On June 4, 2021, amid flowering saguaros and prickly pear cacti, a wildfire bloomed in the Sonoran Desert in central Arizona. Its nascent flames gorged on nonnative grasses desiccated by a long, severe drought, and the fire was further nourished by the weather. A nearby weather station recorded a temperature of 36° Celsius (97° Fahrenheit). And it was so dry that the blades of firefighters’ bulldozers — used to clear brush — sparked small flames as the heavy vehicles dragged on rocks.
Fire ecologist Mary Lata of the U.S. Forest Service first heard about the fire over the radio while conducting fieldwork off to the north, in the Tonto National Forest. “I remember hearing them talking,” she says, “and little by little realizing they weren’t going to catch this one.”
By June 7, winds had blown the wildfire east-northeast into the Pinal Mountains, in the Tonto’s southern reaches. The flames ascended rapidly, overcoming rock cliffs — defying the expectations of veteran firefighters, Lata says — and sweeping through vast, unbroken stretches of chaparral. When the fire reached the highest elevations, crowned by pine forests, it swallowed those too.
The Telegraph Fire, as it’s now called, grew so intense that it began to create its own wind, its rising heat generating a convective force that sucked in air from the sides, Lata says. “Of all the fires I’ve worked on, Telegraph was the nastiest.”
On the fifth day, the fire neared the city of Globe. By then, it had already consumed an expanse that exceeded the area of Globe five times over. The blaze would go down as one of the largest conflagrations in Arizona history, engulfing some 700 square kilometers of land — equal to about half the area of Phoenix. But the fire would not swallow Globe.
Instead, on a ridge just outside the city, the Telegraph Fire encountered a bulwark, the vestiges of a bygone blaze.
Four years earlier, lightning had sparked the Pinal Fire in this location, albeit under milder conditions. Recognizing the need to clear out vegetation that might feed future blazes, fire crews allowed the blaze to consume litter, seedlings and other brush near to the ground. Crews even ignited flames of their own, expanding the fire’s breadth.
Arriving at the Pinal’s leftovers, the Telegraph Fire “went from a running canopy fire, where it was killing about 60 to 70 percent of the trees that it had encountered, to a creeping ground fire, where it was killing about 1 percent of the trees encountered,” says Kit O’Connor, an ecologist at the Forest Service in Missoula, Mont. Eventually, the fire halted about a kilometer away from a neighborhood in Globe’s outskirts.
Had it not been for the Pinal Fire, the Telegraph Fire would have burned into town, Lata says. “There’s nothing we could have done to stop it.”
The decision to let the Pinal Fire burn had been guided by a new blueprint for wildfire management, known as potential operational delineations. PODs section the landscape into zones within which fires can feasibly be contained. The boundaries are determined before the fire season starts by a mixture of artificial intelligence and local knowledge. A POD network can help land managers identify opportunities to harness wildfires that ignite under manageable conditions. The hope is that if subsequent fires erupt amid extreme conditions, there will be less brush available to fuel their fury.
“If you have a fire that’s rushing towards homes, and there is no burned-out area or fuels cleared around those homes, they’re basically guaranteed to be lost,” says O’Connor, who has helped construct PODs throughout the West.
Today, POD networks sprawl across the West, from California to Washington and as far east as Minnesota. That coverage includes some 70 national forests, as well as state and private lands.
But as these wildfire blueprints spread, they face challenges. Keeping them updated to reflect the changing nature of the landscape is a crucial but difficult endeavor. And whether they will protect the interests of the Indigenous people who have managed the landscape for centuries remains to be seen.
But the need for a new strategy is massive.
Climate change and decades of misguided fire management have steadily stoked wildfires in the West (SN: 6/17/22). Compared with four decades ago, the average area burned by western blazes each year has more than doubled. During the region’s record-breaking 2020 wildfire season, thousands of fires burned an area larger than the state of Maryland. These blazes are now burning more than twice as many homes and buildings as at the beginning of this century — from 2010 to 2020, fires destroyed more than three structures for each 10 square kilometers burned. And scientists predict that more land, and more homes, will burn in the future.
Working with manageable wildfires, or those that emerge in ideal locations under favorable weather conditions, to clear away dense vegetation could help reduce the risk that bigger blazes pose to homes and people across the West. “We can’t make fire go away,” O’Connor says. But “there’s potential for huge benefits” in finding opportunities to use it.
Collaborating to change
On December 4 of last year, there was no smoke discernible in the sky above Monterey, Calif. The worst months of the state’s fire season — July to November — had passed. But as seasons go, so do they return. So on this day in Monterey, a crowd of firefighters, conservationists and researchers had gathered in anticipation of the fires yet to come.
“We’re sort of stuck between two paradigms,” Christopher Dunn told the group. Projected behind him were two images. On the left, a painting from 1905 depicts a member of the Blackfeet Tribe crouched on a prairie, setting fire to the grass with a flaming torch. On the right, a staged photo from 1955 shows a fire brigade of jeeps and a helicopter heading toward a smoking fire in the distance. “We need both of these,” said Dunn, a forestry researcher at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
In 1910, just five years after the birth of the Forest Service, the Big Blowup — some 1,700 wildfires in Montana, Idaho and Washington — burned over 12,000 square kilometers in just a couple days. As a result, Congress passed the 1911 Weeks Act, which effectively outlawed traditional uses of fire by Indigenous people. They had used fire for a trove of benefits, from corralling bison to clearing brushy areas for crops. Then in 1935, the Forest Service enacted the “10 a.m. policy,” in which every reported fire should be suppressed by the 10th hour of the next day.
Fast-forward to today, and about 98 percent of U.S. wildfires are suppressed before reaching 1.2 square kilometers. Suppressing most wildfires has allowed thick, continuous beds of vegetation to grow. Under extreme conditions, such fuel loads can nourish huge blazes like the Telegraph Fire. A landscape with frequent fire, on the other hand, tends to develop a patchwork of areas that burned at different points in the past, with vegetation at various stages of regrowth. Such pyrodiverse landscapes, with their rich mix of habitat types, can boost an area’s biodiversity, scientists suspect. What’s more, recently burned patches contain diminished fuel stocks, which can hinder the growth of wildfires even under extreme conditions, like the Pinal Fire scar did.
“We want more fire,” Dunn said. He was speaking to a crowd focused on developing PODs for lands in and adjacent to California’s Los Padres National Forest, along the state’s mountainous Central Coast between Monterey and Ventura.
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