B4
THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2021
Technology has growing role in corralling wildfi res
By DON THOMPSON
Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif.
— As drought- and wind-
driven wildfi res have become
more dangerous across the
American West in recent
years, fi refi ghters have tried
to become smarter in how
they prepare.
They’re using new tech-
nology and better position-
ing of resources in a bid to
keep small blazes from erupt-
ing into mega-fi res like the
ones that torched a record 4%
of California last year, or the
nation’s biggest wildfi re this
year that has charred a sec-
tion of Oregon, half the size
of Rhode Island.
There have been 730 more
wildfi res in California so far
this year than last, an increase
of about 16%. But nearly tri-
ple the area has burned —
470 square miles.
Catching fi res more
quickly gives fi refi ghters
a better chance of keeping
them small.
That includes using new
fi re behavior computer mod-
eling that can help assess
risks before fi res start, then
project their path and growth.
When “critical weather” is
predicted — hot, dry winds or
lightning storms — the tech-
nology, on top of hard-earned
experience, allows California
planners to pre-position fi re
engines, bulldozers, aircraft
and hand crews armed with
shovels and chain saws in
areas where they can respond
more quickly.
With the computer mod-
eling, “they can do a daily
risk forecast across the state,
so they use that for plan-
ning,” said Lynne Tolma-
choff , spokeswoman for Cal
Fire, California’s fi refi ghting
agency.
That’s helped Cal Fire
hold an average 95% of
blazes to 10 acres or less even
in poor conditions driven by
drought or climate change,
she said. So far this year it’s
held 96.5% of fi res below 10
acres.
Nathan Howard/AP Photo
A sign damaged by the Bootleg fi re stands among the haze on Thursday near Paisley.
Federal fi refi ghters sim-
ilarly track how dry vegeta-
tion has become in certain
areas, then station crews and
equipment ahead of lightning
storms or in areas where peo-
ple gather during holidays,
said Stanton Florea, a U.S.
Forest Service spokesman at
the National Interagency Fire
Center in Boise, Idaho.
In another eff ort to catch
fi res quickly, what once were
fi re lookout towers staff ed by
humans have largely been
replaced with cameras in
remote areas, many of them
in high-defi nition and armed
with artifi cial intelligence to
discern a smoke plume from
morning fog. There are 800
such cameras scattered across
California, Nevada and Ore-
gon, and even casual viewers
can remotely watch wildfi res
in real time.
Fire managers can then
“start making tactical deci-
sions based on what they can
see,” even before fi refi ghters
reach the scene, Tolmachoff
said.
Fire managers also rou-
tinely summon military
drones from the National
Guard or U.S. Air Force to fl y
over fi res at night, using heat
imaging to map their bound-
aries and hot spots. They can
use satellite imagery to plot
the course of smoke and ash.
“Your job is to manage the
fi re, and these are tools that
will help you do so” with a
degree of accuracy unheard
of even fi ve years ago, said
Char Miller, a professor at
Pomona College in Califor-
nia and a widely recognized
wildfi re policy expert.
In California, fi re man-
agers can overlay all that
information on high-quality
Light Detection and Ranging
topography maps that can aid
decisions on forest manage-
ment, infrastructure planning
and preparation for wildfi res,
fl oods, tsunamis and land-
slides. Then they add the fi re
behavior computer simula-
tion based on weather and
other variables.
Other mapping software
can show active fi res, fuel
breaks designed to slow their
spread, prescribed burns,
defensible space cleared
Olympic sports you won’t see in Tokyo
around homes, destroyed
homes and other wildfi re
damage.
“It’s all still new, but we
can see where it’s going to
take us in the future when it
comes to planning for people
building homes on the wild-
land area, but also wildland
fi refi ghting,”
Tolmachoff
said.
Cal Fire and other fi re
agencies have been early
adopters of remote imaging
and other technologies that
can be key in early wildfi re
detection, said John Bailey,
a former fi refi ghter and now
professor at Oregon State
University.
Some experts argue it’s a
losing battle against wildfi res
worsened by global warming,
a century of refl exive wildfi re
suppression and overgrown
forests, and communities
creeping into what once were
sparsely populated areas. Cli-
mate change has made the
West hotter and drier in the
past 30 years, and scientists
have long warned the weather
will get more extreme as the
world warms.
Yet, fi refi ghters’ goal is
to replicate the outcome of
a fi re that started Monday
in the canyon community of
Topanga, between Los Ange-
les and Malibu.
It had the potential to
swiftly spread through dry
brush but was held to about
7 acres after water-drop-
ping aircraft were scrambled
within minutes from LA and
neighboring Ventura County.
What fi refi ghters don’t
want is another wildfi re like
the one that ravaged the Mal-
ibu area in 2018. It destroyed
more than 1,600 structures,
killed three people and forced
thousands to fl ee.
In another bid to gain an
early advantage, Califor-
nia is buying a dozen new
Sikorsky Firehawk helicop-
ters — at $24 million each —
that can operate at night, fl y
faster, drop more water and
carry more fi refi ghters than
the Vietnam War-era Bell
UH-1H “Hueys” they will
eventually replace.
It will also soon receive
seven military surplus C-130
transport aircraft retrofi tted
to carry 4,000 gallons of fi re
retardant, more than three
times as much as Cal Fire’s
workhorse S-2 airtankers.
For all that, fi refi ghters’
eff orts to outsmart and sup-
press wildfi res is counterpro-
ductive if all it does is post-
pone fi res in areas that will
eventually burn, argued Rich-
ard Minnich, a professor in
Riverside who studies fi re
ecology.
“No matter how sophis-
ticated the technology may
be, the areas they can manage
or physically impact things
is small,” he said. “We’re
in over our heads. You can
have all the technology in
the world — fi re control is
impossible.”
Working with wildfi res is
more realistic, he said, by tak-
ing advantage of patches that
previously burned to channel
the spread of new blazes.
Timothy Ingalsbee, a
former federal fi refi ghter
who now heads Firefi ght-
ers United for Safety, Ethics
and Ecology, also said fi re-
fi ghters need to adopt a new
approach when confronting
the most dangerous wind-
driven wildfi res that leapfrog
containment lines by show-
ering fl aming embers a mile
or more ahead of the main
inferno.
It’s better to build more
fi re-resistant homes and
devote scarce resources to
protecting threatened com-
munities while letting the
fi res burn around them, he
said.
“We have these amazing
tools that allow us to map
fi re spread in real time and
model it better than weather
predictions,” Ingalsbee said.
“Using that technology, we
can start being more strate-
gic and working with fi re to
keep people safe, keep homes
safe, but let fi re do the work
it needs to do — which is
recycle all the dead stuff into
soil.”
Associated Press writ-
ers Keith Ridler and Chris-
topher Weber contributed to
this report.
DEL’S O.K. TIRE
Croquet, tug of war
were once events
By MAKENZIE
WHITTLE
The Bulletin
The Olympics have gone
through many changes over
the centuries. They’ve
evolved
from
ancient
games, which are believed
to have started in approxi-
mately 776 B.C., into the
modern iteration, which
began in 1896. Through-
out that time, the world
changed, and so too did the
games themselves. Compe-
titions were added, changed
and even removed com-
pletely over the course of
its history.
So, when you plop in
front of the TV for the next
two weeks to take in the
events of the XXXII Olym-
piad, feel lucky that you can
watch the 100-meter free-
style swim event instead of
croquet.
Yes, that is one of the
discontinued
Olympic
events that has been lost to
history.
Lasting only one year,
the 1900 games in Paris
included
this
favorite
low-intensity competition
of backyard barbecues.
Croquet was one of six
offi cial sports in that year
— which also included a
number of unoffi cial ones
including pigeon racing —
and it was the fi rst event to
feature women athletes.
That same year also saw
the debut of a tug of war
event. Even more surpris-
ing than its existence as an
Olympic sport may be the
fact that it lasted fi ve more
games until it was dis-
continued after 1920. The
event took a lot of strength
to pull off , and therefore
it’s more sporting than say
an art competition. But
the thought of something
you played while at fam-
ily reunions as a medaled
event still seems like a
stretch. Tug of war was part
Wikimedia Commons
Great Britain competes against Sweden during the tug of war
competition of the 1912 Summer Olympics held in Stockholm.
of the track and fi eld events
and the teams consisted of
“clubs,” like a city athletic
club or a trade or employee
team, that was chosen by
the countries to compete.
But it’s not all backyard
games that got the boot.
Popular sports like cricket
(though that is planned to
make a comeback in the
2028 games), lacrosse,
Basque pelota and polo
have also gone the way of
the dodo, but are occasion-
ally played as demonstra-
tions during certain Olym-
pic games.
Some games even stretch
the boundaries of two-week
Olympics themselves like
alpinism, AKA, moun-
tain climbing. Awarded to
the country or group that
achieved the most diffi cult
ascent since the last Olym-
pics, the 1924 medal was
awarded to an unsuccessful
1922 British expedition to
Mount Everest.
The team of over 160
made their attempts to
climb the mountain a full
31 years before Sir Edmund
Hillary and Tenzing Nor-
gay successfully summited
and seven of the Nepal-
ese and Indian porters
never made it down. For
their own eff orts, the sher-
pas were eventually given
medals too, albeit later than
the Brits who they climbed
with.
One of the longer-last-
ing and stranger compe-
titions for an event cen-
tered around sports was
an art competition. Intro-
duced in 1912 and lasting
seven games until 1948,
the works on display were
inspired by sports and were
divided into fi ve categories
of architecture, literature,
music, painting and sculp-
ture. The events were even-
tually discontinued when
the International Olympic
Committee discovered that
nearly everyone competing
was a professional, going
against the restriction that
only amateur athletes could
compete (a rule that has
been relaxed). Still, art and
Olympics do complement
each other well, from the
performances of the open-
ing and closing ceremonies
to the overall designs of
the new venues created for
each event.
While these events will
probably never come back
to the Olympics fold, a few
are making their debut this
year and some are mak-
ing a comeback. New this
year is sport climbing,
which includes lead climb-
ing, bouldering and speed
climbing; skateboarding,
which includes both park
and street events; BMX
racing and freestyle; surf-
ing; 3x3 basketball; and
karate. Coming back this
year is baseball, softball
and golf.
Del Thompson, former owner of
OK Rubber Welders.
Klyde Thompson, current owner
Mike Barnett, manager
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