Ready for fire season? Ready for those billows of gray smoke from forest fires all over the West? Ready to worry about your home or your town when firestorms come? If you’re not, neither, are the federal or state governments. The coronavirus has put a stop to the usual flurry of spring training for thousands of firefighters across the United States.
Normally fire managers and firefighters gather every spring to train in classrooms and out on the land where they learn the basics of fighting fires or to climb a ladder of professional advancement. The federal government employs about 14,000 firefighters of various skill levels and every spring they gather to check their physical fitness and train for months of fire season.
The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho oversees federal fire management across the country. Like any large organization, the center may have to severely limit the number of people working in their offices and warehouses as the coronavirus threatens the population. Local fire organizations are based on the national forest or national park level with some regional groups that respond to larger fires. All of these federal organizations are basically “working at home” as the fire season looms. But fire management is a group activity by nature.
State forestry agencies respond to fire on private or state-owned lands. Cal-Fire is the largest and most active state fire agency in the West.
This year, all of this preparation is on hold given social distancing and the coronavirus. Nobody is gathering in classrooms or in groups in the woods to train. Normally when spring training is done, the fire professionals spend their seasons in the cabs of pickup trucks, in helicopters, airplanes, and offices when they are not actively working on a fire. They work close together and gather in fire camps with hundreds or thousands of people when there are large fires. Nobody is sure how fire organizations will be deployed this summer with the pandemic. If the disease is still expanding, federal agency leaders will have to make tough choices about either sickening federal fire personnel or letting some fires go untended.
Many ecologists are already calling for the government to abandon their heavy firefighting efforts in the hundreds of millions of acres of backcountry on US Forest Service, National Park Service or Bureau of Land Management lands. They urge agencies to focus on managing forests and brushlands close to towns, facilities, or residential areas and let fire run its course in the distant wild country. Groups like Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology have long called on the federal government to stop their expensive, unnecessary and often destructive assaults on fires that threaten little more than a few cows and most often increase the diversity of plants and animals.
The Donald Trump administration has encouraged vast numbers of new oil wells on public lands across the West. How those oil facilities will fare in large fires is anyone’s guess. The oil industry signed up for fire danger when it ventured onto our public lands. If Joe Biden is elected president this year, he has promised to stop new oil drilling on federal lands. Firefighters would be relieved as fires near oil facilities leaking flammable gasses can be extremely dangerous.
Federal agencies fought about 12,500 fires in 2018. These fires burned just under 10 million acres. Most of these were remote fires that posed few threats to human values. Yet over time we are seeing larger fires and the climate warms yet a slight decrease in the number of fires overall. As the number of fires goes down, but the acreage burned increases. This means fires are more difficult and costly to manage over time. Already large fires can only marginally be controlled by human efforts and most large fires only calm down or stop when they run out of fuel or rain and snow dampen the fire’s spirits.
Every year since 2000 the average annual acreage burned by fires has doubled. The year 2000 was a regional drought year in the Southwest and it began a trend that shows the influence of global warming on wildfire. As the air becomes warmer and drier in the West, it stresses trees by increasing the amount of water drawn out of their leaves. If the soil is dry, the trees run out of water to replenish that being lost to the air. Moisture-stress makes trees vulnerable to insect attacks and it can kill trees outright. Dead trees burn very hot when they still have dead needles on them but over time, when the needles fall off, the standing dead trunks (snags) do little to increase the intensity of fires that burn among them.
Firefighters learn about this sort of fire behavior in the trainings that are not happening this year.
If the coronavirus prevents fire organizations in state and federal agencies from training and even deploying, we could have a very interesting year of wildfire with little supervision from people. We could see fires breaking free like they were before 1910. We could see the wilds start to assert themselves.
Tom Ribe
Interesting thought, Tom! Thanks for addressing this topic! I know the wildlife are all getting a breather and peace to breed and raise their young without disturbance from the hordes heading out into open spaces around here. The governor of California just closed all beaches and trails from the hordes until further notice!