Advanced Search
April 23, 2024
Wildfires have already made national headlines this year, as Texans recover from the largest fire in their state's history. The impacts of climate change—rising temperatures and drought, in particular—have driven the increase in wildfire frequency and severity, which then contributes to air pollution, including carbon dioxide emissions. Additionally, changes in weather patterns have made wildfires less predictable and more difficult to contain. Co-hosts Dan and Alison are joined today by Joe Scott, founder and principal wildfire analyst at Pyrologix, for a conversation about how fire modeling and hazard assessment can help shape data-driven approaches to wildfire mitigation.
Show notes:
Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, for insight on the latest innovative climate solutions and environmental policy in action. Follow us on social media @eesionline
About this Podcast:
With all the depressing climate news out there, it’s sometimes hard to see progress. The Climate Conversation cuts through the noise and presents you with relevant climate change solutions happening on the Hill and in communities around the United States.
Twice a month, join Environmental and Energy Study Institute staff members as they interview environmental, energy, and policy experts on practical, on-the-ground work that communities, companies, and governments are doing to address climate change.
Whether you want to learn more about the solutions to climate change, are an expert in environmental issues, or are a policy professional, this podcast is for you.
Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And back at my side this week after taking an episode off is my co-host, Alison Davis. Hey, Alison, how's it going?
Alison Davis: Hey, Dan, I'm really glad to be back hosting The Climate Conversation with you today. For today's episode, we're going to talk about wildfires with a focus on how modeling and risk analysis can help communities and decision makers prepare for them. Wildfires are not a new phenomenon. But the scale and severity of wildfires in recent years have devastated communities and resulted in compounding impacts for public health and the economy. And as some of our listeners might remember from EESI’s wildfire briefing, they also produce greenhouse gas emissions that exacerbate climate change, which in turn intensifies the conditions that make wildfires more likely to occur.
Dan: The designation of a “gigafire,” or a fire that spreads over one million acres, used to be unnecessary because it was such a rare occurrence. However, the 2018 bushfire in Australia followed by California's August Complex fire in 2020 inspired the coining of the term. For context, Rhode Island is about 660,000 acres, so we're talking about an area 50% bigger than Rhode Island. The harsh reality is that these gigafires will only become more common for the foreseeable future. In fact, we've already had a gigafire in the United States this year. Just last month, the Smokehouse Creek Fire devastated the northeastern Texas Panhandle and even spilled into western Oklahoma. That blaze spread for three weeks before it was fully contained, by which point it surpassed the million acre gigafire threshold, making it the largest wildfire in Texas history.
Alison: As Texans began recovery efforts from the Smokehouse Creek Fire, strong winds in Virginia caused dozens of wildfires across Shenandoah Valley and the central part of the state. Fortunately, Virginia's fires were nowhere near large enough to be considered a gigafire. But the firefighters and government officials were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of flames that began almost simultaneously, which underscores how important it is for us to understand wildfire behavior and how it's being impacted by the climate crisis. We're joined today by an expert in wildfire modeling and hazard assessment here to share data driven approaches to wildfire mitigation.
Dan: Joe Scott is the founder and principal wildfire analyst at Pyrologix, a research firm in Missoula, Montana that is dedicated to wildfire threat assessment. He has more than two decades of experience in wildland fire science, research, development and application. His firm Pyrologix has provided services to the Department's of Agriculture, Defense, Homeland Security and Interior as well as private companies, NGOs, and state and local governments. Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe Scott: Thanks, Dan.
Dan: Joe, wildfires, I think it's fair to say are notoriously volatile. But predictive modeling technologies are helping to improve wildfire risk mitigation and preparedness. What are the biggest factors that determine how a wildfire will behave? And how much information can be generated by fire behavior models to a reasonable degree of certainty?
Joe: Yeah, well, the factors that affect wildfire behavior have been distilled down for half a century now to the fire behavior, triangle: fuels, weather and topography. And actually learned them in that order. Fuel first. Fuel, weather, and topography because I, I've been in this field actually, my first fire modeling exercise was in probably in 1988, running the old Behave tool. And so I came up through forestry. And that's what we learned is fuels first, but it really, I think, today, we should be calling it weather, fuel and topography. So those still are the three main factors that affect fire behavior. But really the weather is, you know, today's weather is the dominant driver of fire behavior. The fuel is very, very important, but probably not in first position. And then you asked, I think about how much information can be generated by fire models, and how certain. Well, not as much information as some people think. But more than enough for us to take action, take action, either on an individual day where fires burning, or, you know, years in advance. So we have an idea about hazard. And I think what I mean is that I get asked all the time when we see like our work for the wildfire risk communities project found that Hawaii was ranked for highest in the nation. That was kind of surprising even to us, Lahaina was in the 92nd I think percentile community at risk. And that was surprising to a lot of people, including to us three years ago when we first saw that. People thought that we knew all kinds of things about details in Hawaii, for why that was the case. And that simply wasn't true. We didn't really have all those details. We didn't really have specific detailed outputs, but the modeling that we have generally suggested that that was the case. And so to a reasonable degree of certainty, I think he said, well, yes, if we're very generous with his reasonable, then we can do pretty well, what we cannot do with modeling, let's say, you know, if somebody was deciding whether to evacuate a certain neighborhood, I would not use fire modeling to do that. We don't have to do that. And it's that's we can't do that. We don't know exactly where a fire is going to be at different times. And we don't need to in order to make really good decisions, I think.
Dan: Well, we'll give you a pretty wide berth on the reasonableness thing here at EESI. This is complicated stuff. Alison and I just talked to earlier this season, with Gwen Yamamoto Lau she runs the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority. And she talked a little bit about what they were able to do in the aftermath of the Hawaii fires last summer, so if anyone in our audience has missed that episode, it would definitely be worthwhile to go back and check it out. But Joe, I had a quick follow up for you. We did a briefing a few weeks ago—I guess maybe months ago, now we're in April—talking about advanced weather forecasting. And one of our panelists talked about how artificial intelligence can be used to augment sort of existing models for weather forecasting. And he even said something along the lines of, you know, IPCC reports, and the methodologies that underlie the IPCC reports could actually be improved, potentially by using AI-powered research methods. And I'm curious if there's potential in your line of work to harness AI technology or AI-based modeling to predict wildfire behavior?
Joe: Yeah, there is. Right now we use AI, and machine learning, in particular, when we generate some of the inputs to our fire modeling. So when we're making vegetation models, and and modeling how fuel lays out on the landscape, we use some machine learning models for that. And we've also recently built a machine learning model for mapping spatial ignition probability. That is a direct input to a lot of the modeling that we do. And those are fairly low power uses of AI and ML [machine learning] but they're there. I have heard of some folks, at least claiming that they can predict fire behavior with AI. I haven't seen them actually do that yet. And I think there's some potential there. But it remains to be seen how much of an improvement it can we can make the weather weather one sounds interesting, actually. And like I said, since weather is really a very strong driver of fire behavior, having higher quality weather forecast is critical.
Alison: So sort of going from the new to the old, one of the oldest methods of forest management is cultural or prescribed burning. This practice is designed to harness the restorative properties of fire for forests in a controlled setting. But we also know that these small contained fires do produce carbon dioxide emissions, as well as smog and fine particulate matter. How do you think about both the localized and national impacts of cultural burns? And can you talk about the techniques that are used to maintain control of them?
Joe: Yeah, sure. I think first off, let's separate cultural fire from prescribed fire. They're not exactly the same thing. So cultural fire has been in it's still used today by tribes, as a part of their culture. They use it to cultivate materials and food that supports their centuries long traditions. That's cultural fire. Prescribed fire is an analogue to that, but it's not exactly the same thing. So it's the Western world or the European settlers use prescribed fire for different purposes, it's maybe it's a different culture that you can say, but they're definitely closely related. And the tribes often point out that it's not the same thing. And I can't really speak to cultural fire. So but I can talk about prescribed fire, which has many, many local benefits, meaning that the benefits of prescribed fire are generally limited to the land where the prescribed fire took place, especially if it's a relatively small Burn Unit, you don't get to burn 50 acres and have that restore 1000s of acres around this you restored 50 acres more or less. If you get to larger and larger burn units into the 1000s of acres than Yes, I think you can have a bigger effect. And the beneficial effects of fire are relatively short lived. Not say let's say three years to 10 years. You burn grasslands it's about a year or two. That's it, but the prescribed fire effects don't last forever. And then in terms of like adverse effects of prescribed burning, you know, those are also generally localized smoke from prescribed fire is not transported across continents, the way that extreme wildfires can be. So they're usually local to maybe regional, but those air quality effects are, are usually short lived. And then I think that you asked about how these prescribed fires are controlled. So starts with a well planned burn unit. And so this is an area it's you know, it's selected for the area that is going to be burned, determined, usually well in advance has good access for firefighters and fire tenders, kind of a new term about the folks who are actually managing fire and igniting it not just trying to contain it. And you know, a good unit is going to have its edges will be in places that are favorable for controlling a fire like roads and trails and ridges, like that. And then they pick the right day for that unit, which means it's moderately dry, not too dry, that's obviously tough, but it has to be dry enough, or you just won't get the effects that you're looking for. If it's not dry enough, and you just have a fire that just barely does anything, there's no point doing that. And then of course, winds should be light. Often light winds are better than zero winds, because at least you know where the fire might go. And it transports the smoke, light winds in a favorable direction, meaning away from population centers, we want to pick a day when when all those are working in our favor. And then they use ignition pattern to control the fire. So you start with a little testfire to get a feel for how on that day in that place, how the wind and slope come together to determine what's the direction of maximum spread on that day on that unit. And that's where you want to start your ignitions because if you start there and then work backwards, let's say down the slope or into the wind, then the fire, you know, wants to run upslope. And with the wind. When you start that way and work backwards, your fire is always running into itself. So it's you got to get started, then you work backwards. And then there's different techniques of strip head fires, spot fires, strip flanking fires, lots of different ignition patterns that can be used. And they just you know, just use road flares. It's called a fuse Ian firewall, but it's a road flare or a drip torch which is carries to a mixture of diesel and gasoline, mostly diesel, less gasoline. And then the last part really is to monitor and mop it up because you can do the prescribed fire and it'll continue to smolder. It can smolder for days to weeks, and occasionally even longer after the fire. So it's just a matter of revisiting it, and making sure that it's good.
Alison: So we all know the old saying where there's smoke, there's fire. However, this isn't quite the case with wildfire smoke, which can travel 1000s of miles away from the actual side of the fire. Our listeners in the DC area probably remember last summer’s poor air quality and hazy visibility due to rampant wildfires all the way up in Canada. What would you like for people who don't usually experience wildfires directly to know about their public health impacts, including consequences of smoke?
Joe: Yeah, right.So we normally think only about the folks whose homes and businesses are fairly, you know, directly or indirectly exposed to fire like that they can burn and not so much about the fact that everybody else also has to deal with smoke. And it really is it's happened before but in the last few years, so the Canadian fires last year and then 2020 in California where San Francisco was severely smoked in. It drives home that none of us is safe from smoke. And everybody on, on this planet really needs not just in the US what's true here for sure. Has to be prepared to deal with smoke. It didn't used to be this way. But fire and smoke is becoming a big enough thing. I'm not a health expert, right. So I can't I can't speak too much about what is or isn't healthy for smoke. But I think my understanding is that the type of exposure let's say that you guys saw in DC last year is really unpleasant but for a healthy person is not an enormous health risk because it's transitory and short lived. But anybody who has any sensitivity due to a pre-existing health condition, for example, certainly needs to take some measures to guarantee, if possible, good indoor air quality with no home there's homemade box fans that you can turn into filters and and different little tricks like that.
Alison: In 2018, Pyrologix and Headwaters Economics, nonprofit research group focused on community development and land management partnered with the US Forest Service to create the Wildfire Risk to Communities website. This is an interactive resource that allows users to identify and understand various wildfire risk factors anywhere in the country, which we encourage all of our listeners to explore at wildfirerisk.org. What was the role of Pyrologix in creating this resource? And how can the information available on the site improve equity and wildfire preparation and management.
Joe: The as the Wildfire Risk to Communities project was getting going back in 2018. Pyrologixs was just finishing up a small analysis we did for the Forest Service, Pacific Northwest region, which is region six, Oregon and Washington. And the region had asked us to rank the exposure to wildfire of all of the communities in those two states based on some hazard modeling that we had just finished doing for them. And then for the WRC project, we were then hired to develop similar but a scalable method for taking what we did in the northwest and improving it and scaling it to the nation. And so we did that. And then once we had the method all worked out, they then asked us to go ahead and implement that. And so we we developed basically all the methods, we had kind of contributed a few of the measures, landscape scale measures of hazards that we had been working on, are now part of the WRC project and the data that you can download. And then we also devised a way to summarize risk to individual states, counties, and communities. Our role was essentially the back end of the wildfirerisk.org website, all of the data and how it's how it was produced and ranked, and then a little bit of some of the terms and some of the, I think the cool graphics were our idea. There, some of them, not all of them. Yeah, that's how we worked on on WRC. And then I think you asked about improving equity. And there's a lot of focus on that right now. And I would say nobody has the exact right idea of how to do this, everybody agrees that it's important. At this website, we don't take measures of community vulnerability or population vulnerability into our rankings, we rank based on hazard. But we do provide information about those communities with respect to their vulnerability. And so age, and English-speaking populations, and whether they have cars or not for evacuations. And so how much additional help a community might need. So the site itself doesn't tell you how to do this or take it into account, but it should tell local officials that there are people in their community who will need extra help. And one of the things that I like to point out is that even in a community that is ranked with really low vulnerability, so let's say it's a wealthy community, everybody drives and they're doing great. Well, it's, I said everybody, but that's not right. Every community has people who are individually vulnerable, every community does. And even the highest risk communities, just because they're they're highly vulnerable, even if they're moderate hazard, they may not need as much.
Dan: According to the Forest Service, at least a few years ago, about 9.4% of the land area of the contiguous United States was in the wildland urban interface, which I think is abbreviated and pronounced the WUI. Is that correct?
Joe: That is correct that right.
Dan: Okay. So we'll go with that. But that WUI was home to more than 44 million homes, and that is about 32% of US housing stock. And that puts very high concentrations of residential development in close proximity to the highest areas of wildfire risk. For people who live in the WUI who are unable or unwilling to move, what are some effective ways to protect their homes and themselves from future wildfires?
Joe: That's a great question. And actually, I think it's probably even a higher fraction of homes are in the WUI. When you start factoring in communities like Lahaina and superior Colorado, where the fires have spread a long distance into suburban areas, that it's a lot more people who are exposed than we would have thought previously. But people who are exposed, the recipe is the same for addressing that risk. And really, it's to start at the house itself and move outward. And there aren't many wood shake roofs left in WUI area. If you happen to own one, you shouldn't for very long, those are incredibly vulnerable to ember ignitions. But most of most other roofs after wood shake roofs are reasonably resistant to ignitions. Asphalt roofs are class A. So having a good roof is good. And then the first five feet from a building. They call that “zone zero” now, we didn't use to separate that out. And now we say that that zone zero needs to be free of anything combustible, that includes your hemp doormat can't have that and that has in the past been implicated as the ignition source for a house that burned to the ground, was ember landed on the doormat. And then even bark mulch, now combustible mulch, it should not be placed within five feet of your house, because it just simply, it does, it transmits fire directly to your house. And even having a fence around your house, the last few feet should not be wooden. You can have a wood fence around most of it if you'd really like but then you have to transition to something like metal so that a fire on the wood fence doesn't then catch your house on fire. So you have to remember to that people envision a big wall of flames coming to these houses and burning them down. And that's very rarely the case. It's usually low intensity fire and fire getting through your bushes and the embers still land on things. And fire is really insidious, it keeps trying to find a way to catch things on fire. And then you know, clean out the gutters, remove trees and shrubs that are in that first five feet. And then then just keep going. Reducing the amount of dead material that's like if you've had a house that's been around for a while or a yard that's been around for a while, chances are it's been accumulating, we'll call it needle litter litter. It's the dead leaves and needles in the natural world. And getting rid of that as a good idea, removing all the dead material from underneath that. That's one of the things about newer subdivisions, the vegetation isn't old enough yet to really cause much of a problem, but you get around 20-30-40 years old, and it's a lot different. And the main thing is that they can consult with their local fire department for local guidance on what types of plants are appropriate and what kind of things they suggest for your local area.
Dan: Information obtained through wildfire risk and behavior analysis is not only of interest to homeowners in the WUI or not, and policymakers but also to insurance companies. And how is your work impacted the way insurance companies approach coverage for homes in the wildland urban interface?
Joe: Short answer to your question is, I don't know. I don't know how insurance companies are using this information, because they don't tell us. I do know, though, that a lot of insurance companies have their own way of assessing wildfire hazard and risk. And those methods are not published. And there are hazard information providers that sell information to two insurance companies. And to my knowledge, insurance companies are not directly using the information that we produce. But they could it's public information. They're not prevented from doing that. So the main thing about our assessments that we do is that it a little bit levels the playing fields, because it allows homeowners and policymakers to have a view into the same information that insurance companies have, or similar information. And without it, they just have to take what comes down.
Dan: To my last question, I wanted to kind of bring it back to the policymakers base, which is our core audience. And its appropriation season here in DC, or at least the beginning of it for the next fiscal year, FY25. So things like this, I think are just generally on people's minds and wanted to ask you about the Forest Service and how much money it spends on an annual basis on wildfire suppression, which in a really bad year comes at the expense of other priorities that the agency is working on. It seems to me like this might be an example where—kind of like Alison talked about, the “where there's smoke, there's fire” old saying—there's also the saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” And curious how investments in wildfire mitigation can be good value for taxpayers by saving money down the line? And how should policymakers think about wildfire assessments and threat assessments to ensure that the dollars are being spent appropriately, not just on putting them out, but also making investments to help them from getting started to begin with?
Joe: That's a great question. We have been working for a number of years to take our hazard assessments which really assess what's the current look, what is it look like today? And allow us to play? What if games with them? What if we were to do a field treatment here? What if we were to do a prescribed burn there? What if well, and to a lesser extent, what if we were to harden this group of houses and invest money in making houses less prone to ignition? We use our fire modeling to answer some of those questions. How does the probability go down when you do a big landscape scale field treatment? And therefore how does the risk go down? We're not anywhere near yet producing a benefit-cost ratio that would allow you to rank it in terms of other things, but at least we are definitely moving in that direction. And our modeling. Really what it does is that we can actually look a little bit ahead of that. And we look at something called Risk transmission. So not just where the risk is, but where does it come from? Where in the landscape, do fires ignite that eventually do things that we don't like and we're also we're working on a way right now of what my colleague here, Chris Moran, called “pyrocity.” Where does fire filter through the landscape? Does it happen to go through places that do bad things more than others? And those places coupled with a reduction of spread rate really, would be a place to go and look for prioritizing field treatments. And I think that really wraps it up to the end of how can this be used, it's for our prioritization, that 80% of the risk is on 20% of the land area. I mean, that 80-20 is a general rule. But actually, when we've looked at that, in relation to fire hazard and risk, it was more like 95% of the risk was on 5% of the landscape. And that is exactly how to use this for prioritizing where you go, so that you get the highest bang for the buck.
Dan: I think “pyrocity” would be a really good band name. If anyone is looking for a band name suggestion, your your colleague gets bonus points for that. Joe, thank you so much for joining Alison and me on the podcast, it was really interesting learning about your work at Pyrologix and the wildfire assessments that you're doing. And thanks so much. I hope I hope we have a better wildfire season this year than we did last year. Yeah.
Joe: Thanks, Alison. And thanks, Dan.
Dan: Well, Alison, that was a really interesting conversation, it was really cool to talk with Joe and to learn about his work. I'm always amazed and impressed by sort of these fields of expertise that I was previously totally unaware of. This fire science, fire modeling, all of this stuff has existed for a long time, many, many people are experts in it. But I learned a lot today wasn't something that I had really ever learned that much about before. And I'm glad that there are people like Joe on the job thinking about this stuff. I was really interested in his response to the question about AI. And I think that might be something at EESI we keep an eye on whether it's wildfire modeling or other types of modeling that people use to either quantify past climate impacts, or try to predict or anticipate future climate impacts. That'll be an interesting area of my guess, potential innovation, using artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence powered software and models and all that to do a little bit better job than we were able to do previously. So it was really interesting talking to Joe. And like I said, hopefully this year, we don't have the terrible fires. But well, probably would be a little surprising if we don't.
Alison: I'd like to highlight something that I learned, which is the distinction between cultural burns and prescribed burns. I had kind of been conflating those previously. So I appreciate that he clarified the differences between the two types of intentional burning, I think it's important to keep these distinctions in mind. I was also interested in his response, actually, the one that he didn't have as much to say, which was the insurance question. I think that the lack of open engagement with the insurance companies is probably telling in some way, it honestly makes me wonder if companies maybe are using this information, but in order to perhaps deny people coverage or to raise their premiums significantly. That's just speculation. I can't really comment on that, for sure. Maybe something we can look into for a future article. Something else that I want to talk about actually was a comment from our colleague. Anna McGinn. While I was writing the script for this episode, she pointed out that wildfire season isn't really something that we should be talking about anymore, because there's not so much of an off-season for wildfires. There's a peak, sure, but there's not really any time of year where a wildfire won't possibly happen. Like at this point, it's just something we need to be aware of year round. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work on wildfires, head to our website at eesi.org. Also follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time!
Top-Rated Climate Nonprofit – 4-Star Charity