San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Prescribed burns gain supporters
Prescribed burns are becoming increasingly common in California. Also known as controlled burns, prescribed burns are the practice of intentionally igniting fires to remove hazardous vegetation that can serve as fuel for larger and hotter fires.
Fire experts see prescribed burns as a key tool for controlling California’s wildfire problem. Yet they have historically faced resistance from many communities. People are often concerned about their safety and impact on air quality.
“We’re still working on the public perspective,” said Christine McMorrow, a Cal Fire spokesperson. But she said last year’s brutal wildfire season was a “wakeup call” for many California residents. “We have been ramping up to try to in
crease the amount of prescribed burning that Cal Fire is involved in, but also increasing the capacity of private citizens to do prescribed fire,” she added.
A Chronicle analysis of Cal Fire’s tally of local, state and federal prescribed fires shows both the number of controlled burns and the total acreage treated by them have grown over the years. The growth has been especially sharp since 2016, as the state began to encounter some of its worst drought and wildfire seasons.
In 2019, the most recent year for which complete annual data is available, federal, state and local efforts altogether resulted in more than 118,000 acres in 700 controlled burns across the state — the most in recorded history.
From January to June 2020, which is the most recent data available, nearly 52,000 acres were treated in more than 290 prescribed fires across the state. Government agencies — state and federal — were still responsible for the majority of those treatments, but private efforts have scaled up noticeably. Private prescribed fires, which are conducted with permits, treated more than 4,700 acres in the first six months of 2020, compared with just over 3,600 in all of 2019.
The public’s perception of prescribed fires has shifted in the past five to 10 years, said Lenya QuinnDavidson, fire adviser with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council. There’s an increased acceptance of their value as a tool to reduce fire risk.
“People in general are tired of scary fire season after scary fire season,” she said. The public is desperate for a solution and rethinking what’s working versus not, and community members — not just fire agencies — are increasingly getting involved in prescribed fire efforts by joining and forming associations, of which there are 13 now in California, she said.
With changing public perception and continued reports of devastating wildfires across California, public officials have also joined the chorus of people calling for more prescribed fires and sought funding boosts. In 2018, the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire jointly committed to treating 1 million acres a year by 2025 in a landmark deal and dedicating nearly $1 billion in funding to wildfire prevention, a large share of which would be spent on prescribed burns.
However, the state budget actually saw a $150 million reduction in wildfire prevention funding in 2020 under Gov. Gavin Newsom, who reportedly overstated the impact of the state’s prescribed burn efforts. The governor has since committed to approving about $500 million for the current budget specifically for prevention.
McMorrow, the Cal Fire spokesperson, said they are “ramping up” to fulfill Cal Fire’s goal of treating 500,000 acres each year (the U.S. Forest Service aims to treat another 500,000 acres). “It’s really building capacity across the community and that’s what we’re working toward by 2025,” she added, saying more partnerships with private landowners and community organizations to train and educate them are in the works.
QuinnDavidson and other researchers say what’s already being done is nowhere near enough. “It’s a drop in the bucket of what needs to happen,” the fire adviser said. California has about 33 million acres of forestland, 20 million acres of which would benefit from fuel treatments, according to a January 2020 Nature Sustainability study. That may not be an achievable goal, but she says it demonstrates how much more fire the landscape needs.
It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact figure for how much more is necessary, but she and other researchers agree that there needs to be a dramatic shift in how people and agencies approach prescribed fires, which have lengthy and rich traditions in Indigenous and ranching cultures. Crystal Kolden, a land management professor at UC Merced, found in a 2019 study that Western states, including California, are far behind Southeastern states in conducting prescribed fires
“Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable,” Kolden’s study claims.
But there are practical challenges to conducting prescribed fires, including liability issues, funding, weather conditions, environmental regulations, staffing availability, permitting and health concerns. Though prescribed fires rarely result in what experts call “escapes,” they do happen, so that’s another thing to not only prepare for, but also insure against, QuinnDavidson said. Another major concern is air quality, which is why local air districts are involved in the permitting process.
McMorrow of Cal Fire said there are still a lot of people across the state who are concerned about smoke generated by prescribed fires, but that type of smoke is lowintensity and controlled, unlike wildfire smoke. “One thing about prescribed fire is that we create a very detailed burn plan, which is the ‘prescription’ for that burn, and any time we put prescribed fire on the ground, we need to make sure that it is within prescription.”
The California Air Resources Board maintains a prescribed fire database, which tracks current ignitions, where they are and who is conducting them. The board is also part of the governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force’s prescribed fire working group, which is working to produce an overall impact analysis of prescribed fires on the air quality across the state, according to Amy McPherson, a California Air Resources Board spokesperson.
“State forestry policy calls for an increase in fuel reduction efforts including the use of prescribed fire,” she said. “CARB supports this policy and strives to identify as many burn days as possible.”
Weighing all the risks, though, prescribed fires are still necessary, QuinnDavidson, the fire adviser, said. “We all need to be doing more. We need to be creating policies, structures and the funding to do that,” she added.
Wildfires are an inevitable part of California’s landscape, she said. One way or another, they’re going to happen here. “We can choose the way that it burns with prescribed fires, or we can sit back and wait for it to burn with wildfires,” she said.