OCTOBER (All News)

Recent Media Highlights on Fire, Policies, and Politics

October 2020

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Born in the ice age, humankind now faces the age of fire – and Australia is on the frontline

30 October 2020

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

AUSTRALIA – What has been the most shocking event of 2020? Was it awakening on New Year’s Day to more news of terror in Australia’s southern forests, to the realisation that the future was suddenly here, that this spring and summer of relentless bushfire was a planetary event? Was it the silent transmission of Covid-19, already on the loose and soon to overwhelm the world and change the very fabric of daily life everywhere at once? Or was it the surging race riots and protests, especially across America, where police brutality triggered grief, anger and outrage about the inequality and injustice still faced by black people? Could we even distinguish them from each other, this overlapping sequence of horrors?

Fire, plague and racism are always with us, percolating away, periodically erupting, sometimes converging. They came together in the colonisation of Australia when the conquering British brought smallpox, scorned Indigenous rights and fought Aboriginal fire with gunfire. Systemic racism is the virus, declared Black Lives Matter protesters.

In mid-June the historian Geoffrey Blainey, writing in the Australian in defence of colonial statues, looked back on the first day of the year. His opening gambit was this sentence: “On New Year’s Day, no major economist, no famous medical scientist and no political leader had predicted that this would be a tumultuous year.” Only a defiant climate sceptic could have been so uncurious about the events unfolding that day and so dismissive of expertise. For on New Year’s Eve, the savage summer had pulsed into frightening ferocity on the New South Wales south coast and in East Gippsland. Eight people died that day in the fires. Sleepless tourists and residents faced the dawn of the new year without power, fuel or mobile-phone reception, and some without homes. The day brought evacuations, road closures, panic buying, collective fear and a surge of dire predictions. For months, experts and bush residents had been preparing for a tumultuous fire season and here on the first day of 2020 was a frightening climax.

Throughout 2019, fire experts had pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister had refused. The crisis could not be acknowledged in case it gave credence to the need for climate action.

As if neglect and omission in the face of the fire threat were not enough, Coalition politicians and their apologists then hastily encouraged lies about the causes of the fires, declaring that they were started by arsonists and that greenies had prevented hazard-reduction burns. Yet these fires were overwhelmingly started by dry lightning in remote terrain, and hazard-reduction burning is constrained by a warming climate. The effort to stymie sensible policy reform after the fires was as pernicious as the failure to plan in advance of them.

There was barely a moment to breathe between bushfires and Covid. Australians had been in lockdown for months even before the year began, fighting fires that had started at the end of winter, cowering indoors from smoke, heat and ash, and wearing masks on their brief forays outside. People spoke courageously of “the new normal” but did not yet understand that “normal” was gone. Just as they finally stepped outside to sniff the clearer autumn air, it was declared dangerous again. Their masks were still in their pockets.

Despite the connections between these crises, politicians were keen to separate them, as if one blessedly cancelled out the other, not least because the pandemic gave the prime minister a chance to reset after his disastrous summer. Instead of forcing handshakes he was forced to withhold them. For the beleaguered Coalition government, Covid seemed to provide the escape it wanted from climate politics.

Australians were forbidden from talking about the obvious relationship between bushfires and climate, so how will we manage to interrogate the common origins of climate change and the pandemic? The fires and the plague are both symptoms of something momentous that is unfolding on Earth: a concentration and acceleration of the impact of humans on nature. As the environmental scientists Inger Andersen and Johan Rockström argued in June: “Covid-19 is more than an illness. It is a symptom of the ailing health of our planet.”

Or, as the US science writer David Quammen succinctly put it: “We made the coronavirus epidemic.” Not in a laboratory but in the scary, runaway experiment humans are conducting with Earth. Historians and scientists predicted the unpleasant surprises. Like most infectious diseases in the history of humanity, Covid-19 spilled over from wild animals to humans and became a pandemic because of ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, the illegal wildlife trade and increased human mobility. “So when you’re done worrying about this outbreak,” Quammen warns, “worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.”

Doing something about it means more than finding a vaccine; it means urgently addressing the causes of the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis. It means understanding how dire the current rupture is in the long-term relationship between humans and nature.

Could people be alive down there?

In November 2019, as forest fires worked their way down the eastern seaboard, I walked for a week in the Australian Alps, my annual pilgrimage to the high country. The wild granite tors, the delicate beauty of the snow gums and the exhilarating freedom of the alpine herb fields have always lifted my spirits. In late spring and early summer this landscape still carries the memory of snow, of a magic, ethereal otherworld I came to know on skis as a child. Slicks of ice remained tucked under crags. It is a place apart, of subtle colours and sharp air, where ranges of cerulean blue cascade in receding waves to the horizon. But this time the mountains had all gone, swallowed by an apocalypse.

From high in the Kosciuszko national park, I felt like a refugee from the suffering world of the plains, finding solace in the snowgrass and minty alpine forests. I could see nothing of the world below. In every direction I looked down upon a strange, suffocating orange blanket. This was no mystic lake of fog that would evaporate in the morning sunshine; it was something sinister and malevolent, infusing every scarp and canyon with its sickness. There below me, Australia was burning. Could people still be alive down there, in such dense, acrid smoke? Could they breathe? In the mornings, a temperature inversion kept the ugly blanket below me, but each afternoon my eyes started smarting as smoke infiltrated the alpine valleys, turning the sun red. That smoke killed 10 times more people than the flames. It was coming for me and I couldn’t go any higher.

This experience of looking down on a burning world brought home to me, perhaps more forcibly than facing the flames below, what the future might hold. One way to make sense of this critical tipping point is the idea that we are now living in the Anthropocene, having left behind the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last ice age. The Anthropocene – the age of humans – places us on par with other geophysical forces such as orbital variations, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes, and recognises our power to change the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its stratigraphy. Earth was first jolted into the Anthropocene by the industrial revolution in the late 18th century, when people began digging up and burning fossil fuels.

But as I gazed down on the smoke, I remembered an alternative name for this era that has been proposed by the historian Stephen Pyne. It is the Pyrocene: a fire age, comparable to past ice ages. The Pyrocene puts fire at the centre of the human ecological story and contrasts it with ice. Fire is alive and ice is dead. Fire is at the heart of human civilisation, for we are a fire species. Yet we are also, paradoxically, creatures of the ice. We were born in the Pleistocene, a geological epoch that began 2.5m years ago and introduced a series of rhythmic ice ages – or, to be precise, one long ice age punctuated by regular brief interludes of interglacial warmth. The repetitive glaciations of the Pleistocene, which demanded innovation and versatility, promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth.

The Pyrocene is a more radical category than the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene declares the end of the latest interglacial period. The Pyrocene goes further, by declaring the end of the much longer and older Pleistocene, the whole epoch of ice ages. It announces the end of the age of ice, the beginning of the age of fire, and the end of what was truly the age of humans. Not the beginning of the age of humans, as is suggested by the smugly named Anthropocene, but the end. And Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. This is what I pondered as I watched the acrid orange blanket snake up the alpine gullies towards me. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end? Is this what the Pyrocene looks like? Nowhere to go but up, and no up to go to?

The Anthropocene is primarily a geological signature, whereas the Pyrocene is biological; they are both acts of historical imagination that rupture the conventional periods within which we imagine our existence. They ask us to see human history not as something defined by documents or brought into being by the invention of writing, but as a diverse cultural odyssey that is also a biological story – even a geological one. If humans have become so powerful that they can change the condition of the planet’s oceans and atmosphere, then we urgently need to think in deeper time, on a scale where we might better understand the environmental rhythms we are so profoundly disturbing.

And yet, at the beginning of Reconciliation Week in Australia, amid the climate and Covid emergencies and as race riots escalated in the US, the corporate mining giant Rio Tinto detonated 46,000 years of human history at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara. It was an act of sacrilege committed even as George Floyd’s death unleashed avowals around the world that Black Lives Matter. In the age of Covid, people rallying against black deaths in custody donned masks and carried banners inscribed with Floyd’s final words: “I can’t breathe.”

Several years before Juukan Gorge was destroyed, archaeologists found a 4,000-year-old belt made of plaited hair in one of its rock shelters. Its DNA was associated with today’s Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners. Chris Salisbury, Rio Tinto’s chief executive of iron ore, apologised for “the distress” caused by the destruction of the site but not for the act itself, which he defended. Here is staggering evidence of Australia’s continuing inability to empathise or identify with the peoples who discovered this continent and who today are still fighting for recognition, justice, respect and equality before the law.

It is confirmation that in the 21st century our country remains a colony, still unable to accept (as the Uluru statement puts it) that “this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”. The deep environmental and cultural inheritance of this continent, with all the wisdom and perspective it might offer about living in this place, about survival, species and cultural burning, about fires, plagues and rising seas, is not yet important enough to Australians. When will it be, if not now? The insidious smoke is coming.

• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December

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As Trump blames wildfires on CA officials, federal agencies fall short of forest protection goals

31 October 2020

Published by https://ktla.com/

USA – Nearly two years ago, President Donald Trump stood amid the smoky ruins of Paradise, California, where he blamed the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history on poor forest management.

“You’ve got to take care of the floors, you know? The floors of the forest, very important,” the president said.

He ordered the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Interior to make federal lands less susceptible to catastrophic wildfires with measures such as removing dead trees, underbrush and other potentially flammable materials.

But while Trump has accused California and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of doing a “terrible job” of forest protection, his own agencies fell short of his goals for federal lands in 2019.

They treated a combined 6,736 square miles (17,446 square kilometers) — just over half of the 13,203 square miles (34,196 square kilometers) the president sought, according to government data. It was only slightly better than their average annual performance over nearly two decades.

Without directly addressing the figures, the Forest Service said in a statement Friday to the Associated Press that prospects are “very good” for stepping up forest treatments in the next several years, assuming Congress provides more funding and state and private landowners play bigger roles. The agency has formed stewardship agreements with 19 states and “will rely on partnerships with state governments to get this work done,” it said.

The numbers show it will take more than executive orders to make significant progress on a problem that has been building for a century, scientists and advocates say. More money and personnel are needed, along with policy changes.

“The fires are getting bigger, the fire seasons are longer and costs are significantly increasing,” said Dylan Kruse, director of government affairs for Sustainable Northwest, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit that seeks collaboration between forest industries and conservationists. “We need billions of dollars and we’re not even close.”

Trump and Congress have provided only modest spending increases for forest treatments in recent years, he said. The president sought a nearly $50 million cut in 2018, which lawmakers rejected. His 2021 budget recommends $510 million, up from $445 million allocated this year.

Trump has drawn ridicule from political foes and some scientists for arguing that western forest floors should be “raked” and ignoring the role of climate change-induced warming and drought in the West’s worsening wildfire crisis.

But protection measures like those sought in his 2018 executive order have drawn support from administrations of both parties for two decades.

A national fire plan developed under President Bill Clinton and continued under President George W. Bush called for hazardous fuel reduction and suppressing invasive beetles, along with restoration of burned-over lands to prevent erosion. The Obama administration released a fire management strategy that embraced fuel removal and controlled burns.

The amount of land receiving such treatments from the Forest Service and Department of Interior has edged upward, peaking at 10,469 square miles (27,115 square kilometers) in 2009 before declining to almost half that for several years. It jumped to 8,505 square miles (22,027 square kilometers) in 2016 — President Barack Obama’s last year in office.

Under Trump, the treated area has gone from 6,367 square miles (16,490 square kilometers) in 2017 to nearly 7,336 square miles (19,000 square kilometers) in 2018. Last year it was up to 6,736 square miles (17,446 square kilometers).

Still, the Forest Service says 125,000 square miles (323,748 square kilometers) it manages need work such as tree thinning and regulated burns to reduce fuel loads. The agency estimates many times more that much government and private land is vulnerable to severe wildfire.

The Department of Interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, did not respond to written questions from AP.

“These agencies are still lagging far behind on these projects,” said Susan Jane Brown, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center.

Federal officials acknowledge their longstanding policy of putting out fires as quickly as possible, instead of letting some take their natural course, made forests overgrown and less able to cope with drought and disease.

A Forest Service study this month found that about one-third of trees in areas where excessive vegetation had not been removed died between 2014 and 2018. In thinned out places, the tree mortality rate was 11%.

Some treated areas had been subjected to “prescribed” burns — fires intentionally set and carefully monitored.

In its statement, the agency said it now uses prescribed fire on about 2,187 square miles (5,664 square kilometers) of national forest land each year and plans to do more. But it said the practice “has its challenges,” including smoke pollution in nearby communities and a minor risk of losing control.

Those burns — along with other fuel reduction measures — also are costly, requiring gear, materials and skilled personnel. Yet the Forest Service has fewer staffers to devote to them, while hiring thousands more people to extinguish fires that have grown bigger and more numerous.

The service lost 7,000 non-firefighter positions between 1998 and 2015. The share of its budget devoted to firefighting has shot up from 16% in the mid-1990s to more than 50% today and is expected to keep rising as the agency buys more helicopters, fire engines and other equipment.

Shifting resources from forest treatment to firefighting doesn’t bode well for long-term prevention, said John Bailey, an Oregon State University forestry professor who worked with federal officials on a fire management strategy released in 2014. It emphasized fuel reduction efforts, from clearing forest debris to rangeland grazing.

“We’re on a trajectory where fire seasons are going to get longer and drier and resources stretched thinner,” he said. “We’re just not making the progress we need to.”

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Oregon’s 2020 wildfire season set records for destruction. It could be just the beginning

31 October 2020

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

USA – This story has been corrected to reflect that 2012 had 1.2 million acres burned, the most on record, while 2020 has seen 1.07 million acres burned, the second-most. 

Brian Ballou saw the 2020 fire season coming for a long time.

“I’ve watched this steady march of increasing fire danger, really since 1970,” said Ballou, a longtime firefighter and retired information officer for the Oregon Department of Forestry. “We were keenly aware of what was happening just to the south, with towns like Paradise getting wiped off the map. We knew it was only a matter of time before it happened here.”

Labor Day 2020 was that moment. Severe drought, extreme winds and multiple ignitions fueled the most destructive wildfires in state history.

Roughly 1.07 million acres burned during the 2020 season, the second-most on record. The cost to fight the fires was a record, $609 million and rising.

But even more striking was the number of homes lost.

From 2015 to 2019, which included some major wildfire years, Oregon lost a combined 93 homes, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.

This year, 4,009 homes burned down.

Homes destroyed by wildfire

2020: 4,009

2019: 2

2018: 14

2017: 16

2016: 1

2015: 60

Whether ignited by downed power lines or arson, or the explosive spread of active wildfires, flames ripped through a stunning number of Oregon towns from Sept. 7 to 9. From the Santiam Canyon to Southern Oregon, the Oregon Coast to the Clackamas River, the damage was widespread across the state’s west side.

In the past, Oregon’s largest wildfires stayed mostly in remote forest or grassland. In 2012, for example, 1.2 million acres burned in Oregon — the most in state history. But the large number was fueled by giant grass fires in remote parts of the state where few people live.

This year, fires roared into towns or ignited nearby, whipped up on high winds and bonedry fuels that left little time for defense.

Ballou said the only apt historical analogy for this year’s fires came 80 years ago. In 1936, a wildfire fueled by high east winds roared into the South Coast town of Bandon, destroying the town and killing 10 people.

“It’s not like the winds we saw on Sept. 7 and 8 were unprecedented — they’ve occurred a number of times in our history and they’re going to come again,” Ballou said.

A 2020 or 1936 style disaster typically requires a handful of ingredients: dry fuels, extended drought, extreme winds and ignition sources. And the problem, Ballou said, is that the ingredients for that perfect storm are happening more often.  

“Unfortunately, we’re probably looking at the future,” he said. “Until we take meaningful action, this is going to keep happening.”

Rising occurrence of giant wildfires

Terrible wildfires are nothing new in Oregon’s history, whether it’s the Bandon example or the Tillamook Burns of 1933 to 1951.

The largest wildfires in state history are actually believed to have taken place in the 1800s. The Silverton Fire of 1865 is listed as Oregon’s largest at 988,000 acres. A number of other fires apparently reached 400,000 to 800,000 acres in those early days, though accurate mapping is questionable.

The era of giant fires started coming to an end with the creation of the Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry, which brought almost a century of aggressive suppression.

But putting out every fire led to a buildup of fuels in the forest that, combined with rising temperatures, led to the return of megafires in Oregon beginning with the 2002 Biscuit (500,000 acres) in Southern Oregon and B&B Complex (90,000 acres) on Santiam Pass.

 “It was  wake-up call,” Oregon State University forestry professor John Bailey told the Statesman Journal in 2019. “It was that ‘ah-ha’ moment, showing us that past management policies and climate change would make these types of fires more common.”

That’s exactly how it has worked out.

In the decade before Biscuit and B&B — from 1992 to 2001 — Oregon wildfires burned an average of 198,000 acres per year, according to the NWCC. In the years between 2002 and 2017, that number jumped to an average of 433,541 acres burned each year.

From 2012 to 2020, the average jumps to 650,000 acres burned per year.

And the fires have become increasingly dangerous. While Oregon was sparsely populated back in the 1800s, the situation has changed, with Oregon’s fast-growing population pushing into the wildland urban interface.

Oregon had a number of very close calls in the past five years. The Chetco Bar Fire in 2017 came within a few miles and a shift in the weather of burning into Brookings, with a population of almost 8,000 people. The Eagle Creek Fire, also in 2017, trapped 150 hikers and shut down I-84 while threatening Cascade Locks.

Numerous large fires ignited and burned for weeks in Southern Oregon in 2018, but with a big wind event, it could have been far worse.

“If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep seeing big fires and the possibility of more small Oregon towns being heavily damaged,” Ballou said. “There are a lot of places in Oregon that wouldn’t take long for a wildfire to simply erase from the map.”

Zach Urness has been an outdoors reporter, photographer and videographer in Oregon for 12 years. To support his work,subscribe to the Statesman Journal. Urness is the author of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.

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Federal wildland firefighters say they’re burned out after years of low pay, little job stability

31 October 2020

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

USA – What started as a single tree fire in the mountains of Idaho in 2012 quickly escalated into a smoke-filled inferno that surrounded United States Forest Service helicopter rappeller Jonathon Golden and his small team.

Capable of accessing land that is too rugged or steep to reach by foot, rappel crews are the first to respond to wildfires buried deep within forests. Their goal is simple: stop small fires before they balloon out of control.

Golden, who retired from the agency in 2019, was the first of his four-person team to rappel into the smoldering ridge. He remembers the smoke being so thick that not even the whirl of the helicopter improved visibility on the ground.

“One tree turned into five, five trees turned into 20. It was this cascade of fire erupting,” Golden said. “You could hear the unmistakable sound of a freight train of fire roaring up at you.”

Golden, who was 30 years old at the time, had heard about previous firefighter fatalities in the region and didn’t want to take any chances. He was working to establish an escape route when one of his crew members went “rogue,” compromising the team’s ability to stay together.

Using his radio, Golden asked for additional air support but other crews were tied up with their own attack plans. His team was forced to find its own way out.

“I thought we were done, frankly,” Golden said. “I thought we were going to die.”

Eight years later, Golden still cannot shake the experience. He was forced to leave behind his equipment and pack, including his wallet and many of his belongings. They were all destroyed in what was later named the Mustang Fire, which incinerated more than 300,000 acres in the Salmon-Challis National Forest.

Golden was a temporary seasonal forestry technician at the time and never received treatment for what he thinks could be post-traumatic stress. He took just one day off to order a new bank card and was back at work the next day. When he tried to talk to his supervisor about the experience, he was told to move on: “You might as well forget about it.”

Golden is just one of thousands of federal wildland firefighters who work six months out of the year and whose part-time status doesn’t come with the typical benefits or job security given to state and city firefighters.

NBC News spoke with 27 current and former USFS firefighters with similar stories. Nearly all of them said they are grossly underpaid to perform life-threatening work. Many don’t have access to health care and other benefits, particularly during the off-season. They are not even considered to be firefighters, instead falling into a bureaucratic quagmire that designates them as forestry technicians. Some grimly joke that only in death does the agency recognize them as bona fide firefighters.

“It takes us dying to get their attention,” said Riva Duncan, a forest management officer.

Despite the low pay and benefits, many wildland firefighters said they can’t imagine a life outside fire. For some, the adrenaline rush becomes a kind of compulsion. For others, sleeping under the stars and protecting federal land is a higher calling.

“For those of us who stick it out, our love for what we do outweighs everything,” said Duncan, who has been with the USFS for 37 years. “The sacrifices we have made — it’s because we believe in the mission.”

Amid escalating fire threats fueled by climate change and forest mismanagement, these workers are now organizing and lobbying Congress in new ways. They are finding bipartisan support among some Western lawmakers, but many worry the federal agency that employs them is ill-equipped to provide adequate pay and benefits despite the dangerous nature of their jobs.

A plane drops retardant on a forest fire Jonathon Golden was fighting.Courtesy of Jonathon Golden

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of Oct. 1, over 44,000 wildfires have burned nearly 7.7 million wildland acres this year alone. That’s more than 12,000 square miles, or an area about 1 1/2 times the size of New Jersey.

Over the last decade, fire seasons have gradually turned into fire years. This year, more than 4 million acres have already burned in California alone, forcing thousands of evacuations and power outages across the state. Longer-burning fires have also resulted in more dangerous work. In September, a Hotshot squad leader was killed battling the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino County, California.

The USFS declined to make anyone in leadership available for an interview and did not directly address many of NBC News’ detailed questions.

Babete Anderson, a spokeswoman for the USFS, said in a statement that the agency is “working to identify solutions by listening to our firefighters to ensure their needs are met.”

“We need to treat the landscape at a much larger scale, 2-3 times what we do now, together with our partners,” she wrote. “Only then will we significantly reduce the threat of wildfire to communities, ensure our forests endure into the future and provide firefighters the safe spaces they need to respond.”

Low pay, few benefits

It’s difficult to fully appreciate how large the American West is, and most don’t realize how much of it is federally owned and managed. Most states west of Kansas have substantial portions of their territory controlled by the federal government.

The U.S. Forest Service, which operates under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is responsible for roughly 30 percent of all federal land: 193 million acres, or over 301,000 square miles, the overwhelming majority of it in the West. The total area of USFS-managed land is larger than the entire state of Texas by approximately 30,000 square miles.

Western federal lands managed by five agencies.Congressional Research Service

To oversee all of that land, and the 28,000 employees that work on it, the agency has an annual budget of $5.3 billion. Nearly half ($2.4 billion) of that budget is currently spent on “wildland fire management.” A 2015 USFS report estimated this cost will rise to over two-thirds of the agency’s annual budget by 2025, to the detriment of nearly all other agency priorities, including vegetation and watershed management, facilities maintenance and more.

Every fire season, in the spring, USFS ramps up and hires an additional 12,000 seasonal employees, hired primarily for firefighting, most of whom have to reapply for their job each season.

This seasonal employment model is one that many younger firefighters who spoke with NBC News lament: In the off-season, they seek work in fields as diverse as construction to farming to photography, and some even receive unemployment benefits.

In the parlance of the agency, the bulk of the USFS firefighters are “1039s,” referring to the number of work hours they are capped at in a given season. That is just a single hour shy of six months of paid work, which means the federal government can classify those workers as temporary. They are not able to receive automatic health care, retirement or other benefits afforded to permanent employees.

In practice, firefighters battling an active fire often end up working well beyond the 1,039 base hours with overtime, sometimes accruing up to an additional 1,000 hours.

One current forest service employee, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said his low pay means he sometimes can’t afford basic necessities for his kids.

“I struggle to put new shoes on my children as a temporary firefighter,” he said. “I had to look at my 6-year-old and tell her I couldn’t afford brand-new shoes for her while we were shopping at a thrift store after a complete season of firefighting.”

USFS firefighter pay is dictated by the federal pay scale, where most start at the GS-3 level and where pay tops out at around $31,000 annually for full-time employees. By comparison, a first-year firefighter with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire, makes nearly double that amount.

Most rank-and-file temporary seasonal workers are starting at an hourly base salary of approximately $13 per hour plus overtime and hazard pay. One current USFS firefighter posted to Reddit recently showing that after eight years of service his gross pay topped out at around $30,000 annually.

“What the federal government is doing is asking 20-year-olds to risk their lives for $13 to $15 and say, ‘Sayonara,’ with no retirement benefits, nothing,” said Brandon Dunham, a former USFS and Bureau of Land Management firefighter. “That is a human tragedy right there.”

U.S. Forest Service firefighters monitor a back fire while battling to save homes at the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018.Stephen Lam / Reuters file

Dunham and others recently sent a letter to top senators seeking to “advocate for fair pay and wage equality,” among other requests for their ilk.

The former “helitack” crew member — a type of wildland firefighter specializing in helicopter operations — has given up firefighting after 11 years, in favor of working construction, spending more time at home with his wife and hosting a podcast by and for wildland firefighters called “The Anchor Point Podcast.” He decided to leave the field as he felt there was no future for him there.

When asked if he would like to return to wildland firefighting, with an agency like Cal Fire, Dunham did not hesitate.

“I would go jump on a Cal Fire engine in a heartbeat,” he said.

Larger fires, increasing demand

The Reno, Nevada, resident left the USFS at a time when, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service, an average of nearly 7 million acres of federal land has burned every year since 2000, more than double the average annual acreage burned during the 1990s.

Beginning in the USFS 2019 Budget Justification document, even the USFS itself began remarking on the fact that there is now “year-round fire activity” rather than a traditional fire season. “The Nation is experiencing more extreme fire behavior and high risk, high cost wildfire suppression operations in the wildland-urban interface have progressively become the new normal over the last two decades,” the fiscal year 2021 document stated. “It is estimated that 63 million acres of National Forest System lands and 70,000 communities are at risk from uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Annually, there are typically more than 5,000 fires on National Forest System lands.”

There is a rapidly increasing disconnect between the fiscal realities of firefighting (they are paid relatively little) and the ground truth: Fires are burning larger areas than ever before and these firefighters are in higher demand.

“The bureaucracy of the federal government does not match the speed with which fire is changing,” said one USFS firefighter based in Oregon who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.

As fires have increased in frequency and intensity in recent years, fatalities among wildland firefighters have also increased. A 2014 Quadrennial Fire Review commissioned by the USFS and the Department of the Interior Office of Wildland Fire found that the 10-year moving average of wildland firefighter fatalities had nearly doubled in 40 years.

Juggling family and firefighting

Despite the increased fire threat, many wildland firefighters say they are not given the resources or protections necessary to continue working with the U.S. Forest Service year after year.

It took Mike West a decade to become a full-time employee with the agency and even then finding treatment for his PTSD was difficult.

“I had too many close calls,” he said. “I didn’t really want to be out in the field anymore.”

Mike West at the Gasquet Fire on the Six Rivers National Forest in 2015.Courtesy of Mike West

In 2013, a childhood friend who worked as a smokejumper was killed by a limb from a burning tree. The loss devastated West and triggered an onslaught of symptoms — including anxiety, nightmares and depression — he later learned were caused by PTSD.

“I just sort of covered it up,” he said. “At the time I thought it would be weak if I said anything, so I didn’t tell anybody.”

Three years later the symptoms were worse. He developed short-term memory loss and decided to seek treatment through the USFS. The first counselor assigned to him did not have the necessary background to treat PTSD, West said. He found another doctor that could address his trauma but that therapist was located 90 miles away in Reno, Nevada.

For six months West made the commute, which only exacerbated problems at home. He had two small children that he rarely saw and a wife who grew increasingly tired of juggling child care and her own full-time job.

One night, after working an 18-hour shift as a dispatcher, West had enough.

“It got to the point where I had to choose: Do I want to be a good family man and a bad firefighter or do I want to be a really good firefighter and bad with my family? I couldn’t find a balance,” he said.

“More often than not, people leave because of the strain,” he added. “I don’t know too many people who are married and still do the work.”

West finally resigned from the Forest Service in July after 17 years with the agency and became a teacher. His final pay scale as a dispatcher came out to $21.50 an hour plus overtime. In his resignation letter, West pointed to “systemic problems” within the service that made it impossible to continue working for the agency.

Among those problems is their classification as forestry technicians, instead of being fully recognized for their firefighting work.

“You’re a firefighter if you’re thinking about applying, a forestry technician while you’re fighting fires, and if you die you’re a firefighter again?” West wrote in the letter. “I didn’t want to risk my children growing up without a dad because I died fighting fire for an agency that didn’t even consider me a firefighter.”

‘A tipping point’

Communication breakdowns and department mismanagement have persisted for over a generation — and it’s frustrating the dwindling ranks of seasonal firefighters, as retirements are outpacing hiring. This is especially problematic at a time when wildland fires continue to burn larger, faster and stronger than ever before.

In April, 11 U.S. senators sent a letter to U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen warning that the confluence of Covid-19 and high levels of drought in many Western states could make for volatile firefighting conditions, including a 6 percent “‘cumulative mortality rate’ at large fire camps.”

The warning was not passed down to those on the front lines. Instead, it was circulated among crews after someone found it on Reddit.

“I am more than happy to put my life in danger for the work that I do but it felt like a stab in the back,” a current wildland firefighter, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

Jonathon Golden and crew responding to a wildfire.Courtesy Jonathon Golden

When asked about the breakdown in communication between USFS and its employees, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who signed the letter, said, “I’m not just angry about that. I’m furious.”

“We’re going to get through this fire season, but we’re not going through another fire season where there is this kind of fragmented, poorly coordinated policy that our very own firefighters aren’t even getting adequate information from Washington, D.C.,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”

The seasonality of the work, coupled with the low wages and risk, has made recruitment more difficult over the last two decades — and the government has done little to fix the problem.

In 1999, the Government Accountability Office told a House subcommittee it had found that the “firefighting workforces” of both the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management “are shrinking” as a result of retirement.

Over a decade later, the USDA’s Office of Inspector General, the department’s internal watchdog, reached a similar conclusion, warning of a wave of retirement without a corresponding increase in new hires.

In addition to the firefighter recruitment concerns, there’s also a budgetary shortfall for the agency to perform adequate year-round forest management work aimed at reducing wildfire risk.

In 2015, in a USFS paper, the agency warned that absent new large-scale funding, it had been forced to reallocate its budget toward firefighting and away from other priorities, concluding that the agency was now “at a tipping point.”

“As more and more of the agency’s resources are spent each year to provide the firefighters, aircraft, and other assets necessary to protect lives, property, and natural resources from catastrophic wildfires, fewer and fewer funds and resources are available to support other agency work—including the very programs and restoration projects that reduce the fire threat,” the paper stated.

Mike Rogers, a former Angeles National Forest supervisor and board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, said forest management was originally the cornerstone of the agency’s work.

“Our workforce was never a fire department,” he said, underscoring that he began at the agency in 1957. “In the old days, everyone put out the fire when we had a fire but then we went back to our jobs and that was managing the forest. We didn’t have specialized firefighters.”

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Despite these stark warnings, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been little has been little substantial progress on increasing the Forest Service’s budget, nor has there been substantive movement on reclassification of forestry technicians as firefighters, expanding fuel reduction and other preventative efforts.

However, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., collaborated with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on the Emergency Wildfire and Public Safety Act of 2020, which aims to reduce fire risk in their respective states.

In a recent letter to Senate leadership, the two senators had a dire warning.

“If we don’t take strong action now, we worry that what’s happening to California and Montana will soon become the new normal in every state in the West,” they wrote.

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Over 400,000 ha. of forests lost to fire in 2019

31 October 2020

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

GLOBAL – Over 400,000 ha. of forests were destroyed by fire in 2019, the worst year the world has known in recent times in terms of such disasters, the European Commission’s joint research centre noted in a report released on Friday.

The report, which provides an inventory of the devastation wrought by forest fires in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, notes that a record number of protected natural areas were affected throughout the European Union in 2019.

The forests devastated by flames in the Union last year included close to half of the area under the protection of “Natura 2000,” with 159,585 ha. of precious biodiversity sites going up in flames there.

One country was particularly affected: Romania, where 242 fires destroyed a total of 73,444 ha., much of it in the Danube Delta.

Climate change clearly played a role in the intensity, duration and number of forest fires, according to the researchers, with temperatures higher than usual, and scarce rains. Among the things the report highlighted was the unusually high number of fires that broke out even before the start of the traditional forest-fire season.

Noting the horrifying scenes of fires on the West Coast of the United States, Siberia and elsewhere, European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius said Europe’s forests had also been hard hit.

“Part of the answer to ensure that this does not happen at such a devastating scale lies in protecting and managing the forests in a way to reduce their vulnerability to fires, allowing nature to also protect itself,” Sinkevicius stressed.

The Brussels Times

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Bushfire Royal Commission Doesn’t Have The Answers

31 October 2020

Published by https://www.scoop.co.nz/

AUSTRALIA – Experienced land and fire managers from eight community groups across Australia have jointly written to the Prime Minister urging the restoration of healthy and safe rural landscapes. The grass-roots organisations represent more than 6,000 members and 14 regional councils. They have called for an end to the ongoing loss of human life and the socioeconomic and environmental destruction caused by extreme bushfires.

Former Chief of CSIRO Bushfire Research, Phil Cheney, says that a focus on emergency response at the expense of land management has created an unstoppable monster. Expenditure on firefighting forces is ever-increasing whilst volunteers are being cynically used to deflect criticism away from failed government policies. Land management agencies no longer have primary responsibility for suppressing wildfires. Consequently they have little incentive for stewardship and fire mitigation. Cheney is a scientific advisor to Volunteer Fire Fighters Association.

Chairman of Western Australia’s Bushfire Front, Roger Underwood, points to the stark contrast in historical fire management policies and outcomes on either side of the continent. Seventy years of data from WA show a strong inverse relationship between the area maintained by mild burning and the area subsequently damaged by high intensity fires. This relationship is especially apparent in extreme fire seasons.

Underwood is widely experienced in sustainable land and fire management at all levels from lighting or fighting fires on the ground, to leading a State land management agency. He highlights the deep divide between those who actively care for the bush and who understand bushfire science and operations, compared to the Academics and Fire Chiefs who are misleading governments. The Royal Commission did not call upon Mr. Cheney, Mr. Underwood or similar elders to give evidence. Their consideration of previous bushfire inquiries went back only as far as the COAG whitewash in 2004.

The Royal Commission has accepted wrong advice from academics and modellers rather than information from experienced practitioners. Consequently its conclusions on Effectiveness of Fuel Management are substantially incorrect.

Our land was successfully managed for tens of thousands of years, through some extreme natural climate changes, by people with long experience, but only the most basic technology. It is shocking to see how this truly adaptive management has been replaced by reliance on computer modelling and hugely expensive but futile paramilitary response capacity. The inevitable carnage will continue in the wake of this Royal Commission unless active landscape management based on pragmatic science is reinstated.

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Victims and frontline workers say bushfire findings don’t go far enough

30 October 2020

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

AUSTRALIA – I was running my own architectural practice from home in Gipsy Point until we lost everything in the black summer fires.

My practice continues but it operates from the kitchen table of a holiday rental in Mallacoota. I was on the wharf during the fires – the loss of everything, the trauma of the fire itself and the impact on the environment has affected me profoundly.

Being separated as a community during Covid restrictions has made it that much harder.

What resonates most with me from the royal commission’s report is that everyone needs to do their part, from individuals through to the Australian government.

The onus has long been on private landholders to mitigate the risks of fire but we are experiencing less predictable, more severe fire events that cannot be fought at the micro level alone.

If everyone was contributing to reducing the effects of climate change and agencies were properly resourced to carefully manage fuel loads and acquire proportionate levels of fire suppression equipment and personnel, we may have stood a chance. Sadly these are not new recommendations.

The rebuild process has been slow, in part gaining the mental capacity to face it and the cleanup and bureaucracy of moving forward. Our plans have been stuck in the planning process for four months as we try to balance protecting significant vegetation with defendable space.

I am not fearful of living here, I understand the risks. But I do fear for the next community to face this if nothing changes. – Christy Bryar

On the first Friday of September 2019 we lost seven houses in our street in Beechmont in the Gold Coast hinterland. Thanks to the fireys, we were lucky not to lose any lives. By Sunday 8 September, we also lost our original family home, Alcheringa, near the historic Binna Burra Lodge, which my family has run for generations. At the top of the hill, the main lodge buildings and 40 cabins were destroyed at the same time.

Almost 60 people lost their jobs at Binna Burra and many left the area. The fires were a significant loss of family history as my grandfather Arthur Groom was one of the founders of Binna Burra Lodge in 1933. My grandparents and parents were heavily involved in the lodge’s growth over the last 86 years and I spent my entire childhood there. To see it burnt to the ground was heartbreaking, especially for my 81-year-old father, Tony.

I personally feel like the last year has been a total marathon – and it hasn’t ended. For the first time next week, I am finally finding the time to see a counsellor. Our community has been through all the stages of grief and we are exhausted but also in various stages of recovery.

Only two of the seven houses in our street have been rebuilt and some are still struggling with the new bushfire ratings and therefore higher building costs. Re-insurance and higher premiums are another issue that is only just starting to play out.

Meanwhile, the intense reality of the first few weeks still floods back whenever we smell smoke or hear a helicopter. The road to Binna Burra has taken a year to rebuild and therefore the demolition of Alcheringa and sections of Binna Burra has only been completed in the last few months. Slowly, the biggest employer on the mountain is re-employing locals and guests are coming back to explore Binna Burra (apartments, camping and cafe) plus Lamington national park (a soul space for me and many others).

Looking through the report’s overview of last fire season’s events, the statistics and natural disaster outlook, it is clear that all levels of government need to act on the recommendations. Why? To be more coordinated than ever for the onslaught of climate-related disasters and for communities to survive ongoing multiple weather events, let alone rebuild from the ones we have just experienced.

I hope the government takes this as seriously as it has taken the Covid-19 pandemic. Get coordinated, communicate, act on the research and help Australians and the landscape survive these ongoing climate emergencies. – Lisa Groom

I am a deputy group captain for the RFS and last summer I was deploying crews to hugely destructive fires, hundreds of kilometres away from base, in the springtime.

I have three decades’ experience in emergency services and last fire season wasn’t normal. The toll on firefighters was enormous.

It seems that every royal commission into bushfires since about the early to mid-1980s has come back with the same finding. It’s just a continual repetition of what should be happening that no government follows. If there’s a recommendation put through for New South Wales to do this, this and this, they don’t do it – and that’s been proven with the Rural Fire Service and Fire and Rescue not going through with a single call centre to reduce call times.

Having a national aerial firefighting capability seems to be the better idea of the lot [in the report]. That way the assets can be federally owned, not state owned, and the assets will be distributed when and if they are needed – the assets won’t need to be brought in from overseas as they are continually at the moment.

If it was a nationally recognised aerial team, the Department of Defence could also be utilised and trained. There’s no reason why defence members can’t be brought up to speed with basic firefighting or village firefighting or advanced firefighting training, which take no more than three days at a time. I find it really disappointing that type of skill hasn’t been utilised to any real extent at all in any bushfire season that I’ve been involved in.

A royal commission means nothing unless the recommendations are acted upon. It can be completely ignored because the royal commission doesn’t override a government or its ministers.

Until such time as legislation is written and gazetted in order to give federal ministers powers over the states, it’s not going to work. – Greg Hodges

I am an emergency doctor with a mass casualty response expertise, based in Canberra. During the summer, I treated patients with respiratory vulnerabilities who were acutely affected by the bushfire smoke, and have since been dealing with consequences personally.

The findings of the bushfire royal commission are welcome in their recommendations regarding our national disaster response capacity.

Given the political reluctance to address the underlying climatic conditions that underpin such disasters, the least that Australians can expect is to have broad systems in place that can mitigate against the scale of calamities being inflicted upon them. The suggested action plan will not be cheap, and it remains to be seen how many recommendations will not only be accepted, but also funded with real, as opposed to imaginary, dollars.

Immediately, I am, like the authors of a recent article, concerned, about the perfect storm of having a major outbreak of Covid-19 occurring in a vast cohort of patients who have been exposed to bushfire smoke. Many friends and colleagues have been left with chronic minor respiratory complaints, requiring medical advice and care.

We have been relatively lucky in Australia regarding the impacts of Covid-19, but ongoing bushfires such as those we experienced last season render us vulnerable and susceptible to respiratory illness, such as the one threatening the world at the moment.

Doctors understand symptoms and disease, and their significance. This report addresses the enhancement of our “response” to a disease, but its scope prevented it from addressing the disease itself.

It’s a bit like mandating excellent first aid in the treatment of firearms injuries, without addressing the issue of why firearms issues are occurring in the first instance.

Many Australian medical colleges now identify anthropogenic climate change as a medical emergency facing us immediately. The findings of this commission are an excellent tourniquet for the shape of things to come. – David Caldicott

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Carbon-Releasing ‘Zombie Fires’ in Peatlands Could Be Dampened by New Findings

30 October 2020

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

GLOBAL – New simulations have provided clues on reducing peat fires, which hide underground and are notoriously bad for human health and the environment.

Imperial College London researchers have simulated for the first time how soil moisture content affects the ignition and spread of smouldering peat fires, which can release up to 100 times more carbon into the atmosphere than flaming fires. They also simulated how several smaller peat fires can merge into one large blaze, and tracked the interplay between smouldering and flaming fires.

The findings could help scientists, authorities, and landowners to manage the clearing of vegetation in peatlands in the safest way possible. The study is published in Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.

First author Dwi Purnomo of Imperial’s Department of Mechanical Engineering said: “Peat fires are a devastating yet chronically under-researched phenomenon that spurt millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year. If we can use scientific evidence to help people manage them more effectively, we can perhaps dampen their impact on people and the environment.”

Read more at Imperial College London

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Australia bushfire inquiry warns ‘compounding disasters’ to come

30 October 2020

Published by https://phys.org/

AUSTRALIA – Australians should be ready for “compounding” overlapping crises as they face more frequent, costly and severe climate change-worsened disasters, an inquiry into the nation’s recent historic bushfires warned Friday.

Following devastating 2019-2020 blazes that killed 33 people and burned an area the size of the United Kingdom or Ghana, a Royal Commission told Australians “what was unprecedented is now our future”.

Predicting a future in which disasters “will regrettably be more frequent and more severe”, the commission said: “We can also expect more concurrent and consecutive hazard events.”

“In the last 12 months, there was drought, heatwaves and bushfires, followed by , flooding and a pandemic.”

By the time the bushfires had ended in March, they had killed or displaced nearly three billion animals and cost the economy an estimated US$7 billion.

But the commission warned the annual cost of disasters is likely to rise to around $27 billion by 2050, even before accounting for worsening global warming.

The report focused heavily on the  in producing more  and noted: “Further  over the next two decades is inevitable.”

“As a result, sea levels are projected to continue to rise. Tropical cyclones are projected to decrease in number, but increase in intensity. Floods and bushfires are expected to become more frequent and intense.”

Among the 80 recommendations, the report called for better data and more granular projections about what climate change means for specific areas.

But it stopped short of calling on the conservative government—which has slow-pedalled countermeasures—to address the underlying causes, leaving some experts disappointed.

“We have an overflowing bathtub of troubles,” said La Trobe University ecologist Michael Clarke.

“Sure, we can focus on monitoring the levels in the bath, mopping up when it spills over, but we could also look at turning off the taps.”

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly played down the link between  and the bushfires, and committed to keeping Australia as one of the world’s leading exporters of coal and .

Bushfire-prone Australia has seen dozens of inquests into the causes of bushfires and steps that could be taken to mitigate them.

But many measures recommended by inquiries going back to the 1930s have still not been implemented.

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