How California can avoid last year’s historic wildfires
Just 11 months ago California witnessed the worst fires in our history. Nearly 2 million acres of our state were scorched, erasing entire cities. A brown haze shrouded California, closing schools and causing millions of people to stay inside, afraid to breathe the toxic air.
As we enter peak fire season over the next six weeks, California needs to do more to avoid even worse conditions. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature have worked hard to address the crises posed by the wildfires and continuing wildfire threat. They have made commendable progress, but there is an enormous amount of work that remains. Here is what Californians need to be working on now.
Stronger, more aggressive legislative efforts must occur to improve forest management. Both California and the federal government have failed to properly maintain forests, leading to vast amounts of available fuel that can trigger increasingly devastating fires.
We need a statewide prevention program to systematically thin out younger, smaller trees from overgrown forests and do more proactive controlled burning. California needs to pass additional legislation that would increase monitoring and improve our statewide reaction time to wildfires. Measures like SB 560, which is before the governor for his signature, would require electric utilities to reduce power transmission in high-risk areas during the most volatile wildfire periods, while also ensuring customers, first responders and telecom companies are notified of de-energization.
Likewise, we need to establish a California wildfire warning center, which would work with electrical utilities and local governments to expand situational awareness of existing wildfires beyond the capacities of individual counties. The center would create a badly needed automated statewide system that would analyze and monitor wildfires — providing early warning to people in the path of deadly wildfires and saving lives in the process.
Cooperation across states will be crucial. Even if California does everything right, 57% of the state’s forest lands are managed by the federal government. Last year, Oregon and Nevada had some of the worst fires in their history, and many of our most at-risk forests are vulnerable to fires spreading from those states.
Newsom was right to call for the governors of Oregon and Washington to join him in asking for more federal coordination. Federal support is needed to deal with a comprehensive state-federal fire prevention plan.
A new generation of entrepreneurs has developed technologies that may help spot and control fires more quickly than previously imagined. Inexpensive sensors, combined with highresolution, low-orbiting satellites can give us faster information on when and where fires start than ever before.
Light detection and ranging technology, known as lidar, can also give immediate warning nearly as soon as fires have started. Companies like One Concern have developed predictive software technologies, using wind speed and other conditions, to give cities, utility providers and first responders advance warning on where fires are moving and who is in danger. We should be using all of these technologies to make people safer.
Overall, we’ve taken the first steps toward reducing the prospect of catastrophic fires in California. It’s time to think outside the box to proactively work with federal and other state leaders to manage the risk of more serious fires. California is the global technology and innovation leader, but we need to use new technologies like lidar and predictive analytics software to spot fires sooner and deploy firefighters more quickly.
Hotter weather and more fires are the new normal in California and for much of the rest of the world. California should lead the way in providing a comprehensive wildfire policy, fusing technological and political solutions to solve one of the world’s most pressing challenges.