California is Burning

Three things that are making this fire year extremely difficult:

COVID protocols have made everything from feeding firefighters to making group decisions much less efficient. Until this year, everything we do has evolved to be done as efficiently as possible but COVID safety demands distance and time, which are not the best things during an emergency. Even just talking to another masked person takes more time because you can't read the stress in their facial expressions. Many of the cultural shortcuts to communications are no longer. Now, you have to be explicit and make absolutely sure things are clear and understood. Firefighters are not the best at the finer points of English usage, so it just takes more time.

This delays decisions. The consensus is a delayed decision is easier to fix than a bad quick decision, so it can have a cascading effect on the lifetime of the incident. Plus, there are less available resources as some folks have decided to not participate this year because of the extra risk to themselves or their loved ones.

The second thing is a lack of monsoonal moisture in the SW. Most fire years play out on a schedule with AZ, NM, and Alaska all being spring fire regimes and the rest of the west gradually coming online from July through early August and lasting into October or, with California, November. In the SW, larges fires can start in April but the monsoonal moisture from the Pacific typically arrives around July 4, greatly reducing their chances of large fires. In fact, the last week of June is when AZ has the largest number of large fires and by the middle of July, they are usually done for the year.

In the Great Basin, CA, Northern Rockies, and the NW, fire danger usually increases throughout July and peaks in August. That means that in most years the firefighters in the SW can finish up their fires, get a little rest, and then be available to head to Montana or Oregon or wherever they might be needed. But this year, the SW monsoon is almost nonexistent and they have been working large fires since this spring, keeping those forces in place and creating a shortage in other states. (There's also a shortage in the SW because outside resources are not available to come in and help them like in the spring.) The average August temp in Phoenix was 99 this year. That's not the high, that's the average of daily highs and lows. Yes, it is a record, as were their days over 115 and nights above 90.

Additionally, there has been an atypical fire year in the CO Rockies, with that area having more and larger fires than on average.

The third thing is the high number of lightning caused fires in CA. CA has a lot of resources at every level, but when they get overwhelmed, they get priority in the national resource allocation. We assign resources based on values at risk, which can be a squishy term, but think people, major infrastructure, communities. There's just more of that in CA than there is in Eastern WA or ID. So, combined with the SW, that's a big suck of resources that are not usually at that level.

The one saving grace is that the typical summer is dominated by a 4 Corners high pressure system, which often develops and stays in place for long periods. It spins the monsoonal moisture up from the SW, through CA, into OR and WA, then over to ID and MT. By the time it reaches NorCal, there's usually little rain but enough energy to throw out a bunch of dry lightning which starts a bunch of fires. This dynamic has not happened this year. The fire conditions across the west have been conducive to rapid large fire growth and there have been constant fires, but in most places, we just haven't had the number of one-day ignitions that would stretch local response to the point of breaking. The one exception of course, was the freak lightning in NorCal, which was mostly confined to NorCal.

So, COVID makes everything less efficient, the SW has had a terrible year, lightning hit NORCal hard but not so much the other states. It could be a lot worse.

And it will be. There is little doubt that the climate is changing in a way that alters our traditional rhythm and we'll soon have a fire year where all regions are having very bad times of it all at once. There's growing scientific consensus that 40-50% of forests in the western US will burn by 2050. That's just forests, not other wildlands like sagebrush, chaparral, etc. We now talk about the fire year, not the fire season.

Also, what we're seeing is forests are not coming back. If they burn at a high intensity, they come back as brush fields, which would normally be the first step in allowing trees to gradually repopulate an area over a couple of centuries, but brush burns more regularly than forests. There are now too many hot and dry days for the little trees to get above the brush and grow enough to withstand even a low intensity fire before another fire occurs. After 2-3 fires over 20-30 years, the trees are done. We're changing the landscape on a massive scale and we're just getting started.

As an aside, when I started in wildland fire, 7500 acres was considered a big fire. Now, it's hardly worth noting. Today, a large fire is 100,000 acres or more and we measure structures lost in the hundreds or thousands and fatalities in double digits or more. Since 2010, I've personally been on the largest fires ever in East Texas (41K), SE Wyoming (98k), South-Central Oregon (93k), Arizona (538k), New Mexico (170k), and Washington (256k). I've worked others that are in the 100-250k range but were not quite record-setters. That's just me, one of 25,000 or so people in the system. (I also worked a 1.1 million acre fire in Alaska.) Most western states have had their largest fires in history since 2000.

I have yet to be on a fire where there are numerous civilian fatalities, but 27 firefighters have died on my assigned fires.

(1 square mile = 640 acres, 1 acre is about the size of a football field.)

 

Not qualified to speak to the accuracy, but assuming it's correct, found this article to be quite interesting:
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen

 

Basically correct, but these articles are almost always framed as suppression vs prevention. Ideally, you fund both at high levels because you need suppression to buy time for prevention to work. If you heavily invest in prevention, maybe after 10-15 years you can start decreasing the suppression funds, but right now, it's not an either/or.

These articles also never quite get into the cost.

Fuels reduction is incredibly labor intensive. You just can't automate it. You need people with chainsaws and drip torches. It takes anywhere from $350-1,200 per acre for fuels treatments. Let's say you need to reduce fuels on 800,000 California acres each year for 15 years--which is less than the 20 million acres that need treatments. At the end of the 15 years, you have to start it all over again with the first places you treated because vegetation grows. So, taking a middle number of $650 per acre--which I will tell you is probably low-- it would be 800,000 acres x $650 = $520 million per year x 15 years = $7,800,000,000. And then you start all over again. But it would take more because to hit those acreage numbers you'd have to work year round and right now, thanks to personnel policies that go back to the mid-20th century, most firefighters are seasonal. That means fuels treatments get done mainly in the early spring/late fall shoulder seasons. So, you'd have to invest in a substantial permanent work force.

(Both Forest Service and DOI get a combined budget of about $570 million for hazardous fuels treatments this year. That's for the whole country--even if just spread around the 12 western states, it does not go far. Your baseline fuel loads will continue to increase until you have a major fire.)

Let's say you can contract some of that $7.8 billion out and pay for the fuels treatments with targeted timber sales. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll have enough ground-based timber sales (helicopter logging is tough to pencil out these days) to take off a billion or two from your costs, but you're also trading carbon storage and older trees which are more resilient to fire.

Again, that's just California. Add in the other western states and the dollars get significantly larger. Even more so when you consider we should start working on wetter forests in Oregon and Washington now to prepare for the climate change that will push them into drier regimes--there is significantly more urban interface in Washington than California but right now, it does not burn often. That will change in the next couple of decades.

The Forest Service budget this year for fire suppression is $2.25 billion, which is not enough. By the way, that number will be exceeded this year and the extra money will come from a $20 billion emergency fund set aside for fire suppression over the next 10 years. The costs this year will likely hit $3-3.5 billion. Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior is budgeted $395 million for suppression, also not enough to cover this year.

There's a combined budget of about $1.4 billion for preparedness, which includes stuff like equipment, technology, and moving crews around when fire danger indices increase. That should be doubled or tripled to increase manpower, modernize equipment, and invest in appropriate technology for fire suppression and other operations.

To put this in perspective, this year, the federal government will spend about $5.5 billion on wildland fire prevention, preparedness, and suppression. That's the equivalent of the real estate value in a couple of Bay Area communities that we're trying to protect.

Right now, there is little hope that Congress will allocate the stable, consistent, long-term funding needed to make a difference in our western wildlands.

 

Tough day throughout CA. The Creek Fire on the Tahoe NF is only two days old but blew up this afternoon.

 

Looks like California smoking a joint trying to ride out 2020.

 

I said Tahoe NF, but I stupidly messed it up two ways. The Creek Fire is on the Sierra NF, just south of Yosemite and only now is a day old. It took off for 110,000 acres today. Maybe you see that in grass and shrub with sustained winds behind it, but there was little wind and it went through timber. Pardon my French, but that is un-effing-believable. It's the biggest first-day timber run I know of. The biggest acreage gain I've ever been on was about 77,000 acres, but that was on a fire that was already more than 200,000 acres at the start of the day with lots of open line.

Monday it will be windy as the cold front diving down in the Great Basin will create Santa Ana winds.

Here's what it looked like from a passing passenger jet.



Here's the satellite heat signature:



Here's what it looked like from Mammoth Pool Reservoir where a lot of campers retreated to. The National Guard air-lifted out a bunch of folks, some with injuries. I'm not sure they were able to clear the back-country of hikers and campers in time. It will not be a surprise if their are deaths from this.

 

Horrific, but thanks for the info, @rimrocker. Jeebus.

Here in SF, I finally gave up. HEPA Filter off and windows open. It's just too hot this weekend to keep the windows closed.

 

The fire grew so fast it created a near vertical mushroom cloud like a nuke or volcano -- that's insane.

 

The shape of the plume shows how little wind there was. The growth was all terrain/fuel driven. Incredible.

 

As a comparison, here's Hiroshima.

 

I hate to even imagine what would happen with wind, but we might be about to find out.

 

I was picturing something like this from a volcano -- I didn't realize there wasn't any wind I assumed strong winds because of the size/ growth. Amazing it spread so fast -- like the world's biggest pile of dry Christmas trees soaked with lighter fluid.

 

What's a bit depressing is that there have been three major fires this year that burned through fire scars that are from fires I worked 20+ years ago. When I started, the interval would have been much longer, but we have more hotter, windier and drier days now.

Speaking of, here's a relatively new index we use called appropriately enough, the Hot, Dry, Windy Index which measures those three things compared to the average of 1981-2010.

https://www.hdwindex.org/

 

Drove right by the new fire that started yesterday near East San Diego and ashes are raining down on the city today ... normally we worry about the fires in October, but it seems we are off to an early start ... worried that if Santa Ana winds pick up this week, we are in for a world of hurt

 

Yep. That Smokey the Bear Idea really worked for y'all..

 

Dipshit San Bernardino Hillbillies