2018 Fire Season
After the late 2017 fires that burned through New Year, the notion of a fire season in California is at best questionable. The fire season is now all year around. And when the summer arrived in 2018, the wildfires were exceptional distructive again. The questions we address in these set of blogs, what is the cause of these intense fires? What are some of the health implications? And how can we managed wildlands better to prevent catastrophic fires?
Climate, Radiative Forcing, and Carbon Dioxide
Although the Earth’s climate has been changing for hundreds of thousands, even millions and billions of years, even small changes to the Earth’s average temperatures has significant implications for human activities. Climate change science can be extremely complex, but here are two well undertood proceses:
Carbon dioxide (and other ``greenhouse gases’’) trap heat and make Earth warmer than it would be otherwise.
Human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) is rapidly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Note: Not only are carbon dioxide emissions increasing, the rate is accelerating.
Observed CO2 concentrations (black) have been steadily increasing since we have begun measuring them in the 1950s, with a best fit line (red). Note that the slope or the rate of change is also increasing.
Based on these two processes, we can draw the following conclusion:
We should expect the rising carbon dioxide concentration to warm our planet, with the warming becoming more severe as we add more carbon dioxide. But does this mean that we should also expect wildfires to increase as well?
Wildfires and Climate
Most researchers are loath to make predictions in the context of highly uncertain data. However, it’s also useful to consider simple drivers wildfires and how climate might impact them.
Warmer temperatures increase fire hazards. This fact alone should cause us concern.
Warmer temperatures will increase the energy in weather systems. These will probably lead to higher winds; more intense huricanes, precipitation events, and snow storms; and even possbly more droughts. In a nutshell, more extreme weather events that will require new responses.
Strategies to address natural disasters vary. While approaches are severely limited political value, many professionals are thinking carefully about the hazards of fires, how to support victims, and what policies might reduce the risks of wildfires.
If we take these at face value, we might conclude that fires are going to get worse and more extreme with climate change.
Wildfires, Public Health, Management
The devastation of wildfires occurs along multiple axes: loss of life, loss of property, loss of ecosystem services, and impacts on public health. Learning from the history of wildfires, is one of the first keys to manage them in the future.
The EA30 class of the 2018 Fall, evaluated a range of questions associated with climate and fires. First, we some basic aspects of fire science, then we evaluated some of the implications on public health for people around the region. Finally, we reviewed numerous attempts to managed the landscape to reduce the risk of wildfires.
What does fire science say about climate and wildfires?
Our team reviewed a diverse collection of scientific literature to evaluate the implications of climate change and fire science. Wildfires tend to recur based on the physical characteristics of the vegetation and source of ignition and increasingly, climate. In order to have a comprehensive scientific understanding of wildfires in California, we need to examine the causes and the roles of fires in different environments.
Recently, with the California fires of 2018, wildfires seem to have more devastating consequences than before. The human loss of life in the most recent wildfires is unparalleled. What does this mean for future fire research? Should we focus on more effective forest management, as our president suggests? Or does global warming play the largest role in propagating increasingly dangerous wildfires?
To answer these questions, we looked into examples of different fire management and suppression tactics and consequences to try to understand the complex roles of human management, causation, and effects of wildfires. We aim to describe the causes of wildfires by looking into the fire susceptibility rates of different forest types (Tolentino-Serrano 2018) as well as how hydrology plays into the spread of wildfires (Zhuo 2018). Using this information, our research encompasses fire suppression techniques in both Southwest Australia (Ward 2018), the Coastal plains of Northern Florida (Lenhart-Wees 2018), and fire patters in Griffith Park (Mehta 2018).
Public Safety and Health
Over the past few years, the health effects of wildfires have become an increasingly documented concern. Although death tolls offer a staggering and concrete reminder of fires’ ability to devastate communities, wildfires also instigate longer-term health effects. These negatively affect even those not in direct path of the fire’s flames.
Smoke inhalation is one of the greatest health risks to residents not in immediate danger from the fires. For example, particulate matter (PM 2.5) can fluctuate above safe levels months after a fire has been contained (Zhong 2018). Factors such as wind and weather conditions also play a major part in PM2.5 exposure along with proximity to fire. Furthermore, Kania (2018) reports that fuel sources can have differential impacts on public health, and thus states public health officials should play a stronger role in vegetation management that improves both ecological and public health outcomes.
Asato (2018) and Gunasti (2018) investigated hospital admission demography during a smoky period at two hospitals. One hospital, Tri-City Medical Center, is located in a primarily non-white neighborhood with a median income below the state average, while the other hospital, Scripps Mercy Hospital, is located in a primarily white neighborhood with a median income above the state average. Both Asato and Gunasti found that there is a significant difference in trends regarding racial composition of emergency department visits before and during the smoky period of a fire.
The immediate dangers and risks associated with fires is devastating – mortality because people are not evacuated or unable to evaculate are some of the most tragic outcomes of wildfires. Paschal (2018) summarized the problems associated with local officials and the lack of resources they have to make effective evaculation notifications.
Reducing Wildfire Risks and WUIs
Fuel management varies among counties with different levels of temperature and soil moisture across northern and southern California, as well as their patterns of land use (Das 2008). Less populated counties use prescribed fires which increase the amount of small fires while eliminating larger ones. As summarized by Scanlon (2018), a combination of prescribed fire and mechanical thinning is the most effective way to reduce the fuel load in the years following the management technique. Prescribed fires, however, reduce the fuel load by the greatest amount per dollar, so may be more useful in tight budget situations. In addition, Wilk (2018) believes that the presence of Wildland-Urban Interfaces (WUIs) and previous fire sites both significantly influence the type of fuel treatments implemented. For example, Reyes-Salazar (2008) describes how fire suppression and Ponderosa pine forests have created extremely hazards conditions for 75% of the inhabitants in Colorado, thus the state implements fire management techniques that both mitigate the risk of wildfires and protect the communities most proximate to forests.
Other examples of how fire suppression and forest management techniques differ based on geographic context: Additionally, Pauley (2018) believes that suppression and containment techniques have generally been overused in California, however, differing regions in California need to develop individual fuel management tactics that are suitable to the vegetation type. Dyken-Hodapp (2018) evaluated different various techniques used of Florida and suggest that the best techniques depend on the management goals.
Disconnect between federal and state fire prevention
Recent forest fires in California have exposed a disconnect between state and federal fire treatments. Both state and federal agencies are committed to reducing the threat of wildfires in California, but the question of how best to do so still remains. State fire agencies in California tend to focus their efforts on forests near WUIs as well as near previous fire sites (Wilk 2018). However, state efforts do not extend to federal lands, which comprise the majority of the forests in California (Stone 2018). Therefore, although President Trump suggests more civilian management - such as ``raking’‘-much of the land that is burning is under federal, not local or state, jurisdiction, limiting civilian responsibility for mitigative action. More effective forest treatment requires cohesion between federal, state, and local prevention efforts.’’