California is in the midst of one of the worst droughts in its history and has seen 1,000 more wildfires this year than last. In 2013 the largest wildfire ever in the Sierra Nevada, the Rim Fire, took two months to fully contain and seared more than 250,000 acres. Scientists warn that Californians should prepare for a future of more Rim Fires, fueled by climate change, drought, and forest mismanagement. California Burning is an examination of how Californians are coping with the increased threat, technologies being developed to fight and predict fire, and how we can make forests less prone to megafires in the future.
The 2013 Rim Fire grabbed headlines and attention like almost no other. The fire burned into one of California’s most beloved national parks, Yosemite. A year later, the scars still show, not just on the land but on the people who watched it burn.
“It was burning so dramatically here it became obvious that no human was going to stop this fire,” says Jerry Baker of Groveland. “In my mind, at that instant, it was obviously hopeless.”
Baker watched the Rim Fire burn from Tuolumne Trails, a camp he owns for people with special medical needs. He saw the fire jump the Tuolumne River and rage up the canyon toward the camp. He says flames were so high they created a “wall of red” right in front of him.
“What I just didn’t realize was the velocity that fire can create,” says Baker.
He looks at a large swath of scorched land near his property and points to a hill in the distance. “I was watching this hill burn and the flames were over here, and a tree over there would burst into flames just spontaneously,” says Baker.
Baker thought he was prepared. He has defensible space and the buildings on his land have sprinkler systems. But what he witnessed gave him pause.
“The fact that the fire's over there and you’ve cleared all the ground 100 feet away from it doesn’t mean too much when you have trees exploding 100 yards away from each other from the sheer heat and the rain of embers,” he says.
Ultimately retardant dumped from a plane helped save his camp.
Malcolm North, a research scientist with the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, says a perfect storm of conditions made the Rim Fire severe, at one point burning 90,000 acres in two days.
“Ninety-eight degrees in the afternoon, the humidity was five or six percent, and most importantly the winds were blowing 45 miles per hour and gusting up to 65 and 70 miles an hour,” says North. “Even the best fire fighting forces in the world, there’s no way in hell you can contain a fire under those types of conditions.”
North walks through an area burned by the Rim Fire. He says decades of fire suppression created a forest choked with trees and brush. Timber “plantations”planted like rows of corn after a previous fire, also helped fuel the flames.
“The problem is those plantations are really prone to getting incinerated if not vaporized in a wildfire and we had a lot of that in this Rim Fire,” North says.
In 1911, the U.S. Forest Service surveyed a 15,000 acre area in the Stanislaus National Forest, which later burned in the Rim fire. The survey found about 25 trees per acre. Scott Stephens, a fire scientist at UC Berkeley, and his researchers went back to the same area just before the Rim Fire.
“We found in the same places, we saw tree densities of 220 to 230 trees per acre, so at least a tenfold increase.” says Stephens. “Today, you go out there and I have to say, it is wall to wall trees.”
Wall-to-wall trees are a familiar picture for many property owners in the Sierra Nevada. Chris Khan runs the Old Oak Ranch Conference Center in Sonora. For the last several months, he’s worked to remove the estimated 40 to 80 tons of brush and trees he says make the 160 acre campus a danger zone.
"I think the Rim Fire really opened everybody’s eyes to how dangerous things are and how much debris and material that’s on the ground,” says Khan.
The property sits at the top of a canyon and has limited access for fire trucks.
“We’re basically an accident waiting to happen right now, if a fire were to start down below it would just come up, rush through,” he says.
Khan is working with his local Fire Safe Councils, which provide federal funds to communities to help make them fire safe. Glenn Gottschal with the Highway 108 Fire Safe Council says not all homeowners are as aware of the increased threat as they should be.
“I think they have to learn to live with fire, because it’s not a matter of if we’re going to have a fire in this area, it’s just when, and whether or not we can be ready for it.”
Since the Rim Fire, Jerry Baker has built an observation deck at his camp in Groveland. It overlooks the canyon where trees once stood. It’s there as a reminder of the damage mega-fires can cause.
“It is a broad environmental disaster when something like this happens, and that’s not just a disaster for us that want to look at the trees, it’s a disaster for everybody that lives in the state and the country,” says Baker.
Historically, small fires from lightning strikes sculpted the forests, removing smaller trees and brush that could act as fuel. But scientists say until fire is consistently returned to the forest, even a small spark in the wrong place has the potential to become another Rim Fire.
Copyright 2014 Capital Public Radio
