[MCN] The Science of Fighting Wildfires Gets a Satellite Boost

[Matthew Koehler]

Yet another national media outlet is somehow able to write about Montana
wildfires and find an actual, real-life Montana-based fire ecologist,
researcher and/or scientific expert to interview and offer their
knowledgeable opinion.

Meanwhile, many folks in the Montana news media seem entirely intent on
just letting Montana’s politicians – especially from the GOP – engaged in
childish name calling like calling Montana citizens who are
environmentalists ‘extremists’ ‘fringe’ or ‘radicals’ (thereby inciting
hatred, and maybe even potential violence against environmentalists in
Montana).

Maybe someday soon more media outlets in Montana will be able to locate the
wildfire scientists, researchers and experts literally living right under
their noses, or maybe even right next door.

This piece from Megan Molteni in the latest WIRED is worth a read. It’s
titled “The Science of Fighting Wildfires Gets a Satellite Boost” and you
can read the entire article here:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-science-of-fighting-wildfires-gets-a-satellite-boost/

These paragraphs below were very interesting, especially since Zinke,
Daines, Gianforte and the Montana timber industry have blamed
environmentalists for all the wildfires in Montana, and specifically the
Park Creek Fire near Lincoln.

——————

Here’s the straightforward logic of Zinke’s scapegoating: Environmentalists
block the Forest Service from lowering the fuel load on the land, land
catches on fire, and now it’s harder to put out. Thanks, tree-huggers.

*But fire scientists say it’s more complicated than that. Many question the
ecological (and economic) value of thinning forests out, for three big
reasons.  One, the evidence for its efficacy is both scant and at times
contradictory. Two, probabilistic risk assessments show that the thinning
doesn’t really help much because the likelihood of a fire starting close
enough to interact with thinned areas is negligibly small. And three, in
the worst weather conditions—dry, hot, and most importantly, windy—no
amount of thinning or selective logging is going to make much difference.*

*A case in point: that Park Creek fire burning outside of Lincoln. It
started on a remote slope that wasn’t slated for any prescribed burns or
dead tree removals. But such treatments wouldn’t have made much difference
anyway, according to Carl Seielstad, a fire ecologist at the National
Center for Landscape Fire Analysis at the University of Montana*, because
the closest road is more than mile away, at the bottom of a slope.

If you know anything about fire behavior, you know it moves much faster
uphill. And in this case there wasn’t much in that direction, except more
trees. “Without any roads in this area there was nothing for firefighters
to anchor to,” says Seielstad, pointing at a 3D rendering of the fire’s
path he’s pulled up on his computer. “*It’s fair to say that regardless of
treatment, this area would probably have been impossible to contain*.”
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