For the 2021 fire season, the writing is on the wall. The West, despite a few days of intense winter, is far drier than it was leading up to last year’s record-breaking fires.
As a hotshot crew member, the reality of what’s to come fills me with two distinct thoughts: money and dread. With my financial stability tied to overtime pay, I know that my pockets will be full when I am laid off next winter. But the unrelenting fires that stand between now and then make me nervous.
I also know that I am not alone. Across the West, people in homes and communities are filled with anxiety as they look at dry timber and brown hillsides that are usually white this time of year. For them, when the air fills with smoke, there won’t be any fire paychecks, just a prolonged sense of uncertainty.
“The deck is stacked against us. I fully expect a busier season than normal across the Southwest.”
Drought levels often serve as a good indicator of the fires to come, and things are far worse now than they were in the build-up to 2020. Rich Tinker, an author of the U.S. Drought Monitor at the Climate Prediction Center, told me, “In 2020, the highest we got to anywhere, was a D2 — Severe Drought. Now we are looking at D3 — D4 — Extreme and Exceptional Drought across much of the West and almost all of the Southwest.”
When Nick Nauslar, a fire meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center, talks about the fire season to come, he’s particularly blunt: “The deck is stacked against us. I fully expect a busier season than normal across the Southwest.”
For Tinker and Nauslar, the areas of concern primarily encompass the Four Corners states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. When you put together light snowpack, dry fuels and high temperatures, every wildland firefighter knows what that means.
In my time as wildland firefighter, the question I get asked again and again is whether I am ever scared. The answer to this question is “yes,” but not in the life-or-death sense in which it’s asked.
Photo: Malachi Brooks/Unsplash
There are far more constant threats than the flames themselves. Smoke, for one. Carbon emissions, for another.
I think I’m worried most by the knowledge that damage from these wildfires affects the health of millions of people, and that the large wildfires of today are ensuring even bigger ones in the future. Everyone should be concerned about this reality, not just those of us on the fire line.
Wildfires and their management are known by some researchers as a “wicked problem,” where no optimal solution exists. For decades, forest managers were convinced that suppressing all fires was the answer. But we’ve known for a while now how misplaced those beliefs were, even as many agencies cling to that failed strategy of a century ago.
Jerry Williams, former fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, puts it best about our stubborn wrongheadedness: “Every year we set a new record, we invest more in (fire) suppression, invest less in mitigation and wonder why we’re not getting on top of it.” If someone who directed the largest wildland firefighting force in the world makes this statement, it’s probably time to try something else.
What we need are policies and programs that address wildfires in ways beyond just putting fires out. This Spring, Colorado showed that it’s willing to learn from last season’s pain when Gov. Jared Polis and state legislators from both sides of the aisle released a series of bills aimed at wildfire mitigation, not only wildfire suppression.
These bills are exciting for several reasons such as: allocation of millions for forest health projects and grants for communities and individual homeowners to carry out their own hazard reduction projects. Also there is an attempt to seek out incentives for markets to address fuel mitigation through biomass energy.
The author sets a backfire. Photo courtesy: Raine
The millions the state spends now on restoring forests and hardening homes pale in comparison to the costs of firefighting and rebuilding homes. Every dollar spent on prevention saves $17 in suppression costs, according to a report commissioned by former Utah Gov. Gary R. Herbert.
There is also a bill to allow former inmates with firefighting experience to seek future employment with the state, which will help ensure a consistent workforce.
I hope the federal government is taking notes.
This post first appeared at Writers on the Range and is republished here with permission.
For a gripping read about wildfires, and what hotshots deal with, check out Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire.
Photo: Harrison Raine
Know how when you’ve eaten too much of something you probably shouldn’t have eaten so much of, you end up with squirty diarrhoea for hours sometimes? That’s how your body rids excess amounts of stuff that shouldn’t be there. Major fire storms like we saw across the Best Coast in 2020 are the Earth’s squirty diarrhoea. Weeks-long, choking smoke storms like we had here for most of last September are its fart gas. Kinda get what I’m suggesting here?
All that money spent reactively “restoring forests” and “hardening homes” to appease tree-huggers would be better used proactively managing existing forests; clearing out years of accumulated underbrush, felled timber, slash piles and other fuel waiting to go “poof”. Putting out the fires is only half the battle. Mother Nature can take care of “forest restoration” herself as she’d done for billions of years before human environmentalism and will continue to do long after Pyongyang wipes us all out.
Yoostabee here in the NW controlled forest burn-offs would happen occasionally in problem areas, especially in the Cascades, usually a few places a year. As a kid I used to sometimes see indications them off in the distance on road trips with the parental units. Carbon-agenda politics and media-manufactured ignorance killed that practise off by the start of the 2000s.
But of course, as we all know 100% of the problem comes down to global warming, not forest management that’s been budgeted and/or regulated out of existance. Right?
I await your flames.
I think a lot more folks here would agree with the crux of your argument than you might think – that global warming is not 100% to blame. On the flip side, willing to bet quite a few would agree that being a tool about it is 100% to blame for our ability to find common ground.
We are moving into the Sierra foothills this summer. Fire insurance can only be had through California Fair Plan, and is going to be $3k-$4k/year. That gives some indication of what the insurance companies risk analysts have worked out.
Thanks for publishing this article. Getting people thinking about this outside of the fire season is so badly needed. Right now it just seems to be a topic when the fires are burning and people aren’t thinking about long term plans, and just short term fire fighting.
Hopefully there’ll be some 1) guidance, 2) money or 3) help on individual home owners performing hardening and individual off-grid home sprinkler systems.
There’s an interesting bill in the CA state legislature right now that would, if signed into law, allow the state to buy properties at risk of rising seas, and then rent them until the seas claim the properties, using the rental income to pay back the state. Think big luxury homes in SoCal that are right on the beach. It’s a forward-thinking idea and I’d like the state to be that forward-thinking when it comes to fire dangers too.
Where in the foothills? Northern CA? Central?
Northern CA (near Auburn). In summer, the whole area feels like a tinderbox. Ponderosa pines all dry and full of sap. I’d like to be able to see some studies that quantify what hardening your property and a tank/pump/generator/spinkler setup does to the risk. Will 2000 gallons of water sprayed over the house and immediate yard, and not having the house “in” the trees help, or really is there nothing that can be done?
The one difference with sea level vs wildfires, is that (as you noted) will mostly be luxury beach front properties. In the Nor Cal foothills, there’s a mixture, but many/most properties are very basic and not owned by people with much wealth at all. And the Cal Fair Plan fire insurance is probably too expensive for many people up there.
I wouldn’t really want to sell the house to the State and rent back though, I just want some help for everyone to harden their houses and some big fire breaks to be put into the foothills. I appreciate the Cal Fire crews heading into danger, and want to have an infrastructure of firebreaks and roads in useful areas for them, that reduce their risk and increase the likelihood of them being successful in stopping fires. And for fuel removal, a ring around settlements of fuel removal could be good. The forests are too big to protect the whole thing.
I believe we can get the local fire department to pop along and give us some pointers on what to do first.
Yeah, I love that zone. I’ve looked at property in Colfax a few times. My wife works in international partnerships and she’s been connecting people with CalFire with Australian fire officials a lot in recent years, CalFire is really trying to learn as much as possible about spotting fires way earlier, getting better at predicting where hotspots might ignite, and improving the logistics of moving people away from fires quickly, as well as house/property hardening. They’re definitely on the front foot now.