Stanford Scholars Reflect On Fire Effects - Past, Present, Future

PALO ALTO, CA -- The 2018 fire season in California prompted environmental experts to ponder the issues associated with policies surrounding fire prevention as well as new research on the long-term effects of breathing smoky air.

The Stanford News Service interviewed six scholars to gain a better understanding of what outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown coined "the new abnormal."

In November, the Camp Fire in Butte County and the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles collectively killed at least 90 people, burned more than 250,000 acres, destroyed more than 20,000 structures and generated unhealthy air conditions in communities hundreds of miles away. The Camp Fire alone took home the distinction of being the state's deadliest, most destructive wildfire on record.

And to think it's expected to get worse.

The News Service asked experts in health, climate change and public policy to discuss what they learned from this fire season, how the fires influenced their research objectives and ideas they have for averting these disasters.

Patch scratched the surface with a question and answer session with fire management expert Rebecca Miller in an earlier report defining fire climate science as more complex than "raking the leaves" as U.S. President Donald Trump put it.

For one thing, three of the hottest years on record according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have occurred in back-to-back succession, as reported by this news outlet months ago.

Miller is joined here by five colleagues in this extensive multi-sourced analysis that serves as introspection to the launching of 2018 and future decades.

Noah Diffenbaugh:

The recent fires highlight the growing risks in California and the American West. Many of the recent fires in California have occurred with record or near-record combustible material that has been elevated by hot conditions. Decades of research show not only that the area burned in the West has been increasing, but also that global warming has been playing a role by increasing the dryness of vegetation on the landscape.

The National Climate Assessment that was released by the U.S. government the day after Thanksgiving confirmed this evidence, highlighting that global warming has been responsible for around half of the historical increase in area burned. With regard to the conditions in California over the past few years, it is clear from multiple lines of evidence that California is now in a new climate, in which conditions are much more likely to be hot, leading to earlier melting of snowpack and exacerbating periods of low precipitation when they occur. The net effect is an extension of the fire season and greater potential for large, intense wildfires.

A key research question going forward lies i how the odds of the record-setting conditions that civilization has just experienced to what extent have been or will be elevated in the coming years as global warming continues to unfold.

Mary Prunicki:

While researchers have been investigating the impact of air pollution and wildfires on health, the main focus previously has been on the health consequences for those relatively close to the fire. But the Camp Fire highlighted the massive impact that wildfires can have on those more than 200 miles away. As a result, the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research collected biomarkers, as in blood and saliva, from Bay Area residents during the period of increased smoke exposure from the Camp Fire. The center will re-collect biomarkers from the same subjects in one month, when the air quality has been at the typical low levels for several weeks. The goal will be to look for differences in immune function during the two time periods to help determine the health implications for those exposed to the wildfire smoke in the Bay Area. The research will also gauge whether wearing a mask during the wildfire smoke altered immune outcomes.

Rebecca Miller:

State legislators responded to the catastrophic 2017 wildfire season with bills that proposed to increase fuel treatments around California through timber thinning and prescribed burns. Brown issued an executive order in May to establish training and certification programs for prescribed burns and to double the number of actively managed acres in California through thinning, prescribed burns and reforestation. The long-term effects of this executive order and the new wildfire legislation from the 2017–18 session have yet to be seen.

The devastating 2018 wildfires place greater urgency on the need to respond to California’s wildfire problem. Both of these wildfire seasons affected rural and urban areas in Northern- and Southern California, thus increasing interest for action from legislators beyond those from traditionally rural or forested districts. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom has already declared wildfire planning to be a priority of his administration. Looking ahead to the 2019–20 session, wildfires will likely be a major topic of proposed legislation and executive action.

Eric Appel:

There are dozens of communities in California and in the rest of the western United States that are at risk of a catastrophic fire in a similar way as Paradise, and new strategies and technologies are necessary to proactively protect these communities beyond the limitation of reactive suppression efforts.

While the research lab has been focusing on developing a new fire-prevention technology to be leveraged in these high-risk areas, complementary efforts are needed to identify high-risk areas and fund projects to leverage new technologies that are key to fire prevention.

First, three factors remain crucial to identifying high-risk areas are:

• Where do fires happen (exact latitude and longitude)
• How do they happen
• What are the total number of starts per year

The current post-fire reporting that fulfills federal, state, county and city filing requirements most often lacks critical details such as the exact coordinates of where the fire originated. Moreover, post-fire investigation is often unable to determine any obvious culprit and cause of ignition. Furthermore, only fires larger than 10 acres are typically reported to the Fire and Resource Assessment Program as searchable on the state database. This excludes thousands of fires, many of which could have grown to be catastrophic, if conditions on the day were different.

Michael Wara:

The Stanford Climate and Energy Policy Program has been working with California legislators since the 2017 wildfires to explain the root causes of destructive wildfires and to take legal and policy steps aimed at reducing risks and creating greater safety for California. The Camp and Woolsey fires have reinvigorated a legislative conversation, and the Climate and Energy Policy Program is again working with stakeholders to identify potential solutions and perform the necessary analysis to fully develop and vet them. These efforts engage students and faculty from a variety of disciplines across the campus, including the disciplines of law, business, engineering and the natural sciences.

Rob Jackson: