The music in between

Notes from the Fire Tower

Looking toward 2024

It’s been a minute! We have been busy preparing for, and then hosting, the Red Sky Summit on behalf of Convective Capital and The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. You can read more, and see some photos, here. Thanks to everyone who came, lending their voice and knowledge to the common objective of developing and scaling innovative, technology-based solutions to our wildfire crisis.?

On that note about getting busy, as I round out my first full year working at Rain (??) and studying the media about wildfire these news aggregations can start to be a bit more succinct. In the coming year we’ll be more discerning about which news stories to spend time on, looking for exemplary reporting, fresh research, and especially revealing storytelling, while keeping in mind what we’ve already read. (One small caveat: we don’t really need to read more stories about firefighting goats but—who doesn’t love a good firefighting goat story now and then?!).?

This week:

Just one thing ?? | Fire on the prairie

Fire, Generally ?? | Fresh research on cancer-causing wildfire-modified heavy metals, two years with Hotshots, and fire trends

Climate ?? | Recipe for greenhouse gas: Tundra + wildfire, great news from the redwoods and a podcast on the hit to air quality from wildfire

Firefighting ?? | Three firefighters die in Australia ??, distinctly different fire season assessments in California vs. Virginia, & Cory the rescue dog rides a helicopter

Firetech ?? | Pano news and something fresh from Airbus

What’s burning? ?? | Ventura County

If you read just one thing:

What we’ve been seeing in stories about fire, and forests, and climate, is that the problems and their solutions are on the whole very particular to each landscape. For example, one can imagine that the recipe for catastrophic fires in Maui and that solution set are distinct from those in California. This exquisitely written opinion piece, peppered with lyrical prose from novelist Willa Cather, catalogs the particular risks and problems of the Great Plains, which I confess to not often consider when I think about fire.

On the Great Plains, the devil is red cedar coupled with the pioneering desire to see trees on the landscape, the solution is prescribed burns and grazing, and the outcome is a carbon sink more reliable than treecover. Grasslands storing over 90 percent of its carbon underground, out of reach from wildfires that would send that carbon back into the atmosphere. “The Great Plains biome is dying. Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs,” acccording to Dr. Twidwell, rangeland ecologist, University of Nebraska.

Many have detailed the human history of the landscape, others the broader ecology. But Cather captured the music in between: that symphony, at once melancholy and free, terrifying and strange, that swells within us, like the land itself, when we are confronted by the horizon unbroken. “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out,” says Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather’s “My ántonia.” “I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

Fire, Generally

Fresh research on cancer-causing wildfire-modified heavy metals, two years with Hotshots, and fire trends

• A gorgeous photo essay photographed over two years spent with a Hotshot team accompanies a story about their experience, and highlights protections for federal firefighter pay that is a critical issue before Congress right now.?
• The Washington Post discusses the last ten years of fire in the U.S. and why it might be our last quiet one for a while. “Given recent trends in wildfire statistics, it could be the quietest for decades to come without successful efforts to prevent blazes and reduce risks.”
• Just released: researchers revealed that wildfires are releasing (super potent) cancer-causing heavy metals, in particular California’s state rock (Serpentinite) reacts with wildfire to create chromium-6. These chemical reactions endanger our first responders immediately and in an acute form through respiration, and then the local community in the form of drinking water. I am familiar with one of the preserves they studied (Pepperwood) which is well known for its good fire stewardship. It seems that prescribed burns, while protecting from some aspects of fire, do not prevent this dangerous chemical reaction from occurring.?“Grasslands … don’t produce sufficiently high temperatures to create a lot of chromium-6, but shrubs and tree canopies do provide ample heat, [Scott Fendorf, a professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability] explained.
• And, It’s Always Fire Season Now.?

“We are seeing increasing evidence of fires departing the natural range of historical variability being more frequent, more intense, and larger.” —David Bowman, University of Tasmania

Climate

Recipe for greenhouse gas: Tundra + wildfire, great news from the redwoods and a podcast on the hit to air quality from wildfire

• Research reveals that places where tundra has recently burned quickly thaw permafrost and become methane hotspots, exacerbating climate change. “Tundra fires are still relatively rare but are expected to increase due to warming temperatures and more lightning activity.”
• Heartening news from the redwoods, research revealed that trees destroyed by catastrophic wildfire have been pulling from ancient buds 'using carbon transformed into sugars with sunlight that shone more than a half-century ago,' to regenerate. “The longevity of these bud tissues is the shocker here,” said Drew Peltier, an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University.
• If you’re more of a podcast listener than news reader, here’s one for you: Science Friday tackles the news that wildfires are undoing decades of air quality improvement.?

Firefighting

Three firefighters die in Australia ??, distinctly different fire season assessments in California vs. Virginia, amp; Cory the rescue dog rides a helicopter

• ?????? Three firefighters have died in firefighting plane crash in Australia.
• Cal Fire is celebrating a very special 2023 season: for the first time in five years they put more acres of beneficial fire on the land than they fought.
• In Virginia the Department of Forestry released an assessment of their fire season, which was particularly destructive in part because of drought conditions.
• Speaking of working animals (??!), this is just fun: Cory, a rescue dog training for emergency deployment from a helicopter, practices being lifted onboard a firefighting helicopter. He did great, undoubtedly more chill than I would have been.?

Firetech

Pano news and something fresh from Airbus

• Colorado is extending its network of early wildfire detection cameras to offer greater visibility for first responders in hard-to-monitor terrain (hat tip to Pano AI for the story).
• Airbus has made and demonstrated an interesting suppression kit that can drop 20,000 gallons of retardant and requires no modifications to the aircraft. Very compelling.

What’s burning?

• Ventura County, CA is facing evacuations from a Santa Ana wind-driven fire.?

Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting if you are so moved.? Until next time,

Andrea