Thread: Five myths about wildfires

• Natural disaster
• Climate change

Five myths about wildfires


Are wildfires a natural, if tragic, event – or are they getting worse with climate change? Would logging help decrease them? And can they be kept under control with forward planning? BBC Future debunks five common myths.

• By Diego Arguedas Ortiz

13 November 2018

Wildfires are currently raging through California, with thousands of people forced to flee their homes and dozens of residents killed. Earlier this year, a series of wildfires in the Greek coast killed 99 people in the deadliest wildfire worldwide since 2009. In July 2018, smoke from fires in Russia reached as far as North America. This is a new normal.

But as fires multiply around the world, so do questions about them – and misconceptions. Here are five common myths about wildfires – some of which can undermine our success in fighting them.


Firefighters battle flames near Athens in July 2018, where at least 74 people were killed (Credit: Getty)


Myth #1: Regularly logging forests prevents forest fires

A common assumption is that logging, or removing some trees, would prevent fires. In fact, many forest experts say that logging is ineffective. This is because the tree remnants left over after logging, such as stumps and branches, provide a super-fuel for fire – one that is even drier (and more flammable) in the absence of a forest canopy.

There is plenty of science backing these claims. For instance, a recent study showed that burn severity tended to be higher in areas with higher levels of management. Scholars working on wildfire conservation have also rebuked arguments that logging protects endangered species from forest fires, a common argument in favour of tree removal; in fact, it seems that animals like the iconic spotted owl still benefit from a burned-out forest and that removing the trees could hurt them. Even post-fire logging is counterproductive and can lead to more fires.


An owl waits as California's Woolsey Fire approaches (Credit: Getty)


A different practice is clearing entire areas of a forest, a common approach used by firefighters to prevent the fire from spreading.

Myth #2: There is nothing you can do to protect your property

Wildfires are powerful and threatening, but households can reduce their risk by taking action at home. The building itself should be the first concern. Houses with fire-resistant roofs stand a better chance of surviving a blaze. Owners also should remove combustible materials from around the structure, including leaves in gutters and rooflines.


The Woolsey Fire approaches houses in Malibu. Experts say that creating a ‘defensible’ zone around a home can help protect it (Credit: Getty)


Families can create a ‘defensible zone’ between their homes and their surrounding wilderness. This means clearing anything that could catch fire, like brush, dried leaves and wood piles within 30 feet (9m) of structures.

When they are 30-100 feet (9-30m) away from homes, trees should have large distances between canopies – 12 feet (3.6m) of space between tops that are between 30-60ft (9-18m) from a home, and 6 feet (1.8m) of space for tops that are 60 feet (18m) away. This interrupts the fire’s path and slows its pace.

Myth #3: Wildfires are an inevitable fact of nature
While wildfires are a natural phenomenon, the extent and intensity to which they’re happening now are not – and one of the effects of climate change.


Firefighters battle the Woolsey Fire in Malibu in November 2018; the California wildfire season used to end in early autumn, but that’s changing (Credit: Getty)


We saw fewer fires between 1930 and 1980, a period that coincided with cooler and moister conditions. But as the climate has become hotter and drier in the last four decades, the number of fires have increased.In only two years between 1980 and 1999 did wildfires burn more than 6 million acres (2.4m hectares) of US wilderness. But between 2000 and 2017, there were 10 years with burnt acreage above that threshold.

Globally, the length of the wildfire season increased by nearly 19% between 1978 and 2013.


Forest fires in October 2017 in Portugal killed more than 30 people. From 1978 to 2013, the wildfire season’s length increased by nearly 19% (Credit: Getty)


While you can’t point to climate change as causing any particular fire on its own, it does influence factors that help spark and spread fires, like major drought, high temperatures, low humidity and high winds. As a result, scientists say that the increase of wildfires around the world, from Siberia to Portugal, is linked to climate change.

Myth #4: All wildfires are bad and must be quenched immediately

Fires have played a crucial role in ecosystems for millennia and life has evolved beside them: some beetles breed only in the heat of fires, pine cones germinate with periodical fires and cleared space from burnt trees allows for new plants to spring.


A helicopter drops water on a wildfire in Portugal's Algarve in August 2018. Experts say that pumping money into fire fighting might have diminishing returns (Credit: Getty)


In fact, the benefits that many people now hope to achieve with logging or forest management – the clearing of dense woods – is naturally done by forest fires. The flames periodically consume smaller branches and trees, culling the forest which otherwise would otherwise serve as fuel.

By fighting wildfires relentlessly during the past century, we have prevented this ‘cleansing’: less than 1% of US fires are allowed to burn. This strategy works better when there are fewer wildfires – but in our current extreme conditions, pumping more money to fighting fires might have a diminishing rate of returns.

Myth #5: It is possible to eradicate (or control) all wildfires

As we have already seen, climate change, alongside other factors such as the spread of human settlements, is expected to increase wildfires, particularly in mid-to-high latitudes, in the coming decades. The tropics might see a decrease in fires, which might come as a relief for countries nearer the equator. But the rest of the globe would have to deal with an increasing number of them.
Some fires, like California’s Camp Fire, are too fast to be managed. Evacuation and relocation are the only reasonable responses. This leads to the question of whether communities like Paradise, which was destroyed almost entirely by the fire, should stay where they are – or move elsewhere.


County sheriff officers inspect a vehicle for remains; fires like this one, the Camp Fire, are too fast to be managed (Credit: Getty)


Some experts are calling for a return to traditional indigenous fire knowledge to deal with the flames. As efforts to cull fires seem insufficient – and as fires are likely to only get worse – those are questions policymakers must face.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2018...bout-wildfires

Fires are started. The only natural fires are ones caused by lightning or in rare cases some type of bizarre internal combustion which is very rare. People start fires and they started these fires, all of them, with the exception of any that were caused by lightning, but with lightning, you get rain which puts out the fire it started, so .... these massive wildfires are not wildfires, they are arson fires or negligence fires.

Logging companies take the timber and remove the stumps if their contract requires it or the landowner removes them when they replant the forest for a new crop of trees.

The Origin of Wildfires and How They Are Caused

Most wildfires are started accidentally by humans




Steve Nix, Photo Licensed to About.combySteve Nix
Updated July 19, 2018

It is interesting to note that, of the four billion years of earth's existence, conditions were not conducive for spontaneous wildfire until the last 400 million years. A naturally-occurring atmospheric fire did not have the chemical elements available until major several earth changes occurred.


The earliest life forms emerged without needing oxygen (anaerobic organisms) to live about 3.5 billion years ago and lived in a carbon dioxide based atmosphere. Life forms that needed oxygen in small amounts (aerobic) came much later in the form of photosynthesizing blue-green algae and ultimately changed the earth's atmospheric balance toward oxygen and away from carbon dioxide (co2).

Photosynthesis increasingly dominated earth's biology by initially creating and continuously increasing the earth's percentage of oxygen in the air. Green plant growth then exploded and aerobic respiration became the biologic catalyst for terrestrial life. Around 600 million years ago and during the Paleozoic, conditions for natural combustion started developing with increasing speed.

Wildfire Chemistry

Fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat to ignite and spread. Wherever forests grow, the fuel for forest fires is provided mainly by continued biomass production along with the resulting fuel load of that vegetative growth. Oxygen is created in abundance by the photosynthesizing process of living green organisms so it is all around us in the air. All that is needed then is a source of heat to provide the exact chemistry combinations for a flame.

When these natural combustibles (in the form of wood, leaves, brush) reach 572º, gas in the steam given off reacts with oxygen to reach its flash point with a burst of flame. This flame then preheats surrounding fuels. In turn, other fuels heat up and the fire grows and spreads. If this spreading process is not controlled, you have a wildfire or uncontrolled forest fire.

Depending on the geographic condition of the site and the vegetative fuels present, you might call these brush fires, forest fires, sage field fires, grass fires, woods fires, peat fires, bush fires, wildland fires, or veld fires.

How Do Forest Fires Start?

Naturally caused forest fires are usually started by dry lightning where little to no rain accompanies a stormy weather disturbance. Lightning randomly strikes the earth an average of 100 times each second or 3 billion times every year and has caused some of the most notable wildland fire disasters in the western United States.

Most lightning strikes occur in the North American southeast and southwest. Because they often occur in isolated locations with limited access, lightning fires burn more acres than human-caused starts. The average 10-year total of U.S. wildfire acres burned and caused by humans is 1.9 million acres where 2.1 million acres burned are lightning-caused.

Still, human fire activity is the primary cause of wildfires, with nearly ten times the start rate of natural starts. Most of these human-caused fires are accidental, usually caused by carelessness or inattention by campers, hikers, or others traveling through wildland or by debris and garbage burners. Some are intentionally set by arsonists.

Some human-caused fires are started to reduce heavy fuel buildup and used as a forest management tool. This is called a controlled or prescribed burn and used for wildfire fire fuel reduction, wildlife habitat enhancement, and debris clearing. They are not included in the above statistics and ultimately reduce wildfire numbers by reducing conditions that contribute to wildfire and forest fires.

How Does Wildland Fire Spread?

The three primary classes of wildland fires are surface, crown, and ground fires. Each classification intensity depends on the quantity and types of fuels involved and their moisture content. These conditions have an effect on fire intensity and will determine how fast the fire will spread.

• Surface fires typically burn readily but at a low intensity and partially consume the entire fuel layer while presenting little danger to mature trees and root systems. Fuel buildup over many years will increase intensity and especially when associated with drought, can become a rapidly spreading ground fire. Regular controlled fire or prescribed burning effectively reduces the fuel buildup leading to a damaging ground fire.
• Crown fires generally result from intense rising ground fire heat and occur in the higher sections of draping trees. The resulting "ladder effect" causes hot surface or ground fires to climb the fuels into the canopy. This can increase the chance for embers to blow and branches to fall into unburned areas and increase the spread the fire.
• Ground fires are the most infrequent type of fire but make for very intense blazes that can potentially destroy all vegetation and organic manner, leaving only bare earth. These largest fires actually create their own winds and weather, increasing the flow of oxygen and "feeding" the fire.

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-causal...-fires-1342893