5 Misconceptions about Wildfires and Wildfire Prevention
Hello! If you’re reading this, you probably have a pretty good idea of the state of wildfires in the US. Recently, Northern Canada has been ravaged by fires that have blown smoke into the East Coast, making much of the air unbreathable for weeks. This is just a taste of what the West Coast has felt more times than we can count and it’s only getting worse.
But there are still things people need to understand about wildfires that aren’t in the popular media. These are complex natural disasters that we continue to try to fight and push back. Those that cover these disasters in the media are oftentimes reporting the same things we’ve known for over a century and some are reporting just straight up outdated information.
We’ve come to set the record straight. Strap in and let’s get right into it!
1) We are equipped to handle mega-fires.
The way we’ve been fighting wildfires hasn’t changed for the last 50+ years. We’ve come to the point where we’re using helicopters, air tankers, and thousands of tons of water and fire retardant to put massive fires out. But what about the front lines? We haven’t changed the way we’ve fought fires at all from the human-perspective, leaving thousands of fire fighters in harm’s way when massive fires come around.
These fires have gotten so big that they’ve begun to create their own weather, with fire tornadoes and massive winds that pull brush in at up to 1 football field of spread a second. People are still put in the mix with heavy machinery powered by gasoline and worked until they collapse. As fire searcher Jim Cook says, “Unfortunately, no matter how many folks you have working, firefighters have as much ability to control a wildfire as the National Guard does to stop a hurricane.”
2) We should be putting out all wildfires.
The literature is clear: wildfires are essential for the health, stability, and biodiversity of the forest. Policies surrounding how we approach wildfires haven’t changed since the early 20th century, with fire departments operating on a “no wildfires by 10am” timeline. The goal for the last hundred years has been to eliminate all wildfires as humans migrated further west, but we’ve really just been depriving the forests of wildfires.
Fire catches with the right elements of dryness, heat, and fuel and there are currently over 100 million dead trees on the forest floor. Dead trees aren’t just good fuel, they’re GREAT fuel. It’s the driest, most flammable fuel there is. And in the past, we’ve had cycles of burning the buildup of dead trees on the ground so that wildfires stayed relatively small and timid. But because we’ve been stopping wildfires before they get to this dead fuel, it just lies there, building up until the next wildfire season and the next and the next.
Now, we have pounds and pounds of available fire accelerant just waiting to catch, a lot of which are on peoples’ properties and they have no idea! If we let some wildfires burn and remove excess fuel on the ground, our forests become healthier, less crowded, and more importantly, our fires don’t grow as huge as they have been in recent decades.
Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
3) Prescribed burns are the best and only way to curb wildfires.
This kind of goes along with point 2 but if you’re not familiar with prescribed burns, it’s where firefighters or what’s called “burn bosses” will section off an area to set fire to. The purpose of doing this is exactly what you think: to burn the fuel on the ground and reduce the chance of a wildfire happening there. This also creates a bit of a buffer zone between any wildfire passing through the area and neighboring zones. Now, this solution is a great tool that we continue to use today, but there are also a lot of problems.
For one, the scale we’d need to perform this at is massive. Nature Sustainability said that “California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.” That’s a lot of burning, which releases more carbon into the air and would take an abundant amount of organizing. Despite the fact that a lot of that acreage would be on private land, there are also other factors that play into when you can do a prescribed burn.
Burn bosses need to get permits weeks or months in advance to perform prescribed burns. They need to consult air quality control to assess whether or not the smoke can be swept up in upcoming wind patterns, get approvals from nearby towns, and hire the right teams to be available for long periods of time, not to mention prescribed burns are incredibly costly and labor intensive. “Even well-planned burns can turn disastrous, as when a fire started by the United States Forest Service this spring was transformed by gusting winds into New Mexico’s largest wildfire on record.”
We need to begin utilizing other methods of wildfire prevention, the most popular behind prescribed burns being vegetation management and home hardening. Both of these methods either reduce the fuel surrounding important structures or property, keeping homes and people safer, or reinforce surrounding infrastructure so that even if megafires do blow through property, you can be sure they’re safe. Our problem now is that there are people in high-risk wildfire zones and we need to be actively trying to protect them from how deadly these fires can get.
4) We have enough money to prevent wildfires.
Since the 20th century, we’ve been getting money from the government to fight and suppress wildfires. But wildfires have gotten so expensive that we started spending more than half of the budget fighting wildfires instead of preparing for them. Not only that, but we consistently spend more than the budget allocates every year, going into further debt as the wildfires get more unwieldy. “Most of CalFire's budget—roughly $3.3 billion out of a total budget of $3.8 billion in 2022‑23—funds wildfire protection and suppression (also referred to as wildfire response or firefighting).”
This means we’re not spending nearly enough on preventing wildfires as we should be. If we spent as much money as we did doing prevention as we have for suppression, our forests would be cleaned up within the next decade. Calfire, the largest wildfire organization in California responsible for prevention and suppression on both private and public lands, was “struggling to track wildfire prevention projects that experts say are desperately needed to protect communities from destructive wildfires.”
5) There’s nothing you can do to protect your property.
Quite the contrary! Your property, your belongings, everything you hold dear to you can be saved with a few adjustments to your space. The first is called defensible space, the area around your home that you can mitigate from wildfire risk. You can start by removing combustible materials from your home; this includes things like dry brush, grasses, chopped wood, bushes, and hanging trees. You can also remove any flammable material near the base of your house, like a garden bed made of wood or a dead tree. More on this in this article. (link the article about defensible space or 5 things you can do right now to protect your home)
You can also go the home hardening route, which includes fire proofing things around the exterior of your home that would cause your house to go up in flames. This includes things like replacing your vents to be more fire resistant, making your wood metal instead of wood, installing a sprinkler system to keep any existing wood wet in the event of a fire, and so on. Here’s a list of all the things you can do to harden your home!
So, as you can see, there’s a lot of things we get wrong about wildfires and that’s okay! What matters is that we learn from those and start taking action now.
