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.

[caltrek]

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/

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New Study Reveals Wildfires are Increasing Across Eastern U.S.
December 18, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) In a new analysis of data spanning more than three decades in the eastern United States, a team of scientists found a concerning trend – an increasing number of wildfires across a large swath of America.

“It’s a serious issue that people aren’t paying enough attention to: We have a rising incidence of wildfires across several regions of the U.S., not only in the West,” said Victoria Donovan, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of forest management at the UF/IFAS West Florida Research and Education Center. “We’re allocating the majority of resources to fire suppression in the western part of the country, but we have evidence that other areas are going to need resources, too.”

The team used data from the federal Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Database from the years 1984 to 2020, the most recently available dataset at the time, to quantify the characteristics of large wildfires – each burning over 200 hectares, or 490 acres. This included identifying which regions during that period had the largest fires, most land burned and seasonality factors.

Their findings indicated increasing wildfire risk across the southern and eastern portions of what’s known as the Eastern Temperate Forests, an area that roughly bisects the country from Michigan in the north to the eastern half of Texas in the south.

“The eastern U.S. has the most expansive wildland-urban interface in the country and thus is at high risk from wildfire,” Donovan said. “The thought behind this research was that if there are signals that wildfires are increasing, we need to understand what those changes look like.”

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1011311

To read the results of the study as presented in Geophysical Research Letters: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co ... 3GL107051

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Black Summer Bushfires in Australia Wiped $2.8 Billion from Tourism Supply Chain
January 30, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A first of its kind study of the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia has revealed that the tourism industry nationwide took an immediate hit of $2.8 billion in total output to its broader supply chains and almost 7300 jobs disappeared nationwide.

The fires four years ago triggered widespread tourism shutdowns in many parts of the country in the lead up to the peak Christmas and New Year season, resulting in $1.7 billion direct losses to the tourism industry, which triggered the larger drop in supply chain output.

“These results are an illustration of what can be expected in the future not only in Australia, but in other nations that are vulnerable to climate-change driven disasters,” said Vivienne Reiner, a PhD student with the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in the Faculty of Science and lead author of the study, published in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.

“It’s important to note that our study, which measured tourism’s losses through Australian supply chains, did not quantify other economic costs, such as the supply-chain impacts of losses from agriculture or forestry, which were also substantially impacted by the fires,” she said.

While the fires had the biggest impact on Australia’s east coast, the impact from tourism losses was national and felt across the economy, the researchers found.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1032887

For a presentation of the study as published in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1 ... 4-00142-8

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46 reported dead in Chile as forest fires move into densely populated central areas

Source: AP

By PATRICIA LUNA and ALEXANDRE PLAZA
Updated 4:54 AM CST, February 4, 2024

VIÑA DEL MAR, Chile (AP) — Intense forest fires burning around a densely populated area of central Chile have caused at least 46 deaths, Chile’s president said Saturday evening, and officials said at least 1,100 homes had been destroyed.

In a nationally televised address, President Gabriel Boric warned that the death toll could worsen as four large fires burn in the region of Valparaiso, where firefighters have struggled to reach the most threatened neighborhoods.

Boric urged Chileans to cooperate with rescue workers.

“If you are told to evacuate don’t hesitate to do it,” he said. “The fires are advancing fast and climatic conditions have made them difficult to control. There are high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity.”

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/chile-forest ... 010450ee5f

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Long-term Drought Promotes Invasive Species by Reducing Wildfire Severity
by Sarah Kimball, Jessica Rath, Julie E. Coffey, Moises R. Perea-Vega, Matthew Walsh, Nicole M. Fiore, Priscilla M. Ta, Katharina T. Schmidt, Michael L. Goulden, Steven D. Allison
February 21, 2024

Abstract:

(Ecology Society of America) Anthropogenic climate change has increased the frequency of drought, wildfire, and invasions of non-native species. Although high-severity fires linked to drought can inhibit recovery of native vegetation in forested ecosystems, it remains unclear how drought impacts the recovery of other plant communities following wildfire. We leveraged an existing rainfall manipulation experiment to test the hypothesis that reduced precipitation, fuel load, and fire severity convert plant community composition from native shrubs to invasive grasses in a Southern California coastal sage scrub system. We measured community composition before and after the 2020 Silverado wildfire in plots with three rainfall treatments. Drought reduced fuel load and vegetation cover, which reduced fire severity. Native shrubs had greater prefire cover in added water plots compared to reduced water plots. Native cover was lower and invasive cover was higher in postfire reduced water plots compared to postfire added and ambient water plots. Our results demonstrate the importance of fuel load on fire severity and plant community composition on an ecosystem scale. Management should focus on reducing fire frequency and removing invasive species to maintain the resilience of coastal sage scrub communities facing drought. In these communities, controlled burns are not recommended as they promote invasive plants.

Read more here: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wile ... ecy.4265

caltrek’s comment: This kind of turns conventional wisdom on its head. It only applies to Southern California except that further studies might conclude that it applies to other areas as well.

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Xcel Energy says its facilities appeared to have role in igniting largest wildfire in Texas history

Updated 10:30 AM EST, March 7, 2024

CANADIAN, Texas (AP) — The utility provider Xcel Energy said Thursday that its facilities appeared have played a role in igniting a massive wildfire in the Texas Panhandle that grew to the largest blaze in state history.

Texas officials have said they are still investigating the cause of the fire that has burned nearly 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers) and destroyed hundreds of structures. The Minnesota-based company said in a statement that it disputes claims that “it acted negligently” in maintaining and operating infrastructure.

“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” the company said in a statement.

Electric utilities have taken responsibility for wildfires around the U.S., including fallen power lines that started a blaze in Maui last year. Transmission lines also sparked a massive California wildfire in 2019. The Texas fire was among a cluster of fires that ignited in the rural Panhandle last week and prompted evacuation orders in a handful of small communities.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-te ... 284858845a

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