Solving for Mega Fire

In recent years, massive and fast-moving fires have devastated communities and forests throughout California and the American West, leaving tragedy, displacement and ruin in their wake.

Solving for Mega Fire is a comprehensive proposal for taking on the threat of mega fire, even as the climate grows warmer and drier.

Introduction

For those living in the Western U.S., the growing severity and threat of wildfire has been all too apparent in recent years, and nowhere more so than in California.

During 2017, California experienced its largest (by acreage) and most destructive (by structures burned) fires in the Thomas and Tubbs fires. Only one year later, both of these records were broken again by the Mendocino Complex and Camp fires.

Massive, unprecedented fires are occurring in California and throughout the American West as a result of three converging trends: global warming, forest mismanagement and more homes being built next to fire prone wild lands.

Consider the conditions in California leading up to the tragic spate of fires of 2017 and 2018: the state saw its four hottest years on record between 2014-2018, and the driest drought ever recorded between 2012-2016. Nearly 150 million trees died between 2010-2017 due to drought, overcrowding and warmer winters.

Meanwhile, to satisfy housing demand for the state’s expanding population - which has grown from 26 million in 1980 to 40 million today - subdivisions and homes have been developed in areas that were once wild.

While California may receive more attention for its fire disasters, worsening fire trends are evident in all states west of the Rocky Mountains.

Wild Fire Trends in Western States

In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of mega fire (plural), defined as an extreme wildfire that burns over 100,000 acres and severely impacts human communities.

Mega fire occurs as a consequence of a hotter, drier climate and dense, unhealthy forests (a result of suppressing natural fire for over a century). Together, these factors create the conditions for huge, explosive fires that can rapidly spread into developments built on the edge of wild lands.

By mid-century, the American West is predicted to be 2 – 5 degrees Celsius warmer than today. With an increase of only 1.6 degrees Celsius, acreage burned in Western states would double, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Thus, the mega fire of today may become normal, and even be dwarfed by those yet to come.

These monster blazes will threaten growing numbers of people who continue to move into the western states, drawn to homes set amidst the scenic landscape of mountain and forests. Since 1990, 60% of all new homes have been built near wild lands, and this trend shows no signs of slowing.

We can feel helpless as mega fire erupts every year, with each new fire seeming to be more devastating than the one before, and only destined to grow worse as Earth’s climate grows hotter and drier.

We have no choice but to take this threat on directly and decisively. The American West will continue to see massive fires in the years to come, yet by utilizing proven tools and strategies we can greatly reduce the exposure and harm done to our communities.

Solving for Mega Fire is not about stopping fire entirely, it is about protecting our communities using a comprehensive set of tools and strategies. It means actively working with the lands we live on to restore forest health and allow for the return of natural, low intensity fire.

To live safely in fire-prone ecosystems, we must learn to accept and integrate fire into our lives, using it intentionally to reduce risk and manage the environment, as native people in North America once did (and still do, where land rights allow).

Key Terms

  • Mega Fire: A wildfire burning over 100,000 acres, often featuring extreme behavior and rate of growth.
  • Suppression: Federal policy since 1913 that puts out every fire that starts, even in ecosystems where fire is natural and necessary.
  • Wildlife Urban Interface: The border zone between new home construction and wild lands where fire is common.
  • Fire-Prone: Habitats that have historically burned and adapted to fire.

Making Friends with Fire

To begin, we must examine our cultural mantra of “fighting fire”. Taking on the challenge of mega fire will require that we reconsider our perception of fire as an enemy to be thwarted whenever it emerges. In fact, fighting every fire is a significant part of the problem.

Since the devastating fires of 1910 in Montana, Idaho and Washington, the U.S. government has enacted a policy of suppressing wild fires anywhere that they start.

By fighting every fire in regions where it is natural and even ecologically beneficial for the land to burn, we've created an environment primed for mega fire. Without natural fire the forest becomes overcrowded, spreading nutrients and water too thinly for tree health, and making trees vulnerable to pests and diseases.

Fire suppression leads to thick stands of young trees and the accumulation of woody debris on the ground, forming an ignitable, low-lying source of fuel for fire to spread and ladder upwards into trees as a crown fire. These conditions, plus global warming, create the conditions for mega fire.

In truth, we cannot stop fire where it is meant to burn. The question is whether the fires will be low intensity, moderate burns that renew forests or explosive, high intensity firestorms that destroy communities and whole forest systems.

Across what is now North America, indigenous people in pre-colonial times intentionally burned the land with low intensity fire, in order to create open areas to hunt game, clear space for growing useful plants and to limit the outbreak of large fires.

In contrast to the American ideal of preserving an untouched natural landscape purely for scenic recreation, native people were in active relationship with the land that they lived and depended on, guiding nature’s processes to meet their needs.

In the arid west, we must relinquish our belief that we can preserve the purity of wild lands while suppressing their natural expression of fire, without consequences.

We will need to partner with and guide natural processes on the lands where we choose to live, in order to effectively stem the outbreak of mega fire.

Restoring Fire and Forests for Community Safety

We cannot intervene across all the millions of acres of forests to undo a century of fire suppression policy, yet we can protect homes, towns, watersheds and power lines from mega fire by restoring natural patterns of low intensity fire and openness in landscapes along the borders of the Wildlife Urban Interface (WUI).

In these areas, we can create a buffer strip of managed habitat between communities and wild lands (which I will refer to as the buffer zone or protective zone), in order to slow the advance of mega fire and deny it fuel.

The WUI has a mix of public (state or federal) and private land ownership, so cooperation and coordination between government and individuals would be imperative for establishing cohesive protective zones. Most likely, this can be achieved by providing proper incentives and support for homeowners to maintain defensible space and reduce ignitable vegetation or materials on their property.

Buffer zones can be created by thinning out dense undergrowth and woody waste, and establishing wide, open areas as firebreaks. Once this is achieved, the buffer can be maintained by regularly clearing the ground of vegetation and saplings with proscribed fire and grazing animals.

Employing goats and sheep on a rotational grazing schedule would reduce the frequency of proscribed burns, and help assuage local concerns about the air quality impacts of regular burning.

Sheep maintaining a fire break. Credit: Living Systems Land Management

Sheep maintaining a fire break. Credit: Living Systems Land Management

Visually, this zone would resemble a patchwork of spacious forest with fewer, healthier trees and open meadows along the periphery of towns and suburbs. Additionally, parks and trails could be built into the buffer zone for recreational use.

We have proof that similar land management methods can thwart mega fire: in 2011, the Wallow Fire consumed 538,000 acres in Arizona and New Mexico, yet previous work thinning trees and proscribed burns on the periphery of communities helped to slow the fire and saved many homes.

In particular, the traditional land management practices of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, who selectively log, clear and burn their forests with low intensity fire, are credited with playing a crucial role in halting the massive blaze.

Left: Unmanaged forest stand after fire. Right: Managed and thinned forest. Credit: GovTech

Left: Unmanaged forest stand after fire. Right: Managed and thinned forest. Credit: GovTech

Funding Protective Buffer Zones

Establishing protective zones along the WUI would be labor intensive and incur high upfront costs, as forests must be thinned and cleared by hand before proscribed fire can be utilized. Due to the reality of state and local budget constraints, these high costs could limit the extent to which buffer zones could be created.

Thus, reducing the cost of creating protective zones is critical to match the broad scale of the threat from mega fire. Without government subsidies, the best option for reducing costs is to earn revenue from the excess woody material being removed.

The challenge is that small diameter trees, brush and dead wood (whose abundance is the issue in forests) have little economic value as conventional products like timber or pulp.

An unconventional approach - that once more utilizes fire - may offer a solution in the form of biochar. Biochar is created from burning any organic material in a high heat, low oxygen environment, where pyrolysis can occur.

Biochar does not depend on wood quality or diameter to yield a quality product, making otherwise low-value wood waste a viable feedstock for biochar production.

Biochar has a unique molecular structure, which acts to increase water and nutrient retention in soils, filter chemicals and pollutants, and stably store carbon dioxide for centuries.

Thus, biochar can earn revenue from a variety of uses:

  • Soil amendment.

  • Cheaper filtering medium for wastewater treatment plants.

  • Material to reduce agricultural pollution.

  • Long term, durable sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Without trying to capture energy or heat, biochar can be produced on site in a cheap and low-tech manner. Wilson Biochar Associates has created a portable, low cost biochar kiln specifically for pyrolyzing biomass in conjunction with thinning forests.

Crews of two can operate multiple kilns simultaneously, continually cutting fuel to size to pile onto the kiln. Once the material is burnt, the fire is quenched and a lid is placed on top to cool the char overnight.

The market for biochar is modest, yet growing. Western states could use their institutional leverage to help create demand for biochar from forest management. Here are a few ideas:

  • Give farmers a tax credit for adding biochar to their fields, as a way to conserve water in the arid west, where farms use most of the freshwater.

  • Support and promote biochar as a compliance option for reducing pollution from conventional agriculture operations.

  • Facilitate the transition from expensive activated carbon filters to cheaper biochar filters in wastewater treatment plants.

  • Purchase biochar through state agencies for forest restoration and the filtration of pollutants into rivers, lakes, bays and the ocean.

Wilson estimates that a crew of 12 working a full day could yield $7200 in biochar, which could fund or at least lower the cost of creating protective zones. Further study is certainly needed, including the avoided cost benefits of reducing risk and preventing catastrophic damage from wild fires.

This method of thinning forests and generating revenue from biochar can be applied to clearing power lines from the threat of falling trees and limbs in high winds, which was the cause of multiple catastrophic fires in northern California. Reducing the enormous cost of such work by generating revenue could help to speed up line maintenance and protect against future line failures.

Conclusion

In reality, concerns over the upfront cost of protecting communities along the WUI must be weighed against the priceless value of human life, and the massive financial costs of mega fire that we’ve already seen.

The 2017 and 2018 fire seasons together incurred $40 billion in direct costs for California, with potentially much higher numbers when the full costs of health impacts, lost jobs and wages, and property values are accounted for.

Ecological intervention in forests along the WUI would create jobs in rural and inland areas, where unemployment is typically higher. Communities would have a bulwark against devastating fires, and open spaces to enjoy.

Expanding the use of biochar would reduce pollution, boost water conservation and ensure that more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere for generations to come.

The key is to accept fire and work intentionally with it, becoming stewards of the arid lands we choose to call home, where fire is a natural and essential expression.

Addendum:

Solving for Mega Fire also means planning, designing and adapting communities for the inevitable occurrence of fire.

Thinning forests to protect homes along the WUI and infrastructure, such as reservoirs and power lines, is an important part of solving for mega fire, yet by itself is insufficient.

Only by pairing targeted forest management practices with fire-wise policy, planning and incentives can we effectively protect communities from catastrophic fire damage.

Many fires are not started by a wall of flames erupting from the forest, but rather from embers raining down on homes from a mile or two away. We must require ignition resistant building materials in new homes, and provide grants for retrofitting existing homes with these materials.

We also must change existing perverse incentives, where local and state governments benefit from encouraging development into the WUI, yet the majority of fire fighting and disaster aid costs are borne by Federal agencies.

Finally, a continuous buffer zone between forested areas and homes will protect subdivisions and towns with clear boundaries from encroaching fire, yet in reality many individual homes are scattered throughout the WUI landscape.

We can encourage and support homeowners who proactively managing their property to reduce fire risk, by providing a property tax break and free vegetation removal.

Visit Headwaters Economics for more in depth research on fire-wise policy and planning.