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“I like to think of fire ingredients as somewhat similar to the ingredients you need to start a campfire,” said John Abatzoglou, associate professor in the University of California Merced’s climatology laboratory. “You need enough fuel, good fuels [kindling, flammable plant matter], you need this fuel to be dry enough, and you need an ignition source to bring these three things together and you have what it takes for a fire.
In 2021, all the ingredients are there, leaving the region ready for a fire.
“The West is a powder keg this year,” Abatzoglou said.
The high heat and dry weather resulted in ground conditions throughout the Northwest that are normally seen much later in a typical fire season.
“We are seeing fire behavior that we usually don’t see until mid-August,” said Josh Harvey, chief of the fire management bureau in the Idaho Land Department.
Trees moist enough to withstand the heat of a fire usually help slow the spread of fires, experts say. Oregon firefighters say conditions on the ground are so dry that even large trees are contributing to the spread.
“It’s almost as if the trees are rising like grass,” said Jim Gersbach, spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Forestry. “They also go up quickly and instantly when burning, because the needles don’t have a lot of moisture.”
What starts a fire can be random, Abatzoglou said, pointing to accidental thunderstorms or sparks from revealing parties of the genre. But the conditions must be right for the fire to experience explosive growth.
“What we see, at least in years like this, is that it is dry for a long time of the year and over a large geographic area,” Abatzoglou said. “It’s those extra spins on that roulette wheel that increase the risk of fires finding their way to scorch the landscape.”
Forests are also much denser due to the practice of putting out all forest fires for much of the last century, regardless of their threat to people. A dense forest needs more water to stay healthy, leaving it more likely to dry out and start an explosive fire.
“Because of the way we have managed the forests, we have created the conditions for the fires to be more severe,” said Donald Falk, professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Arizona. ” It’s ours. We stopped the fire from doing its job.
Even before the Beckwourth compound fire in California and the Bootleg fire in Oregon exploded, firefighters had to contend with an unusually high number of small fires this year.
In Oregon, Gersbach said firefighters have fought 68% more fires this year than average. And it’s not just Oregon: much of the western and northwestern United States has also seen significantly higher numbers of fire starts.
With many northwestern states experiencing equally unprecedented and severe conditions, resources are dwindling.
“When we talk about the resources available to fight these fires, the system is being exploited,” said Harvey, of the Idaho Lands Department. “There just isn’t much there.”
Overloaded staff make it more likely that small fires that would otherwise have been brought under control will get out of hand, Harvey said.
Heavy and constant rains are what end fire seasons, experts say. With the warmest temperatures of a typical calendar year still expected to arrive, forest fires will get worse unless rains arrive.
“We just don’t have good reason to believe this is going to happen,” Abatzoglou said.
If strong winds arrive before the rains, an already bad fire season could turn disastrous. Abatzoglou said that when the wind hits a fire, especially in a drought, “you can get over half a million acres in a matter of days.”
Experts say changes in the region’s climate mean conditions will be increasingly conducive to fires.
“What we like is that Oregon and much of the western United States are experiencing the cumulative effects of several years of drought, which impacts the frequency and intensity of fires.” , said Gersbach. “It’s something of a new normal.”
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