Why aren’t we ready for wildfires?
The world is getting hotter and drier but inferno-controlling strategies are the subject of fiery debate, reports Harry de Quetteville
They are images from Dante: hellish landscapes, illuminated by vicious tentacles of flame; people shrieking in fear and despair. Greece, Italy and Siberia today. California yesterday. Australia before that. The wildfire devastation seems never ending.
What is going on? Smoke from Russia is now above the North Pole, a terrifying first. Is this the sign of a new, infernal era, or merely of a few particularly cruel, cursed months? Can we celebrate once the fires are out or must we learn to live with this Hades?
Fire has always been with us. A quarter of a century ago, I worked in California’s Redwood National Park, home to the tallest trees in the world and not too far from where the “Dixie” has now become the largest wildfire in the state’s history. Then a youthful eco-warrior, I was keen to protect the glories of the natural world. So it was a surprise when, on my first morning, after glimpsing bears and eagles, a huge chainsaw was pressed into my hand by a ranger.
It wasn’t destruction, but management. We were trying to build firebreaks: cut gaps in the vegetation that would stop flames sweeping across the land, reaching the so-called “bald hills” with their tinder dry grass, and whipping up firestorms. We knew we had to try, but we also knew that, if the worst catastrophes hit, our efforts had as much chance of turning the tide of fire as Canute did of sending back the sea.
Long before that, though, the US had been trying extreme measures to extinguish terrible fires. Some of the bravest people I’ve ever written about are “smokejumpers” – firefighters who parachute into the path of wildfires then try to block or beat them back. They started their daredevilry back in 1940.
There are still hundreds of US smokejumpers today, all required to be in peak physical condition. In Greece, by contrast, firefighting efforts seem to rely on thin ranks of often middle-aged firefighters, whose exhausted, soot-charred features stare out of photographs from the carnage this week, their wrinkles lined by ashes. Unions say thousands more are needed.
It is not just a lack of resources on the ground. In the air, too, it turns out that Greece is underequipped. Despite its perennial risk and outsize military spending, the country has just 67 firefighting aircraft, of which just 20 make it into the air at any one time, as others are refuelled or repaired – or just in the wrong place. The country’s prime minister has been forced to apologise on national television. Even arch enemy Turkey is now one of a host of countries dispatching aircraft to help. Dimitris Stathopoulos, head of the Greek firefighters federation, has blamed the effects on public services of a decade of austerity, adding that 5,000 more firefighters were needed urgently. “We are constantly on alert,” he said. “In March, we had 10 days of floods, then snow. In Varympompi and in Evia, we’re going to be there for 20 days with 500 firefighters because these are dangerous times.”
Things are undoubtedly getting worse. The world is getting hotter and drier. Last week, Greece recorded its hottest ever temperature: 46.3C. Across the Atlantic, half of America is officially in drought. For many monitoring stations in the western states, June and July have been the hottest on record. Across the world, similar records keep tumbling. The question is whether these are cyclical phenomena, or down to climate change.
The answer seems to be the latter. The journal Nature has examined 190 extreme weather events over a 14-year period from 2004, and found that with heatwaves, almost all were most severe or more likely as a result of climate change; for drought the proportion was three quarters. The twin problems of heat and drought reinforce each other: there is less moisture in the soil to evaporate and cool the landscape. And once fires start, the combination makes the blaze drastically harder to stop.
Inevitably, then, the number and size of wildfires is increasing. Back when I was wielding my chainsaw, a freakish year saw six million acres burnt across the US; now it is regularly more than 10million.
The cost of such fires, says the US government, tops $40 billion a year, and 90 per cent are started by people, mostly accidentally. Yet it suggests that part of the solution could lie with people too.
Which leads to prevention and mitigation. The non-partisan Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) had noted that the impact of wildfires is more dramatic because we are building homes ever closer to fire-prone areas.
Such developments should be “discouraged” it suggests. But it is not always easy. In Greece, apocalyptic scenes such as the ones we are witnessing now have been a feature of life for decades. Often arson is to blame, with forest areas cleared by wildfires later sprouting new concrete blooms – villas and hotels – in a country where a historic lack of a forest registry means land’s legal status is as opaque as a hillside shrouded in smoke.
One report noted that Greece’s “terrible fire season was easily predictable”. It was written 15 years ago, but could have easily been dispatched today.
As the land dries, other strategies are required. C2ES calls for “removing fuels, such as dead trees, from forests that are at risk”. But such management is often itself the subject of fiery debate.
Here in Britain, for example, arguments raged in the wake of the devastating Saddleworth Moor blazes of 2018, about whether the RSPB, which manages the land, was to blame for not carrying out “controlled burns” of the heather. Some scientists said that allowing it to build up led to a stockpile of fuel which intensified fires so far that they spread to the underlying peat.
True, the technology of firefighting is improving as fires themselves are worsening. Sensors and remote cameras have replaced watchtowers in areas at risk; drones and even satellite imagery can track fires if they do break out. Data on wind speed and direction can be loaded onto high-spec topographical maps, allowing computers to model blazes and how they might develop.
Such techniques have allowed some fires in America this summer to be extinguished before they got out of hand. But that has required a speedy response from both ground and air. And not all countries are able to blaze such a trail.