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Wildfires – what to do
Universities of California and Nevada, Wildfire Zone
The Wildfire Zone creates awareness of wildfire risks and hazards and offers tips on how you can reduce them. By working together as individuals and communities, we can all reduce the risks of wildfire.
What to do:
Before a fire …
During a fire …
After a fire …
(October 2007)
Developed by Farm and Home Advisor’s Office, University of California (Cooperative Extension), based on materials from University of Nevada Cooperative Extension’s Living With Fire program Web site, www.livingwithfire.info.
Reporters’ Resources on Wildfires in California and Elsewhere
Society of Environmental Journalists
(25 October 2007)
Fires In Keeping With Global Climate Change Predictions (text and audio)
Andrew Theen, Oregon Public Radio
he catastrophic fires in Southern California continued into their fourth day Wednesday.
Researchers at Oregon State University predicted 5 years ago that global climate change would produce rampant fires in Southern California.
As Andrew Theen reports, one of those researchers says fires on the level of the California blazes could become commonplace in uncommon areas.
It’s not always easy being right. Like most Americans, Oregon State University Professor Ron Neilson was transfixed to the television, watching images of houses engulfed in flames throughout Southern California.
Although he predicted this scenario, Neilson calls the fires “absolutely astonishing.”
Ron Neilson: “It’s one thing to forecast this stuff it’s quite another to actually see these scenarios playing out in the real world.”
Neilson is also a bio-climatologist with the USDA Forest Service. He said it’s unclear whether the fires that have ravaged over 430,000 acres in four days are a direct result of climate change, but he says they are “consistent” with it.
He’s worried the fires in California could be “the tip of the iceberg.”
The increasing variability of regional climate patterns has people like Neilson worried. The theory is several wet years followed by quick dry-outs could bring catastrophic fires to less fire-prone forests like those in the East and South.
But what does this mean for Oregon?
Neilson says those variable conditions could happen here, with costly results.
(24 October 2007)
Climate Change (part I): Age of mega-fires
Editorial, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Today, California’s burning. Tomorrow, who knows? The wildfires and the unprecedented evacuations are a phenomenon that is likely to grow across the West as unchecked climate change wreaks havoc with temperature and precipitation patterns.
As with hurricanes, science won’t tell us whether global warming causes any specific fire. But the evidence about the trend is clear.
Earlier this year, a study in Science found hotter, drier temperatures have increased the number of Western forest fires, their size and the period of each year when fires were a threat. On CBS’ “60 Minutes” last weekend, study co-author Tom Swetnam said the long-term effects of frequent, huge fires could kill half of the forests. CBS aptly titled the piece, “The Age of Mega-Fires.”
So far, California’s response seems to be better than anything in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. But the longer-term burden on Californians, emotionally and physically, is going to be huge. Federal taxpayers will also carry a good deal of extra load.
And it’s not like California, its neighboring states or any of us in the West can expect the threats to ease.
(24 October 2007)
Global warming link to natural disasters
Amy Goodman, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Fires rage through Southern California. Massive rainstorms drench New Orleans. The Southeast U.S., stretching from Tennessee across the Carolinas and into Georgia, is in the midst of what could be the worst drought on record there. While the media do an admirable job bringing us live images of extreme weather, it doesn’t explain why those events are happening.
What links these crises? Global warming. Two words that have all too often been vacuumed off government Web sites and erased from government scientific studies.
If the press isn’t making the connection, Bill McKibben is. In 1989, he wrote the book “The End of Nature,” one of the first books to describe global warming as an emerging environmental crisis. Now he is leading a campaign to draft mass grass-roots participation to publicize the potential catastrophe of climate change and to demand federal action to “Step It Up.”
(24 October 2007)
Mother nature’s revenge against human development
Andrew Gumbel, Independent
Everyone who comes to southern California learns to be afraid of the Big One, the earthquake that will level everything. But even major tremors do not present such an immediate, visceral and terrifying threat as wildfires, which strike with shocking regularity and are getting worse.
This week’s inferno, raging all the way from the Santa Barbara foothills to the Mexican border, has many immediate causes – notably, freakishly strong desert winds that have acted like a blowtorch on a region undergoing an unprecedented drought – but it is also part of a long-standing clash between natural weather cycles and the whims of human development.
“This is mother nature versus human nature,” said Bill Patzert, a renowned climatologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s about too much development and too much fire suppression building up fuel over the past 50 years… In some ways this is the great war that will be fought here in the 21st century.”
(24 October 2007)
Also at Common Dreams
A taste of what’s to come
Global warming and the California wildfires
Joseph Romm, Gristmill
Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive — as many scientific studies have concluded. Why? Global warming leads to more intense droughts, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt (hence less humid late summers and early autumns), and more tree infestations (like the pine beetle). That means wildfires are a dangerous amplifying feedback, whereby global warming causes more wildfires, which release carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating global warming.
The climate-wildfire link should be a special concern in a country where wildfires have burned an area larger than the state of Idaho since 2000.
…Can we say that the brutal San Diego wildfires were directly caused by global warming? Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer put it this way on NBC Nightly News Tuesday:
The weather we’ve seen this fall may or may not be due to the global warming trend, but it’s certainly a clear picture of what the future is going to look like if we don’t act quickly to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases.
Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona climate scientist, who coauthored a major study on the subject (see below) said in 2006:
We’re showing warming and earlier springs tying in with large forest fire frequencies. Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it’s not 50 to 100 years away — it’s happening now in forest ecosystems through fire.
I researched wildfires for my book — hence the “Hell” in Hell and High Water — and my view is closer to Swetnam’s for several reasons.
(24 October 2007)
More text and links at original.
California’s age of megafires
Daniel B. Wood, Christian Science Monitor
Drought, housing expansion, and oversupply of tinder make for bigger, hotter fires.
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Los Angeles – There’s a reason fire squads now battling more than a dozen blazes in southern California are having such difficulty containing the flames, despite better preparedness than ever and decades of experience fighting fires fanned by the notorious Santa Ana winds. The wildfires themselves, experts say, generally are hotter, move faster, and spread more erratically than in the past.
The short-term explanation is that the region, which usually has dry summers, has had nine inches less rain than normal this year.
Longer term, climate change across the West is leading to hotter days on average and longer fire seasons. Experts say this is likely to yield more megafires like the conflagrations that this week forced evacuations of at least 300,000 resident in California’s southland and led President Bush to declare a disaster emergency in seven counties on Tuesday.
Megafires, also called “siege fires,” are the increasingly frequent blazes that burn 500,000 acres or more – 10 times the size of the average forest fire of 20 years ago. One of the current wildfires is the sixth biggest in California ever, in terms of acreage burned, according to state figures and news reports.
(24 October 2007)
