Fire Season is Here

(and paid subscriptions are active)

Dear Readers,

Fire season 2021 is here. I will begin sending these updates out weekly, biweekly, or daily, depending on conditions. My hope is to report on fire activity while also lending historical, cultural, and ecological context. Please note that paid subscriptions are now active for this newsletter, and you will always receive the weekly update (to be sent every Tuesday) for free, but only paying subscribers will receive content beyond that.

Currently there are two fires burning in New Jersey, one in Egg Harbor (70% contained) and one in Brendan T. Byrns State Park. It’s important to not that both of these fires are burning in Pine Barrens, which is a fire dependent ecosystem, but in Egg Harbor the fire has been threatening structures.

In California, an arson fire (suspect arrested) was set in the Palisades. Over 1,000 people have been evacuated from Topanga Canyon and the surrounding Santa Monica mountains. Some of the areas now burning in Topanga Canyon haven’t burned in fifty years, which is about right for the fire interval of California Chaparral, which is 30-150 years (a reminder that a “burn interval” is the amount of time between fires in a given ecosystem).

Again, a reminder that fire has always existed in the Chaparral ecosystem. The issue is that these mountains are now filled with residences and have become what’s called the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI, pronounced wooey), which complicates things quite a bit. The chaparral ecosystem itself has also changed with the introduction of invasive species such as wild oats (a grass that can survive the hot summers), eucalyptus (a highly flammable tree first introduced to decorate wealthy California neighborhoods in the fifties), whitethorn, and giant reed, amongst many others. These species add fuel and flammability to an already flammable ecosysystem.

There is also the issue of long-term drought in California, along with longer dry seasons, which causes soil moisture to drop (especially in areas where snow melts faster and faster each year) and creates a feedback loop of dry soils and drier fuels. We must also understand that the houses and structures are a kind of fuel in these WUI fires, and often communities fail, for many reasons, to update structures and defensible space to code, therefore increasing wildfire volatility.

Right now, in mid-May, hotshot crews are just coming on board (many California crews welcome their seasonal workers on and around May 1), and resources are limited.

In Arizona, motorists and residents are being warned of wildfire risks as summer approaches. Only four days ago a red flag warning was issued for the Medford area in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Outside of the U.S., Manitoba is struggling to contain several fires. Only a couple weeks ago there were fires in North Dakota, south of Manitoba.

According to the United States drought index most of the western United States is experiencing some level of drought. More than half of the United States is under drought conditions currently.

If fire activity increases, I’ll be sending out another update in a few days.