It can be manipulated; it can leap as far as the wind will allow and it can turn infrastructure to ash. The key, as fire experts say, is managing the landscape and using this tamable force to prevent an un-tamable disaster.
This year’s late-spring rains may have postponed major wildfire threats this far, but those same rains could signal flames to attack late in summer with the resulting increase in vegetation.
Dr. Chris Dicus, coordinator for Wildland Fire and Fuels Management in the forestry department at Cal Poly, said fire gurus always plan for a peak fire season.
“Fire is natural,” Dicus said. “Fire does what it’s supposed to do. The problem comes when we put out homes in an ecosystem that’s designed to burn.”
This year, with the recent rains and higher precipitation, Dicus said vegetative fuel later in the season is a foreseeable threat. With more moisture, there will be plenty of grasses, meaning plenty of fires. The Sierras should see a late fire season too because snow still remains at higher elevations. Wildfires may also find fuel in irregular landscapes.
“You’ll see fires in areas you don’t normally see them, like the deserts,” Dicus said.
Fire statistics supplied online by the California Department of Forestry (CDF) for the last two years show that 1,663 acres burned from Jan. 1 to Apr. 17 in 2009, whereas only 276 acres burned from that same time frame this year. A five-year average of that same interval showed 2,389 acres burned in California.
Dicus’ work revolves around how to put out fires, how to start fires (prescribed burning) and how to develop a fire-resistant community. This involves urban planning by designing homes and deciding where to place them within a safe environment before a fire comes along.
Russel White, a graduate student working under Dicus in the Natural Resource Management department, said the way a fire burns depends on multiple factors such as immediate weather behavior, yearly climate patterns and types of fuels present. Grass fires will burn quicker whereas chaparral with a greater total biomass will burn for much longer and at hotter temperatures. He said the large fires are usually a situation where all factors fall into place perfectly.
“The most control we have is over the vegetation,” White said. “There’s so many acres out there that need to be treated. It’s this huge task.”
These methods for controlling vegetation range from mechanical to prescribed burning. There’s timber harvesting, hand crews that are soft on the environment, (“the surgery” as White said) and mastication, which involves excavators mashing up vegetation “like a paper shredder.” The purpose of this management in many plant communities is to decrease the density of underbrush to prevent the canopy from catching fire; it’s essentially eliminating the ammunition for a wildfire under the right weather conditions.
“We shouldn’t think about it simply as a natural phenomenon,” White said about fire. “It’s part of the tool set we have for interacting with the natural environment. We need to have our tools open to us to use because the scale of the challenge is so great.”
As for prescribed burns, Dicus explained them as fires set under certain weather conditions, which are conducive to control. The purpose is to reduce hazard for local inhabitants by consuming fuels and to benefit the ecosystem or fire dependent species via cycling of nutrients.
“Fire does a lot of natural processes that you can’t replicate with the mechanical approach,” White said.
The concerns with prescribed burning are air pollution or carbon emissions and more practical concerns such as smoke and the danger of conditions going haywire. Dicus’ research with his graduate students involves looking at what the longterm effects of prescribed burns are on ecosystems and carbon sequestration, or the ability of local plant communities to absorb carbon.
“Research has shown that a greater number of species prefer recently burned communities,” Dicus said.
The Cotton Fire in San Luis Obispo county was the first large fire on the California landscape so far this year. Igniting at Highway 166 and Cottonwood Canyon, it burned 2,044 acres almost two weeks ago. The fire was started on the morning of May 15 and was put out on May 18.
Alan Peters, unit forester in the Pre-fire Division with CDF said they have a running saying in the department: “It’s always going to be the worst fire season ever.” Peters said there was barely enough grass to carry a fire in that area last year.
“The desert areas will readily carry fire that wouldn’t have last year,” Peters said. “There’s more potential for roadside fires, too.”
Peters sees fire as the most substantial natural disaster society is likely to encounter, but showed an appreciation of fire in a managed setting.
“Fire is one of the best tools we have to manage the landscape here in California,” Peters said.
Many of the prescribed burns in San Luis Obispo County occur near Lopez Lake because Cal Fire and local ranchers have a partnership, according to Dicus. Cal Fire prescribes burns for hazardous fuel reduction, and the ranchers benefit from range improvement for cattle.
He said the Diablo Canyon Power plant has also seen prescribed burns in the past, including last fall, which he explained as a daunting event to watch.
“A wildfire at night, next to a nuclear power plant on a fault … What could possibly go wrong?” Dicus said.
Other prescribed burns in the area are planned in the coast range and the Santa Lucia range, as well as areas of large ownership. Some are closer to urban areas, such as a prescribed burn near the edge of Pismo Beach last year, Peters said. The areas chosen depend on funding and the California Strategic Fire Plan.
White further explained that in general before setting a prescribed fire in it’s often necessary to stage an area, such as mechanical brush clearing before bringing in a fire.
“(That way) it’s not so powder keg, ready-to-blow kind of thing,” White said.
White has also worked at the other end of the spectrum, where fire has taken the upper hand. He’s working with Swanton Pacific Ranch, property owned and managed by Cal Poly north of Santa Cruz, to study the effects of the Lockheed wildfire, which burned more than 30 percent of the ranch’s property in August of last year, totaling 7,817 acres.
Caused by an unattended campfire, the whole area was evacuated for over a week before the fire was contained. White said another graduate working at the ranch at the time explained August 12 as the strangest, warm, dry and windy evening.
A little bit closer to home, the Cal Poly campus has also seen four fires in the last four years, according to Dicus.
“We are certainly not immune here on campus to wildfires,” Dicus said.
Two of the fires were sparked at the same power pole. A vulture brushed the power line falling to the ground in one incident, Dicus said.
According to CDF, equipment use and vehicles ranked as the leading causes of wildfires in a statewide average from 2000-2005. The worst wildfire in California history was the Cedar Fire in San Diego County in 2003. It burned 273,246 acres destroying 2,820 structures and resulted in 15 deaths.
The Central Coast is not immune to damaging wildfires. In August 1996, the Highway 58 fire in San Luis Obispo County burned 106,668 acres ranking it 13th among the 20 largest California wildland fires by acreage burned. Caused by a vehicle igniting dry grass near the road, the Highway 58 fire engulfed 13 structures, but caused no deaths. With not as many acres burned but a memorable event in the local community, the Highway 41 fire in 1994 burned at a rate of two acres per second at its peak, destroying 42 homes, causing massive power outages and shutting down two major highways. Fourteen firefighters have also died in San Luis Obispo County since 1946 while fighting wildland fires.
Fire experts are sharing information and trying to learn from the past to better prepare for future fires from vegetation management to urban planning.
Dicus is heading to Australia next month to work with the Bushfire Cooperative Research Center on how to deal with similar fire problems in similar landscapes. Dicus was in Australia last year in February for the devastating Black Saturday bushfires where more than one million acres was burned, entire towns were destroyed and 173 people died.
“Being there with the survivors, crying with them and hugging them impacted me in a significant way,” Dicus said. “It was life-altering.”