On January 7th, Santa Ana winds up to 100 mph whipped across the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles. A blaze ignited in Eaton Canyon created a shower of embers that rained down on the community of Altadena that destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 17 people.
The source of the blaze is still under investigation. Still, some authorities believe that power lines owned by Southern California Edison Power Company may have ignited the Eaton Fire. Turning off the power to some transmission lines is a common practice when high wildfire risk could have overloaded the remaining power lines, leading to the ignition. If true, it demonstrates how complex and challenging it is to deal with wildfire threats to communities.
I recently visited Altadena to see for myself the results of this blaze. I saw the charred ruins of homes surrounded by green trees, blooming flowers, and shrubs.
While the burning chaparral in the San Gabriel Mountains led to the Eaton fire, it was wind blown embers that destroyed most of the houses.
Embers from burning homes created a domino effect, with one burning structure creating the embers that ignited the next home in the neighborhood. Even a portion of downtown Altadena was burned, including multi-story apartments, a bank, stores, and even a middle school.
The conclusion I came away from after viewing the Eaton Fire (as well as numerous other large blazes over the years, like the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, the Thomas Fire by Santa Barbara, the Carr Fire by Redding, the Rim and King Fires in the Sierra Nevada and others) is that home hardening is where our efforts for community protection must expand.
Home hardening includes removing flammable vegetation adjacent to homes, putting screens on vents to prevent embers from entering the house, installing a fire-resistant roof, perhaps a rooftop sprinkler system, and cleaning gutters, among other measures. Those actions can make a difference. After the Camp Fire, one analysis found that about 51 percent of the 350 single-family homes in Paradise built to the new codes escaped damage, compared with just 18 percent of the 12,100 homes built before the standards.
The current federal policy of fuel reduction through logging and prescribed burns can enhance fire spread under the extreme conditions and exceptionally high winds that characterize all large blazes. See here and here for example.
One of the problems with federal policy is that a good percentage of all acreage charred by wildfire annually is in non-forested areas. For instance, the plant community burned by the Eaton Fire (and the nearby Pacific Palisades blaze) occurred in Chaparral.
Clearing chaparral or even forested stands, except immediately adjacent to structures, provides no long-term fuel reduction benefit and can lead to regrowth of grasses, which are even more flammable than chaparral.
However, even in regions of the country where forests dominate, logging and prescribed burning can often exacerbate fire spread during extreme fire weather conditions. It’s important to note that all large blazes occur during such conditions with drought, high temperatures, low humidity, and, most importantly, high winds.
I know of no logging or prescribed burns that reduce drought or wind—the primary factors in high-severity wildfire spread.
Logging opens forests to greater wind penetration and drying of surface fuels and soils. Prescribed burns can promote the regrowth of fine fuels like grasses and enhance fire spread.
The idea that dead trees increase the spread of fire is another myth. It is fine fuels that support wildfire. The fact that snags remain after a high-severity blaze is evidence that tree boles seldom burn. By contrast, green trees have more flammable resins in needles, cones, and small branches that support fire spread.
The current policy of fire suppression can contribute to future higher-severity blazes. Instead of fire suppression, allowing existing wildfires to reduce fuels across large landscapes is more effective and efficient. Natural wildfires have fewer negatives than current timber cutting practices, including soil erosion from logging roads, removal of wood biomass, disturbance of sensitive wildlife, increases in weeds, and other negative consequences of forest management.
What we have is an urban fire problem. We can build homes that are resistant to wildfire. We can implement policies that reduce the flammability of the immediate area around structures.
Unless we make such changes in our wildfire policies, we will likely see more unstoppable fires threatening western communities like what occurred in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, California.
Most of the recent blazes in CA have occurred in chaparral and urban areas. Below is a chart created by Bryan Baker of Los Padres Forest Watch.
Comments
Its obvious to anyone who spends a moment or two THINKING about it that the homes must be built in a way that protects them from fire – the few ideas in this post could make a huge difference. Clearing brush & bushes etc away from a home? It only makes sense.
Altho just NOT building in an area that has wildfire danger seems a good idea to me. I agree with George’s post – logging & putting roads in wild areas only exacerbates the whole wildfire mess.
Not building and living where humans don’t belong is the ONLY real solution. The rest is just more environmental and ecological damage. Killing native plants because they’re close to a house? How is that anything good?
I agree with el Rey; thinking is not the same as believing. A friend of mine’s steel Quonset house apparently (it had a wood porch) burned from the inside out, as did another friend’s newly-built, fully “hardened” house (he said that the bathroom window had blown OUT!). He suspected a vortex. I suspect he might be right.
When I was acting as staff for an Open Space Management and Fire Hazard Reduction Task Force in the early seventies, my literature research turned up an article about an outback Australian who had built his own automatic/manual fire-suppression system that included a large storage tank, pump, steel plumbing, batteries, and strategically-located thermocouples designed to activate automatically or manually in time to shield the structure from incoming embers and keep windows “cool.” The fire researchers at the Western Region Fire Lab I interviewed and learned a lot from were ‘way ahead of the fire suppression experts. Their work was largely ignored.
Certain wildland fire “experts” seem to be unaware that only fuels less than a half-inch in diameter burn in the flame front. This seems to undermine the “intuitively correct” idea of clearing by mastication (which leaves behind dried chips), “controlled” burning, logging (which leaves behind dry slash), bulldozing, and, as George says, produces a fresh crop of weedy grasses and forbs that are perfect ignition beds and flame-spreaders. New growth of indigenous vegetation results in more, not less, flammable fuels in a relatively short time, requiring regular, expensive “vegetation management,” which seems never to be done before the next fire scare ignites emotions (not, as El Rey points out, THINKING) again.
Modern homes contain so many hydrocarbon materials that burn hot and leave behind toxic ash. If hydrocarbons are a main fuel source should we be putting them in our homes? Less stuff inside might also mitigate the combustion and toxic ash.
If we all would just go back to the days when we lived in log cabins with very little furniture and didn’t have cars but horses. We didn’t have landscaping.
Only had one change of clothes and one pair of shoes. Those were the good old days ehh?