $13 an hour and rely on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet. Biden recently called that a "ridiculously low salary." He plans to announce that no federal firefighter will make less than $15 an hour, the official said.

A small B.C. village that endured the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Canada for days on end this week was engulfed in flames Wednesday night and residents were forced to flee, many without their belongings.

Mayor Jan Polderman says he told everyone to leave Lytton, as a fire rapidly spread into the community of about 250 people. He signed the official evacuation order at 6 p.m. PT.

"It's dire. The whole town is on fire," Polderman told CBC News. "It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere."

The extreme heat wave gripping the Western United States and Canada is spurring wildfires in several U.S. states and British Columbia.

Driving the news: Evacuation orders were issued in California, Oregon, Idaho, and B.C. In Arizona, two firefighters died when their aircraft crashed while responding to a wildfire in Mohave County, per a Bureau of Land Management statement.


Oregon's Bootleg fire was threatening transmission lines that supply California with power after doubling in size to 120 square miles on Saturday.
A huge wildfire in Northern California's Plumas National Forest, known as the Beckwourth Complex, "generated its own lightning," the Los Angeles Times reports.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Firefighters struggled to contain an exploding Northern California wildfire under blazing temperatures as another heat wave hits the U.S. West this weekend, prompting an excessive heat warning for inland and desert areas.

On Friday, Death Valley National Park in California recorded a staggering high of 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 Celsius) and could reach the same high on Saturday. If verified, the 130-degree reading would be the hottest high recorded there since July 1913, when the same Furnace Creek desert area hit 134 F (57 C), considered the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth.

The Beckwourth Complex — two lightning-caused fires burning 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of Lake Tahoe — showed no sign of slowing its rush northeast from the Sierra Nevada forest region after doubling in size between Friday and Saturday.

California’s northern mountain areas already have seen several large fires that have destroyed more than a dozen homes. Although there are no confirmed reports of building damage, the fire prompted evacuation orders or warnings for roughly 2,800 people along with the closure of nearly 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) of Plumas National Forest.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dozens of wildfires burned across the torrid U.S. West on Monday, but fire agencies reported some progress in corralling the flames and forecasters predicted a gradual decrease in extreme temperatures.

The fires have forced evacuations in numerous areas with scattered homes and tiny communities where some burned houses and other structures have been observed, but total losses were still being tallied.

The fires erupted as the West was in the grip of the second bout of dangerously high temperatures in just a few weeks. A climate change-fueled megadrought also is making conditions that lead to fire even more dangerous, scientists say.

The National Weather Service said, however, that the heat wave appeared to have peaked in many areas, and excessive-heat warnings were largely expected to expire by Monday night or Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Wildfires that torched homes and forced thousands to evacuate burned across 10 parched Western states on Tuesday, and the largest, in Oregon, threatened California’s power supply.

Nearly 60 wildfires tore through bone-dry timber and brush from Alaska to Wyoming, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Arizona, Idaho and Montana accounted for more than half of the large active fires.

The fires erupted as the West was in the grip of the second bout of dangerously high temperatures in just a few weeks. A climate change-fueled megadrought also is contributing to conditions that make fires even more dangerous, scientists say.

The National Weather Service says the heat wave appeared to have peaked in many areas, and excessive-heat warnings were largely expected to expire by Tuesday. However, they continued into Tuesday night in some California deserts, and many areas were still expected to see high in the 80s and 90s.

(NBC) Emblematic of the difficulties firefighters are facing across the American West, crews are battling a rapidly growing blaze in Northern California, just 10 miles from the town of Paradise, where the collective trauma of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state's history remains palpable nearly three years later.

Since it began Wednesday morning, the Dixie Fire in Butte County has scorched about 5,000 acres of brush and timber near the steep terrain of the Feather River Canyon, and was 7 percent contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said Friday.

While fire officials said the flames were sweeping away from populated areas and into the forests of neighboring Plumas County, residents who lived through the Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 people and burned more than 153,000 acres, remained on edge. Butte County officials issued an evacuation warning for the small communities of Pulga and East Concow, east of Paradise.
…
Elsewhere in the West, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, the largest wildfire burning in the United States, has torched an area bigger than New York City and destroyed at least 20 homes, fire officials said. It remained about 7 percent contained as of Friday morning.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Dry, unstable and windy conditions will keep fueling a massive wildfire in southern Oregon, forecasters said, as the largely uncontained blaze grows by miles each day.

The Bootleg Fire was just one of numerous wildfires burning across the U.S. West.

Crews had to flee the fire lines of the Oregon blaze late Thursday after a dangerous “fire cloud” started to collapse, threatening them with strong downdrafts and flying embers. An initial review Friday showed the Bootleg Fire destroyed 67 homes and 117 outbuildings overnight in one county. Authorities were still counting the losses in a second county where the flames are surging up to 4 miles (6 kilometers) a day.

The conflagration has forced 2,000 people to evacuate and is threatening 5,000 buildings, including homes and smaller structures in a rural area just north of the California border, fire spokeswoman Holly Krake said. Active flames are surging along 200 miles (322 kilometers) of the fire’s perimeter, she said, and it’s expected to merge with a smaller, but equally explosive fire by nightfall.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A rapidly growing wildfire south of Lake Tahoe forced the evacuation of a mountain town and the cancellation of an extreme bike ride through the Sierra Nevada, leaving thousands of riders and spectators stranded Saturday and rushing to flee the area.

The Tamarack Fire, which was sparked by lightning on July 4, exploded overnight to about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) and was burning six miles (10 kilometers) south of Markleeville, a small town close to the California-Nevada state line. It has destroyed at least 3 structures, authorities said. A notice posted on the 103-mile (165-kilometer) Death Ride’s website said several communities in the area had been evacuated and ordered all riders to also evacuate immediately.

Kelli Pennington and her family were camping near the town Friday so her husband could participate in his ninth ride when they were told to pack up and leave. They had been watching smoke develop over the course of the day, but were caught off guard by the fire’s quick spread.

“It happened so fast,” Pennington said. “We left our tents, hammock and some foods, but we got most of our things, shoved our two kids in the car and left.”

(The Conversation) Something unusual happened this year in Idaho. Fire and health officials began issuing warnings about the health risks of wildfire smoke several weeks earlier than normal. With almost the entire U.S. West in drought, all signs pointed to a long, dangerous fire season ahead.

Smoke is now turning the sky hazy across a large swath of the country as dozens of large fires burn, and a lot of people are wondering what’s in the air they’re breathing.

As an environmental toxicologist, I study the effects of wildfire smoke and how they differ from other sources of air pollution. We know that breathing wildfire smoke can be harmful. Less clear is what the worsening wildfire landscape will mean for public health in the future, but research is raising red flags.

In parts of the West, wildfire smoke now makes up nearly half the air pollution measured annually. A new study by the California Air Resources Board found another threat: high levels of lead and other metals turned up in smoke from the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise. The findings suggest smoke from fires that reach communities could be even more dangerous than originally thought because of the building materials that burn.

Here’s a closer look at what makes up wildfire smoke and what you can do to protect yourself and your family.