PLEA Network

28 June 2017, Climate Home, Even Boeing-747 tanker jets can’t win our total war on fires. The more effectively we suppress fires, the worse they become. As climate change makes the world more combustible, we need a new approach. In 1910 Ed Pulaski, a US Forest Service ranger, rounded up his men who were fighting a forest fire in dense conifer forests in northern Idaho and forced them, some at gunpoint, to take refuge in an abandoned mine shaft. The Pulaski tunnel (now a tourist site) represents the dramatic historical moment when ad-hoc approaches to controlling wildfire were shown to be utterly inadequate – this heroic failure provided the impetuous for the US Forest Service to declare total war on fire. Nearly all of Pulaski’s men survived the conflagration, one of thousands of fires that burnt across Idaho during an extremely hot and dry summer, an event now known at the ‘Big Burn’. The sheer ferocity, geographic scale and destructive power of the 1910 Idaho fires shifted the focus of the US Forest Service (USFS) from forestry toward fire fighting. This led to the development of networks of fire towers to identify wildland ignitions. They would be extinguished by teams of trained forest fire fighters, many of whom use a combined ax and mattock invented by, and named after, Ed Pulaski.The iconic mascot Smokey Bear was created by the US advertising industry to promote forest fire awareness. The USFS fire fighting policy evolved to a mandated extinguishment of any new forest fire ignition by 10am the following day, with some managers demanding that the fire size was kept below 10 acres. This total war on fire also drove innovation. In the early 1960 the USFS established Fire Lab at Missoula where an aeronautic engineer, redeployed after the defence department project he was working on was cancelled, developed the first mathematical description of fire, creating the foundation for predictive fire behaviour modelling….But there is a very big catch. The US approach is proving to be ecologically and economically unsustainable – especially in an era of increasing fire threat due to climate change.1 Total fire suppression has created the ‘fire suppression paradox’: the more effective suppression is the worse fires become. Fuel that would historically have been burnt by lightning or indigenous people builds up, resulting in catastrophic fires that are uncontainable regardless of the available technology. The fire suppression paradox also has another unintended and counterproductive consequences: communities come to believe flammable landscapes are safe, resulting in increasing urban sprawl into wildlands that are primed to burn. This massively increases the risk of loss of life and property and the inevitable, tragic loss drives further investment into aerial fire fighting. Climate change is turbo-charging this feedback – fire seasons are worsening, fire disasters are becoming more destructive, and hence demands for more investment in aggressive fire fighting are growing worldwide. Collectively this is creating a dangerous and economically and ecologically unsustainable fire-suppression spiral. Read More here