- Author: Mike Hsu
Pilot program in Santa Barbara County shows promise for bolstering resilience
After a rash of wildfires across Southern California in 2003, many counties, cities and neighborhoods adopted Community Wildfire Protection Plans to improve their preparedness and fire response. But Rob Hazard, fire marshal for Santa Barbara County, has noticed that CWPPs and resources are unevenly distributed across areas at high risk of wildfire.
“Communities that are more affluent, more white, they are the ones that end up getting the grants, they're the ones that end up getting the projects to mitigate risks,” Hazard said, “whereas more disadvantaged...
/h3>- Author: Rachelle Hedges, Project and Policy Analyst for Berkeley Forests
Wildfires burning in western U.S. forests have increased in size and severity since the late 20th century, with a number of recent fires exhibiting characteristics that match the criteria for mass fires – or fires that burn with high intensity over large continuous areas for long durations of time.
Operational fire behavior models, commonly used by federal and state fire suppression agencies to predict how wildfires will behave, cannot predict mass fire behavior, largely because they do not include the important combustion and fire-atmosphere interactions. The Creek Fire, which exhibited mass fire behavior when it burned through the southern Sierra Nevada in 2020, was...
- Author: Kara Manke, UC Berkeley
Clearing California's forests of dense overgrowth is a critical first step for curbing catastrophic wildfire in the state. But forest restoration — whether through prescribed burning or thinning — comes at a high price: Not only are these treatments costly, but cutting down or burning vegetation can release stored carbon dioxide, accelerating the impacts of climate change.
A new analysis by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, provides a roadmap for how...
- Author: Lauren Dunlap
Stakeholders from across disciplines and institutions offer recommendations to ensure safe, reliable water supply amid a growing wildfire threat
It's intuitive that wildfires can affect ecosystems, harm wildlife and contaminate streams and rivers. But wildfires can also have complex, severe and direct effects on our water supply and infrastructure — effects that have only become clear in recent years. Scientists and policymakers must integrate insights and experience from many disciplines and sectors to understand and address the consequences.
In September, 23 scholars and practitioners with a diversity of water and fire expertise came together to...
- Author: Susan Kocher and Ryan Tompkins
Californians have been concerned about wildfires for a long time, but the past two years have left many of them fearful and questioning whether any solutions to the fire crisis truly exist.
The Dixie Fire in the Sierra Nevada burned nearly 1 million acres in 2021, including almost the entire community of Greenville. Then strong winds near Lake Tahoe sent the Caldor Fire racing through the community of Grizzly Flats and to the edges of urban neighborhoods, forcing the evacuation of tens of...