The Science of Wildfires: Why They're Getting Worse | WSJ

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- It was just a fireball and traveled so fast. - I just saw flames all up on the hill behind my house. - It was Armageddon I'll tell you, the fire coming in and burning all around us, - [Narrator] Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Oregon, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greece, Russia. These are just some of the places where in recent years, wildfires have raged out of control. NASA satellites detect more than a million large fires worldwide every year. - The Western United States, for example, has seen larger fires in each of the last several years and more intense burning, and many times as fire spread faster, making them more difficult to put out and more dangerous for the communities who live in that vicinity. - [Narrator] In many cases, the blazes are set by human activity, but sometimes policy fuels the flames too. Consider California, the state's forests are overgrown in part because of past federal policies of putting out wildfires rather than letting them burn. Some of these policies were enacted in response to a devastating fire in 1910, in which millions of acres burned more than 80 people died, years passed and suppression became the go to strategy for dealing with fire. - [Narrator] Ignition, It only takes a minute to wipe out a century. - [Narrator] initiatives like Smokey Bear urged Americans to help prevent forest fires. - Only you can prevent forest fires. - In 1974, Congress passed the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act in an effort to save lives, and that plan worked. Around that time according to the act fires of all types killed more than 12,000 people each year. Today according to the U.S Fire Administration, the death toll is lower, but- - Part of the reason we see increasing fuels and increasing extreme fire behavior is that we have a legacy of putting fires out and allowing fuels to grow permitting fires when they do start to get out of control, - [Narrator] Overgrown forests have an abundance of small and medium trees known as ladder fuels, which can make fires more dangerous. - Ladder fuels would allow a surface fire burning often slowly along the ground to transition into the canopy, or it can spread more rapidly. And when those trees are burning, the embers that are blown by the wind can ignite the neighboring trees, they can also be spread further downwind. - [Narrator] That's part of the story of California's 2018 fire season. The deadly campfire was fed by dry weather, fast winds and ladder fuels. According to recent research, 20 million acres of forest land, or nearly 20% of California would benefit from what's known as fuel treatments. Land managers can limit the fuels that could create large, fast moving fires in several ways, including getting out vegetation, think logging or clearing brush, prescribed burns where small fires are set deliberately, or letting natural wildfires in unpopulated areas run their course under the watch of local firefighters. But clearing out brush can be expensive and labor-intensive. First since many of these trees are small in diameter, so they don't have commercial value as timber and there's little financial incentive to remove them. And federal policies have historically favored putting out fires as soon as they start to keep people safe. - Maintaining that balance of different ecosystem types IN different fire frequencies is more difficult when we move into areas with more dense human populations. And so the wild land urban interface is really where these two challenges meet, where people are living in communities against landscapes that historically have had fire activity. Those are landscapes that are very difficult to protect when fires do start. - [Narrator] One of the factors affecting California's wildfire season is new housing construction in fire prone areas. Climate change is adding to the problem too. - Where fuels are abundant today and where climate change is leading to warmer and drier conditions, we are already seeing more extreme fire behavior. - [Narrator] According to recent Federal Data, the last decade was the warmest on record. During the summer of 2020 fires burned in the Arctic, as parts of Siberia broke the record for the highest temperature ever recorded above the Arctic circle. - They're almost always too cold and too wet to burn. So as those landscapes, which are warming three times faster than the rest of the planet, continue to warm and dry, we certainly expect to see more fires in those remote landscapes directly in response to climate change. - [Narrator] In August of 2020, wildfires most of them sparked by lightning raged out of control across California. Earlier in the year, state officials had warned of high fire danger caused by a dry winter and warm spring. It's a pattern scientist generally attribute to climate change. In May, the mountain snowpack in California, Sierra Nevada was just 13% of normal and it's not just 2020, half of California's 20 most destructive wildfires have happened since 2015. Across the forests of Southeast Australia, NASA mapped more fires between 2019 and 2020 than they had in the last 16 years. The fires were fueled by extreme heat and drought, hotter, drier weather sucks moisture out of the trees, grasses, and other fuels making them more flammable. And this is making fire management all the more complicated. - So as conditions that allow wildfires to spread are lasting longer across the United States and elsewhere, there's a shorter and shorter window where active management could happen under conditions that wouldn't risk fires escaping and spreading into lands as a wildfire. - [Narrator] That means fighting fire with fire might not be an option for certain regions anymore. So to help with wildfires, researchers are working on algorithms to improve forecasting. - [Doug] If we can anticipate the timescales and the locations where fires are most likely, we have the best chance of trying to mobilize and prepare resources to anticipate fires and make up more timely decision about which fires to put out and which to let burn. (soft music)
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Channel: The Wall Street Journal
Views: 265,345
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: WILDFIRES, CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES, CLIMATE CHANGE, SIBERIA, AMAZON RAINFOREST, FIRE OF 1910, OVERGROWN FORESTS, FORESTRY, CAMP FIRE, FUEL TREATMENTS, NATURAL WILDFIRES, LIGHTNING, AUSTRALIA WILDFIRES, FIRE PREVENTION, Rescue Services, United States, Australia, wildfire, california fires, california wildfire, california fire season, wsj, the wall street journal, wsj fires, wildfire season, canada wildfires, canada fires, air quality, new york air quality, quebec fires today, scnc
Id: gN-T6NDWQ1g
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 6min 23sec (383 seconds)
Published: Tue Sep 01 2020
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