#wildfire suppression

A provincewide state of emergency is no longer in effect due to improving wildfire conditions, though risks remain for over a dozen communities that still aren't clear of wildfire threats. Premier Wab Kinew announced the end to the Manitoba emergency order during a Monday news conference. It was originally issued May 28 amid a spate of wildfires that forced thousands to evacuate rural and northern communities. Kinew credited the end of the state of emergency to ongoing wildfire suppression efforts, favourable recent weather conditions and the "good nature and hard work" of Manitobans, particularly in the north and east, where people have been able to start returning home.

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Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

The towering trees of Yosemite National Park have long held a treasured place in the American psyche, whether the ancient and majestic sequoias, the Ponderosa pines with their snake-patterned bark, or the acorn-laden black oaks, the lifeblood of many Native American cultures.

It was with this legacy in mind that two top Yosemite park officials walked last week through a collection of tree stumps and explained to a visitor why they ordered chain-saw-wielding crews to fell hundreds of trees.

As she trudged past the remnant of a felled incense cedar, Cicely Muldoon, the superintendent of the park, acknowledged that the notion of cutting trees in Yosemite could be hard to explain to the public. “It hurts people’s hearts,” she said. “But we have to use every tool at our disposal to save the forests and to save the park and to restore a healthy ecosystem and to keep people safe.”

With more than 140 million trees killed in California by drought and plagues of beetles over the past decade — 2.4 million of them in Yosemite alone — forestry experts describe the state’s forests as wounded and extremely vulnerable. Now, as the state suffers another severe drought, Yosemite seems perennially under siege by fire and smoke.

In just the past month, the Oak fire and the Washburn fire have raged near and in the park, prompting evacuations, closing entrances and threatening the largest stands of sequoias, including the prized Mariposa Grove.

Ms. Muldoon says that more aggressive steps need to be taken than before to make the forests of Yosemite more resilient. But she and the park’s management will first have to prevail in court.

A judge this month temporarily halted the park’s biomass removal efforts, as the tree cutting was euphemistically known, in response to a lawsuit filed by an environmental group based in Berkeley, Calif., that argues that the park did not properly review the impacts. The thinning project covers less than 1 percent of Yosemite’s forests.

Whether or not the lawsuit proves successful, it is resonating well outside of the park’s boundaries by raising larger questions about how to manage forests in the age of climate change.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Wildfires in Canada have so far scorched forests totaling the size of the state of Virginia. The province of Quebec recorded its biggest blaze ever this month as it advanced across an area 13 times as large as New York City. Mega fires, so vast and ferocious that they simply cannot be fought, have erupted across the country.

Even as thousands of Canadians and firefighters from abroad continued to battle more than 900 fires, Canada’s record-shattering wildfire season has made it clear that traditional firefighting methods are no longer enough, experts in wildfires and forests say.

Instead of focusing on putting out flames, wildfire agencies, provincial governments and the logging industry must carry out fundamental changes to prevent fires from igniting and spreading in the first place, they say.

They include steps like closing forests to people when conditions are ripe for fires and increasing patrols to spot smaller fires earlier, when there is still a chance to contain them.

New strategies are crucial because wildfires, in the vastness of Canada, are expected to become increasingly difficult to combat as they grow more frequent and bigger in the hotter and drier conditions resulting from climate change.