Learning from the SoCal Fires

It is too early to do a post accendium on the southern California fires, but not too early to suggest some lessons that should be learned. According to Monday’s report, the fires spread across nearly 474,000 acres and burned 2,700 structures (at least 1,700 of which were homes).

Fourteen deaths have been associated with the fires. Four of the eleven fires started on national forests, four on state lands, two on county lands, and one on a military base. Government agencies collectively spent more than $63 million to suppress the fires.

So what can we learn from these fires?

Thinnings are not the solution

The old conventional wisdom (circa 1910 to 1990) was that, if you give the Forest Service enough money, it will be able to suppress all fires. The new conventional wisdom (circa 1990 to 2007) is that fire suppression led to a dangerous build up of fuels that must be treated with thinnings and prescribed burnings.

Some people are still promoting this version. But the new new wisdom — at least, the consensus of many fire ecologists — is that thinning trees on federal lands is neither necessary nor sufficient to protect homes on private lands.

Click to download a larger version

The above map compares the 2007 fires (in red) with other fires in the past five years (in yellow outlines). According to the new conventional wisdom, those fires should have reduced the fuels enough that the 2007 fires would have stopped at their boundaries. Instead, as can be seen from the map, the new fires penetrated miles into the boundaries of the old ones. So how can thinnings keep people’s homes safe?

Half the Fire Problem Is in Southern California

Even if thinnings were the answer, the Forest Service and other federal agencies have failed to spend the money they have in the right places. Half the homes and other structures burned in 2007 were in southern California, which is typical for most fire years. Yet the federal agencies spend far less than half their hazardous fuel treatment money in southern California. Instead, they spread that money around to national forests and other lands all across the country.
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The thinning advocates argue that thinnings are “financially wise” because they can be done “by allowing carefully watched private companies to harvest wood that can be used for all kinds of useful purposes.” While this might be true of some forests in the Northwest and northern California, the chaparral forests at the heart of the southern California fires have negligible economic value.

If treatments in other places could be done without subsidies, this indicates that the feds should be spending well over half the subsidies for fuel treatments in southern California. Since they are not, it is clear that the Forest Service has not really attempted to protect homes. Its goal is really just to maximize its budget and spread that money around.

Shelter in Place Worked

As noted last week, five neighborhoods in San Diego County were designed to be so fire safe that residents were encouraged to stay in their homes during the fires rather than evacuate. The fires touched upon several of these neighborhoods, yet not a single home was burned.

The Witch Fire burning in Crosby, a shelter-in-place neighborhood. Click photo for a larger image.
Flickr photo by Vissago

On the other hand, the Associated Press reports that half the fire-related deaths resulted from evacuations. (For what it is worth, two people died in their homes which, no doubt, were not firewise.)

The point is that evacuations are dangerous. Properly designed and managed, firewise homes are safe. Making neighborhoods firewise is both necessary and sufficient to protect homes from wildland fire.

It Will Take a While for the New New Wisdom to Become the Conventional Wisdom

The Wall Street Journal interviewed Richard Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute. Though Halsey is one of the possessors of the new new wisdom, he says (in an email to his group’s newsletter list) that “the reporter did everything he could to make me say that I had finally seen the light: chaparral is evil and needs to be eliminated.” While he refused “to bite,” the article still tries to leave the impression that Halsey regrets his support for natural chaparral.

It probably took more than ten years — from about the time of the 1988 Yellowstone fires to the 2000 Los Alamos fire — for the new conventional wisdom to replace the old. If we are lucky, it won’t take quite that long for the new new wisdom to take over.