Fires Anew

Fires Anew

   No sooner did I write (briefly) about the fires when the recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek arrived in the mail.  And nestled among it's many pieces was a story by Kyle Dickman about the fires raging across the West and the people who are fighting them.  As with so many professions, from nurses to police to the person fixing your roof, we have no idea of the time and difficulty and juggling that that person has to go through, until we find that we really need them.  But in the fire article, there showed a basic shift from fire and forest maintenance (for indeed, it is the National Forest Service that is the one obligated to fight these forest fires), to that of saving homes.  More and more people are building homes (sometimes rather large ones) in more and more remote areas, and the priority now appears to be to save the homes at virtually any cost, even if it means sacrificing other parts of the forests.

   But the article gives you a better idea of what some fire fighters are facing when battling something so large and so hot and so out of control: “This thing’s going to burn until the snow flies,” Joe Flores, a Forest Service firefighter from Vernal, Utah, says to his partner, Todd Gregory, as they race ahead of yet another out-of-control wildfire.  Flores, who’s fought fires for 21 years and is an expert on fire behavior, has never seen anything like this year, with so many superhot, superfast fires burning at once.  He’s riding shotgun in Gregory’s pickup on U.S. Route 97, and they’re speeding along the Columbia River, trying to reach homes outside Chelan (population 4,000), a tourist and farm village four hours east of Seattle, before one head of the sprawling Reach Fire does.  The two can only do so much to protect homes without an engine or a full crew, but they can try to make sure everybody has evacuated...Embers lifted on 40-mile-per-hour gusts of wind clear the mile-wide Columbia and ignite parched grass on the opposite shore.  There, beneath Wells Dam, the fire climbs the bank and lights another 8 square miles of dry grasslands.  A second head of flame continues a run northwest toward the Cascade Mountains...Gregory pulls up to a ranch house tucked in an orchard.  There’s a well-watered lawn out front and a small wood shed next to it that’s already burning.  A wave of 6-foot flames is advancing at about 7 miles per hour from Chelan and toward Pateros, a 600-person town that lost 300 homes to wildfire last year.  Engine running, Flores gets out of the truck just as a tank explodes in the garage.  A bolt of flame vents above the roof.  The smell of sulfur wafts over them...“100 million people in the West can no longer expect to just pick up the phone, dial 911, and have a Hotshot come and save them.”-- “We got to get out of here.  I’ve no idea what we’re breathing in,” Gregory says.  A panicked Labrador-mix rushes out from behind the garage and leaps on Flores.
“Do you mind?” Flores asks.  Gregory shoots him a look: Dude, what kind of question is that?  Flores lifts the Lab into the truck’s cab.  With flames now working through the garage roof, they pull out and head back to fire camp, a sprawling tent city that’s sprung up to house firefighters on break from the fire lines.  Although the house survives, the garage is toast, one of 38 structures incinerated in the Chelan area over the next 10 hours.  A fruit storage warehouse will get reduced to neat squares of ash and charcoal.  Fresh apples in crates melt into globs of sticky black sludge.  Parked cars become metal skeletons.  Some 1,600 residents, who began the morning believing they were protected by almost 1,000 firefighters, leave in a hurry.  Some escape through areas that have already burned, passing smoking telephone poles and downed power lines whipping the ground.  When Flores gets back to fire camp, he delivers the dog to a public information officer, who posts photos of the missing animal on Facebook.   He brings the Lab into his tent that night to calm its nerves.  The Lab’s anxiety is short-lived.  At 4 a.m. it wakes the officer ready to play, and by that afternoon, the owner has responded and they are all but cartwheeling around each other in the parking lot.  “It’s so cliché,” Flores says, laughing. “A fireman saving a pet.”...There are so many blazes all across the Western U.S. that there aren’t enough firefighters to fight them.  The National Guard has been called up, as have active-duty soldiers trained in 24 hours for the fire line.   Canada has sent firefighters to help.  So have Australia and New Zealand, and still there aren’t enough.  An unprecedented 32,000 men and women are struggling to control the flames, yet it’s possible to walk for miles over burning ridges and down smoke-choked drainages without seeing a single firefighter.  “Fire activity is off the charts,” says Shawna Legarza, the Forest Service’s fire director for California.  As bad as Washington state is, California has been burning since early July, and there are 42 large fires active now.  By mid-August, fires have consumed 7.2 million acres nationwide, mostly in Alaska.

   As mentioned earlier, several factors have combined to create a large part of this new wave of fires; drought has weakened broad areas, as have pine beetles taking advantage of stressed trees and causing them to wither and die, and of course, climate change (itself a complicated issue but one summed up nicely by Pope Francis in his latest encyclical, Laudato Si/Praise Be to You, recently reviewed in the New York Review of Books).  Again from the story by Kyle Dickman:  Today, temperatures in the West average 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in 1895, when record keeping started.  They’re forecast to increase an additional 4 to 6 degrees by 2100.  “Think of the warming atmosphere and moisture in the forest as a puddle of water on asphalt,” says Park Williams, a climatologist at Columbia University.  “The warmer it is, the faster the puddle evaporates.”

Hotter temperatures make dense forests drier, and the fires more extreme.  In California, a 1-degree temperature increase is associated with 35 percent more acres burned; in Montana, it’s twice the acreage.  The conditions generate megafires, blazes far too intense for firefighters to safely stop.  Arizona’s 2011 Wallow Fire was a megafire, and so were California’s 2013 Rim Fire, which burned 250,000 acres, and New Mexico’s 2011 Las Conchas.  That biblical firestorm blackened 1.4 acres of mature forests every second for 14 hours straight.

   Adding to all of this, of course, is the money.  The National Forest Service budget review for 2016 shows how much of it costs have been diverted to fighting fires ("The cost of fire management has grown from 13 percent of the agency’s budget in the 1990s to over 50 percent in 2014.  It is subsuming the agency’s budget and jeopardizing our ability to successfully implement our full mission.").  And what exactly is the mission of the Forest Service?  Briefly summed up from their budget proposal, the National Forest Service: ...manages a system of 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 44 States, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands...These lands encompass 193 million acres, an area almost twice the size of California...We support the sustainable stewardship of non-Federal forest land across the Nation, including 423 million acres of private forest land, 69 million acres of State forest land, 18 million acres of Tribal forests, and over 130 million acres of urban and community forests.  In addition, we maintain the largest forestry research organization in the world, with more than a century of discoveries in such areas as wood and forest products, fire behavior and management, and sustainable forest management...the various activities on the NFS contributed over $36 billion to America’s gross domestic product and supported nearly 450,000 jobs...Fifty-six percent of the 751 million acres of the Nation’s forested land is privately owned...we monitor and assess forest health conditions on all lands nationwide, both public and private, tracking outbreaks of insects and disease and providing funds for treating areas at risk.  Our Slow the Spread program has reduced the spread rate of gypsy moth by 60 percent, with a benefit-to-cost ratio of 3:1...Without the program, about 50 million more acres would be infested, resulting in the need for larger and more costly treatment needs in the future...From 2000 to 2030, the U.S. could see substantial increases in housing density on 44 million acres of private forest land nationwide, an area nearly as large as North and South Carolina combined.  More than 70,000 communities are now at risk from wildfire, and less than 15,000 have a community wildfire protection plan or an equivalent plan...From 2010 to 2060, the U.S. is expected to lose up to 31 million acres of forest overall, an area larger than Pennsylvania.  Twenty-seven percent of all forest-associated plants and animals in the U.S., a total of 4,005 species, are at risk of extinction.

   With so much of the NFS' budget going to fighting fires (and diverted away from forest management), the request is for either more funding for fighting the fires, or a shift to designating the fire fighting costs as emergency funds.  And while the President backs such budget proposals, Congress appears unwilling to budge (those of you not located in the U.S., it is our Congress that controls the allotment of monies).  Valuable water and monies are disappearing quickly, even as the large fires regenerate and snowfalls decline.  But as Kyle Dickman's article says, quoting the chief of the Forest Service's fire department, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."