Climate change and a combination of other factors are driving unprecedented fires in the west of the US, an American wildfire expert says.
Michael Kodas, author of Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, talks to Kathryn Ryan about "megafires" as unprecedented blazes wreak havoc across the western United States.
A man looks for items in the remains of his mobile home after a wildfire swept through the R.V. park destroying multiple homes in Estacada, Oregon Photo: AFP
Listen to the full interview with Michael Kodas
The west coast of the US is in an unprecedented fire season, he says.
“In California it’s been very unusual in that they do have wild fires in the summer, their peak fire season is still weeks away and for more than a month now they have had epic wild fires that have behaved entirely differently from what they’ve seen in the past and this comes on several years of other record-setting fires.”
Some of these fires became mega fires (over 40,000 hectares) in a day, he says.
These fires have torn through forests which don’t typically burn and have raged intensely through the night, when fires usually calm down, he says.
“Other fires in Washington and Oregon have behaved similarly and have burned right through towns right up to edges of cities.”
The fires are also generating their own weather systems.
In California the fire created pyro cumulus nimbus clouds, basically, a giant thunder storm formed on top of the smoke plume.
“And an actual tornado came down from that cloud back into the fire, it was the first time ever the National Weather Service put out a tornado warning for a weather system that formed from a wildfire.”
Freak lighting storms provided the ignition for this massive conflagration, he says.
“These storms dropped around 12,000 lightning strikes and about one in five of those started a wildfire.”
Whether climate change caused these storms is unclear but there have only happened before once or twice in recorded history, Kodas says.
Climate change has certainly played a part in providing the fuel for these fires, he says.
“In California the temperatures have been notably warmer and the explosion of wildfires that they saw coincided with a heat dome in the western US that spread from California to where I am in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
“That led to a temperature of 130 degrees in Death Valley some meteorologists say that is the hottest temperature ever recorded reliably on the planet.”
California has been in drought for five years, and that on the back of a similar drought in the preceding years.
“The ongoing drought has led to about 160 million trees dying in California, just since 2010, so those trees are a huge amount of fuel and are very dense in areas where these fires are burning most intensely.”
Other factors come in to play too, he says. He agrees with comments by Donald Trump that forest management is a contributing factor, but is clear where the responsibility lies.
“The forests that are badly overgrown in California are largely on Federal land, so actually President Trump is who is in charge of managing those forests, only about 3 percent of the forest that really need thinning are under the jurisdiction of the state of California.”
Fuel load management is a problem that goes back years, he says.
“We have a problem with that throughout the West largely due, ironically, to putting out too many fires in the past.
“Some forests here in the US burned every five years with low intensity ground fires that cleared out a lot of debris and ground fuels that President Trump has complained about.”
This fuel build-up is the result of a zero tolerance to wildfire in the US.
“We’ve had a zero-tolerance policy towards wild fire for about a century, so if you put out every fire in those forests that burned every five years for a century, it’s not difficult math to figure out that you’re going to have exponentially more fuel.”
Manually managing these overgrown forests is now challenging because of the rugged terrain and the fact that controlled burns are risky, he says.
High house prices have also pushed people in search of affordable housing to flammable areas, he says.
"And then you provide power to those people and those power lines spark a lot of fires"
Pacific Gas and Electric, which is the main utility in California, has been in bankruptcy because of people that have been killed in wildfires started by its powerlines.”
A fire industrial complex is also at play in the US, he says.
“Back in the early 1990s the US spent $US3 million fighting, preparing for and recovering from wildfires.
"That number easily tops $US3 billion a year and about half of that money goes to the private sector.
“When you see an airplane dropping that red retardant on a fire, it’s almost always a private contractor.”
It is in the contractors’ interests to fight every fire, regardless of whether it is necessary, and this is decimating budgets, he says.
“We end up running out of money virtually every August or September fighting wildfires in the US.”
And the extra funds come out of money set aside for prevention, he says.
“They raid other pots of money usually that is set aside to prepare for the next bad wildfire, so a lot of the thinning operations end up underfunded because all that money has to be spent fighting fires.”
Resources are also being stretched thinly as fores are now burning in what were typically low fire seasons.
“Our nation has different fire seasons at different times of year. California’s normal peak fire season is in the fall, whereas out where I live it’s more early in the summer, Arizona and New Mexico it’s often late in the spring.”
This used to mean resources could move to where they were needed – not so now, Kodas says.
“We have mega fires burning in half a dozen states all over the country right now.
“Colorado has the largest fire in its history burning right now.”
And the amount of land burning has increased dramatically.
“In the US back in 2015 we had ten million acres burn in a single year.
“In the 1970s the average for the decade was 3 million a year. We broke that record two years’ later in 2017 and now they are thinking that will probably double again.”
And as the climate warms wetter parts of the country are now burning, he says.