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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 2021
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APPEAL TRIBUNE
Biden climate plan aims at Western wildfires
make,” Bailey said.
“But that’s not necessarily the best
long term-decision because all that does
is kick the can down the road to when it’s
hot, dry and windy,” he said.
For decades, wildfires in some areas of
Baja California in Mexico have been left
to burn, keeping the forests and chapar-
ral thinned out. As a result, blazes there
don’t burn as intensely, said Stephanie
Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute
of the Environment and Sustainability.
“The Mexicans haven’t been able to af-
ford this kind of vast firefighting infra-
structure that we have, and so they just
let the fires burn. And you know what?
They don’t have the catastrophic fires be-
cause they haven’t fought the fires. And
they have low-intensity fires that were
the norm in California before we decided
to prevent burning,” Pincetl said.
Zach Urness and Damon Arthur
Salem Statesman Journal
USA TODAY NETWORK
If every person in the United States
started driving electric cars powered by
wind turbines tomorrow, and each coun-
try on earth agreed to dramatically re-
duce greenhouse emissions, the West
Coast would still see catastrophic wild-
fires in the coming years and decades.
Climate change has tilted the future
toward more fire and that’s unlikely to
change in the short term, experts say,
even as President-elect Joe Biden unveils
a climate plan aimed at combating hu-
man-caused warming of the planet.
“Even with a really good climate plan,
we will still see decades of warming,” said
Chris Field, director of the Woods Insti-
tute for the Environment at Stanford Uni-
versity. “There’s a lot we can do to reduce
the risk of catastrophic fires, but when
we think about those next steps, they
need to be taken in the context that cli-
mate change will likely get worse in the
next three to four decades.”
The 2020 wildfire season was among
the worst on record across the West
Coast. More than 5 million acres burned
in California, Oregon and Washington.
Tens of thousands of homes were de-
stroyed and 44 people killed.
Since 1895, the average annual tem-
perature in California has increased by
about 3 degrees, from 56.5 to 59.5 de-
grees. That's similar to Oregon and
Washington and to other states across
the West, Field said.
Aggressive action could limit warming
to 3.6 degrees or less, compared to prein-
dustrial levels, while continued high
emissions could mean warming up to 7.6
degrees by 2100, according to the Inter-
national Panel on Climate Change.
Biden’s $1.7 trillion, 10-year plan for
aggressively reducing greenhouse gas
emissions and moving to a 100 percent
clean energy economy no later than 2050
could help stave off the most catastroph-
ic wildfire scenarios, particularly in the
second half of the 21st Century, but it's
not a cure-all.
“You have to start somewhere,” said
Erica Fleishman, director of Oregon Cli-
mate Change Research Institute at Ore-
gon State University. “Even if the actions
of today aren’t seen in your lifetime, a lot
of people want to think about their kids
or grandkids and what kind of world
they’re going to live in.”
In the meantime, say fire experts, ag-
gressive action is needed to improve for-
est health and transform communities
into places equipped to handle a future of
more and bigger fires.
In this story, we'll look at how climate
change has fueled larger and hotter fires,
and the things experts say we can do now
to mitigate the worst type of disasters.
California firefighters on the front
line of climate-fueled fires
Ground zero in the explosion of large
and powerful wildfires is California,
which saw over 4 million acres torched
this season — far more than any other
western state.
"Many firefighters are experiencing
‘career’ fires — what would normally be
the most dangerous and destructive fire
of their career — nearly every year," Cali-
fornia Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection spokeswoman Christine
McMorrow said.
McMorrow said fire season has in-
creased by 75 days across the Sierra
Mountains, due in large part to a smaller
snowpack in the mountains that melts
earlier, due to warmer spring and sum-
mer temperatures that, in turn, dries out
the forest and turns the state into a tin-
derbox by late summer and autumn.
Once fires do arrive, warmer nighttime
temperatures leave firefighters less time
for overnight recovery, while hotter day-
time temperatures fuel growth.
Taken together, the result has been
fires that roar with historic speed and in-
tensity.
"The biggest change in fire behavior
has been the incredible increase in rate of
spread," said Timothy Ingalsbee, execu-
tive director of Firefighters United for
Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. "Wildfires
are hopscotching across the landscape,
leap-frogging across fireline, roads, riv-
ers, and other typical barriers to fire
spread. The conventional tactic of 'an-
chor, flank, and hold' until crews can
pinch off the headfire is not working,
both because climate change-fueled se-
vere weather conditions are not abating
and because fires spread rapidly in all di-
rections."
Ingalsbee noted that during Oregon's
Labor Day fires — an event fueled by 50-
to 75-mph dry winds last September —
the Holiday Farm Fire roared 20 linear
miles in just five hours.
"That rate of spread is beyond the liv-
ing experience of anyone in fire manage-
ment today," he said.
Drier forests in the Northwest
Drier forests are beginning to become
more common in Oregon as well, a place
so famous for being wet its state univer-
sity's mascot is a duck.
This past Labor Day, the worst wild-
fires in state history roared into populat-
ed areas with a speed and force never be-
fore seen.
While a historic windstorm was the
Damage to the Oak Park Motel caused by the Beachie Creek wildfire is seen in
Gates, Oregon on Sept. 18, 2020. BRIAN HAYES / STATESMAN JOURNAL
main reason, a quarter of the state was
also mired in an extreme drought, some-
thing that's been increasingly common
over the past two decades and particular-
ly since 2015.
In the past two decades, only 2006
saw no drought whatsoever in Oregon
and 16 of the past 20 years have seen
some level of severe drought.
U.S. Forest Service fire analyst Rick
Stratton said the Pacific Northwest is the
place that's changing the quickest in
terms of how likely wildfires are becom-
ing.
"In the last 15 years, we’ve seen some
places double or triple for burn probabil-
ity," Stratton said. "(Oregon's Labor Day
fires) were an extremely rare weather
event, but a takehome is that most places
in Oregon are now a potential fire envi-
ronment. We have to understand that if
conditions are right, that this can hap-
pen."
The loss of the West’s mighty
forests?
Drought hasn't just led to conditions
ripe for wildfire in California, it's killed off
an estimated 147 million trees, Cal Fire of-
ficials said.
And dead trees make explosive fuel for
wildfires.
The 2020 Creek Fire, the largest single
fire in state history at 379,895 acres,
burned in an area of "significant tree
mortality which was due to a bark beetle
infestation caused by several years of se-
vere drought," McMorrow said.
And the health of forests is a para-
mount concern, stressed Field. The west-
ern forests of the United States store
massive amounts of carbon dioxide, and
when they burn up, that storage is lost,
leading to a negative feedback loop
where bigger fires fuel more warming,
and more warming brings more fire.
"When you look around the world, less
than half the emissions from fossil fuels
stay in the atmosphere while the other 55
percent are taken up in oceans and forest
— we get a huge subsidy from forests," he
said. "Wildfires push us in the opposite
direction."
Long-term, Fields said, stakes
couldn't be higher.
"I actually think the terrifying thing is
that we need to avoid losing the forest
across the Western United States," he
said. "It's not that crazy. We have 30 mil-
lion acres of forest in California and we
burned 4 million in 2020. We could lose a
majority of forests and the foothills could
become so unsafe communities can't re-
main there. Forest protection needs to be
a very high priority."
The rise of invasive plants prone to
wildfire
It's not just dry forests and heat that's
fueling wildfires. In some cases, climate
change has changed the ecosystem in a
way that can accelerate wildfires.
Fleishman has studied the rise of
cheatgrass, an invasive plant that's been
spreading across the Great Basin and the
inland West, near cities such as Reno,
Boise and Salt Lake City.
An invasive species that's believed to
have arrived from Central Asia in the
1800s, cheatgrass is highly flammable
and appears to be well-suited to the
warm and wet winters, and hot, dry sum-
mers climate change is bringing across
the West.
"Cheatgrass does really well with the
type of rainy, wet winters we've been see-
ing and are expecting to see in the future,"
she said. "And when it dries out in the
summer it becomes extremely flamma-
ble."
In areas where cheatgrass has become
dominant, acres burned has increased
200 percent since 1980, Fleishman said.
"It’s a big deal," she said.
h Fire agencies need to stop aggres-
sively fighting every fire, a policy they say
has contributed to forests that have
grown too dense.
So far, though, not enough is being
done to address how climate change has
contributed to making fires larger, more
intense and more frequent.
“We’re getting our butts kicked, to be
blunt, spending more money and getting
more fatalities and not being more effec-
tive, so we’ve got to address our fire man-
agement system,” said John Bailey, a for-
estry professor at Oregon State Univer-
sity.
Using fire to fight wildfires
Climate change, coupled with aggres-
sive fire management over the past 100
years or so have left forests overgrown
and dense, causing them to burn hotter
and faster during fires.
Communities across the West, espe-
cially where people live in the “wildland
urban interface,” need to do more con-
trolled burns designed to reduce the
amount of thick underbrush.
Fire managers say removing the un-
derbrush keeps fires from growing up
from the forest floor to the tree tops and
killing bigger trees.
When trees and brush are thinned out,
fires tend to burn less intensely. Much of
California evolved to occasionally burn,
but in the past 100 years, fire agencies
have prevented that natural process.
Prescribed burns bring fire back, but it
is used under controlled conditions and
when the weather allows it.
“Before we went in and put out every-
thing, fires were less intense and not as
devastating. They didn’t wipe everything
out,” Bailey said.
Nearby communities need to learn to
live with some smoke from controlled
burns, but it’s a trade-off for reducing the
risk of deadly, fast-moving blazes in the
summer, he said.
“How do you like your smoke? Do you
like it as these big wildfire massive
events that trap you in your house a week
at a time or some prescribed burning
smoke in the spring and the fall when
weather conditions aren’t too bad,” he
said.
Since California’s deadly Camp Fire,
which killed 85 people and destroyed the
town of Paradise in November 2018, state
officials have increased the amount of
prescribed burning annually, said
McMorrow.
The state and U.S. Forest Service,
which owns roughly half the forest land
in California, have agreed to set fire to 1
million acres a year as prescribed burns
by 2025, she said.
Even if the state reaches its goal, a mil-
lion acres a year is a small fraction of the
thinning needed statewide, said Rebecca
K. Miller, a graduate student and re-
searcher at Stanford University.
About 20%, or about 21 million acres,
of California’s forested areas need some
type of prescribed burning or other fuel
reduction treatment, she said.
Oregon needs $4 billion for fuels
treatments
While California has invested heavily
in home protection and forest manage-
ment, Oregon is just beginning to ramp
up its process.
In a special legislative session last
month, Oregon's legislature approved
$100 million for wildfire recovery and
prevention — that could include a num-
ber of projects aimed at protecting com-
munities and thinning forests.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has also pro-
posed treating 5.6 million acres of forest-
land across Oregon, which her wildfire
council estimated would cost about $4
billion.
But how that huge number would ac-
tually be paid for remains unclear.
Five big things we can do now to
slow wildfire
Letting some fires burn
Experts studying the effects of climate
change on wildfires in the West point to
four specific areas where people need to
adapt as blazes grow deadlier and more
destructive.
h Forests need better management.
h Homes built in areas where fires
thrive should be more fire resistant.
h The threat of wildfire should be part
of planning for new neighborhoods and
other developments.
But along with forest thinning, experts
say state, federal and local agencies also
need to change the way they fight wild-
fires.
“We’ve got to change our fire manage-
ment system that still to this day runs
and puts out every fire, even under those
conditions where we’re wanting to pre-
scribe burn, where we extinguish the
fires just because that’s the easiest deci-
sion to make, the lowest-risk decision to
Building homes to survive the next
wildfire
In addition to changing the forest,
communities need to adapt, experts say.
Communities in the wildland urban
interface — where development meets or
intermingles with undeveloped wildland
— should also be designed to be more fire
resistant, said Max Moritz a wildfire spe-
cialist at the University of California,
Santa Barbara’s Bren School.
In 2020, Moritz co-wrote a guide for
communities on how to build in the wil-
dland-urban interface. To protect homes
from oncoming wildfires, he suggests
new construction should be built in areas
to take advantage of barriers in the land-
scape such as water bodies, roads, parks,
irrigated farmland and meadows.
And rather than spreading homes out,
they should also be grouped away from
hillsides and other sources where fire ap-
proaches.
“These are considerations that defi-
nitely should be codified into law at some
level, if we are going to continue devel-
oping in fire-prone areas ... which we are
going to do, given the need for housing
and the fact that climate change is mak-
ing many places more fire-prone,” Moritz
said.
After the Camp Fire, there was a rec-
ord 181 bills introduced into the California
Legislature dealing with wildland fire,
Stanford’s Miller said. Prior to that, law-
makers dealt with an average of 24 wild-
fire-related bills annually, she said.
Moritz’s and others' guidelines for
new construction include such features
as fire-resistant roofing, soffits under
outdoor eves, flame-resistant siding,
double pane windows, external sprin-
klers and fine mesh attic vents, she said.
California law already requires homes
built after 2008 to include those fire-re-
sistant features.
About 51 percent of the 350 single-
family homes built after 2008 survived
the Camp Fire with little damage, accord-
ing to a McClatchy News analysis.
By contrast, only 18 percent of the
12,100 homes built prior to 2008 escaped
damage, according to McClatchy. How-
ever, Stanford's Miller said the vast ma-
jority of the state's housing stock was
built before 2008.
Many fire agencies have long advocat-
ed keeping vegetation thinned up to 100
feet around homes, but recently they
have also begun pushing homeowners to
keep all vegetation at least 5 feet away
from homes to prevent plants from being
ignited by burning embers sent airborne
by wildfires.
Wildfires are almost certainly going to
continue getting larger and more de-
structive across the West, with or with-
out a Biden climate plan.
States like California and Oregon have
plans to safeguard communities, but the
key will be funding.
"We have a wildfire problem and jobs
and rural economy crisis," Field said.
"Putting a lot of people in the forest could
help with both issues. But it will also re-
quire funding and some compromise."
Zach Urness has been an outdoors re-
porter, photographer and videographer
in Oregon for 12 years. Urness is the au-
thor of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and
“Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be
reached at zurness@StatesmanJour-
nal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on
Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.
Damon Arthur is the Record Search-
light’s resources and environment report-
er. He welcomes story tips at 530-338-
8834 and damon.arthur@redding.com.
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