Climate Change’s New Big Blaze Threat

“We don’t get out in front of hurricanes with fans, trying to change their direction. We don’t get out in front of tornadoes, trying to turn them around.” 

Unknown firefighter

“[Traditional weather] models are going to be inadequate to deal with a new climate.”

Weather Underground founder Jeff Masters.

We live in an era where old-world environmental thinking needs a new, ground-up approach. Climate change has rewritten so many rules, but we have been abysmally slow to adapt. I read in recent articles that 1.3 billion tons of California almonds sit unsold, waiting for foreign buyers (who normally only pay on delivery) to absorb massive new shipping costs. Yet, the big question is why water-impaired regions are still growing certain nut trees, which use more than 20+ times the water of average agricultural crops. Water-stressed California produces 82% of the world’s almonds, 98% of the U.S.’s pistachios, and 99% of the U.S.’s walnuts -- the three most water-intensive nuts on the market. Put another way, those 1.3B tons of almonds required 7.5-million-acre feet of water (half the size of Los Angeles County), which, according Heal the Bay chief executive Tracy Quinn, could make up the water shortfall the state is facing for an entire year.

But if you think that’s an archaic practice that should change, think about how we approach wildfires in 2022. Simply put, we still apply turn-of-the-20th-century firefighting technics to a whole new generation of mega-blazes that the world has never faced before. Adriana Petryna, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused her studies on such old-world approaches to a climate changed world. Writing for the July 10th Los Angeles Times, she explains how futile such firefighting is and how a new reality-check is required. Combine excessive dryness (which is more than just “drought” – “aridification” or “desertification” are more apt) with high winds, and one in six Americans is in areas of high risk for wildfires. Yet we still try and contain the uncontainable.

“Risk factors are together setting the stage for disasters that our present tools are not always able to manage or suppress. The winds that pushed the [recent 300,000 acre] New Mexico fire beyond control reached 80 mph. [Colorado’s recent Marshall fire, which destroyed 1100 homes, pictured above] topped 115 mph. That’s like a Category 3 hurricane… In an interview with NPR, Boulder’s wildland fire chief Brian Oliver likened the futility of fighting some wildfires to ‘trying to fight a hurricane.’ …

“Fire risk has changed, but the public’s expectations about emergency response have not… The idea that fire can be fought, stopped or metaphorically turned around dates to the early 20th century, when practices of fire suppression evolved, in part, to protect the monetary value of large trees. By 1935, all reported forest fires were to be contained, controlled or put out by 10 a.m. the next day (known as ‘the 10 a.m. rule,’ which is no longer in force). After World War II, the war on wildfire was waged, thanks to the availability of military surplus vehicles, firefighting aircraft and improved road access to facilitate suppression efforts.

“Early models of fire behavior focused on controllable wildfires; suppression practices took root before fire spread behaviors were sufficiently understood. For a while, such practices worked. The U.S. Forest Service, the largest employer of wildland firefighters, touts a 98% initial-attack success rate. Yet the initial-attack success rate in the early 20th century, before the introduction of aggressive suppression technologies, was roughly the same (around 97%). The success rate back then was largely because fuel had not accumulated, thanks to ‘millennia of active burning by Native Americans and natural fires,’ in the words of wildfire scientist Mark Finney. As a result, flames were low-intensity and burned low to the ground, ‘making it easy to achieve a 97% initial-attack success rate’ and safer to manage.

“Over time, the war on wildfire strengthened the enemy, because successful suppression leaves more and more fuel for larger fires. Success created other risks: As one fire manager told me, ‘Now we’re chasing suppression fires.’… This raises the question: Which fires should actually be fought?” Petryna. We build in vulnerable areas. We have allowed dried brush and dead trees to accumulate. And we still believe that we can knock down and contain the massive wildfires… applying the same practices that we use on smaller forest blazes. So, what is the answer?

“Wildfires affecting more than 100,000 acres (megafires) are now so common that the National Interagency Fire Center ‘has stopped tracking them as exceptional events.’… Their roving nature, in forested or suburban enclaves, upends preconceptions of which places in the U.S. are vulnerable to fire. Many Americans still want to imagine clear boundaries between fire-safe and fire-prone areas and fund more suppression resources to keep fire out, but fires routinely overrun the fuel breaks meant to control them and firebrands cross over highways, finding their way to and sparking new fires in distant communities. As the Marshall fire showed, any community ‘downwind of a grassy area on a windy day ... could be vulnerable,’ in the words of the mayor of the leveled town of Superior, Colo.

“Our mental models of fire are no longer ‘relevant to the physics of what is actually happening ,’ in the words of retired U.S. Forest Service fire research scientist Jack Cohen. Fires are best seen not as apocalyptic or inevitable, so much as opportunistic: They burn where they can. Unabated fossil-fuel burning and wishful thinking are opening more pathways for fire. We should own up to these physics while supporting risk mitigation in communities that are most vulnerable to catastrophic loss…

“If we understood wildfires to be like hurricanes, we would evacuate as a fire approaches and then return to clean up and maybe rebuild. But we are stuck in the old expectation of fighting fire wherever it ‘wants’ to go, be it in wildlands or densely packed suburbs. Though protecting homes was not supposed to be part of the U.S. Forest Service’s mission. As one former wildland firefighter reminded me, ‘Fire control people have increasingly become protectors of private properties, infuriating the firefighters and their agencies.’

“The fury seems justified. In the world we have created, a wildfire will go wherever we have allowed fuel to accumulate, whether that fuel is underbrush, logging debris or a vacation home. No army of fire control workers can turn it around, and they shouldn’t have to sacrifice themselves trying.” Petryna. Repeating the same behavior but expecting different results… well, you know, that is one definition of insanity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as mother nature snarls at our archaic approach to climate change, we all seem to forget that massive change requires massive rethinking.