Shortly after the Pacific Palisades and Altadena swept the catastrophic fires, demand was high among wildfire experts Stephen Pyne and Jack Cohen. They are respected for their historical and scientific expertise, and they provide Comments and opinions.
Although none of them live in California, they are familiar with its terrain, devilish winds and hillsides ready to burn, and their message is clear. Like these fires, the tragic tragedy is that they don’t have to be that bad.
“It’s not the LA burning, but the majority of its developments enhance rather than devalue the threat of fire.” Pyne wrote last month.
Currently, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, who lives outside Phoenix, is the author of numerous books, exploring the cultural role of the fire shaping human history.
Cohen is a retired research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, Home ignition power and collaborated with the Missoula Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula, Montana where he lives.
“Uncontrollable extreme wildfires are inevitable,” He wrote it five years ago “But by reducing the potential for home ignition … we can create fire-resistant homes and communities.”
The Alphabet Street community in Pacific Palisades was burned in the Palisades fire.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Frustrated over the decades of the ever-ineffective efficiency of firefighting efforts, both of which advocate a more complex understanding of fires and ecosystems that promote urban and wild land fires. Fires are often seen as a crisis and a state of emergency that it is separated from many factors of destructive nature that may mitigate the damage.
This interview with Pyne and Cohen has been edited for length and clarity.
Many scientists Climate change As a major factor in these explosive fires. But what you see is different.
Stephen Pyne: I have no doubt that global warming is putting energy into the system in a way that usually aggravates these fires. However, from the 18th century, American cities were often burned because towns were made of the same materials as rural areas – and burned in the same winds and droughts. And then in the 1960s and 1970s, we National fire problemswhich requires federal agencies to modify their fire policies. All of this was before climate change. This is simply because of land use and fire fighting habits.
Eaton and Palisade open fire
The devastating fire killed at least 28 people, destroyed and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, worth more than $275 billion, and made the burning area 2½ times the size of Manhattan.
The climate is obviously a serious contributor, but if we listened to the knowledge of taming urban wildfires learned in the last century, this latest outbreak wouldn’t be that bad: strictly mandatory mandatory combustion and building regulations; zoning destroyed a lot Fuel; install fire protection systems suitable for actual risks; create an environment where insurance can be operated. These reforms, ultimately political, are the reasons why urban fires disappear nationwide. As if almost all the extinction plague was gone, we decided that we no longer needed to maintain the Pyric hygiene that contained it.
Jack Cohen: As Steve said, fire is a sociological issue and climate change has become a key part of the discussion, but we encountered these issues before climate change. Fires are essentially a physical phenomenon, and these fires represent physical problems. Pacific Palisades and Altadena are burning due to ignition issues, not because of climate change. The community was burned because the house was on fire. This is very simple.
Fire is described as unprecedented. What does the history show?
Pyne: Calling January’s fire “unprecedented” doesn’t take us anywhere. We experienced a city fire and we fixed it. For example, After the Berkeley Fire in 1923, Wood shingles are prohibited on new buildings near the Bay Area. They were often seen as dangerous, but then during the post-war big housing boom, especially in Southern California, Mumushi returned. Reforms have had bad fires, but they are often fragmented, and the cities here, and the cities there, are usually too late, almost always reacting.
Cohen: These fires are unprecedented because they happened in January and because it didn’t rain that month and it was a little bit fire. We encountered similar catastrophic fires in the fall The 2017 Fire This destroyed the Santa Rosa community in Coffey Park and Fountaingrove in October, as well as the Camp Fire launched in 2018 The destruction of Paradise Town November.
How do you think these fires can change the discussion about the struggle?
Pyne: I was asked but didn’t know how to answer when the pain became enough, we actually had a serious conversation and solved the basics, which was more about changing the fuel provided by the house than designing the fuel Once a cityscape breaks out, new technologies will curb the outbreak. I think these recent fires may be enough to act as catalysts, but I think that because of the massive amounts and damage that have been established in the city fires for decades.
What bothers me the most is that I’m working to find mechanisms that can be united and have serious discussions in a coherent way and to jointly decide what we need to do. But we haven’t reached that point yet. I think this is a political failure. I think this is a collapse of our ability to reach a legitimate consensus. The fire spread to a contagious nature. It requires a collective response. I’m not sure if we have enough process to call the necessary social events.
Cohen: Like Steve, I think the high visibility that Palisades and Altadena destroys will stimulate change. But the most frustrating thing about another community disaster is that the main social perception of the threat of wildfires has become a major obstacle to wildfires historically becoming an inevitable obstacle to wildfires. Our language greatly mocks wildfires. It becomes “explosive”. It “makes the house evaporate on its roads.” When we are compatible with wildfires, It is cast in this doomsday term?
The dramatic exaggeration of our language depicting wildfires matches the mundane reality of how houses and structures are ignited during extreme wildfires. The research I and others have done has determined that the grand burning embers are the main source of numerous and small amounts of ignition within the community. The ignition loophole of the house – related to burning embers and the burning materials surrounding the house – leads to damage. Reduce this vulnerability and reduce community ignition potential.
Unfortunately, this information was ignored and undermined when the head of the Forest Services Department had especially ignored and destroyed before Congress raised expectations for wildfire control. The agency suppresses 98% of fires Totally suggest that inhibition is possible. The problem, of course, is that all of our major community wildfire risk issues are in uncontrollable 2%.
As a result, we will eventually feel like victims of fire, and victimization will be a barrier to solving the problem.
How do we start thinking about fire in a more constructive way?
Pyne: At least in the fire community, part of the general narrative is that we know enough about fires that the public and politicians must be educated. But every potential community – social, economic, political, intellectual, scientific – studies this question somehow misleads it. We are working to come up with the right definition.
Fire is a systematic problem – involving ecology, politics, sociology – we are just not ready to understand it in this way. So we still see it as a part-time seasonal phenomenon, with occasional emergencies.
Cohen: Most people think their understanding of fire is wrong. Often, people think of wildfires as things rather than processes. A few years ago, a fire in Colorado was described as “The tsunami of 300 feet high.” The fire cannot spread. It propagates only when specific ignition and combustion requirements are met, and unfortunately most homes meet these requirements. We focus more on visible flames (tsunamis), than on our main structure ignition mechanism: burning embers.
Many agencies, of course federal agencies, believe that the intensity of firepower determines the risk of community wildfires. But the intensity of the fire has nothing to do with structural ignition fragility – how the house is ignited. However, they remain focused on keeping fuel loads low – emission reduction brushes, forest thinning – which burns at lower intensity, but still leads to uncontrollable extreme fires. When our institutions, institutions and politics recognize that we have no choice but to control the inevitable extreme wildfires and recognize that community wildfire risks are a structural ignition issue, we can create fire-resistant, fire-resistant fire-resistant communities.
The road to recovery will be long. Do you see hope along the way?
Pyne: What I took away from the current conversation is that perhaps all parties involved need to re-examine their understanding of what we see. Maybe we can reach a consensus on the actual need to improve conditions and do it in a fire understanding way.
I’m beginning to think that the fire problem is so common in many of its manifestations that we can’t have a general solution, but we don’t need a universal response either. A hundred small things may be enough to add up to make a big change.
Let’s end the ridiculous problem of the power line that caught fire. Let’s break down the fuel landscape size of monoculture, whether it’s trees, wood flowers or houses. Let’s improve emergency evacuation routes and protocols. The fire touched so many aspects of land and life that there were many entry points for risk reduction.
Cohen: My particular philosophy on environmental issues is that they are all human problems. This is not a problem with the Earth, nor anything other than a human problem, which is usually possible. In this case, we can live with fire. But it’s obvious that we need to learn how.
