The 2022 Wildland Fire Thread

Yeah, the PNW and Northern Rockies have had a moist and cool spring which is a nice respite. However, it has done little to change the fundamentals. 2-3 weeks of hot, dry, and windy is all it will take to bring us back online for fires and we'll certainly be there by late July.

The good news is the monsoonal moisture is poised to hit the SW 2-3 weeks earlier than average, which will help greatly in NM and AZ. The bad news is that once the 4 Corners summer high is established, that monsoonal moisture gets spun up through California, Oregon, Washington, and over to Idaho and Montana in a way that often creates dry lightning. Also, Alaska is having more fires than were predicted based on the conditions just a few weeks ago.

Here's a decent illustration of the 4 Corners High, which can be very strong and park for long periods during the summer. In this one, the high is little lower than usual as the blue H crossbar should be in Utah and Colorado. As the high rotates it drags moisture out of the SW and wraps around. The further from the SW the rotation gets, the less moisture you have but there is often enough atmospheric energy for lightning. Curiously enough, the 4 Corners High has not been as prevalent in recent years as it has in the past which is likely attributable to the squirrely jet stream as it meanders all over the place in response to a warming arctic.

One of the problems we have is that these larger long-term dynamics are becoming unstable and unpredictable. That creates local conditions that outstrip our experience. If you have to constantly test your assumptions, your reaction and response times slow down too.

 

I hate to get involved too much with aircraft issues for a couple of reasons. The first is that those are contract aircraft and when you have contract aircraft there is always a public relations effort by the companies to get them more use which means more contract money. See this 60 Minutes reporter just accepting everything the company guys said (and the guy who has big contract with them--if they are being paid for by a particular fire, that means Orange County is not paying for those days). See also the 747 Global Supertanker--everywhere there was a big fire the company would parachute into a community and tell them their airplane was the secret sauce that would put the fire out and save the town. In reality, planes that big aren't nimble enough to drop at an effective height over uneven topography. On flat, open ground, great. In hills and mountains, not so much.

I suspect there was a bit of salesmanship in the story. Now, there have been some successes with night flying in SoCal communities. Flying over the Sierras at night is a different story than flying over Santa Ana. I can see where you could use the tech around communities where the airspace is not too complicated. I would be wary about using it in steep terrain at night.

The second is that aircraft are the most visible tool we have and folks tend to think nothing is happening unless they see red stuff falling. Aircraft don't put the fire out unless you're in short grass. They can help firefighters on the ground but they are not the answer. Media and the public can't seem to get this with any regularity.

Another thing is r****dant r****ds. It does not suppress. If you don't get perfect saturation and the r****dant gets hung up on leaves and branches, the fire can easily burn under the drop. If you do get good coverage, the fire can bake it for awhile and then find a path through. So you drop r****dant at night and slow the fire down a bit but you may not have the ground crews to follow up. Working unsecured line at night is incredibly risky mostly due to hazardous trees/limbs that you can't see and avoid. Whenever you drop on trees there's a good chance you'll weaken the tree or branches which adds to the risk of ground firefighters.

Then there is wind. The higher the wind speed the lower you have to be when you drop to negate dispersal and evaporation. Windspeeds of around 35 mph are when we shut down day operations because the risk is too great. The night threshold would be considerably less I would think.

Now, heavy helicopters are awesome tools. I'd rather have one than a tanker--more drops, easier to get on target, shorter turn-around. You can knock down a lot of fire with a heavy helicopter. But again, you have to follow it up on the ground in most fuels.

I suspect one reason they weren't used that much is the crew experience. Yeah, you've flown over Orange County where you know the ground and how the topography affects wind patterns, but the crest of the Sierras are different and the crew had no experience in that environment.

If there is a hard landing or a crash, how will you get to them? There aren't that many crews that can do night hoists and that assumes you can get ground help to them in short order. The Golden Hour Rule says you need to have folks with traumatic injuries in advanced care within one hour or their chances for survival plummet. If the fire officials looked at the risks and made that call--which is separate from flight risks--that's hard to argue with.

So, yes, there is a need for more action at night, and no, night-flying helicopters are not the silver bullet. With the changing climate we are seeing not only daytime temps rise but nighttime temps don't drop like they did 20 or more years ago. Nighttime humidity recoveries are not happening. Fire burns actively all night now and ground temps can also affect the wind speeds leading to even more fire activity at night. However, whether we can identify the nighttime risks and reduce exposure to those risks sufficiently to move ahead with night operations beyond our traditional actions is another question.

Since the 1970s, there has not been one year where we've had zero wildland firefighter fatalities and based on percentage, the type of wildland firefighter we lose the most are those who work in the sky. If there was any real bureaucratic reluctance to night flying, it was based primarily on the fear of what it would mean for one of those ships to go down over the fire.

I do expect the feds and states to soon be doing more aerial work at night but I bet they focus much more on drone capacity than live crews.

 

Yesterday was the first of the month which means the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise releases new monthly outlooks. This one gives us our first glance at October. It looks like a tough autumn for the Mississippi Valley and Texas. (Keep in mind that the red means elevated risk of wildland fires. Not red means average levels of risk--not no risk.)

 

Smoke forecast for today, with most coming from fires in California and Utah.

It will be hot across the West today and you can expect some new large fires to appear on the landscape over the next few days. Here's a map of dead fuel moisture for 100 hour fuels. 100 hour fuels are roughly the size of your arm or calf while 1,000 hour fuels are torso or bigger pieces of wood. That blob over the Great Basin will get bigger in coming days. (For reference, the 2x4 you get at the hardware store has a moisture content of 15-30%.)

Here's a map of current live vegetative stress. Simply, the darker the area the more susceptible vegetation is to fire.

Working the Yosemite fire, two aircraft had a branch almost fall on them, such is the uplift of the hot air created by the fire. It was the second time in two days. Here's the radio traffic:

 

Hot Shots working in the Mariposa Grove at Yosemite. It appears fire personnel were able to push the fire around the grove and keep the Sequoias from burning. One tactic is to build line around each designated tree or group of trees. Sometimes a trunk will even be wrapped with the same material that is used to make fire shelters. Below is the General Sherman Tree from Sequoia NP, which was wrapped last year when fire was nearby.

 

Yeah, I've been meaning to go back and read some TVA history where they relocated entire communities to make way for dam-created lakes. Several other New Deal era relocations might have some lessons too, as well as new towns started by the feds, like Los Alamos. The politics and economics of retreat are going to be intense as the people relocating have to go to some piece of land that someone already owns. That, or we use federal and state public lands. Then there is the history of the place that is under threat. We are about to need an army of librarians, archivists, museum workers, archaeologists, preservation architects, photographers, and historians to move what can be moved and document what can't.

 

Looking at the trends, we're about 10-14 days and a decent lightning bust from having a bunch of large fires across most of the West. By then, things will have dried out enough to give us a bunch of ignitions and carry a few beyond initial attack. We'll see California pop more in the time between now and then.

While we wait on that, here's a flood video. "Floods follow fires" is the saying, particularly in the SW where hydrophobic soils are often formed when the fire burns conifer parts and leaves a waxy rosin-like residue that creates a repellent layer over the soil. When it rains in sudden bursts, as happens during SW summers, you can get a lot of water coming off of a burn scar. The ash tends to sit on top of the soil, so you get a bunch of it being picked up by the runoff and flowing downhill.
https://fb.watch/eh_3juZjaq/