Posts Tagged: Rim Fire
Earth Economics Rim Fire Report Published
Earth Economics has recently released a report assessing the economic impact of the 2013 Rim Fire. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission commissioned this report which addresses fire impact on a range of ecosystem service values.
As of September 17, 2013, the Rim Fire covered over 256,000 acres of land and direct firefighting costs were estimated at over $127 million. This report was compiled using satellite data from September 17, 2013, before the fire was fully contained, and represents a conservative underestimation of lost ecosystem benefit and direct costs.
The study categorized the overall burn area into eight distinct vegetation types and valued them based on 10 of 18 identified environmental benefits.
Vegetation Type |
Environmental Benefits |
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Overall first year benefit losses are estimated at between $100 million to $736 million. The report also identified pre-fire values of environmental benefits ($210 million to $1.5 billion) and available carbon storage ($101 million to $782 million). These values represent estimated total value of these resources and while these benefits have not been wholly lost following the fire, it will take decades if not longer for them to fully recover.
The report also identifies additional benefit losses from fire stress mortality, long term human health costs, and ecosystem services damage from snow pack, soil structure, and water filtration degradation among others. These are important issues that were not specifically considered due to a lack of primary local data at time of assessment but represent additional strain on the economics of ecosystem management.
With large scale high severity wildfire becoming more common throughout California, the cost of suppression is rapidly becoming a major issue in lands management.
This report presents a detailed look into the various costs incurred by a large scale wildfire event many of which can be avoided or offset by alternative management strategies. It remains to be seen how these lost services and values will affect the overall cost of the Rim Fire moving into the future, but this report shows the immediate first year's loss already representing a significant portion of the overall available environmental utility.
For the full report, click the link below:
In Rim fire's wake, lessons for saving our forests
BERKELEY – In late July, UC Berkeley fire ecologist Scott Stephens was working in Stanislaus National Forest, gathering data on how a century had altered its character. What he saw were the signs of a clear and present danger.
“The thing that was startling was that there was more change than I ever would have imagined,” recalls Stephens, a professor of fire science who devotes much of his time to field research. “I remember thinking, ‘Boy, this place is really susceptible to high-severity fire.’”
On Aug. 17 the Rim Fire ignited, changing the forest far more, and in far less time, than anyone could have imagined. The blaze scorched hundreds of square miles — roughly a quarter-million acres — in the Stanislaus, and thousands of acres in neighboring Yosemite National Park. It left what has been described as a moonscape, in the process killing wildlife, destroying habitat and – as he discovered when he returned in September – reducing his 400-odd research plots to embers.
Stephens had left the area by the time the fire erupted, but four of his Berkeley undergrads — summer technicians supervised by a member of his research team — were still taking readings a few miles from ground zero. They were in regular contact with the U.S. Forest Service’s district office, he says, and “realized in a hurry they had to leave.”
The Rim Fire, to Stephens’ distress, confirms the most urgent finding from decades of research. As he and his co-authors wrote in a paper published this month in Science, “Fire policy that focuses on suppression only delays the inevitable, promising more dangerous and destructive future fires.”
“We know that taking fire out of ecosystems is a big deal in places like mixed-conifer forests, which used to burn every decade or so,” he says. Then, in 1905, the Forest Service was established – not coincidentally, the year the last fire occurred in the area Stephens was studying. It wasn’t long before the agency began implementing its so-called 10 o’clock policy, which called for extinguishing every fire by 10 a.m. the morning after it was discovered.
But by clearing out understory, those smaller, low-intensity fires once acted as natural firebreaks against larger, more damaging fires. Acording to survey data, Stephens says, a section of one of his research plots had 19 trees per acre larger than six inches in diameter in 1911. When he and his students were there in July, they found 260 such trees per acre, “an astonishing difference.”
Even as density has increased, though, the average diameter has dwindled as younger trees fill in the spaces between older, bigger ones. And the amount of dead and downed material on the forest floor has quadrupled or even quintupled, Stephens says, to perhaps 40 tons per acre. That adds up to an unprecedented “continuity of fuel,” he says, enough to feed a raging inferno fierce enough to destroy the imposing, old-growth Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees beloved by visitors to Stanislaus and Yosemite.
“A lot of places in the Sierra Nevada have been harvested so thoroughly, the big old trees are gone,” says Stephens, who grew up in a lumber-mill family. “But this place was different. It still had trees that were three-and-a-half, four feet in diameter. These are trees that are 300 years old, easy.
“So I was standing there thinking, ‘My goodness, here are these trees that are really important, we don’t have them in all national forestlands, and they’re vulnerable. And then we went back, and every one of those trees was dead. And it wasn’t just that area. It was miles. Miles and miles of dead trees. It was really kind of sad.”
‘A decade to change course’
“I was really a forest person in a big way when I was a young kid,” says Stephens, though not, perhaps, in quite the way he is now. Both of his parents worked at Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Co., as did his grandfather and three of his uncles, before the company fell victim to a notorious hostile takeover in 1986.
“It was so close to me that I never saw it as all that special,” he says. He earned his undergraduate degree, in fact, in electrical engineering, worked as an engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense and lectured at Sacramento State, his alma mater, for a number of years.
He’d just begun Ph.D. work in electrical engineering at UC Davis when he was introduced to the realm of natural sciences and “knew it was in my heart to follow it.”
“I liked electrical engineering,” he explains, “but I just didn’t love it.”
He loves fire science. He seems to derive special pleasure from his work in research stations like the UC Berkeley-run Blodgett Forest near Auburn, where he and his students conduct experiments with prescribed burns. They set these themselves with drip torches, steel cans with a highly combustible mix of diesel and gasoline set off by a burning wick.
“That’s the fun part,” says Stephens, who acknowledges it can sometimes be intense as well. “Every fire you’re on you learn from, because they’re always a little different – the wind changes a little bit, the weather changes a little bit, the fuel changes, the topography’s different. So every one is a learning exercise.”
Among the most crucial lessons, he says, is the ecological importance of natural forest fires, and the counterproductive nature of suppression. Climate change and drought, he adds, only exacerbate the dangers.
The good news, he says, is that more and more land managers appreciate the vital role natural fires and controlled burns can play in preventing future Rim Fires. The bad news: Population growth in and around national forestlands, combined with budget constraints on both federal and state agencies, greatly complicates the task of adapting management policies to forests’ need for smaller, more frequent, less destructive fires.
The National Park Service has recognized this for decades – which helps to explain why the Rim Fire wreaked most of its destruction outside Yosemite’s borders – and even the Forest Service has recently seen the light, Stephens says. But the agency has been hampered by the need to protect homes and structures, which means putting fires out instead of letting them burn.
“People living in the urban interface have really changed the whole fire dynamic,” Stephens explains, “because now, when a fire starts, if it’s near anyplace that’s got people, all of the engines go to structure support. They try to defend houses, they cut shrubs around them, they burn out away from them and they basically put fires out that are coming in.
“Structure protection costs a fortune,” he adds.
The nation’s fire-suppression budget has soared from around $300 million in 1995 to $2 billion today, an increase Stephens attributes in large part to persistent building in forested areas – including those where fires have occurred. “Unless there’s some way to link the real costs associated with that,” he says, “I see no reason to change.”
As long as the U.S. government keeps subsidizing fire management in the urban interface – where it has no authority to restrict private building — federal agencies won’t have the resources to ensure more sustainable forest ecosystems, Stephens says. He and his Science co-authors suggest making the states responsible for the costs of firefighting in the urban interface. The recommendation, which would require an act of Congress, is “heartburn city for California,” he admits, and won’t be popular with other budget-strapped states, either.
“I’m just trying to figure out a way work can get done on these lands,” Stephens says. “I think we have a decade to really change course.”
“I do think that we know enough,” he says, to make critical policy changes. “The science is getting more and more clear. The vulnerabilities are very clear. So I am optimistic that things could change. I’m optimistic that Congress could engage at some time, and really make a difference. When it’s going to happen, I don’t know.”
To Stephens, though, failure to act isn’t an option: “I think the stakes are so high that, for me, it’s almost unimaginable that we don’t change course.”
/h4>/span>Time is Ripe for Fire Detection Satellite, say Berkeley Scientists
As firefighters emerge from another record wildfire season in the Western United States, University of California, Berkeley, scientists say it’s time to give them a 21st century tool: a fire-spotting satellite.
An artist’s concept of the FUEGO satellite, which would snap digital photos of the Western U.S. every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited fires. Image by R. E. Lafever, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Such a satellite could view the Western states almost continuously, snapping pictures of the ground every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited wildfires. Firefighting resources could then be directed to these spots in hopes of preventing the fires from growing out of control and threatening lives and property.
The UC Berkeley scientists have designed such a satellite using state-of-the-art sensors, written analysis software to minimize false alarms, and even given it a name – the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit (FUEGO). They’re hopeful it can be built for several hundred million dollars, either by government or private entities.
“If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker and more easily, including preparing for evacuation,” said fire expert Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental science, policy and management. “Wildfires would be smaller in scale if you could detect them before they got too big, like less than an acre.”
Stephens, physicist Carl Pennypacker, remote sensing expert Maggi Kelly and their colleagues describe the satellite in an article published online Oct. 17 by the journal Remote Sensing.
“With a satellite like this, we will have a good chance of seeing something from orbit before it becomes an Oakland fire,” said Pennypacker, a research associate at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, referring to the devastating 1991 fire that destroyed more than 3,000 homes in Berkeley and Oakland. “It could pay for itself in one firefighting season.”
With global warming, Stephens said, wildfires are expected to become more frequent and more extensive. This year alone, California’s firefighting arm, CAL FIRE, has responded to over 6,000 wildfires, 1,600 more than average, according to tweets by the department’s information officer Daniel Berlant. Wildfire-prone areas stretching from Spain to Russia could also benefit from their own dedicated satellites.
Updating an outmoded system
Fire detection today is much like it was 200 years ago, Stephens said, relying primarily on spotters in fire towers or on the ground and on reports from members of the public. This information is augmented by aerial reconnaissance and lightning detectors that steer firefighters to ground strikes, which are one of the most common wildfire sparks.
Infrared images of the area around Yosemite National Park on Aug. 17, 2013, before and 10 minutes after ignition of the Rim Fire. The images, taken by the GOES weather satellite, show that fire hotspots can be detected from space. GOES is a powerful, all-purpose satellite, and was not exclusively designed for fire detections , unlike the proposed FUEGO geosynchronous satellite, which could scan areas every few minutes. Images by Chris Schmidt, Univ. of Wisconsin.
“Even today, most fires are detected, in some way or another, by people,” he said. “Even the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park this past summer was detected by someone who saw a smoke column.”
But satellite technology, remote sensing and computing have advanced to the stage where it’s now possible to orbit a geostationary satellite that can reliably distinguish small, but spreading, wildfires with few false alarms. Pennypacker estimates that the satellite, which could be built and operated by the federal government, like the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES); as a partnership between government and the private sector, like the Landsat satellite program; or by a private company alone, would cost several hundred million dollars – a fraction of the nation’s $2.5 billion yearly firefighting budget.
The idea of a fire detection satellite has been floated before, but until recently, detectors have been prohibitively expensive, and the difficulty of discriminating a small burning area from other bright hotspots, such as sunlight glinting off a mirror or windshield, made the likelihood of false alarms high. Today, computers are faster, detectors cheaper and more sensitive, and analysis software far more advanced, making false alarms much less likely, according to researchers.
“Simply put, we believe we have shown that this kind of rapid, sensitive fire detection of areas bigger than 10 feet on a side is probably feasible from space, and we have evidence that the false alarm rate will not be crazy,” said Pennypacker, who has designed sensitive satellite-borne detectors for 40 years. “Our work requires further testing, which we are eager to do.”
The approach is similar to what Pennypacker and colleague Saul Perlmutter used 20 years ago to search for exploding stars to study the expansion of the universe. In that case, they created an automated system to compare consecutive images of the night sky to look for new points of light that could be supernovas. Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics, shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which proved that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
How it works
“In concept, this is a simple system: a telephoto camera, an infrared filter and a recording device. We are just looking for something bright compared to the surroundings or changing over time,” Kelly said. “Then, we do these rapid calculations to determine if one image is different from the next.”
Pennypacker and graduate student Marek K. Jakubowski developed a computer analysis technique, or algorithm, to detect these differences in space and time and to distinguish them from bright lights that might look like fires. This involves several billion calculations per second on images taken every few seconds, covering the entire West every few minutes. The new paper reports on tests of this algorithm using existing imagery from real fires, but the team hopes to get funding to test the system on a fire that is starting, such as a prescribed burn.
Images taken in two different infrared wavelengths reveal different details of a smokey fire, demonstrating that a fire-spotting satellite could see ignition sites obscured by smoke. These images are of a 2003 fire in the San Bernardino National Forest near Los Angeles, taken by the ASTER satellite.
“The point is, satellites like Landsat and GOES provide great information after a fire starts; they can focus and monitor a fire by looking at smoke plumes, fire spread, hot spots at the edges, etc.,” Kelly said. “FUEGO is designed for early detection of smaller fires. Right now, we lose a lot of time because fires are already big by the time we see them.”
The FUEGO design, for which UC Berkeley has filed a patent, was developed with funds from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
Other authors of the paper are Michael Lampton, a research physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory; Robert Tripp, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics; and Christopher Schmidt of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Pennypacker, Lampton and Tripp are also members of the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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