#bootleg fire

By Scott Scheffer

Climate scientists around the world are alarmed by a triple climate-change-related crisis that hit the western U.S. and Canada in June and July.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

When a monster of a wildfire whipped into the Sycan Marsh Preserve here in south-central Oregon in July, Katie Sauerbrey feared the worst.

Ms. Sauerbrey, a fire manager for The Nature Conservancy, the conservation group that owns the 30,000-acre preserve, was in charge of a crew helping to fight the blaze — the Bootleg fire, one of the largest in a summer of extreme heat and dryness in the West — and protect a research station on the property.

Watching the fire, which had already rapidly burned through thousands of acres of adjacent national forest, she saw a shocking sight: Flames 200 feet high were coming over a nearby ridge. “I said, OK, there’s nothing we can do,” she recalled.

But as the fire got closer, it changed dramatically, Ms. Sauerbrey said. “It had gone from the most extreme fire behavior I had ever seen in my career to seeing four-foot flame lengths moving through the stand.” While the fire kept burning through the forest, its lower intensity spared many trees, and the station survived.

Firefighters describe this kind of change in behavior as a fire “dropping down,” shifting from one with intense flames that spread quickly from tree crown to tree crown to a lower-level burn that is less dangerous. There are various reasons this can happen, including localized changes in winds, moisture, tree types and topography.

But for Ms. Sauerbrey and her colleagues with The Nature Conservancy, what she witnessed was most likely a real-life example of what they and others have been studying for years: how thinning of trees in overgrown forests, combined with prescribed, or controlled, burns of accumulated dead vegetation on the forest floor, can help achieve the goal of reducing the intensity of wildfires by removing much of the fuel that feeds them.

It’s a goal shared by others in the West, where the 2021 fire season saw several extremely large fires. The Bootleg fire, which burned more than 400,000 acres, was one of the largest in the state’s history. And two fires in Northern California, the Dixie and Caldor fires, together burned 1.2 million acres.

Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:

The Bootleg fire stampeded through southern Oregon so fiercely that it spit up thunderclouds. But when the flames approached the Sycan Marsh Preserve, a 30,000-acre wetland thick with ponderosa pines, something incredible happened. The flames weakened and the fire slowed down, allowing firefighters to move in and steer the blaze away from a critical research station.

That land belongs to the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit that has worked with the local Klamath Tribes to bring back pre-colonial forest management techniques such as prescribed fire—small, controlled burns that clear out fire-fueling vegetation, renew the soil and prevent bigger, runaway blazes.

Pete Caligiuri, the group’s forest program director, credits those efforts with saving the research center, suggesting that the ancient forest management tools can have a dramatic impact.

“That’s exactly what we had hypothesized and hoped would happen,” said Caligiuri. “The research station is completely unimpacted, unharmed by the fire—the fire moved all the way around it.”

A similar phenomenon occurred in the Black Hills Ecosystem Restoration Project, another area where the Klamath Tribes had worked with the US Forest Service to thin young trees and apply prescribed burning. When the Bootleg fire finally swept through, the forest was far less damaged than other areas that were not treated, the forest service said, noting that deer were even seen grazing on a “green island” preserved by the treatment.

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud over the Bootleg Fire July 14, 2021.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

A towering cloud of hot air, smoke and moisture that reached airliner heights and spawned lightning. Wind-driven fronts of flame that have stampeded across the landscape, often leapfrogging firebreaks. Even, possibly, a rare fire tornado.

The Bootleg Fire in Southern Oregon, spurred by months of drought and last month’s blistering heat wave, is the largest wildfire so far this year in the United States, having already burned more than 340,000 acres, or 530 square miles, of forest and grasslands.

And at a time when climate change is causing wildfires to be larger and more intense, it’s also one of the most extreme, so big and hot that it’s affecting winds and otherwise disrupting the atmosphere.

“The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the state forestry department. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”

The Bootleg Fire has been burning for two weeks, and for most of that time it’s exhibited one or more forms of extreme fire behavior, leading to rapid changes in winds and other conditions that have caused flames to spread rapidly in the forest canopy, ignited whole stands of trees at once, and blown embers long distances, rapidly igniting spot fires elsewhere.

“It’s kind of an extreme, dangerous situation,” said Chuck Redman, a forecaster with the National Weather Service who has been at the fire command headquarters providing forecasts.

When Mount Mazama, a 12,000-foot volcano exploded approximately 7,700 years ago, the mountain collapsed into itself and created a caldera–not a crater. Subsequently, the caldera–not the crater–filled with rain and snowfall, giving birth to Crater Lake–despite not being a crater. Craters, on the other hand are formed by the outward explosion of rocks and other materials from a volcano. Given…

Oregon Gov. Warns Of ‘Harsh Reality’ Amid Mammoth Bootleg Fire

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) warned Sunday the state would likely see more devastating wildfires linked to climate change as firefighters continue to battle the mammoth Bootleg Fire, the largest blaze in the United States this year that is still burning near the state’s border with California. Brown made the comments on CNN’s “State of the Union,” telling host Jake Tapper that an increase in…