Megafire

by Michael Kodas

  Each year homes spread deeper into these increasingly flammable landscapes. A 2015 study by the U.S. Forest Service reported that about one in three U.S. residences—44 million homes—are in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where development abuts fire-prone open space.4 Research at Colorado State University shows that between 1970 and 2000, there was a more than 50 percent increase in the number of homes beside flammable forests, scrub, and grasslands, and two-thirds of those houses were adjacent to wildland prone to high-severity fires.5 By the 2010s, according to research by Headwaters Economics, the number of homes burned each year in U.S. wildfires was more than seven times higher than in the 1970s.6 Records at the National Interagency Fire Center show that average annual wildland firefighter deaths doubled between the 1970s and the 2000s.

  Budgets are burning as well. In 1995, 16 percent of the Forest Service’s budget was spent on wildfires. Twenty years later wildfires consumed 52 percent of that funding. During that period U.S. government spending to fight wildfires increased from around $300 million to $1.5 billion annually.7 In the decade leading up to the 2013 disaster on Yarnell Hill, the government’s total tab for preparing for, fighting, and recovering from wildfires averaged more than $3 billion a year. That average was less than $1 billion in the 1990s.8

  EACH OF THESE FACTORS came to bear on the Granite Mountain Hotshots, both during the months they traveled around the nation fighting enormous fires on federal land and in their final moments, when they were overrun by a small blaze in their own backyard. Their home turf, in fact, is among the areas of the planet with the most rapidly increasing wildfire hazard.

  At the time of the Yarnell Hill disaster, Arizona, according to a report from Climate Central, was enduring a combination of warming and drying faster than any other state in the nation.9 After a century of extinguishing every wildfire it could, researchers found that some Arizona forests that historically had fewer than 20 trees per acre now have more than 800–40 times their natural density of fuel, a condition endemic to ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest.10

  Development is spreading into those ever more flammable forests as fast as in any other part of the nation. According to an analysis by the Arizona Republic, the pace of home building in the state’s fire-prone landscapes jumped by 91 percent between the 1980s and the 2000s.11 While those homes are increasingly palatial, few of them meet the standards of Firewise programs from the National Fire Protection Association or Community Wildfire Protection Plans from the U.S. government’s Forest and Rangelands initiative. Some homeowners who bristle at any government telling them how to manage their land also expect it to provide protection for their property regardless of the hazard they create, thus magnifying the risk.

  Officials often promote strategies to manage wildfire based on economic or political considerations rather than science. The “fire-industrial complex” that developed to combat the blazes is today worth billions of dollars and is often driven more by business interests than ecological or safety considerations.

  Arizona is not unique in its increasing exposure to the hazard of wildfire, and the tragedy on Yarnell Hill is but one of a series of disastrous fires that are increasing in frequency, intensity, and destructiveness on every forested continent. While the deaths of the Granite Mountain Hotshots would draw more international media attention than any previous forest firefighting disaster in the United States, mass-fatality wildfires are also increasingly occurring overseas, often with far greater death tolls than that of Yarnell Hill.

  CONFLAGRATIONS ELSEWHERE ON THE PLANET are harbingers of what’s to come, for both America’s forests and its firefighters, but they are also present challenges to our nation today. During the past decade the United States has sent crews and equipment to every corner of the globe to fight exploding wildfires.

  In the Australian Alps, fires on February 7, 2009, killed 173 people and overran entire towns. In Marysville, most of which burned, residents had to pull the town’s fire chief away from his own burning home while his wife and son died in the flames inside.12 Sixty U.S. firefighters flew to Australia on just 48 hours’ notice to help battle the blazes. Until that day Australia’s McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index spanned a scale of 0 to 100, but at Melbourne Airport on “Black Saturday” the scale hit 165 after a month of the warmest temperatures in 154 years and record low rainfall. The day the fire ignited, the airport recorded its highest temperature ever. After the blaze Australia expanded its fire danger scale to account for rising temperatures and decreasing moisture. Bushfire danger there has hit the new level of “Catastrophic—Code Red” repeatedly since it was adopted.

  On Mount Carmel, where in the Bible Elijah brought down fire from heaven to prove the power of his God, a 2010 wildfire killed 44 people, including an Israeli police commissioner, the police chief of Haifa, 36 prison guards, and a 16-year-old volunteer firefighter. The nation has suffered tens of thousands of wildfires in the past century, but recorded virtually no natural ones prior to that, an indication of the man-made nature of Israel’s fire crisis. Since Israeli independence in 1948, the Jewish National Fund, which purchased the land for the founding of Israel, has promoted planting trees in the nation as the most Zionist of acts. Jews from around the world have contributed to the planting of forests, leading the nation that once had just 1 percent of its countryside wooded to now having 8 percent covered with forests.13 But as the pines in monocultures matured and the warming climate dried the forests, the JNF’s trees have fueled a series of increasingly destructive wildfires. Israelis have taken to calling the planted pines “firebombs” and their cones “hand grenades.” Ten nations sent aircraft and firefighters to Israel to help fight the blaze on Mount Carmel. One of those nations, the United States, sent C-130s loaded with fire suppressant and retardant from German airfields and funding from Washington, D.C. The “Supertanker,” a U.S. 747 converted to drop some 20,000 gallons of fire retardant, flew from California to Mount Carmel, where it made two drops on the fire before turning around and flying home. Although the Supertanker was rarely used in the United States, an updated version of the 747 returned to Israel six years later when a series of arsons ignited forests across the country and drove more than 10,000 people to evacuate Haifa.

  In 2012 Spain was overrun by its largest wildfires in two decades, including one that trapped some 150 tourists in their cars. Dozens stumbled or slid down the rocky hillside below the flames, arriving at the seaside with burns, bruises, and broken bones. A French family of five, lost in the smoke and chaos, came to the edge of a cliff instead of the beach. Pascal Couton died instantly when he fell onto rocks in the sea below. His 14-year-old daughter, Océane, drowned. In all, nearly 600 square miles of Spain burned, killing firefighters, a forester, and a farmer, and driving residents to shelter in caves. Blazes in the Canary Islands forced 5,000 to flee, with nearly a thousand of them boarding ferries to escape.

  In 2015 the smoke from some 100,000 intentionally set Indonesian fires spread over 3,100 miles and drove more than half a million people to seek medical care. The haze from the fires forced the closure of airports and schools as far away as Thailand. Indonesia prepared warships to evacuate villagers trapped in the smoke for months, but not before more than 20, most of them children, choked to death in the toxic orange fog. The United States sent more than two metric tons of firefighting equipment, and Russia sent jets to help battle the conflagrations. The Guardian newspaper described them as “almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century,”14 and the nation’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency called them a “crime against humanity.”15 By year’s end, the fires had done over $14 billion in damage—more than twice the toll of the 2004 tsunami, which killed thousands of Indonesians.16 And their impact has been global. The scale of the burning since the 1990s has led successive Indonesian presidents to apologize for the haze that blankets Malaysia and Singapore every summer, and in bad years spreads across Southeast Asia. The fires, almost all of them i
ntentionally started by multinational corporations and slash-and-burn farmers, often burn underground into the spongy peat that lies beneath many of Indonesia’s rain forests and holds up to 10 times more carbon than the trees. On some 40 days during 2015 the Indonesian blazes released more climate-warming CO2 than the entire U.S. economy,17 thus warming the global climate and driving increases in wildfires around the planet.

  Six months after the Indonesian fires subsided, hundreds of blazes ignited in western Canada as early-spring temperatures rose as high as 90 degrees—as much as 40 degrees above normal and roughly as hot as Miami.18 Snowpack fell as low as 85 percent below average. The worst of the fires destroyed some 2,400 buildings in Fort McMurray, the Alberta city developed to service the tar sands, which produce oil with the greatest impact on the climate. More than 100,000 people in the city deep in the northern boreal forest and the camps serving the oil fields fled on the only highway leading south. Much of the population was evacuated more than once as the fire that covered nearly 400 square miles when it entered the city grew to more than five times that size—nearly as big as Delaware. Firefighters from as far away as South Africa joined in the effort. As in Indonesia’s tropical forests, the destruction of the northern pine forests is magnifying the climatic changes driving the fires. The increase in wildfires and insect infestations driven by the warming climate has turned boreal forests around the world from carbon sinks that suck planet-warming CO2 from the atmosphere to carbon sources that are releasing more greenhouse gases than they sequester.19 The fires also amplify the impacts of climate change on ice and oceans, as black soot in the smoke travels as far as Greenland, where it peppers glaciers, absorbs the sun’s heat, and speeds the melting of ice sheets, thus raising sea levels with the flood of runoff.20

  In Russia wildfires burned some 75 million acres of boreal forest in 2012, dwarfing the U.S. record of 10 million acres.21 Blazes in the summer of 2010, the previous record year there, blanketed Moscow with so much smoke that it, along with the heat wave that drove the fires, doubled the normal summertime death rate in the city.22 Similar fires are increasingly burning into cities around the world—Colorado Springs in 2012; Valparaiso, Chile, in 2014; Cape Town, South Africa, in 2015; and Fort McMurray in 2016.

  In Greece the massive wildfires of 2007 killed 67 people, threatened the relics of Olympia, burned into the suburbs of Athens, and nearly brought down the nation’s government. In 2009, 2010, 2013, and 2015, more fires threatened the nation’s forests, cities, and governments. The fires exhibited behaviors nobody in Greece had ever seen before, baking stone ruins into piles of lime and blowing firefighting aircraft back from the flames. Firefighters saved only the most cherished antiquities and let entire villages burn. Ironically, the fires in the birthplace of democracy have paralleled the nation’s elections, with most election years bringing new waves of fire and closer elections bringing more flames.23 Wildfires have become such a scourge in Greece that when the Czech artist David Cerny sculpted a map of national stereotypes for the entrance to the European Council building in Brussels, he showed Greece as a charred wasteland.

  IN THE UNITED STATES, as in the rest of the world, the flames are proving impossible to stop. A decade before the Yarnell Hill Fire overran the Granite Mountain Hotshots, Arizona and Colorado simultaneously had the largest wildfire in each state’s history to that date. A year later a hunter started the largest fire in California history. The “Fire Siege of 2003” burned across Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Ventura, and San Diego Counties, killing 12 people in its first 24 hours, turning 2,232 homes to cinders, and blackening 275,000 acres of land—an area more than twice the size of the entire city of Los Angeles.

  Alaska set a state record the following year when wildfires burned more than 6.38 million acres of timberland and released more greenhouse gases than did the burning of all the fuel that passed through Alaskan pipelines that year. At the other end of the nation, Texas suffered its worst wildfire ever when the 2006 East Amarillo Complex spread over a million acres of grasslands, killing 12 people and more than 4,000 cattle and horses in just 48 hours.

  For those who thought such catastrophic conflagrations only burned in the West, 2007’s Big Turnaround Fire was appropriately named. The largest fire in Georgia’s history, it burned nearly 400,000 acres and eventually merged with the Bugaboo Scrub Fire, the largest fire on record in Florida. Nine years later dozens of fires spread across the Southeast in November and December, killing 13 people in Tennessee, where they burned over entire towns.

  Utah’s record-setting conflagration, the Milford Flat Fire, burned over 567 square miles in 2007. Smoke from the blaze caused highway pileups as far away as California, drove truckers to abandon their rigs, and forced the closure of 150 miles of Interstate 15. Then the flames returned to California. The Zaca and Witch Fires burned from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, killing nine people, injuring more than 60 firefighters, and destroying 1,500 homes. Emergency personnel evacuated more people during the fires than they had during Hurricane Katrina. That number would have been even higher had the call from San Diego’s city attorney to evacuate the entire municipality been heeded.

  Since 2000 more than a dozen U.S. states have reported the largest wildfires in their recorded histories. Beginning with the Fourmile Canyon Fire that broke out when I was moving into my cottage in Boulder in 2010, Colorado broke its most destructive fire record four times in four years.

  IN 2006 —​DURING WHICH a then-record 9.8 million acres of land burned in the United States—Anthony LeRoy (Tony) Westerling, a fire and climate researcher, released a paper with colleagues from across the West showing that in the 16 years after 1986, western forests saw a fourfold increase in the number of wildfires and a sixfold increase in the amount of land they burned when compared with the previous 16 years.24 A follow-up paper released by Westerling in 2016 showed that wildfires in mid-elevation western forests had continued to increase and that grasslands and scrublands were showing a similar trend.25

  On average, according to the nation’s “Quadrennial Fire Review 2009,” wildfires burned 7.15 million acres a year between 2000 and 2008—twice the average during the 1990s.26 Between 2005 and 2014, three years saw more than 9 million acres burn—the most since the federal government began keeping those records half a century earlier. Then, in 2015, the area burned topped 10 million acres for the first time on record. U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists estimate that in the coming decades, as much as 20 million acres will burn annually. During the 1970s that average was just over 3 million. And there’s another worrisome trend in the data. Decades ago, though far fewer acres burned, there were often just as many fires. So on average today’s fires are larger than those earlier in the record.27

  According to the U.S. Forest Service, the worst 1 percent of wildfires consume 30 percent of the nation’s firefighting budget.28 Huge, hot, and fast, these fires make up a new category of fire, exhibiting behaviors rarely seen by foresters or firefighters. The infernos, often comprising many fires attacking on multiple fronts, can launch fusillades of firebrands miles ahead of the conflagration to ignite new blazes in unburnt forests and communities. The flames create their own weather systems, spinning tornadoes of fire into the air, filling the sky with pyrocumulus clouds that blast the ground with lightning to start new fires, and driving back firefighting aircraft with their winds. The intensity of their heat makes them impossible to fight with direct attacks.

  “They cannot be controlled by any suppression resources that we have available anywhere in the world,” said Kevin O’Loughlin, when he headed Melbourne’s Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre at the turn of the millennium. For their physical impact on the landscape Professor Stephen J. Pyne, America’s preeminent wildfire historian, calls the fires “climatic tsunamis.”

  One of the few successes firefighters, foresters, and scientists have had in dealing with them is to give them a name—megafires.

  WHEN I MOVED TO COLORADO, I joined the tho
usands of migrants to the West who are both threatened by and contributing to increasingly destructive wildfires. And by the time the Granite Mountain Hotshots marched up Yarnell Hill, I knew that a fire doesn’t have to be big to deserve the “mega” title.

  3

  Prescott

  Prescott, Arizona—July 1, 2013

  THE FIREFIGHTERS WHO RECOVERED the hotshots’ bodies didn’t bring them home to Prescott, but took them instead to the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix. During the ride there members of the honor guard teared up as people crowded the sides of the highway—men in their dress military uniforms; children costumed as firefighters, their mothers sobbing beside them. Some saluted or held their hands over their hearts. All of them fell silent as the caravan passed.

  The wives, children, parents, and siblings of the hotshots—there were more than 200 immediate family members—would wait nearly a week for the procession of 19 white hearses that brought their bodies back to Prescott. The men who escorted the bodies to Phoenix, however, returned home that night to find firefighters from across the country and press from around the world flooding the city.

  Prescott, with the city slogan “Everybody’s Hometown,” would normally welcome the attention. Frontier Days, the biggest yearly event in the city, was scheduled to kick off as the honor guard returned from Phoenix. In the coming days, horses, bulls, and cowboys in chaps would fill the rodeo grounds. In other years at many city celebrations, such as the upcoming 150th anniversary, revelers would don period western garb. Men in bowlers or ten-gallon hats, revolvers on their hips and their gray mustaches waxed into handlebars, escorted women with parasols, fishnet stockings, and garish dance-hall dresses. But in 2013 the first day of the world’s oldest rodeo was notable only for the 19 riderless horses parading through the ring.