At nearly every community meeting on firefighting efforts in the US West, residents want to know why crews don’t douse the flames to save their homes and the valuable forests around them.
It’s not that simple, wildfire managers say, and the reasons are many, some of them linked and tied to climate change over the decades. The cumulative result is an increase in huge wildfires with extreme and unpredictable behavior that is threatening communities that in some instances did not exist a few decades ago.
How do we balance that risk by allowing firefighters to succeed without transferring too much risk to the public? Evans Kuo, a Type 1 incident commander assigned to the nation’s largest and most dangerous wildfires. I wish it didn’t happen, but it’s a zero-sum game.
More than 20,000 wildland firefighters are battling some 100 major wildfires in the US West. Their goal is control, meaning a fuel brake is built around the entire fire using natural barriers or man-made lines, often with ground crews using bulldozers or hand tools.
Estimated containment dates for some wildfires are no longer burning until October or November.
why so long?
A big concern is security. Kuo said residents sometimes request him to send firefighters to areas where they know they may be killed.
That’s a deal-breaker, he said on a day off after 18 straight days from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. on wildfires in Washington state. I am not putting people at risk.
To actually put out these large fires, or label them controlled, would require cold weather with rain or snow, weeks away for many states.
I would say pray for rain because that is the only thing that is going to get us out of this fire season.”
Has the forest fire changed?
Kuo has been fighting wildfires with the U.S. Forest Service for 30 years, spending the first part of his career as a frontline firefighter with the ground crew, which is the backbone of any wildfire effort. At the time, forest fires of 150 square miles (390 square kilometers) were unusual. Now the tremor reaches five times that size and even more, becoming large enough to weather its own.
Redefining what the new normal is, Kuo said. We get these megafires.”
Is forest fire suppression in the past playing a role now?
For much of the last century, firefighters were mostly successful in suppressing wildfires in ecosystems that had evolved to rely on wildfires. Initially, firefighters benefited from forests that had already been periodically cleared of brush and debris from wildfires that could proceed every two decades. But with fire suppression, experts say, where the brush and debris now accumulates, forest fires could climb into branches and crowns of large trees, creating huge wildfires that spread across the entire forest. kills the sample.
How has drought affected forest fire suppression?
On top of the fire suppression have been decades of drought that the study linked to human-caused climate change. This has been exacerbated by hot and dry weather this year, leading to a historically low moisture content in forests that have become tinder-dry.
Dustin Miller, director of the Idaho Department of Lands, said our safety districts are historically seeing far warmer and dryer than normal conditions that make dry fuel.
Those dry fuels allow wildfires to spread more quickly. On large fires, embers may leak out to start spot fires on the other side of natural obstacles such as rivers. Sometimes a fire on the spot can put firefighters at risk of being caught in the flames back and forth.
Miller said the state is facing $100 million in costs this year to fight the fires the state is responsible for protecting, which are mostly state forests, but also include some federal and private forests.
What about disease and insect infestations?
Diseases and bug infestations in trees, whose defenses have been weakened by drought, have led to forest-wide epidemics that have killed millions of trees in the US West. Those dead trees, called snags, become fuel for wildfires, as well as an increased risk for firefighters, who may be hit by fallen branches or unstable trees.
Are more houses in wooded areas a problem?
Homes at what firefighters call the wildland-urban interface pose particular problems for firefighters, typically tying many firefighters over structure protection, rather than actively engaging in wildfires.
Kuo said that we base our strategy and tactics on protecting values at risk. Houses, subdivisions, communication towers, gas pipelines, railways and roadways, transmission lines.
He said that defensively built houses help. More people in forested areas as well as people rebuilding have led to more human-caused wildfires. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise says humans cause about 87 percent of wildfires each year.
Are there enough firefighters?
The country has more than 20 Type 1 response teams to deal with the nation’s largest wildfire, and like Kuo and his colleagues on those teams, nearly every other firefight this year, are in short supply.
He and his crew agreed to work longer than their 14-day shift on the Washington fire to ensure that another Type 1 crew would be available.
Another problem is the lengthening of the wildfire season, which means that many seasonal firefighters leave for school before the wildfire season ends.
Josh Harvey, the chief of the Lands Department’s Bureau of Fire Management, said about 30% of state firefighters go back to school. Overall, Harvey said there is a widespread shortage of firefighters, fire engines and logistical support, and the state can no longer rely on help from neighboring states or federal partners.
There have also been occasional shortages of jet fuel for retardant bombers in some states.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Harvey said. We are living now and making history of fire.
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