Western Wildfires have now burned an area bigger than New Jersey

Source: Oliver Whang & Taylor Maggiacomo - National Geographic
Weather conditions and a huge backlog of management issues have led to the worst fire season on record—and it’s not over yet.

My brother, Ethan, was working the harvest on Fisher Vineyards in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, and was ordered to evacuate that morning, along with more than 50,000 other people. As he left, he said, the sky was red and he could smell smoke through his face mask. “It was insane, and terrifying,” he told me. This year’s wine country wildfires haven’t reached the size of infernos from past years, but they are growing and still threaten to swallow many homes and workplaces. Perhaps those most affected by the raging fires are the region’s seasonal agricultural workers. Many are Hispanic, being paid hourly wages, and they may find themselves without jobs or homes if these blazes continue. As thousands flee the smoke, making their way toward evacuation centers and houses of nearby acquaintances, there is a lot of uncertainty in the air. Anxiety, too. “This sucks,” Ethan told me while driving away from the vineyard, heading for our cousin’s house in Los Angeles. “This really, really sucks.”

Wildfire season in the West usually becomes intense in late October, peaks at the end of the year, and tapers off through the spring. But a confluence of factors has made this year’s season spark early and become particularly devastating. Up and down the West Coast, high winds, droughts, lightning storms, and human activity have all added up to deliver frequent and severe fires. The flames have burned 5.8 million acres so far in the three states most affected—California, Oregon, and Washington, a total area larger than the state of New Jersey. Wildfires have killed at least 36 people to date in those states and destroyed hundreds of homes.

In California, forest undergrowth has been allowed to grow in recent years, providing more fuel for the flames. Regional phenomena called the Santa Ana and Diablo winds also kicked in earlier than usual, driving raging fires in the already hot, dry conditions. In the normally moister forests of Oregon and Washington, droughts and high temperatures were factors, too, but easterly winds reaching speeds of 50 miles an hour—what scientists are calling a once-in-a-hundred-years wind event—caused the fires there to flame up fast and made them difficult to contain. Since 2002, the average acreage burned by wildfires in these three states has increased nearly threefold. This year, fire season has been so bad that the air quality in parts of the West Coast was briefly the worst in the world—and experts predict more damaging blazes are still to come.

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Here's how wildfires get started—and how to stop them

Source: Claire Wolter - National Geographic
In the United States, fire season lasts from June through September. Here’s what you need to know as seasonal winds drive flames across the country.

WILDFIRES CAN BURN millions of acres of land at shockingly fast speeds, consuming everything in their paths. These rolling flames travel up to 14 miles an hour, which converts to about a four-minute-mile pace, and can overtake the average human in minutes. In 2020, the wildfire season in the United States—which lasts from June through September—promises to be particularly devastating. This summer is expected to be the hottest on record, with drought conditions predicted in California through September. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed mitigation efforts—such as homeowner assistance programs and controlled burns—due to concerns over social distancing and respiratory dangers. By the end of June, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection had responded to nearly double the number of fires than it had in the entire 2019 season. Destruction caused by wildfires in the United States has significantly increased in the last two decades. An average of 72,400 wildfires cleared an average of 7 million acres of U.S. land each year since 2000, double the number of acres scorched by wildfires in the 1990s. In 2015, the largest wildfire season recorded in U.S. history burned more than 10 million acres of land. Because much of the U.S. is expected to get hotter and drier with climate change, wildfire risk is generally expected to rise. At the same time, as the population in the United States rises and people increasingly move into rural and wilderness areas, more homes and other structures are likely to be placed in harm’s way. That’s why it’s critical to understand how wildfires get started, how to stop them, and what to do when they occur.”

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How do Wildfires start ?

Though they are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as natural disasters, only 10 to 15 percent of wildfires occur on their own in nature. The other 85 to 90 percent result from human causes, including unattended camp and debris fires, discarded cigarettes, and arson. Naturally occurring wildfires can spark during dry weather and droughts. In these conditions, normally green vegetation can convert into bone-dry, flammable fuel; strong winds spread fire quickly; and warm temperatures encourage combustion. With these ingredients, the only thing missing is a spark—in the form of lightning, arson, a downed power line, or a burning campfire or cigarette—to wreak havoc.

How they are stopped

Firefighters battle blazes by depriving them of one or more of the fire triangle fundamentals. One traditional method is to douse existing fires with water and spray fire retardants. Firefighters also sometimes work in teams, often called hotshots, to clear vegetation from the land around a fire to contain and eventually starve it of fuel. The resulting tracts of land are called firebreaks. Firefighters may also employ controlled burning, creating backfires, to stop a wildfire. This method involves fighting fire with fire. These prescribed—and controlled—fires remove undergrowth, brush, and litter from a forest, depriving an otherwise raging wildfire of fuel.

Fireball-dropping drones and the new technology helping fight fires

Source: David Helvarg - National Geographic
Technology old and new is being pulled into the battle against California's fires.

As unprecedented wildfires ravage California and much of the West, firefighters have taken innovative steps to try to keep up with the flames. An array of new and existing technologies has been pulled into the fray—including fireball-dropping drones and repurposed passenger jets—to enhance ground-based, time-tested techniques. Fighting fires still depends on cutting firebreaks, setting backfires, and spraying water. The best tools are often simple ones: water hoses, bulldozers, brush-clearing axes. However, in an age where climate change is promoting more and bigger fires that consume millions of acres in a single season, the profession of firefighting must be quicker, safer, and cover greater ground—even as a spreading pandemic makes the work that much harder.

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Arrival of the drones

Because of their size and maneuverability, drones can access places that fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters can’t, making them arguably the greatest innovation in firefighting this year. At least 30 pilots guiding some two dozen drones are fighting wildfires in Oregon, California, Colorado, and elsewhere. That’s twice as many as last year, when the federal Wildfire Management Technology Act was signed into law to allow more drones to be used to fight wildfires. “We’re getting a significant increase in requests this year. We don’t have the pilots or aircraft to meet the needs now,” says Joe Suarez, a drone specialist with the National Park Service and superintendent of the Arrowhead Hot Shot fire crew in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. In August, Suarez was flying an M-600 drone over the Woodward Fire on the Point Reyes National Seashore. He was using the six-rotor aerial vehicle, equipped with thermal imaging, to map the fire, which covered 5,000 acres then. Human-piloted aircraft could not risk flying into the coastal fog and the smoke. Simon Weibel, another longtime firefighter who now works for a company called Drone Amplified, joined Suarez that day. He brought along a funnel-shaped attachment for the underside of a drone, a device that can release 450 ping-pong-ball-sized incendiary devices in less than four minutes.

Each of the one-inch spheres, called Dragon Eggs, contains potassium permanganate, and just before they are released they are given a pin injection of anti-freeze. The reaction between the two chemicals ignites the spheres after they hit the ground. The eggs can set fires ahead of an advancing wildfire in hard-to-reach places, denying it fuel. “A bonus is you can do nighttime ops and work in smoky conditions, because if a drone crashes, no one dies,” Weibel notes. At the Point Reyes fire, the drones were “a good safety tool for getting in where it was too thick or too steep for the firefighters,” says Suarez. And the Dragon Eggs they dropped enabled the backfire to cover a strip of land that was 300 to 400 feet wider, which made it a much more effective barrier against the spread of the wildfire.

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The next tech?

Given how quickly drones have been adopted for firefighting, it seesm certain we’ll be seeing flocks of them over wildfires in the next few years. But Dennis Brown, Cal Fire’s senior chief of aviation, is quick to admit that, critical as aircraft are, “it’s boots on the ground that put out fire.” And it’s today’s frontline firefighters, heavy equipment operators, and fire incident managers who will decide the right tools and direction to improve firefighting.

During the past five to 10 years, many crews have begun packing smoke-penetrating thermal-imaging cameras that are useful for spotting fire movement and hot spots otherwise hidden by heavy smoke, providing added safety. Materials science has also offered firefighters some relief, by creating lighter and more durable flame-resistant and breathable clothing. It has dramatically reduced heat casualties in areas where summer temperatures can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit even before anything catches fire. Asked what new technology he’d like to see next, Suarez suggests better communication tools to safely operate in the smoke. “When I was in the Navy we had something where the whole fleet could see where everyone was and what they were doing. It’d be nice to have a (ground-based) system where we know where we all are and communicate better with live video to help us with our decision-making and our situational awareness,” he says.