TGU is getting some:
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I was eating a meal the other evening with a good friend who is a oncologist. As the beers and ciders flowed late into the night we dove deep into the war on cancer. She surprised me with saying the terms
Strategy and Tactics and how, for the most part, they have stayed the same.
And continued to say
Technology and human intelligence has evolved but in the end if you do not get out ALL the cancer* the patients survival is reduced dramatically.
This got me thinking on this topic of RX burning and fuel reduction management as a whole.
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Have there been recent studies or ground investigations where these latest (last 5 years) California wildfires has been through fuel management areas?
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Have they been effective in their purpose?
It seems to me that if you have a patchwork of honest to goodness hard work as to prevent the patient to fall out of homeostasis, all it takes is a conflagration of cancer cells somewhere else in the body to destroy all that effort.
My paradigm may have shifted a little but I would like to see the evidence.
Though I do love seeing Zeke work with locals on living with fire like the Koncow,Maidu and other tribes did.
*metastasis
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This is not from California, but rather Oregon.
"And, even more surprising: In areas that were just thinned, and not burned, the fire appeared to be hotter than areas that werenât treated at all.
At the time, some in the timber industry saw the fires as a sign of failed forest management; if they could just cut down the trees, there would be less to burn.
But on the clear-cut plots and in areas where ladder fuels were thinned, but no burning happened, the Biscuit Fire burned hot and fast. Bormann thinks the hardwood trees that would normally be removed in thinning operations helped dampen the fire. That hypothesis was put to the test in 2020, when a test plot containing Douglas fir and red alder burned in the Holiday Farm Fire. Bormann said research on that location is ongoing."
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Iâve seen this anecdotally with a large fire in my area. I did some good size prescribed burns before the fire came through and had good results in those areas. This was on commercial timber lands- areas that had been logged only faired terribly. Iâve been thinking about throwing together a story map to compare burn severity over different treatment areas but I donât have the resources (not going to purchase arcgis just to prove this point).
B Baker over at LP Forest Watch has put together some interesting logging vs fire spread maps for the Dixie and Caldor - but I would consider that work to be more persuasive than scientific. There are a selection of studies that link logging to increased fire behavior I can dig a few up if anyoneâs interested. That being said I also have read studies that show how prescribed fire can increase fuel loading. Really comes down to if the work is done right or not.
I think your last line is the keyâlogging (or thinning) which leaves well-spaced healthy trees, and which uses whole-tree yarding to bring the majority of the slash into the landing for chipping or burning is fairly universally accepted as both improving forest health and reducing fire risk. Logging which leaves lots of slash out in the woods, and which doesnât adequately thin out smaller trees could have little benefit, or a negative effect. The better outcome is not necessarily hard to achieve, but sometimes takes a little more time and might result in a little less revenue. Of course, that lost revenue may be offset in the future if that well thinned forest doesnât burn, or if it does burn itâs at a lower severity.
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Edited: To bring this back to the topic of âprescribed fireâ -
The idea of âlogging as a surrogate for fireâ makes it really hard to get fire use work done. This idea allows for more restrictive policies/less funding on fire use in exchange for less restrictive policies/more funding for logging. That idea has been pushed by the us forest service pretty much from its foundation and has a lot to do with the mess we are in now.
EL DORADO COUNTY, Calif. â
Former Gov. Jerry Brown invited fire experts and scientists to his home to come up with an action plan aimed at better managing forests to prevent devastating megafires that have become the new norm in California.
The Dixie Fire, which sparked in July, became the stateâs second-largest on record, burning more than 900,000 acres across five counties.
âYou see these big fires and you say, âWow, weâre in a new ballgame here,â and we have to act in that manner. We have to act differently,â Brown said.
He convened a group in late September at his ranch in the Venado district of west Colusa County to draft what they have called the Venado Declaration.
The declaration states that $5 billion was spent in 2020 to suppress fires in California. So, it proposes spending that much a year of public and private money on preemptive measures.
âWe have to do it over many, many years from here on out. So, this is not a one-off,â Brown said.
âThe peer-reviewed science all suggests active forest management, engaging in a variety of tools in the toolbox, prescribed fire and forest thinning,â said Ken Pimlott, who served as Cal Fire director under Brown.
On top of saving forests, Pimlott said the effort is about reducing impacts to water quality and air quality. He noted the air quality from wildfires that affects not only California, but also the general western United States and as far away as New York.
This year, the former Cal Fire leader experienced a wildfire for the first time as a resident instead of as a first responder. He lives in El Dorado County near where the Caldor Fire started.
âAlthough not actually evacuated, we were very close to the evacuation zone and predicted wind shifts were a threat every day in the early part of the fire,â Pimlott said.
The Caldor Fire burned through Grizzly Flats and prompted unprecedented evacuations in South Lake Tahoe. The last time evacuations in the city happened was in 2007 for the Angora Fire. While that fire did burn through hundreds of homes in South Lake Tahoe, its threat of burning lasted roughly a couple days while the Caldor Fire never actually burned a home in South Lake Tahoe despite it being a lingering threat for much longer.
The Caldor Fire rounds out the top 15 of the stateâs largest fires. Moreover, it was the eighth biggest on record and has all burned within the last four years.
âWeâre not going to get rid of fire in California,â said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Area Fire Advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension in the North Coast of California.
She said a key part of the declaration is using tactics, like prescribed fires, to adapt and doing way more of it than the state is currently doing.
âWe donât have enough people who know how to do this work, so thereâs a big idea to create a prescribed fire training center in California where we would actually be training up community and agency and tribal members to do more prescribed fire,â Quinn-Davidson said.
The group says investments have to be big and long-term, or it could mean the loss of the forests as they are today.
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Some landonwer-driven #goodfire action in Butte County with our newly-formed Prescribed Burn Association. Cal Fire has sent engines to stand by for these burns, but their people arenât allowed to help - none of the burns have required any suppressionâŚ
Weâve gotten 6 burns larger than 5 acres done in past 8 days.
Largest local unit was 20 acres in heavy lop and scatter pondo pine and live oak.
The first video is about some underburns we are doing on private lands above Chico with mostly volunteer labor. There is a little funding for overhead.
Second video is from a burn we did today which hosted a camera crew from CNNâs United Shades of America program.
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Chico Fire Department burned about 185 acres of grass at the Chico Airport today in 4 different units. Good training, and they achieved some grassland improvement as well as removing cover for rabbits which run out onto the runway and cause problems. #bunnyburning
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Chico Fire Department put some #goodfire on the ground today in Bidwell Park. This 15-acre burn wrapped around the north side of Horseshoe Lake and the Moneyface Parking Lot. It was done to reduce star thistle and invasive grasses, and to create a strategic area of reduced fuels to help firefighters if they need to catch wildfires burning out of tougher-to-access parts of Upper Park later in the summer.
CFD had help from the CSU, Chico Ecological Reserves, who provided a squad of experienced land stewards. The Reserves have been training a lot of burners over the past decade, and they are really a dialed-in prescribed fire resource at this point. Great to see everything they have been building being applied in our local community! The California Conservation Corps also provided a couple people.
These burns have been awhile in the making. The Butte County Resource Conservation District did a lot of work developing a vegetation management plan for City of Chico lands in 2020 and 2021. As part of that effort, Deer Creek Resources developed a citywide prescribed fire plan, and also developed the operational burn plan for this project. This burn is as part of a larger effort to maintain a rotating network of prescribed fire plots throughout Bidwell Park.
Videos here:
https://www.facebook.com/zeeko.salvage/posts/pfbid02m8BBLZkqqhd6BJ8KENjfJBL5zuVJVcCZ3XzPzW9xtsVzfGHiALzMqD8D9v3d6fFZl
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Here is a talk I did about mapping wildfire hazards in the City of Chico, and about ways climate change is amplifying wildfire threats in Butte County. Originally presented at @IAWF #FireClimate2022. We highlight @ChicoFDâs prescribed burning program. https://youtu.be/jTe8xTmQfG8
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The last 10 minutes of this interview has a segment about moderating the effects of firing operations on wildfires, and a story about a landscape-scale firing operation on the 1999 Bucks Fire, in the North Fork Feather River.
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Zeke⌠thank you for that interview and especially that clip. Klumpâs statements echo what many of us retired wildland firemen feelâŚthe backfire groups in the wildland fire services are out of control and doing more damage than good.
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July 2, 2022
IN 1974, I was newly appointed CDF Assistant State Forest Ranger ( ASFRâŚnow Battalion Chief) in the Badger District of Tulare Ranger Unit and old brush fire Ranger from Miramonte Camp named Bill Halley told me âThe Chamise wonât burn until the Buckeye loses it leavesâ.
Years later in the early 1980âs I was working in the Whitmore District of Shasta Ranger Unit and large part of my job was planning and conducting large ( what we now Call Landscape scale) range and veg management burns. Our unit goal was to burn 10,000 acres annually, most of that in the summer and early fall. I had validated Bill Halleyâs words over the years, but since I was now fuel sampling in the wildlands and executing large scale brush burns I could now make the correlation between live fuel moisture and fireline intensity.
I was selected as one of the Cadre to develop and teach courses in California Advanced Fire Behavior which later evolved into S-490. The course was necessary to provide instruction the the new staff hired to administer the newly formed Chaparral Management program. I wrote the lesson plans for the Advanced Fire Behavior potion of that programâŚbasically I used the lesson plan from the S-590 course taught at the National Advanced Resource Technology Center ( NARTC, now NAFRI) at Marana, Arizona but I included topics on marine influence, geographic wind events like Santa Anas and Sundowners and keyed back to California fuels. I included the correlation of certain indicator plants to measured LFMâs in those lessons. Those lesson may have been presented elsewhere, but to my knowledge its the first time they were written and formally presented.
Its important to understand the term critical fuel moisture. In both live and dead fuels the CFM is the point at which that fuel adds to the combustion process. If the CFM is above critical, the moisture acts like a heat sink and reduces Fire Line Intensity ( FLI).
When we sample for Live Fuel Moisture we collect both new growth and old growth samples. These are weighed, placed in a convection oven and dreid, then reweighed. We used microwave ovens before I had a convection proven available, and found that the microwave burned some portions of the sample and left others undercooked.
Live fuel moisture in brush peaks in the early summerâŚmay go as high as 200% and then taper off as the heat increases and the plants enter summer dormant period.
Critical LFMâs in new growth Chamise is 60%, in Manzanita its 80%. The LFM in NEW growth in important in determining the flammability of brush. In poor growth years youâll see the report of âno new growth, old growth samples , etcâ
In my area, around Redding, Ca. and up to about 4,000 feet elevation the California Buckeye leaves turn yellow when the Manzanita LFM is around 90%⌠the Poison Oak leaves turn red at similar numbers. That should be warning sign to field firefighters that the brush is nearing critical LFNM and when the fire comes into alignment with wind, slope and solar heating the brush will burn as if its a dead fuel. The LFM will vary with aspect and soil conditions. Those plants on South or West facing slopes, in thin poor soil go dormant sooner.
Chamise is more volatile and usually has a higher component of dead in the canopy, so it will carry fire at higher LFMâs⌠that how and why we can burn South and West slopes of chamise in the winter.
Dead Fuel Moistures (DFM) are prime indicators for extreme fire behavior. A 10 hour fuel stick at 4% or lower should be an alert⌠a 1000 hour ( (3 to 8 inched diameter) DFM of 9% or less in the Sacramento Valley area ( PSA 5 ) should be regarded as a serious warning of potential extreme fire behavior.
The best indicator for 1,000 hour fuels approaching critical is the fact that those large diameter fuels will not self extinguish in a no wind situation, they will burn to white ash.
If anyone wants current information about forest fuels and various fire indexes I their area I recommend the Northern California Geographic Area Cordination Center website âŚNorthern California Geographic Area Coordination Center
One of the best books on the subject of fuels and brush modification is Lisle Greenâs booklet âBurning by Prescription in ChaparralââŚPSW Technical report PSW-51 which is available online.
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Hard to talk about Jan van Wagtendonk without talking about his mentor, Herold Biswell. Interesting read here about Biswell, and the uphill battles he (and Jan) fought to get prescribed burning accepted by academia and fire suppression agencies.
An excerpt:
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Good burn yesterday west of Forest Ranch, in Butte County. Here is a thread with some videos. Weâll have a longer video about the project on The Lookout YouTube soon. https://twitter.com/wildland_zko/status/1595107430777569280?s=20&t=zKfjeJVYdbxbFJPy8Lz4CQ
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Not prescribed Fire but thinning of forest in NJ. Donât hear too much about wildland fires out there or measures to prevent them. Article shows a glimpse of the issues faced when trying to clean up our forests.
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Video about a burn we did last week near Forest Ranch, California.
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