Tag: wildfires

What if We’ve Been Thinking About Wildfire Smoke the Wrong Way?

Helping on a prescribed fire as a volunteer firefighter sometime in September, I felt the anticipation that had been building in our team dissipate as we learned that we would not be able to proceed with the day’s planned ignitions. We gathered our tools and snacks and slouched back toward the briefing area. I imagined others who had been assigned to work on the burn cordoning off the day as a lost cause. Folks who were working for local companies and non-profits would only be able to bill for the couple of hours we spent standing around waiting for orders, and there would certainly be no overtime. The Lomatium, Whitebeam, Kincaid’s lupine, and other species the land managers hoped would benefit from habitat restoration because of the burn would have to wait, maybe until the next week, maybe until the next season, as would their goals to reduce the likelihood of a high severity fire on the preserve. Such was the reality of attempting a planned burn, or a prescribed burn, in the suburbs of the densely populated pockets of the Willamette Valley. (read more...)

The MQ-9 Reaper Amid Environmental Crisis: Weapon of War or Humanitarian Tool?

On Saturday of Labor Day Weekend 2020, a situation was rapidly deteriorating north of Fresno, California. Sometime around 6pm on September 5, the Creek Fire started, gained momentum, and burned north (Gabbert 2020a). The fast-moving fire blocked the road from campgrounds in the area, stranding hundreds of campers visiting Mammoth Pool Reservoir. Quietly circling overhead was an MQ-9 Reaper, observing the apocalyptic looking situation. The sensors attached to the bottom of the MQ-9 Reaper could see through the billowing clouds of smoke. The California Air National Guard crew flying the MQ-9 was looking for something: a landing spot for evacuations (Solman 2020). (read more...)

The Memory of Fire: Burning Backwards into the Future

Fire breathes oxygen. Fire consumes organic material. Fire ages and dies. Fire runs, jumps, and simmers. Fire responds differentially to external irritants. Fire has moods. Among many of its seeming affinities with metabolizing life, fire also has an excellent, perhaps perfect, memory. As such, wildfires have one inviolable rule: never backtrack. Fire never goes backwards, never rewinds. Because of this stubborn refusal one of the most successful and widely practiced approaches to halting the progress of wildfires is to pre-burn swaths of land toward which a fire is raging. Once fire comes upon a burnt landscape it cannot proceed, it starves to death. When employed indirectly to create a control line, this strategy is called burnout. However, this strategy can also be employed to directly attack a fire by igniting a blaze and propelling it into the path of a wildfire. This is called backburning. Conclusively, you can fight fire with fire. (read more...)