The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)

Technology has key role in corralling Western wildfires

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As drought- and wind-driven wildfires have become more dangerous across the American West in recent years, firefighte­rs have tried to become smarter in how they prepare.

They’re using new technology and better positionin­g of resources in a bid to keep small blazes from erupting into mega-fires like the ones that torched a record 4 percent of California last year, or the nation’s biggest wildfire this year that has charred a section of Oregon, half the size of Rhode Island.

There have been 730 more wildfires in California so far this year than last, an increase of about 16 percent. But nearly triple the area has burned — 470 square miles.

Catching fires more quickly gives firefighte­rs a better chance of keeping them small.

That includes using new fire behavior computer modeling that can help assess risks before fires start, then project their path and growth.

When “critical weather” is predicted — hot, dry winds or lightning storms — the technology, on top of hard-earned experience, allows California planners to prepositio­n fire engines, bulldozers, aircraft and hand crews armed with shovels and chain saws in areas where they can respond more quickly.

With the computer modeling, “they can do a daily risk forecast across the state, so they use that for planning,” said Lynne Tolmachoff, spokeswoma­n for Cal Fire, California’s firefighti­ng agency.

That’s helped Cal Fire hold an average 95 percent of blazes to 10 acres or less even in poor conditions driven by drought or climate change, she said. So far this year it’s held 96.5 percent of fires below 10 acres.

Federal firefighte­rs similarly track how dry vegetation has become in certain areas, then station crews and equipment ahead of lightning storms or in areas where people gather during holidays, said Stanton Florea, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman at the National Interagenc­y Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

In another effort to catch fires quickly, what once were fire lookout towers staffed by humans have largely been replaced with cameras in remote areas, many of them in high-definition and armed with artificial intelligen­ce to discern a smoke plume from morning fog. There are 800 such cameras scattered across California, Nevada and Oregon, and even casual viewers can remotely watch wildfires in real time.

Fire managers can then “start making tactical decisions based on what they can see,” even before firefighte­rs reach the scene, Tolmachoff said.

Fire managers also routinely summon military drones from the National Guard or Air Force to fly over fires at night, using heat imaging to map their boundaries and hot spots. They can use satellite imagery to plot the course of smoke and ash.

“Your job is to manage the fire, and these are tools that will help you do so” with a degree of accuracy unheard of even five years ago, said

Char Miller, a professor at Pomona College in California and a widely recognized wildfire policy expert.

In California, fire managers can overlay all that informatio­n on high-quality Light Detection and Ranging topography maps that can aid decisions on forest management, infrastruc­ture planning and preparatio­n for wildfires, floods, tsunamis and landslides. Then they add the fire behavior computer simulation based on weather and other variables.

Other mapping software can show active fires, fuel breaks designed to slow their spread, prescribed burns, defensible space cleared around homes, destroyed homes and other wildfire damage.

“It’s all still new, but we can see where it’s going to take us in the future when it comes to planning for people building homes on the wildland area, but also wildland firefighti­ng,” Tolmachoff said.

Cal Fire and other fire agencies have been early adopters of remote imaging and other technologi­es that can be key in early wildfire

detection, said John Bailey, a former firefighte­r and now professor at Oregon State University.

Some experts argue it’s a losing battle against wildfires worsened by global warming, a century of reflexive wildfire suppressio­n and overgrown forests, and communitie­s creeping into what once were sparsely populated areas. Climate change has made the West hotter and drier in the past 30 years, and scientists have long warned the weather will get more extreme as the world warms.

Yet, firefighte­rs’ goal is to replicate the outcome of a fire that started Monday in the canyon community of Topanga, between Los Angeles and Malibu.

It had the potential to swiftly spread through dry brush but was held to about 7 acres (3 hectares) after water-dropping aircraft were scrambled within minutes from LA and neighborin­g Ventura County.

What firefighte­rs don’t want is another wildfire like the one that ravaged the Malibu area in 2018. It destroyed more than 1,600 structures, killed three people and forced thousands to flee.

In another bid to gain an early advantage, California is buying a dozen new Sikorsky Firehawk helicopter­s — at $24 million each — that can operate at night, fly faster, drop more water and carry more firefighte­rs than the Vietnam Warera Bell UH-1H “Hueys” they will eventually replace.

It will also soon receive seven military surplus C-130 transport aircraft retrofitte­d to carry 4,000 gallons of fire retardant, more than three times as much as Cal Fire’s workhorse S-2 airtankers.

For all that, firefighte­rs’ efforts to outsmart and suppress wildfires is counterpro­ductive if all it does is postpone fires in areas that will eventually burn, argued Richard Minnich, a professor in Riverside who studies fire ecology.

“No matter how sophistica­ted the technology may be, the areas they can manage or physically impact things is small,” he said. “We’re in over our heads. You can have all the technology in the world — fire control is impossible.”

Working with wildfires is more realistic, he said, by taking advantage of patches that previously burned to channel the spread of new blazes.

Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighte­r who now heads Firefighte­rs United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, also said firefighte­rs need to adopt a new approach when confrontin­g the most dangerous wind-driven wildfires that leapfrog containmen­t lines by showering flaming embers a mile or more ahead of the main inferno.

It’s better to build more fireresist­ant homes and devote scarce resources to protecting threatened communitie­s while letting the fires burn around them, he said.

“We have these amazing tools that allow us to map fire spread in real time and model it better than weather prediction­s,“Ingalsbee said. “Using that technology, we can start being more strategic and working with fire to keep people safe, keep homes safe, but let fire do the work it needs to do — which is recycle all the dead stuff into soil.”

 ?? Rich Pedroncell­i / Associated Press ?? Cal Fire Capt. Danell Eshnaur uses the Fire Response Tactical Analyst program to use computer modeling to help pre-position fire fighting resources on the Dixie Fire at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Sacramento Command Center in Rancho Cordova, Calif., on Friday.
Rich Pedroncell­i / Associated Press Cal Fire Capt. Danell Eshnaur uses the Fire Response Tactical Analyst program to use computer modeling to help pre-position fire fighting resources on the Dixie Fire at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Sacramento Command Center in Rancho Cordova, Calif., on Friday.

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