Fire, it might be said, is a hot topic

Tragedy in Chile, smoke reports, fire predictions, and news from Maui

Just one thing:

If you just pay attention to one thing this week, at the start of February deadly fires raged in Chile, devastating their botanical garden—a national treasure—and killing a worker and her family as well as ~130 Chileans (expected to climb as officials continue to comb through the wreckage. “Hundreds of people are still missing and some 14,000 homes have been damaged, officials say.” For context, the fires in Maui killed 101 people and damaged 3,000 structures.

Reuters covers how climate change exacerbated the fires (drought, heat wave, high wind), NASA shows us how closely the fire burned to active urban areas, and The New York Times connects our California floods and these fires in two areas known for their mild weather. The Washington Post reports that in contrast to much of the scenes of devastation, this Chilean community, still standing, provides evidence that planning and preparation make a huge difference to fire resiliency. The Guardian calls for new tactics in South America in the ‘age of megafires’ and this group of citizens calls for solidarity, no more monoculture and an end to extractivism (prioritizing gain from land rather than its ‘social function of feeding the people’).

Also, it came out just after I'd posted my own newsletter on substack, but this week in his weekly newsletter, David Wallace-Wells covers the fires in Chile and connects them with the fires in Maui. I'm looking forward to diving into it today.

This week:

• Notes from the Fire Tower | ??? Paper copy
• Fire, Generally ?? | ? Utility Dive, ?? Hawai’i update, Canada smolders & scientists at MIT measured unhappiness
• Climate ?? | Air pollution study, snowpack, prescribed burn windows & fire risk in the Eastern US
• Firefighting | ?????? Marking Black History Month, involuntary manslaughter, aerial ?? firefighting and some of the policies limiting prescribed burns
• Firetech | ?? AI here, too!

Notes from the Fire Tower

Paper copy

I love it when the fire news arrives in print and I can carry it around with me: this time it was in the shape of The New Yorker. This four-page article by Elizabeth Kolbert, who read & quoted from an astonishing number of recent studies and books on the ‘hot topic’ of fire, goes over some territory we’re quite familiar with here in Fire News (beneficial fire, worsening fire conditions, devastation and mayhem, etc). But in there too, are some insights: Some argue that taxpayers bear the burden of wildfire-fighting cost, which functions essentially like a subsidy to the tune of up to 20% of a home’s value, while municipalities have an incentive to encourage growth regardless of fire risk to bring in more property tax revenue. There’s of course also mention of the CO2-wildfire feedback loop (hotter, drier conditions = more wildfire which releases more C02, etc) and quotes from a panoply of papers on how fires are worsening.

Fire, Generally

Utility Dive, Hawai’i update, Canada smolders and measured unhappiness

• Insurance analysts say the growing risk of severe wildfires due to climate change, and a shifting legal landscape that increasingly holds utilities accountable for the damages caused by the conflagrations, has changed the calculus that goes into a utility’s liability insurance policy.
• In Hawai’i, where the 101st victim of Maui’s fires has just been confirmed, this story highlights the difficulty of rebuilding after a fire—even if your house still stands, while The New York Times covers a report just released detailing the events and learnings.?
• In Canada, drought and wildfire concerns are causing event organizers to adjust summer plans while firefighters continue monitoring holdover fires, which are still smouldering after last summer.??
• MIT researchers provide data that measures greater unhappiness of populations experiencing wildfire smoke, especially if the fire was started across a national border.?

Climate

Air pollution study, snowpack, prescribed burn windows and fire risk in the Eastern US

• NYT reports that, “More than 125 million Americans will be exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution [a fifty percent increase] by the middle of the century, largely because of increased smoke from wildfires, according to estimates released on Monday.” Meanwhile The Hill looked at the same report and chose the headline, ‘Climate Change is making it more dangerous for children to play outside,’ and the BBC also covered the report, choosing to fill in further detail about what you can do about it.?
• From Idaho to Georgia, USA, the prescribed burn window is shrinking because of climate change, though in the Rockies the window is expanding (because it’s getting warmer, and allowing earlier burns than previously).
• National Geographic covers the increasing risk of wildfire in the eastern US, where population density might make them much more deadly.
• ?Gah, another thing to add to the wildfire-climate feedback loop... wildfires impact snowpack and lengthen fire seasons...?

“There's a really strong correlation between the length of the snow season, especially the spring snow disappearance date, and all of these different fire parameters, like the number of fires, the size of the fires, the number of fire complexes when two fires burn together, the overall burn severity of the fire,” she added. “So all of those things are amplified when we have declining snow packs and earlier snow disappearance dates.”

Firefighting

Marking Black History Month, involuntary manslaughter, aerial firefighting and some of the policies limiting prescribed burns

• Happy to share a story of a formerly-segregated firehouse in Philadelphia, very timely as we honor Black History Month. WFMY Channel 2 interviews Ernest McCoy, a Black firefighter who was part of the first group of segregated Greensboro North Carolina Firefighters, formed in April 1961. “The interesting thing is that when we went to a fire, there was no color—only orange.”
• A couple in California pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter charges related to a gender reveal photo shoot that started the El Dorado fire in 2020, killing one firefighter, causing 3,000 evacuations and burning 7,050 acres.?
• Prescribed burns are often touted as a vital forest treatment to reduce burn intensity during fire season, but aside from all the practical reasons they are difficult to enact at large scale (changing climate reducing good burn days, staffing, funding and so on) there are also policies in place that prevent them, from prohibitive air quality rules (more on that in the next bullet) to an infamous court case referred to as Cottonwood, which you can read about in this scathing rebuke of it from the Breakthrough Institute.?
• One of the struggles for prescribed burn practitioners are limitations on burns due to local and federal regulation around air quality—even though good fire releases much less toxic smoke than catastrophic megafires do. The Feds are said to be considering a rule change to allow for some accommodations for prescribed burns, and in Plumas County they’re currently considering a rule change to remove a No Burn Area in the town of Quincy, which has faced catastrophic fire on numerous occasions. If you’re local, you can attend a public workshop from 11 am - 1 pm, Monday, March 4th at the Quincy Library.

“The inability to perform prescribed fire in the red area, and restrictions… make it difficult to protect our community the way we would like to (by utilizing prescribed fire). However, some might say there is value in having restrictions within these denser residential areas,” writes Logan Krahenbuhl, Program Manager for the Plumas Underburn Cooperative.

Firetech

AI here, too!

• Scientists are using AI to predict wildfires with LightningCastAI. "AI has the potential to be a game changer in a number of ways, including early fire detection, lightning prediction, forecasting fire spread and behavior, mapping fire perimeters and assessing wildfire risk prior to ignition,” while freeing up humans to do things that are harder for machines, like coordinating and communicating with stakeholders, according to Mike Pavolonis, physical scientist with the NOAA/NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research.

As always, thanks for reading, sharing & commenting. And, until next time,

Andrea