Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 18, 2009
3. Watersheds –
Firefighters making headway in California wildfires
L.A. Times
Are wildfires getting worse?
Mother Nature News
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Firefighters making headway in California wildfires
L.A. Times-8/17/09
More than 4,100 firefighters appear to be gaining the upper hand this evening in their efforts to battle two major California wildfires that have been burning out of control.
Authorities say the Lockheed fire in Santa Cruz County is 65% contained and the La Brea fire in Santa Barbara County is 75% contained.
In the Lockheed blaze, fire crews are having success cutting fire breaks and beating back flames amid cooler temperatures and a drop in the winds, authorities say.
"They're making good progress," said Nadim Yehia of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
If weather conditions remain favorable, he said, fire crews are expected to have full containment within several days.
More than 2,100 firefighters and 14 water-dropping helicopters are trying to control the fire that has burned thick redwood groves near the Santa Cruz County town of Swanton. The blaze, which started Wednesday, has consumed 7,017 acres.
The cause of the fire was under investigation, authorities said.
In Santa Barbara County, meanwhile, 2,078 firefighters are battling the fire that has scorched 87,490 acres of fast-burning chaparral, grass and timber in rugged terrain in Los Padres Forest near Santa Maria. The ground crews are being aided by 59 helicopters and 12 fixed-wing aircraft, the U.S. Forest Service said.
Authorities say the blaze, which has been burning since Aug. 8, was started by a cooking fire at a camp operated by a Mexican criminal organization that grows marijuana in the forest.#
Are wildfires getting worse?
Mother Nature News-8/18/09
By Russell McLendon
As Smokey Bear celebrates his 65th birthday this month, forests are on fire across the U.S. West. Thousands have fled their homes in California while wildfires explode across the state. Two fires alone are currently burning a million acres in Alaska. Nationwide, an area almost eight times the size of Rhode Island has gone up in smoke this year.
It's part of a recent trend that gives the impression — despite what Smokey says — that we've lost our knack for preventing forest fires. After burning an average 2.9 million acres in the United States annually from 1985-1995, they've averaged more than 6 million acres a year ever since, including nearly 20 million combined in 2006 and '07.
"We are seeing a significant trend," says Rick Ochoa, fire weather program manager at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. "Over the last 10, 12 years, fire activity has been much higher than normal."
The problem isn't that we're losing our touch, though. In fact, it's partly that we're a little too good at fighting wildfires — by oversuppressing them for decades, people disrupted natural fire cycles and let too much wildfire fuel build up. Forestry managers now light controlled burns to clear out this excess debris.
More people also now live near forests than in the past, raising both the stakes and chances of a fire. From 2001-2008, humans started five times more wildfires than lightning did. Backyard burn piles and arson are two of the top human causes, although cigarettes, campfires and catalytic converters are also often to blame. The recent 87,000-acre La Brea Fire in Southern California was reportedly started on an illegal marijuana farm.
But Ochoa worries, as do many scientists, that there's another, even more dangerous culprit fanning the flames: climate change.
"We still have a long way to go on prescribed burns," he says. "But I would say that while we are making improvements on that, in some regards the global warming is outrunning our ability to do it."
Wildfire seasons tend to oscillate between severe and calm every couple years, but scientists have begun noticing an overall upward trend in the acreage burned, if not necessarily the number of fires (see graph above). It seems to correspond with the ongoing increase of U.S. temperatures that's widely blamed on greenhouse gas emissions.
"It was probably sometime in the '90s, maybe late '80s, when I really noticed it personally," Ocha says. "But if you look back at the research, the last 10 to 15 years, they're much higher than what we've seen in the last 30 years in terms of fire activity. And the dominant factor has been the climate change."
How does climate affect wildfire?
As usual, most wildfires this year have been out West. About 2.9 million acres have burned in Alaska, and long-running droughts in the already-arid Southwest have fed intense fire seasons in Texas (668,000 acres), New Mexico (360,000) and Arizona (170,000). About 180,000 acres have burned in California, but its high population density means even small fires can cause big trouble.
Despite having higher rainfall, the East Coast is far from fireproof. South Carolina had its worst wildfire in 30 years this April, forcing thousands to evacuate during the height of Myrtle Beach's spring tourist season. Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp burned for four months in 2007, sending plumes of smoke 250 miles north to Atlanta. And New Jersey's Pine Barrens — an eccentric ecosystem with orchids, carnivorous plants and rare pygmy pines — contains some of the densest wildfire fuels in the country, equivalent to more than 1,300 gallons of gasoline per acre in some places.
Longer and larger droughts are forecast as the climate heats up, which will in turn feed bigger wildfires all across the country. Even now, delayed snowfall and early snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada Mountains is straining one of the West's main watersheds, and overall U.S. precipitation is down 10 percent since 1966. Many also blame the spread of voracious pine beetles — which are suddenly turning entire forests into firewood — on rising temperatures.
"The primary driver is climate change, the fact that we're seeing warmer years and more droughts," Ochoa says. "That means fuels are drier, a greater amount of insect damage and earlier snowmelt."
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is widely seen as the best hope for combating climate change, and that's already proved to be an uphill battle. But there are still lots of things anyone can do to prevent forest fires — when they need preventing, that is.
What causes wildfires?
Fire is a natural occurrence in every U.S. state except Hawaii. Sparked by lightning, natural wildland fires clean out dead or overgrown plant matter, exposing the soil for new plant growth and preventing dangerously big future fires.
They can also have customized effects for specific ecosystems. In Alaska, for example, springtime fires help warm up the frigid soil, and pitch pines living along the East Coast — especially in the fiery Pine Barrens and Florida Everglades — rely on wildfires to help them reproduce.
As Europeans streamed into North America during the past few centuries, they were often surprised by the large wildfires they encountered, and a well-meaning assumption soon became tradition — forests on fire were seen as forests in trouble, and most wildfires were extinguished while they were still small. This had drastic ecological consequences as the fire fuel built up over decades, setting off waves of wildfire when it finally did burn out of control, often during a drought.
Today, forestry officials conduct controlled, low-intensity burns for a variety of ecological tasks, mainly clearing out dry, dense debris that could fuel a fire. More than 2.1 million acres have undergone prescribed burns in the United States so far this year, which is already more than in all of 2008. And it's still not enough.
Most wildfires caused by humans begin when flames escape from burning debris piles, a problem that can be alleviated by obeying local burn bans or simply checking the weather before burning. While the No. 2 cause, arson, isn't as easy to prevent, there are thousands of wildfires started across the country each year by various other acts of human carelessness.
Flicked cigarettes and abandoned campfires are two well-known fire starters (thanks to Smokey's tireless six-decade campaign), but cars, trains and various other mechanical equipment can also provide a light. The catalytic converters on automobiles — which serve an environmental purpose by filtering pollutants from tailpipe emissions — can heat up dry vegetation beneath an idling car, igniting a wildfire.
Trains, tractors and other industrial workhorses sometimes start fires by shooting sparks into dry grass or brush, although spark arrestors greatly reduce that risk.
"People have to be extra careful with things like campfires, catalytic converters," Ochoa says. "We can't control the lightning, but we can control our actions. It's only August — we still have a lot of fire season to go."#
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/are-wildfires-getting-worse
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