Wildfires and other fire incidents

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Entire Louisiana town under mandatory evacuation because of wildfire
Source: AP

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — An entire town in southwestern Louisiana is under mandatory evacuation orders because of a wildfire that state officials say is the largest they have ever seen.

Usually during this time of year, the Deep South state is addressing threats of imminent hurricanes, tropical storms and flooding. But this summer Louisiana has been plagued by record-breaking heat and extreme drought, which have made the wildfire risk unusually high. This month alone, there have been nearly 360 wildfires in the state.

Louisiana’s largest blaze, the Tiger Island Fire in Beauregard Parish, has already burned an estimated 15000 acres (6,070 hectares) — approximately 23 square miles (60 square kilometers) — accounting for more acres of burned land than the state usually has in an entire year.

The fire forced the 1,200 residents of Merryville, a rural town just east of the Texas border, to evacuate Thursday night. There have not been any reported injuries, but at least three residential structures have been burned, the Beauregard Parish Sheriff’s Office posted on social media.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-wi ... 108ac2c3ed

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UC Irvine Scientists Reveal What Fuels Wildfires in Sierra Nevada Mountains
September 25, 2023


Introduction:

(UC Irvine) Irvine, Calif… Wildfires in California, exacerbated by human-driven climate change, are getting more severe. To better manage them, there’s a growing need to know exactly what fuels the blazes after they ignite. In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine report that one of the chief fuels of wildfires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains is the decades-old remains of large trees.

“Our findings support the idea that large-diameter fuel build-up is a strong contributor to fire severity,” said Audrey Odwuor, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCI Department of Earth System Science and the lead author of the new study.

Researchers have known for decades that an increasing number of trees and an increasing abundance of dead plant matter on forest floors are the things making California wildfires more severe – but until now it was unclear what kinds of plant debris contribute most to a fire.

To tackle the question, Odwuor and two of the study’s co-authors – James Randerson, professor of Earth system science at UCI, and Alondra Moreno from the California Air Resources Board – drove a mobile lab owned and operated by the lab of study co-author and UCI alumna Francesca Hopkins at UC Riverside, to the southern Sierra Nevada mountains during 2021’s KNP Complex Fire.

The KNP Complex Fire burned almost 90,000 acres in California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. In the fire’s smoke, the team took samples of particulate matter-laden air and analyzed the samples for their radiocarbon content at UCI’s W.M. Keck Accelerator Mass Spectrometer facility with co-author and UCI Earth system science professor Claudia Czimczik.

Read more here: https://news.uci.edu/2023/09/25/uc-irv ... ntains/

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