The Fire Next Time

30 August 2012

published by www.omaha.com

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USA–– While we’re facing more wildfires than ever, the federal government wants us to return to outdated firefighting methods.

Earlier this summer, the deputy chief of state and private forestry, James E. Hubbard, sent out a memo laying guidelines for the remainder of wildfire season. His message: Effective immediately, regional, area, and station directors should adopt the default position of “full containment” when approaching all wildfires.

Full containment means going all-out to put a blaze out as soon as possible—an approach that to most of us would seem pretty sensible. But it actually goes against decades of research that suggest a more balanced approach: allowing some wildfires to take their natural course, playing a cleansing role in the forest ecosystems, and clearing out some forms of underbrush and other material (called fuel)—all of which helps reduce the size of wildfires in the future.

Hubbard’s order covered only this season and, he says, does not represent a permanent policy shift. But while many foresters understand the reasoning behind the deputy chief’s request for a change—more on that in a minute—it has some of them worried. Why? Because even if they return to standard procedure next year, the immediate fix puts the long-term solution for managing the country’s forests—and fires—in serious jeopardy and could actually make things much worse.

With a record-breaking season of heat and drought has come an unprecedented season of wildfires. Recently, a Washington state blaze burned more than 20,000 acres of national forest and destroyed 60 homes, forcing 400 families to evacuate and prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency. On the national scale, that’s just a tiny blip. According to the Interagency Fire Center, 31 large fires are currently active, while 7 million acres have already burned across the country this season—well above the 10-year average and charring the previous record set in 2006.

And that means our resources for fighting them—the aviation fleets, the smoke jumpers, and the budgets that pay for it all—are stretched thin. You can measure the cost in dead 20-year-old firefighters in Idaho, or tens of millions of dollars in charred homes and getting boots on the ground. Or you can look at giant blob smoke map Julia Whitty has posted over at Mother Jones. But that high price is why Hubbard wants local forest services to reverse battle tactics and pursue aggressive suppression, even in the remote wilderness. The agency’s $984-million budget for this year has already been busted, with cost projections of $1.4 billion.

Predictive Services—the office that uses a huge amount of recorded data to make short- and long-term predictions about wildfires—may have taken stock of the situation and encouraged Hubbard’s order to fight all fires aggressively. But as with so many short-term solutions in the face of eminent threat, the long view is being set aside, and that’s the scary part.

For more than 100 years, the U.S. Forest Service has been researching, reacting to, and generally trying to understand wildfires, and along the way, our methods have changed significantly. In 1910, the “Big Blowup” destroyed about 3 million acres—roughly the size of Connecticut—in Idaho, Washington, and Montana. The devastation of the Big Blowup, much of which reportedly took place in just 36 hours, cemented the idea of fighting fires aggressively and immediately. In the 1930s, the Selway forest fires in Idaho and Montana led to the “10 a.m.” policy: Try to contain every fire that is reported by the next time 10 a.m. comes around. But in the 1960s and ’70s, foresters began to recognize that fires were important parts of natural systems, and the policy of “fire use” came into play—the idea that local and regional managers could and should allow some fires to burn. That’s partly because in mountainous areas, they are nigh impossible to control, and sometimes it’s deemed too dangerous to send firefighters into a blaze.But they also serve an important purpose: preventing even worse burns. “Thinning the herd,” it seems, happens in the forest—and can actually help build natural hurdles to subsequent blazes.

The 2000s have seen some very bad years for wildfires—in part thanks to a bevy of stupid or reckless human-started blazes—but until this summer the general policy stayed mostly the same: Let forest and land managers make the decisions of what to let burn and what to put out. This year’s shift is a reflection of just how up against the wall we are, nationally, when it comes to resources for fighting wildfires. The scariest part is that things seem to only be getting worse with climate change. A recent climate study published this summer in Ecosphere suggests that over the next 30 years, 38 percent of the planet will see increases in fire activity. By the end of the century, that number is projected to be 62 percent. If this holds true, now may not be the time to go back to fire-fighting techniques popular in the 1910s.

When I wrote earlier this season about the newer technologies we’re now using to fight fires, I spoke with David Calkin, a Ph.D. in economics and a research forester at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont. Calkin’s view of forest management is macro, and he doesn’t seem prone to exaggeration. Even when I was pressing him on climate change or how damaging the policy shift could be, he was more likely to talk about the natural progressions of systems than to say that the extreme weather and awesome scope of the burning—which NASA satellites are now monitoring from orbit—were cause for extreme alarm. But there’s no question that he is worried.

“When we look at climate models, some parts of the world are expected to get wetter and hotter, some expected to be drier and hotter,” he said. “But there is a concern that this is a step back. Even in the policy direction it acknowledges that it’s not a good long-term strategy.”

You could almost consider it a surge strategy—like the kind we used in Iraq with, shall we say, mixed success. Throw everything we’ve got at the fires now, to stop it from getting worse. Is there a third way? Until we can make our own rain, cool the climate, and stop shooting live ammo at rocks during drought season, probably not. Even our best technologies and treatments are still relatively puny against Mother Nature.

Any forester will tell you—fire is a part of life. And we’ve got ourselves a firewalker’s dilemma, a choice between setting our shovels against the small stuff and ignoring the smoke of a massive burn on the horizon, or taking the long view. This season, we’ve set our shovels to the small stuff, and lives and housing developments have been saved. But it’s going to set us back in the battle to manage, and to let nature take its course. This season, we’re making the next big burn even bigger.

When the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-evidence-heat-trapping-effects-wildfire-particles.html#jCpWithin 24 hours, a few researchers at the David Skaggs Research Center had opened up a particle sampling port on the roof of the building and started pulling in smoky air for analysis by two custom instruments inside. They became the first scientists to directly measure and quantify some unique heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-evidence-heat-trapping-effects-wildfire-particles.html#jCpWhen the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Within 24 hours, a few researchers at the David Skaggs Research Center had opened up a particle sampling port on the roof of the building and started pulling in smoky air for analysis by two custom instruments inside. They became the first scientists to directly measure and quantify some unique heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles. “For the first time we were able to measure these warming effects minute-by-minute as the fire progressed,” said CIRES scientist Dan Lack, lead author of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also were able to record a phenomenon called the “lensing effect,” in which oils from the fire coat the soot particles and create a lens that focuses more light onto the particles. This can change the “radiative balance” in an area, sometimes leading to greater warming of the air and cooling of the surface. While scientists had previously predicted such an effect and demonstrated it in laboratory experiments, the Boulder researchers were one of the first to directly measure the effect during an actual wildfire. Lack and his colleagues found that lensing increased the warming effect of soot by 50 to 70 percent. “When the fire erupted on Labor Day, so many researchers came in to work to turn on instruments and start sampling that we practically had traffic jams on the road into the lab,” Lack said. “I think we all realized that although this was an unfortunate event, it might be the best opportunity to collect some unique data. It turned out to be the best dataset, perfectly suited to the new instrument we had developed.” The instrument called a spectrophotometer can capture exquisite detail about all particles in the air, including characteristics that might affect the smoke particles’ tendency to absorb sunlight and warm their surroundings. While researchers know that overall, wildfire smoke can cause this lensing effect, the details have been difficult to quantify, in part because of sparse observations of particles from real-world fires. Once the researchers began studying the data they collected during the fire, it became obvious that the soot from the wildfire was different in several key ways from soot produced by other sources—diesel engines, for example. “When vegetation burns, it is not as efficient as a diesel engine, and that means some of the burning vegetation ends up as oils,” Lack said. In the smoke plume, the oils coated the soot particles and that microscopic sheen acted like a magnifying glass, focusing more light onto the soot particles and magnifying the warming of the surrounding air. The researchers also discovered that the oils coating the soot were brown, and that dark coloration allowed further absorption of light, and therefore further warming the atmosphere around the smoke plume. The additional warming effects mean greater heating of the atmosphere enveloped in dark smoke from a wildfire, and understanding that heating effect is important for understanding climate change, Lack said. The extra heating also can affect cloud formation, air turbulence, winds and even rainfall. The discovery was made possible by state-of-the-art instruments developed by CIRES, NOAA and other scientists, Lack said. The instruments can capture fine-scale details about particles sent airborne by the fire, including their composition, shape, size, color and ability to absorb and reflect sunlight of various wavelengths. “With such well-directed measurements, we can look at the warming effects of soot, the magnifying coating and the brown oils and see a much clearer, yet still smoky picture of the effect of forest fires on climate,” Lack said. CIRES is a cooperative institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-evidence-heat-trapping-effects-wildfire-particles.html#jCp

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Fallen Idaho firefighter lived the life she chose

18 August 2012

published by www.stltoday.com

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USA–– MOSCOW, Idaho • Anne Veseth was a 5-foot-11 blond beauty who liked to dress up and go out with friends. She also was a trained auto mechanic and a forest firefighter.

Today, a huge crowd is expected for the funeral of the young woman who died last weekend when a tree fell on her while she was fighting a blaze in Idaho.

“Her cards were up,” said mother Claire Veseth, 55, a nurse in this college town. “It was an act of God.”

Fire officials are investigating the death. Veseth, 20, died as she and other members of her 20-person crew were trying to extinguish the 43-acre Steep Corner fire near Orofino. They were establishing and reinforcing a fire line on one perimeter of the blaze, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Phil Sammon said.

At least two federal investigators from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration are on the scene in Orofino, looking into Sunday’s death. An investigation could take up to six months.

Between 2002 and 2011, only two of 58 U.S. Forest Service firefighter fatalities came from hazardous trees like the one that killed Veseth. As of July 31, eight firefighters have died this year in wildland fire incidents, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Veseth was a Type 2 firefighter, one of the agency’s thousands of seasonal employees dispatched to the nation’s forests during the spring and summer fire seasons. The Forest Service said Veseth had completed the safety courses required of every person in her crew.

Her mother and three surviving siblings — Rachel, 26; Brian, 24; and Julia, 22 — gathered at the family home Thursday. Father Roger died in 2003.

Brian Veseth has been a forest firefighter for seven years, and he was approached by his sister in 2010 about getting a job. This was Anne’s second year fighting wildfires, and she was assigned to a base camp near Orofino. Brian described his sister as a “bombshell” who easily made friends with boys.

Rachel Veseth described her sister’s clothing style, which often ran to blue basketball shorts, a wife beater T-shirt and cowboy boots.

But ‘she loved to dress up, put on makeup and do her hair,” Rachel said. “She wore heels despite being 5-11.”

The children grew up just outside this college town. Anne Veseth graduated from Moscow High School with a 3.92 grade point average, and recently completed a two-year degree in auto technology at nearby Lewis-Clark State College, despite having previously expressed little interest in auto repair. She worked sometimes at an auto store in town.

But her family said she wasn’t sure about becoming a mechanic. Like many 20-year-olds, Anne was still trying to decide what to do. Her family said she was so interested in firefighting that she had enrolled at the University of Idaho here with a goal of studying forestry or fire ecology, which is the study of how fire impacts wildlands.

“She loved it, and went back this year,” her brother said of firefighting. Anne this year had already been sent to fires in Colorado and Arizona, he said.

With Brian already a firefighter and Rachel previously working as a river guide on some of Idaho’s whitewater streams, Claire Veseth was used to her children having risky jobs.

“My children never chose sedate office jobs,” Claire said. “But I never held them back, either.”

She was home alone last Sunday when she got a telephone call from Brian, who she said sounded as if he was gasping. Brian had been given the bad news by his supervisor.

“When he asked if I was sitting down, I knew it was probably Anne,” Claire said, wiping away tears. “I felt like my heart kind of ripped apart.”
 

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