Indigenous activists brace for worsening wildfires under climate change

31 August 2020

Published by https://nmpoliticalreport.com

USA – SANTA FE —  Up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Medio Fire is burning over four square miles of forest land. Its smoke has been combining with that from wildfires across the West and spilling down the mountains into Santa Fe and nearby communities.

When Carrie Wood found out that elders in the Nambé, Tesuque and Pojoaque pueblos had been contending with that smoke for days, she decided to step in and help. Wood and other organizers of the Three Sisters Collective first tried looking for air purifiers in stores, but everywhere they looked from Española to Santa Fe to Albuquerque had low stock.

They bought what they could and took donations, but wound up making purifiers themselves. Three Sisters members set up shop in Wood’s patio on Monday and, using box fans, 20-inch Filtrete air filters and duct tape, they made over 30 filters to bring to the elders and others with respiratory issues exacerbated by the smoke.

“We’re only doing what Indigenous women have been doing forever — helping the community,” Christina M. Castro, a Three Sisters member of the Taos and Jemez pueblos, said.

While it was a scramble to get all the air purifiers together and delivered in just a couple days, Castro and Wood are braced for the reality that they’ll have to do this again.

The changing climate and development encroaching onto natural spaces are making wildfire seasons worse in New Mexico and across the West.

In addition to threatening homes on Santa Fe’s outskirts, the Medio Fire has brought poor air quality to the region. The state Environment Department’s Air Quality Bureau said those with respiratory conditions should take extra precautions.

“Smoke from wildland fires does not discriminate, as evidenced by the smoke impacts we are seeing in the Santa Fe area,” the agency said in a statement. Real-time air quality monitoring fis available on an online map from the department.

While the recent smoke and haze make wildfire concerns more pressing, they aren’t new. New Mexico’s state government said the trend of worsening wildfires began over 20 years ago in the late 1990s.

“Both climate change and fire exclusion have created fuel conditions and fire behavior that is unprecedented [and] creating large burn scars on the landscape,” the state forestry division wrote in its draft 2020 Forest Action Plan. “Wildfires continue to grow larger, burn hotter, and leave vast areas denuded of trees and vulnerable to debris flow.”

‘The manifestation of the climate crisis’

Artemisio Romero y Carver, a high school senior, was on a run near his home just outside Santa Fe recently on a route he’d been running for years when something new happened: His eyes started to burn from the wildfire smoke.

The first thought that came to his mind was bleak: “This is the manifestation of the climate crisis and this is only going to get worse from here,” he said.

While burning eyes were a fresh symptom of climate change for Romero y Carver, he said he has already seen winters and summers get warmer in his young lifetime. He’s noticed fires get worse and more frequent and the monsoon season go from predictable to ever-changing.

Romero y Carver is on the steering committee for YUCCA Action, a youth-led climate activist group. Part of the blame for climate change, he said, lies with New Mexico politicians.

He’s pushing for a moratorium on fracking, the controversial drilling technique where sand, water and chemicals are pumped underground to extract oil and gas. It’s widespread in New Mexico, especially in the northwest’s San Juan Basin and the Permian Basin in the southeast.

Fracking’s environmental impacts are major — from polluting water to drying out soil to emitting methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Those impacts are worsening climate change and are partly to blame for the increasing wildfires, Romero y Carver said. He believes it’s time for New Mexico officials to stop allowing fracking on state lands.

“Our land is being sold out,” he said. “Our forests, our wildlife, our children are being sold out.”

With the effects of climate change already bearing down on New Mexico, Castro said Indigenous knowledge can help everyone. Many environmental and Native activists say tribal fire management practices could mitigate some of the catastrophic wildfires of recent years.

While U.S. fire officials have a history of fully suppressing fires, tribes historically were able to avoid the massive blazes of today by learning to coexist with fire, often letting natural fires burn, restoring the forest floor and eliminating the fuel for a larger fire.

“The fire makes me so sad. Our local community is suffering,” Castro said. However, she said investing in Indigenous knowledge is helpful “so that we can be fortified to all the imminent changes that are already upon us with the environment.”

Wood, who is Navajo, noted that the mutual aid efforts that have gained prominence in the coronavirus pandemic will be just as vital as climate-induced disaster continues.

She said that while bureaucracy often slows aid efforts by the government or other larger entities, smaller, local collectives can act fast — like Three Sisters did to get air purifiers to elders.

“Having that strong, tight-knit community where we trust each other and we work [together] is very important,” Wood said. “We need to be able to act fast, and that is not going to happen with just one person.”

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Wildfire Suppression Efforts Have Gotten More Aggressive, But Is There An Ecological Cost?

31 August 2020

Published by https://www.ijpr.org

USA – Smoky summers caused by large wildfires in recent years led to a strong public outcry. Now, federal land managers aggressively put out as many fires as they can before they get large.

National forest managers are responsible for managing wildfire on federal land under their control. Kris Sexton with the Klamath National Forest says she doesn’t like to take chances when it comes to safety.

“We always take aggressive action to put fires out right away and when they’re small,” she says.

These efforts have gotten even more aggressive in recent years, particularly since the notoriously smoky summers of 2017 and 2018. Merv George, who’s responsible for fire management in the Rogue River- Siskiyou National Forest, says it’s important to catch fires before they get out of hand.

“If we get an ignition source out there whether it be lightning or human start, it’s going to be really hard for us to get the resources we need to get that fire out if we can’t catch it in the initial attack,” George says.

But some conservationists believe that the current focus on fire suppression may be doing more harm than good. Tim Ingalsbee is with Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. Ingalsbee, a former firefighter himself, says that aggressive wildfire suppression is a losing battle and it may be depriving forests and wildlife of the fires they need to thrive.

“Making war on nature, we are damned if we lose for sure,” says Ingalsbee. “And we’re quite damned if we win because it will be a very different planet if we try to rob ecosystems of the fire they need to maintain their ecological integrity.”

Ingalsbee wants to move towards coexistence with fires rather than fighting them. He believes the current methods of fighting nature matches the imperialist culture of the west, with big corporations benefiting from economic drivers.

Advocates of ecological fire management believe that because most plants and animals have evolved with recurring fires, steering natural fires rather than stopping them will rejuvenate habitats and restore ecosystems.

Indigenous communities have evolved with fire, as well. Bill Tripp is with the Karuk tribe along Northern California’s Klamath River. He says before European settlement, his people managed fire to enhance food production and provide materials for traditional cultural practices.

“Those practices have been adapted in this place over thousands and thousands of years,” says Tripp. “When the fire exclusion paradigm began, our indigenous people were shot and hung and everything else for burning. Our intent is to work within our existing systems to bring those practices back.”

Standard firefighting techniques, such as using bulldozers to cut fire line, can leave long lasting scars on the landscape. Fire retardants can be toxic to waterways and wildlife. Burning also reduces insect populations and helps to fertilize the trees and make better acorns for people and wildlife to eat. The Karuk tribe has long practiced ceremonial burns to shade the river and reduce water temperatures.

Dominick DellaSalla is the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a project of the Earth Island Institute. He says using a lighter touch would be more beneficial in the long term.

“While we need fire suppression to protect homes and lives, it’s being overdone,” says DellaSalla. “There’s almost this knee jerk reaction every time there’s a fire start which even when those wildfires are burning remotely under safe conditions and performing their necessary ecological benefits.”

But for the land managers who are responsible for keeping nearby communities safe, letting natural fires burn is just too risky.

“I don’t really think that there’s a time or a place when mother nature hands us a fire where we would be in a position to know,” says Klamath National Forest’s Kris Sexton. “Because we don’t know what next week’s weather is going to bring us, we don’t know the resources available to us fourteen days out or any of those other things.”

Merv George with the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest believes that there’s a difference between good fires and bad fires, especially when trying to find natural balance.

“Bad fire is when you’ve got fire at the hottest time of the year where it’s really hard to control,” says George. “If that thing gets away and you don’t have the ability to put it out, the likelihood of that fire doing destruction not only to the environment but to some communities gets exponentially riskier. To me, trying to do ecological benefits with bad fire situations is definitely not worth the risk.”

Sexton believes that maintaining a healthy balance in the forest requires planning and expertise. “We really like to reach that ecological balance through prescribed fire and fire that we manage kind of on our terms rather than Mother Nature’s terms,” she says.

Prescribed burning and other forest treatments are expensive and are often complicated by variables such as weather and logistics. According to the Forest Service, there are at least 28 million acres of forest in the 15 western states that need treatment. It would be a challenge, to say the least, to gather the money and labor force necessary to replace natural fire with human intervention.

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Smoke from wildfire blackens prehistoric Greek city walls

31 August 2020

Published by https://abcnews.go.com

GREECE – ATHENS, Greece — Monuments at Greece‘s archaeological site of Mycenae have not been damaged by a wildfire that swept through the area, despite the blackening from smoke on the iconic entrance to the ancient citadel, Greece’s culture minister said Monday.

Four water-dropping planes and two helicopters helped dozens of firefighters contain the blaze Sunday after it reached the fringes of one of Greece’s most important archaeological sites, 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Athens.

The Bronze Age fortified city, whose rulers were key figures in ancient Greek legend, including the Trojan War, flourished centuries before the major Acropolis temples were built in Athens and was a major center of Mediterranean civilization.

Smoke from the flames blackened the 3,250-year-old Lion Gate, named after the monumental relief sculpture of two heraldic lions flanking a pillar that crowns the entrance to the ancient citadel.

“The damage caused by yesterday’s fire was the least possible,” Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said during a visit to the site Monday, adding that none of the site’s monuments or the Mycenae museum had suffered any damage.

Photos released by the ministry Monday showed no traces of burning inside the site.

“Smoke blackened some walls,” Mendoni added. “The problem is (only) aesthetic.”

“The Fire Service acted swiftly … and prevention measures worked: Dry vegetation had all been cleared away,” Mendoni said. “That’s what saved the monuments,.”

A spokesman for Greece’s main political opposition, the left-wing Syriza party, questioned the speed of the response by the Fire Service, noting that the fire had entered the site. The party said it was carrying out a separate inspection Monday and called on the minister to apologize for downplaying the damage.

Mycenae has been closed to visitors but the Culture Ministry said it will reopen Tuesday.

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Australia faces ‘cascading’ natural disasters: bushfire royal commission

31 August 2020

Published by https://www.smh.com.au

AUSTRALIA – The bushfire royal commission’s interim report warns Australia increasingly faces “cascading, concurrent and compounding” natural disasters but stops short of the practical action called for when Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the inquiry.

Mr Morrison declared in February the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements would be “focused on practical action that has a direct link to making Australians safer”.

The commission was handed a six-month reporting window “so recommendations can be acted upon before our next bushfire season”, Mr Morrison said. While the bushfire season has already begun in Queensland and NSW, the interim report into the Black Summer bushfires explicitly says it does not contain draft recommendations.

The 24-page “interim observations” report released on Monday instead identifies a long list of research initiatives and policy reforms. A number of “propositions” for comment will be released next week. The commission, which received 1700 submissions and heard evidence from 290 witnesses, is now working with state and federal fire managers.

Inquiry chairman Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin said the commission would release “preliminary observations to share our present perspectives as we approach the final stages of our inquiry”.

The commission’s interim report said state, territory and federal governments must better share resources and co-ordinate their disaster responses and recovery efforts.

It said hundreds of thousands of Australians lived in high-risk areas. Of the 3000 homes destroyed in the past summer, 99 per cent were located in areas identified as bushfire prone, it noted, with 74 per cent built before the introduction of the Australian Standard 3959 for construction in a bushfire-prone area.

The commission is seeking feedback on a national agency to co-ordinate state and federal preparation and response to natural disasters, which would “support the development of skills and expertise in recovery, and foster consistent approaches to recovery”.

It also suggested investigation of a national disaster declaration system because currently there was no “clear mechanism to elevate matters to national leaders”. Mr Morrison was criticised last summer for being too slow to call out the defence force to assist with bushfires.

National co-ordination is also a priority for disaster warnings and real-time monitoring – such as fire service warning apps – which the commission said “differ in quality and consistency” across the country.

Emergency Management Minister David Littleproud said the “interim observations identify areas that all levels of government, separately and collectively, can work on to improve our preparedness for upcoming disaster season”.

The Berejiklian government last week said it would implement all 76 recommendations from the independent NSW Bushfire Inquiry. It backed increased use of satellite technology and co-ordination between jurisdictions to improve alerts and responses to bushfires and noted the need to improve guidance for landholders to conduct fuel-reduction burns, but said existing rules needed to be implemented better rather than new legislation.

Black Summer fires burned more than 10 million hectares of country, claimed 33 lives and destroyed more than 3000 homes. University of Tasmania experts told the commission 445 people likely died of smoke pollution.

The commission said fires cost more than $2 billion in insured losses, $3.6 billion in economic losses to tourism, agriculture and hospitality and $2 billion in health costs.

The commission was due to report by August 31 but due to disruption from COVID-19 that date was extended. Another block of hearings kick off on September 21 with the final report due by October 28.

with Peter Hannam

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Arctic wildfires emit 35% more CO2 so far in 2020 than for whole of 2019

31 August 2020

Published by https://www.theguardian.com

ARCTIC – The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Arctic wildfires this year is already 35% higher than the figure for the whole of 2019.

The latest data, provided by the EU’s Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service, shows that up to 24 August 245 megatonnes of CO2 had been released from wildfires this year. The figure for the whole of last year was 181 megatonnes.

The peak number of active fire observations was about 600 in late July, compared with 400 in 2019. The average equivalent number between 2003 and 2018 was about 100. Copernicus estimated that 205 megatonnes of CO2 was emitted between 1 June and 31 July alone. The wildfires coincided with a heatwave in Siberia, where temperatures soared to more than 30C (86F) in some areas.

Dr Mark Parrington, senior scientist at Copernicus, said the Arctic wildfires this summer may be setting a new precedent. Emissions increased significantly in July and early August compared with 2019. “In some respects [the data] has been similar to 2019 in terms of the dry and warm conditions in the Siberian Arctic. This year, the difference was a large cluster of fires that burned through July for many days leading to higher estimated emissions.”

Dr Thomas Smith, assistant professor in environmental geography at the London School of Economics, said 2019 had already been an anomalous year in the Arctic circle. “We have seen two years of anomalously high activity, according to the satellite record that goes back to 2003,” he said.

Smith also warned that some fires were destroying ancient peat bogs containing carbon that has accumulated over thousands of years, a process similar to fossil fuel burning.

Analysis performed by Smith, covering May and June of this year, suggested that about 50% of the fires in the Arctic Circle were burning on peat soils, with the vast majority of the fire activity occurring in eastern Siberia.

Arctic wildfires have become a cause for concern in recent years, with fires becoming more widespread and persistent in 2019 and 2020.

In June, Russia’s aerial forest protection service reported that 3.4m acres of Siberian forest were burning in areas unreachable to firefighters. Last summer, the Arctic fires were so intense that they created a cloud of smoke and soot bigger than the EU landmass.

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Survey to track impact of COVID-19 and bushfires on new mums and babies

30 August 2020

Published by https://the-riotact.com/

USA – Sophie Brian and her partner, Daniel Schorn, are proud new parents of their first child, Parker, a healthy, bubbly, blue-eyed, four-month-old girl with the world at her feet.

Sophie says she will tell Parker about the special time she was born: conceived just before the past summer’s bushfires and born in April during the height of the first COVID-19 lockdown.

“It was definitely scary,” she tells Region Media between nap time for Parker. “There were a lot of little things that impact your frame of mind.

“My family are all in Sydney so I wasn’t able to have my mum there for the birth. It was hard for my family to come and see her at the beginning. We couldn’t have a baby shower which is a little thing when you look back on it, but they are still important parts of being pregnant through bushfires and then COVID-19.”

Sophie says she is thankful her pregnancy was without complication, but there were times when she worried about the effects of bushfire smoke and the additional stress of COVID-19. Once Parker was born, the new parents were grateful to wrap themselves in a new-born bubble and enjoy their first days as a family.

“There’s been lots of video calls with my family,” she says. “Your body is changing so much and I wanted to do things like exercise, but my GP told me not to go outside while the bushfire smoke was around. So I was wearing a mask back then when I did have to go out.

“My appointments with midwives were at home and there were a few tests that my partner couldn’t come to, but it was fairly straightforward.”

Sophie says a new survey developed by the Australian National University (ANU) will be very helpful to examine the effects of the past summer’s bushfires and COVID-19 on pregnant women and their babies

The four-stage Mother and Child 2020 survey is part of a larger study – in partnership with the University of Canberra, University of Wollongong, Canberra Health Services and NSW Health – to determine how these recent crises have impacted living conditions, as well as the mental and physical health of new mothers and their babies.

Lead ANU researcher Professor Christopher Nolan says the results will be used to form a series of recommendations for how to improve our health system and emergency responses during major crises.

“We need to listen to the experiences of these mothers and look at the challenges they faced during the bushfires and pandemic,” he says. “Understanding these challenges is the only way we can look to improve these systems in the future.”

Cobargo resident Zoey Salucci was seven months pregnant when the bushfires forced her to evacuate her home with her two-year-old daughter and find shelter on a beach in Bermagui.

“The smoke was so thick I couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Being pregnant, your lungs are already squashed and this made it feel so much worse.

“I ended up sitting in a car because I couldn’t handle the smoke and I knew I would end up having to run to the beach if the fire got close.

“I was under the most intense and indescribable stress that I have ever experienced. Not knowing how to escape or what the smoke was doing to my baby was the most horrible feeling.”

Rebecca Clark gave birth to her youngest daughter in Canberra during the height of COVID-19 restrictions. She says stress was her major concern as well.

“Ten minutes before I went in for my C-section, we still hadn’t been told whether my husband would be allowed in with me,” says Rebecca.

“I spent a lot of my pregnancy feeling locked up and stressing about whether the bushfire smoke had an effect on my baby, and because of COVID-19, the stress and uncertainty stayed with me even in those final moments before I had my daughter.”

The survey is available to anyone who was pregnant or had a baby no older than three months on 1 February, 2020, or became pregnant by 30 April, 2020, in Canberra and southeast NSW. Researchers are particularly interested to hear from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers, and women from culturally diverse backgrounds.

You can register for the Mother and Child 2020 survey via the ANU website. The researchers hope to deliver results within 12 weeks.

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Wildfire funding bill dies in California Legislature

30 August 2020

Published by https://calmatters.org/

USA – California lawmakers abandoned a last-minute bill that would have raised $3 billion for wildfire and climate change projects by extending an existing fee on some utility customers.

The proposal, AB 1659, was introduced just five days before the end of the legislative session, with some lawmakers complaining they didn’t have sufficient time to review it. As the complex bill chugged through the legislative process, it was amended at each stop and faced broad-based opposition from legislators in both parties.

At the end of a chaotic session, the bill died an ignominious death: Legislators never brought it to a floor vote in the Senate, a victim of too little support and too little time.

“Wildfire prevention and climate change are important issues in California, and deserve thoughtful discussion to figure out potential funding proposals.”

assembly speaker anthony rendon

The funding package was aimed mainly at preventing wildfires, but also provided millions to restore state parks, local forest-thinning projects and conservation projects. Ultimately it proved to be too cumbersome to move on.

“Our leadership was not comfortable with shoehorning this into the last minute of the session,” said Hugh Bower, chief of staff to Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Kevin Mullin, who co-authored the bill along with Assemblyman Richard Bloom, a Santa Monica Democrat.

Bower said much of the bill’s focus was on fire prevention rather than immediate fire suppression, so lawmakers believed the bill could wait to be fleshed-out and reintroduced when the legislature reconvenes in January.

State officials assured the bill’s authors that California had enough funding to deal with the current wildfire siege, Bower said.

The bill required a two-thirds vote of each chamber to pass.

In other action, the legislature on Sunday passed a bill that would ease restrictions on California’s inmate firefighters who seek to work for state agencies, potentially adding to the state’s fire efforts.

The legislation, AB 2147, will speed up the process of expunging the former inmate’s criminal record, allowing them to apply for various state-issued licenses, including an emergency medical technician license, a prerequisite for state and local firefighting jobs. It excludes some felons from applying.

The state has relied on inmate crews to fill gaps in staffing  but that assistance was thin this year as state prisons released inmates early because of the coronavirus. The legislation now goes to the governor for his decision.

For the utility fee funding bill, some legislators launched late-hour efforts Sunday to craft a drastically stripped-down version — retaining only the $500 million for current fire projects. But they were not immediately successful. Amending a bill so close to the end of session is unconstitutional, although that prohibition can be waived by the governor in case of emergency.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said that threshold was not met in this case.

The emergency rule “is designed to provide transparency, and overturning it should be done sparingly,” he said in a statement provided to CalMatters. “Wildfire prevention and climate change are important issues in California, and deserve thoughtful discussion to figure out potential funding proposals.”

The bill was accompanied by robust debate, laying bare an agonizing tug of war between the urgent need to fund wildfire and climate change projects and the realities of a budget shriveled by the economic stress of the coronavirus response.

The proposed legislation, which would have set aside $2.5 billion for fire and climate change-related projects, would have piggy-backed on a 2019 law that authorized a fee on electrical customers’ bills to create a $21 billion insurance fund to pay for utility-caused fire damage. The bill would extend that fee until 2045.

Lawmakers said the cost to ratepayers would be less than $1 dollar a month and would yield  more than $2.5 billion in bonds.

Some legislators and others criticized the targeting of only customers of the state’s three largest utilities —  Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric —  effectively requiring them to underwrite fire prevention projects that benefit all Californians.

The funding package was aimed mainly at preventing wildfires, but also provided millions to restore state parks, local forest-thinning projects and conservation projects.

Consumer advocates characterized the bill as a “backroom deal” and pointed out that ratepayers had already been asked to pitch in to pay for wildfire projects.

“There will be fires next year, are they going to come back and ask for more?” said Mark Toney, executive director of the ratepayer advocacy group The Utility Reform Network. Toney estimated that the recent proposal would eventually saddle ratepayers with at least $7 billion, after interest and fees are calculated.

The proposal included immediate and longer-term uses for the funds. The first would borrow $500 million for firefighter training and for fire prevention projects, to begin a month after the bill is signed into law. That is the piece of the legislation that some lawmakers were attempting to craft into a new bill over the weekend.

The second part, to be developed in six months, would have allocated funds for a long list of priorities, including home hardening, creating defensible space and investments in public safety, particularly in low-income communities

Both funds would have been overseen by the Public Utilities Commission and the state Natural Resources Agency.

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Federal firefighter units juggle COVID-19 infection on fire lines

29 August 2020

Published by https://www.nbcnews.com/

USA – Federal firefighter units tasked with putting out some of the nation’s biggest wildfires are grappling with the reality of a fire season coinciding with a pandemic.

As historic wildfires have spread through much of the West this summer, firefighters organized within the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service are testing positive for COVID-19 — having to, at times, learn on the fly how to mitigate the spread as virus spikes hit various fire camps assigned to active blazes.

Wildland firefighters are sometimes considered the last defense, called in after local resources are stretched thin. Federal crews spend the fire season crisscrossing state borders as they are sent to fight the latest burning blaze. And that constant traveling, as well as the close working proximity, have offered a challenge to COVID-19 mitigation, especially as firefighting methods like holding the line can require elbow-to-elbow teamwork.

In a normal year, the coordination between the Interior Department’s bureaus and the Forest Service, who compile the federal wildfire response, is complex. COVID-19 has added another element of complication.

Arizona’s Bush fire was one of the first major fires this season, and was one of the first to test out the dual challenge of firefighting during a pandemic. The blaze, first started by a car fire in the state’s Sonoran Desert, burned nearly 200,000 acres, ultimately becoming the fifth largest fire ever in the state.

“We kind of live for this. This is a mission of ours. You know, we become firefighters because we want to protect the land and serve the people,” said Eric Solomon, a Forest Service public affairs officer for the Tonto National Forest, where the Bush fire was. “At the beginning of this fire season, COVID was still something that we really didn’t understand. So, there was definitely an element of fear there that, ‘What happens to me if I get sick?’”

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At one point, as many as 855 firefighters were assigned to fight the Bush fire. In late June, eight members of an Oregon-based Bureau of Land Management fire crew working to fight the fire tested positive for COVID-19 just days after arriving at the camp. They had to be quarantined at hotels with nine others that they came in contact with. The cluster of cases was considered to possibly be one of the largest COVID-19 exposures to firefighters so far this year, according to a report by John Szulc, fire risk management officer in the Pacific Northwest/Alaska region.

The incident was just one of many virus exposures that have so far taken place this fire season, with agency coordinators anticipating the number to grow. Fear of spread is especially heightened as experts warn breathing in wildfire smoke could worsen the symptoms of COVID-19.

“COVID has added another logistical layer on top of an already complicated logistical situation where you are providing for personnel safety, saving homes, and now providing for reducing spread amongst hundreds or thousands of firefighters on one incident,” a spokesperson for the National Interagency Fire Center, which organizes national fire response across the agencies, said.

State and federal fire crews have had months between the onset of the pandemic and the anticipated fire season to prepare for the collision of the two, and many lead with the working assumption that crews would inevitably test positive.

“The reality is you’re going to see positives in camp, that’s just the era we are in globally,” Mariana Ruiz-Temple, Oregon’s chief deputy fire marshal, said. “Knowing that and not being afraid of that, is what’s important.”

A joint study published this month by the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station and the Colorado State University that modeled potential COVID-19 spread among fire camps, found that in the worst case scenario, more than 5 percent of all fire crew would be infected on the job, with it proving fatal for 1 percent.

The number of positive COVID-19 cases in federal firefighting crews is not being tracked on the national level. Instead, individual bureaus are responsible for counting and publicly sharing that data.

To date, 45 Bureau of Land Management firefighters, 122 Forest Service firefighters and one U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service firefighter have tested positive for the virus, according to each agency respectively. A seasonal firefighter working for the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks, Alaska, died Aug. 13 shortly after testing positive for COVID-19 while on the job. So far, 54 firefighters within the Bureau of Indian Affairs have tested positive for COVID-19, a source told NBC News, and the bureau confirmed five agency firefighters are currently positive with the virus. The National Park Service would not provide the total number of its fire staff who had tested positive, despite multiple requests.

To counter the virus’s spread, crews have changed many aspects of their on-the-ground fire response including organizing smaller sleeping camps, suspending buffet lines, adopting Zoom-based morning check-ins and wearing masks during transport. But the adaptation has still offered challenges.

In one June incident, several firefighters across three states tested positive for the virus after a member of a fire helicopter, or helitack, team contracted COVID-19. The person on the helitack team for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest started experiencing fever and chills while fighting the breakout of the Murphy fire in Nevada. That crew member self-isolated, but none of the 13 other members of the crew went for testing or were isolated, according to a report by the safety officer for Humboldt-Toiyabe.

“This was the third helitack crew member to be tested in the last couple weeks. Therefore, the apparent regularity of this process may have introduced a relaxed mood within the crew, not to mention the two previous negative test results,” the author of the report wrote.

Days later, those crew members were assigned to a fire at Colorado’s San Juan National Forest. One crew member and another dispatcher later tested positive, which ultimately led to the suspension of helitack operations for 14 days. Two Forest Service firefighters from Georgia’s Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest who had been detailed to the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, later also came down with COVID-19.

“Managing COVID-19 in the wildfire suppression environment is an exercise in trade-offs,” the safety officer wrote. “The threat of community impact from a wildfire has been deemed more significant than the threat of community spread from a potential exposure to COVID-19. What size of outbreak or degree of hospitalization will it take to change this dynamic? It’s not a matter of ‘if it will happen.’ It’s a matter of ‘when.’”

Solomon is more positive about the learning curve firefighters have had to deal with, when considering the balance of doing their jobs and being safe. He said wildland crews this year have largely been able to quickly learn how to best mitigate risks.

“I think we’re just adaptable. This is different. People just realized we just needed to do things a little differently this year,” he said. ”It’s just a new normal for us now.”

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Wildfire spotting goes high tech: Can Silicon Valley save Northern California?

29 August 2020

Published by https://www.lmtonline.com

USA – As 12,000 lightning strikes pummeled the Bay Area this month, igniting hundreds of fires, fire spotters sprang into action.

Their arsenal of tools includes thermal imagery collected by space satellites; real-time feeds from hundreds of mountaintop cameras; a far-flung array of weather stations monitoring temperature, humidity and winds; and artificial intelligence to munch and crunch the vast data troves to pinpoint hot spots.

For decades, wildfires in remote regions were spotted by people in lookout towers who scanned the horizon with binoculars for smoke — a tough and tedious job. They reported potential danger by telephone, carrier pigeon or Morse code signals with a mirror.

Now, fire spotting has gone high tech. And the technology to address it is getting exponentially better and faster, trained by a growing body of data about wildfires. It’s making firefighters more nimble and keeping them safer. The only question is whether silicon-powered progress can keep up with the climate change-fueled flames.

Tech has also made fire spotting more democratic. Anyone can go online to see the satellite and camera images, while interactive maps display the conflagrations’ locations. Footage from some of the mountaintop cameras went viral this month as they transmitted apocalyptic images of the raging flames that ultimately burned them in the CZU Lightning Complex fires.

PG&E analysts Neal Narayan and Anthony Malnati Sr. monitor a small fire in August 2019. Technology used by companies like PG&E to spot fires continues to improve.

“It’s Netflix for fire,” said Graham Kent, who runs the AlertWildfire.org system, which has about 550 cameras in California, a number he hopes to double by 2022. The cameras capture a still image every second to make time-lapse videos, using near-infrared technology for nighttime viewing. “They give an intimate sense of what’s going on. There’s a primal sense like we’re still living in caves; everyone fears fire.”

The network of cameras, backed by a consortium of the University of Nevada at Reno, UC San Diego and the University of Oregon, allows authorized personnel such as fire command teams to rotate, pan and zoom to zero in on suspicious plumes of smoke. The AlertWildfire system is adding some mobile cameras — a trailer with a 30-foot tower that can be positioned anywhere it’s needed.

The images from the cameras and satellites, along with footage captured by piloted and unpiloted aircraft, and weather station data, are vital components in the rapidly advancing technology for fire spotting.

The new technology “is helping us fight more-aggressive fires more aggressively with a calculated level of safety,” said Brice Bennett, a spokesman for Cal Fire. “Fire-line commanders utilize intelligence from all these different inputs. Situational awareness is paramount — fully understanding the events unfolding around you, not just what’s directly in front of your face but what will occur in the next 12 hours.”

The “boots on the ground” crews use the detailed data to get information even while they’re en route, he said. The digital maps can show where the hottest spots are, for instance, so they know what areas to avoid and where to construct fire lines.

Volunteer fire spotter Rich Martin uses an Osborne Fire Finder in the Mount Zion Lookout in Amador County.

“We can use this information to understand where fires are spreading, where they’re most active and to get rapid alerts for wildfires,” said Scott Strenfel, manager of meteorology and fire science at PG&E. “It’s pretty exciting with all this technology coming together. The earlier you can spot a fire, the earlier you can take suppression action.”

During fire season, PG&E staffs its new Wildfire Safety Operations Center around the clock. Analysts in the room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters monitor big-screen monitors displaying data-packed maps and information flowing in from a variety of sources.

The company used to spend a couple of million dollars a year on a smoke patrol program. Every afternoon during fire season, seven pilots would fly in set patterns (similar to a lawn-mower’s path) over heavily forested areas in its service territory, looking for smoke. But satellite advances meant it could get similar information for a tenth of the cost — and have continuous coverage, Strenfel said.

Even in a test version last year, the satellite system detected an early-morning grass fire on Mount Diablo in July 2019 about 15 minutes before the first 911 calls came in, he said. PG&E now has systems in place to notify local fire agencies when its technology spots fires.

Technology comes into play after fires as well. “We map burn severity to see how much damage resulted from the fire, so resource management can stabilize the landscape and mitigate hazards like flash floods,” said Brad Quayle, a program manager at the Forest Service’s Geospatial Technology and Applications Center, which uses satellites and other technologies to detect and monitor fire activity.

Technology also helps authorities decide whether and when to evacuate locals.

“A fire is a dynamic situation with high winds, dry fuels, proximity to populations, especially in California,” said Everett Hinkley, national remote sensing program manager at the Forest Service. “We can provide rapid updates to infer the direction and speed of those wildfires to help people calling the evacuation orders.”

Although satellites have been used in fire spotting for about 20 years, a new generation of satellites and onboard tools have dramatically improved their aptitude for the task.

“Weather satellites have thermal channels that can be used for fires, but they’re optimized to look at cloud temperatures (which are) very cold, not for very high temperatures,” said Vincent Ambrosia, associate program manager for wildfires at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Newer satellites with spectral sensors and advanced optics technology now provide finer spatial resolution and data processing.

There are two types of satellites: Polar orbiter satellites are closer to Earth and provide higher-resolution images, but capture them only twice a day. Geosynchronous or geostationary satellites stay over a specific geographic area, providing images about every five minutes, but must fly about 22,000 miles above the Earth to synchronize with its orbit, so the images are more coarse.

Researchers have lengthy lists of tech improvements they hope to see in the near future.

One is unpiloted aircraft that can stay aloft for months at a time, perhaps 100,000 feet above the ground, “providing persistent surveillance of a fire event, allowing (firefighters) to make real-time decisions,” Ambrosia said. “It’s the same as the resources that support troops on the ground in battle scenarios.”

Quayle likewise said he’d like to see “long endurance, high-altitude platforms that can serve the purpose of a satellite but fly in the atmosphere.”

Several private companies are working on options such as solar-powered aircraft or high-altitude airships like dirigibles, he said, estimating that deployment is between one and five years out.

He’d also like to see satellites built specifically for fire detection, something now being developed in Canada, which is replete with remote, fire-prone forests. “That satellite system is probably five years out from completion and launch,” he said, noting that the rest of the world can share it.

While some have speculated that the smaller drones flown by hobbyists could be deployed, they lack the power and range to fly high enough to usefully spot fires. But their technology, too, could improve over time.

Another future upgrade is for computers to get even better at “reading” the data via improved artificial intelligence, to cut down on false positives. “We need better machine learning to process this data overload, because you can’t put enough analysts in front of screens to handle it all,” Hinkley said.

Despite all the high-tech wizardry, many fires are initially reported through a traditional system: 911 calls. Blazes increasingly occur near populated areas so there are essentially millions of potential spotters on the ground.

“The 911 calls in many places will be the first notification,” Strenfel said.

But calls to 911 can mean a deluge of information without the specifics that firefighters need — so the satellites and cameras come into play to home in on exact locations.

“In cases like we just went through, with the lightning causing 500 fires all at once, and many people calling, that information can be overwhelming,” Strenfel said. “The satellite detection systems (show) where these fires are in real time.”

Kent from AlertWildfire said similar things about his camera network.

When a 911 call comes in, authorities “can turn to a camera and see the ignition phase of that fire,” he said. Cameras can also triangulate a fire’s exact location. Under normal circumstances, they can “see” 20 miles in daytime; 40 miles at night if there aren’t obstacles. But he’s seen fires caught by cameras as far away as 100 miles in the daytime and 160 miles at night.

Sometimes traditional ways reemerge.

Cal Fire’s Amador-El Dorado Unit recently refurbished two dilapidated lookout towers and now staffs them during fire season with community volunteers.

Armed with a two-way radio, binoculars and an Osborne Fire Finder — a topographic paper map with sighting apertures to help gauge a fire’s distance and location — the volunteers have spotted 85 “smokes” since June 1, with seven of them being first reports, said Diana Swart, a spokeswoman for the unit.

“These human volunteers get up in that tower with their old-fashioned Fire Finders from the early 1900s,” she said. “In these very rural wooded areas, fires otherwise may not be noticed until they get very large. Having a person out there who’s actively looking is key.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid

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Californians are buckling under forest fires, COVID-19

29 August 2020

Published by https://www.theglobeandmail.com

USA – It had already been a difficult enough year for Christine Pascoe. She recovered from COVID-19 this spring just in time for local public-health officials to shutter her small electrolysis business as part of an effort to slow the spread of the virus.

The latest blow came last week, when Ms. Pascoe was forced to flee her home as wildfires encircled the small community of Ben Lomond, tucked into the mountains above Silicon Valley.

“Stress, just unbelievable stress,” Ms. Pascoe said while sitting in front of a Red Cross shelter in nearby Santa Cruz, where evacuees have been sleeping in individual tents set up inside an auditorium to enforce physical distancing. “It’s been probably the worst thing in my life.”

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In recent days, California’s COVID-19 epidemic has collided head-on with the state’s long-standing climate crisis, which has sparked an unseasonably early and aggressive start to the annual wildfire season. A rare summer lightning storm earlier this month has started nearly 700 fires, burning an area the size of Prince Edward Island and forcing nearly 140,000 people to flee their homes.

The wildfires have slowed the state’s efforts to combat the pandemic at a time when California was looking to start reopening businesses and schools. The state reported that it was testing half as many people a day as it did before the fires, which have shut down almost a dozen COVID-19 testing sites.

The pandemic has also hampered efforts to tackle the blazes, with fewer firefighters available even as crews have been stretched thin by the sheer number of fires. At the same time, the wildfires have raised concerns that large-scale evacuations could cause a new wave of infections in hard-hit communities. “Any activity or action that increases mixing among people who haven’t been together in quite some time creates a transmission risk,” said Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary.

California lawmakers were scrambling to find new money for wildfire suppression before the legislative session ended this week. But that too was hindered after the state Senate was forced to shut down its in-person session because a senator tested positive for COVID-19.

The twin perils of a pandemic and wildfires have been particularly hard on small retail businesses, many of whom had received approval to move their operations outdoors, only to be forced to close down because of poor air quality from the fires.

“The good news is the earthquake has been postponed until further notice,” joked Dave Jones, who operates a small jewellery business in Santa Cruz, a coastal city at the epicentre of one of the state’s larger wildfires. Mr. Jones used to find many of his customers through flea markets. But those have been closed because of the pandemic, and few customers have been willing to brave the smoky skies to visit the table Mr. Jones set up in the city’s downtown. “It’s a nightmare,” he said.

Public-health officials are also grappling with how to advise Californians to deal with the competing risks from COVID-19 and the fires.

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After urging residents earlier in the year not to buy N95 respirators so they could be reserved for essential workers, health officials are now warning that cloth face coverings won’t protect against wildfire smoke, which can exacerbate respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19. And having encouraged vulnerable populations to shelter in place, officials are struggling to persuade residents – particularly seniors in the quaint mountain towns that are in the path of wildfires – to evacuate.

“Now we’re telling many folks who haven’t left their homes for months, who are worried about exposure to COVID, that it’s safer to leave than to stay,” Dr. Ghaly said.

The pandemic has similarly thwarted firefighting efforts at a time when the state is battling a huge number of simultaneous blazes,

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