Shortly after the devastating fires swept over the Pacific Ocean’s Palisade and Altadena, wildfire experts Stephen Pine and Jack Cohen were in high demand. Respecting their historical and scientific expertise, they provided commentary and perspective.
Neither of them live in California, but they were ready to burn on their terrain, their demonic winds, and the hillside, and their message was clear. As much as these fires were tragic, the bigger tragedy is that they didn’t have to be that bad.
“What’s surprising is that Los Angeles is not going to burn, but much of its development has strengthened the threat of fire rather than blunting it,” Pine wrote last month.
Currently a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and lives outside of Phoenix, Pyne is the author of numerous books exploring the cultural role that fires have shaped human history.
Cohen, a retired research scientist with the US Forest Service, is an authority on home ignition dynamics and has worked with the Missoula Fire Research Institute in Missoula, Montana, where he lives.
“Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable,” he wrote five years ago.
The Pacific Palisades neighbourhood on Alphabet Street was burnt with the fire of the Palisades.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
He is dissatisfied with the continued inefficiency of decades of firefighting and advocates a more refined understanding of fires and ecosystems that cultivate urban and wild flames. Fires are often seen as crisis and emergency situations, so they are divorced from many factors that contribute to their destructive nature.
This interview with Pyne and Cohen has been compiled for length and clarity.
Many scientists point to climate change as a major factor in these explosive fires. But you see it differently.
Stephen Pyne: There is no doubt that global warming places energy in systems in the way that generally exacerbates these fires. However, American cities from the 18th century were often burned as they were made from the same materials as towns, as they were burned in the same winds and drought. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, we had a national fire issue and demanded that federal agencies modify fire policies. All of this was before climate change. This was simply due to land use and fire practices.
Eton and the Palisade Fire
The catastrophic fire killed at least 28 people, leaving over 18,000 buildings worth more than $275 billion, leaving a burn zone 2.5 times the size of Manhattan.
The climate is clearly a serious contributor, but this latest outbreak would not have been so bad if we had heard what we learned in the last century when tame urban wildfires. Zoning to split large sweep of fuel. Installation of fire prevention systems suitable for actual risks. Create an environment where insurance works. These reforms were ultimately political and extinguished urban fires across the country. It was like, not doing anything to eradicate the plague, we decided that there was no longer any need to maintain the hygiene of the fish that includes it.
Jack Cohen: As Steve said, fire is a sociological issue and climate change has become an important part of the debate, but there were these issues well before climate change. Fires are essentially physical phenomena, and these fires represent physical problems. The Palisades and Altadena in the Pacific burned not because of climate change, but because of ignition issues. The house set fire to fire, and the community burned. It’s that easy.
The fire is described as unprecedented. What does the historical record show?
Pyne: Calling the January fire “unprecedented” doesn’t take us anywhere. We’ve been experiencing city fires and have fixed it. For example, after the 1923 Berkeley fire, new construction around the Bay Area banned wooden shingles. They were generally considered dangerous, but in Southern California, especially in the postwar period, wooden shingles have returned. Reforms continue to follow bad fires, but they are fragmented, cities here, cities there, and mostly too late, almost always responsive.
Cohen: These fires were unprecedented as they happened in January and didn’t rain that month and ignited. Like the 2017 Tubus fire that destroyed the Santa Rosa area of Coffey Park and the Santa Rosa area of Fountey Grove in October, and the 2018 camp fire that began destroying the town of Paradise in November, we A similar catastrophic fire broke out in the fall.
How do you think these fires will change the debate about the battle over fires?
Pyne: The question I’m being asked, but I don’t know how to answer it when pain is enough to actually have a serious conversation and deal with basic issues. Devising new technologies to blow away urban landscapes will help to suppress the outbreak. I would like to think that these recent fires could be scary enough to serve as catalysts, but I was thinking that because city fires have accumulated size and damage over the decades.
What I find most upset is the mechanisms where we can come together and have serious discussions, in a consistent way, and collectively determine what we need to do. It’s something I’m struggling to find. But we haven’t reached that point yet. I think that’s a political failure. I think it’s a breakdown in our ability to reach a consensus that is accepted as legal. Fire spreads like a contagion. A collective response is required. I don’t know if there is an appropriate process to convene the necessary society.
Cohen: Like Steve, I would like to think that Palisade and Altadena’s high destructive vision stimulates the quest for change. But what’s most frustrating about another community disaster is dominating social perceptions of the threat of wildfires, whether by fire fighting agencies, public and politicians. Our language dramatically bores wildfires. It becomes “explosive.” It “evaporates the houses along that road.” How can we live a life compatible with wildfires when cast in such apocalyptic term?
The dramatic exaggeration of our language explaining wildfires does not coincide with the mundane reality of how houses and structures ignite during extreme wildfires. My and other research have identified lofted combustion embers as the primary source for initiating numerous simultaneous small ignitions within the community. The vulnerability of the ignition of the house leads to destruction in connection with embers and burning materials surrounding the house. Reducing that vulnerability reduces the chances of community ignition.
Unfortunately, this message has been particularly ignored, and that the head of the Forest Service has been holding 98% of fires in the full sense that Congress is able to control wildfires. It was weakened when it was done before raising expectations. The problem with that is, of course, that all of the wildfire risk issues in our major communities are at 2% out of control.
As a result, we feel like a victim of a fire, and the victim becomes a barrier to problem solving.
How can you start thinking about fire in a more constructive way?
Pyne: At least in the fire community, part of the general story is that it is the public and politicians that we know enough about fire and need to be educated. But given this issue, all potential communities, social, economic, political, intellectual, scientific, in a way, misdefined it. We have a hard time coming up with a proper definition of what it is.
Fire is a systematic issue, and by exposure to ecology, politics and sociology, we are not prepared to understand it that way. So we still treat it as a very emergency part-time seasonal phenomenon.
Cohen: What most people think they know about fire is wrong. Usually people see Wildfire as something rather than a process. A few years ago, the Colorado fire was described as a “300-foot-high flame tsunami.” The fire hasn’t spread like that. It only spreads when certain ignition and combustion requirements are met, and unfortunately most homes meet those requirements. We pay more attention to visible flames (its tsunami) and do so compared to the main structural ignition mechanism, the burning email.
Certainly, many federal agencies assume that the strength of the fire determines the risk of a wildfire in the community. However, the strength of the fire has nothing to do with the vulnerability of the structure’s ignition. How does the house get fired? Still, they focus on maintaining low fuel loads such as low fuel loads (reducing brushes, thinning forests, etc. Our institutions, institutions, and politics control the inevitable extreme wildfires If you recognize that there is no option for this and recognize that the risk of wildfires in your community is a structural ignition issue, you can create a fire-resistant community that can withstand ignition.
The path to recovery will be long. Do you see something faintly hoped along the way?
Pyne: What I carry out of the current conversation is that all involved may need to reconsider our understanding of what we are seeing. Maybe we can agree on what we actually need to do to improve the conditions and do it in a way that the fire understands.
I am beginning to think that fire problems are so widespread to many of its symptoms that we cannot have a general solution, but there is no need for a universal response either. A small 100 might be enough to lead to big changes.
Let’s end the stupid problems of power lines that launch these fires. Split up monocultures of fuel landscape size, such as trees, chaparrals, houses. Improve emergency evacuation routes and protocols. Fire touches so many aspects of land and life, so there are many entrance points to mitigate the risk.
Cohen: My particular philosophy on environmental issues is that they are all human issues. It’s not a problem of the earth, it’s nothing but a problem of humans. This is generally resolved. In this case we can live with fire. But obviously, we need to learn how to do that.
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