The Fire the Next Time

 

“It takes community action.”

Greg Dillon, director of the Fire Modeling Institute at the

US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station

We all face searing heat waves. The East Coast faces hurricanes, a nasty polar vortex, storm surges and coastal erosion. The Midwest watches tornados, severe continuous drought mixed with uncontrolled flooding. The West is plagued by desertification, severe water shortages, and fire, fire, fire. As of June 1st, New Mexico’s largest and most destructive blaze has burned for nearly two months, alone consuming more than 315,000 acres of land — an area about the size of the city of Los Angeles.

“Known as the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fire, the massive blaze has forced waves of evacuations from the outskirts of Las Vegas, N.M., a small city about an hour’s drive east of Santa Fe, and other mostly rural communities in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The fire, which started as two separate blazes that later merged, has damaged or destroyed more than 350 homes and other buildings so far, but no lives have been lost.” New York Times, June 1st. It’s not a seasonal issue. Things will not cycle back to “normal.” Climate change has worked a seemingly unstoppable reset. We are doing vastly too little, vastly too late to reverse this trend.

The fire season is starting earlier in Western states, lasting longer and producing an exponential increase in the size and intensity of the blazes. “Those conditions, typical for the Southwest during a La Niña climate pattern, added to longer-term risks: forests left overcrowded and unhealthy by decades of aggressive fire suppression; a mega-drought that created a tinder-dry landscape; and the background warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity… Add high winds to the mix and you have ‘the perfect recipe for extreme wildfire,’ [said Dr. Park Williams, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies long-term drought trends and the effects of climate change].

“Long-term drought and warmer-than-usual temperatures have contributed to increased fire risk across much of the Western United States in recent years. And large, destructive wildfires have become more common, especially in California. As the climate has warmed, traditional fire seasons have been expanding too — starting earlier and ending later in many parts of the world… This year in New Mexico, major fires began burning three to five weeks earlier than they normally do, according to an analysis of satellite data.” NY Times.

And this will just keep getting worse… we can treat just the symptoms and the devastation, but at some point, we need to wake up and understand the cost of letting climate change continue to rise… is a whole lot more than addressing it while we can. There is no corporate, employment or economic model that says it is less expensive to treat the effect of climate change… than dealing with climate change itself.

We here in California think we have the worst fires in the nation, but the most fire-prone counties are in Texas, New Mexico (obviously!), Oklahoma, Montana… and Georgia?! But as Alex Wigglesworth, writing for the May 24th Los Angeles Times points, if you live anywhere near a fire-prone area, “Researchers expect millions of properties to face six times the threat in 30 years… Overall, more than half of all properties in the lower 48 states — nearly 80 million — are at some risk of being affected by wildfire, with about 1.9% of properties facing an annual risk of 1% or greater, according to [Jeremy Porter, chief research officer for the] First Street Foundation. That figure also is projected to rise.

“‘On average, the burn probability — the likelihood of the risk of wildfire — is about doubling over the next 30 years, and that’s across the country,’ Porter said. ‘So on average, any property that has risk is likely to see that risk double. And then that also brings into account a lot of places that don’t have risk today are going to see risk moving into the future.’” A 1% fire risk may not seem like much, but if you live in such an area for a decade or more, the risks clearly skyrocket. And if you try and fireproof your home as much as possible – and there’s a lot you can do – but “If one home in a neighborhood works to mitigate their wildfire risk, but their neighbors aren’t doing anything, then they’re not effectively reducing their risk very much,” tells Greg Dillon (noted above) to the LA Times, “It takes community action.”

The projections using “a weather data set from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that provided a 10-year time series and updated that with information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, [Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation] said… Researchers ran hundreds of millions of simulations to understand the fire probability of every 30-by-30-meter pixel across the country both this year and in 2052, he said.

“The results differ from existing risk mapping from the federal government and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection because they project risk over time and take into account specific property-level information, down to construction materials, vent exposure and the amount of defensible space surrounding a home, which can be gleaned from tax assessor records and satellite images, Eby said.

“Federal employees are prohibited from endorsing or not endorsing private businesses, the Forest Service said. But Greg Dillon, director of the Fire Modeling Institute at the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, said the methodology appeared sound… Dillon led the modeling efforts used in the Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities mapping, which models fire risk at a community level. He said the agency does not drill down to the parcel level in its modeling because there are potential uncertainties and because it believes the community is an appropriate scale for action when it comes to mitigating risk.” We need to stop pretending this is a can that should continue to be kicked down the road. The laws of physics are unconcerned about “losses”; they cannot be voted out of existence or simply prayed away. And they’re here!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we should all be on red alert, fire-red alert!