But until it comes, we live under threat of wildfire. That’s been on the mind of one of our listeners …
Pete Smoot: I’m Pete Smoot. I live in South San Jose. I’ve been living here for many decades at this point … and I love hiking around in our parks.
Olivia Allen-Price: As he hikes around, he thinks a lot about wildfire – and how it’s both vital to the health of our ecosystems … but how it can also have devastating consequences.
Pete Smoot: We keep hearing that we have record numbers of acres of forest burning. And I keep wondering, well, forest people say that the forest should burn all the time just for forest health. What should a normal forest fire year look like? How many acres should be burning?
Olivia Allen-Price: I’ve wondered this too. Today on the show we’ll take a long view at what wildfire looked like in California before colonization – and try to parse out what “normal” should look like today. Plus, we’ll answer this second question from Pete…
Pete Smoot: I live near Quicksilver Park and it’s never had a wildfire in there in all the time I’ve been living here. And I’m kind of wondering like how due are we for a fire?
Olivia Allen-Price: That’s all just ahead on Bay Curious, the show that answers listener questions about the San Francisco Bay Area. Stay with us.
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Olivia Allen-Price: Our question asker Pete Smoot has a lot of great questions about wildfires – ones that many of you might have considered too, especially if you live near a fire prone area. Or open land that just looks like it’s ready to burn. Danielle Venton is a climate reporter at KQED, and has been covering wildfires for nine years. Welcome, Danielle.
Danielle Venton: Happy to be here.
Olivia Allen-Price: So, Pete’s got a few questions, but let’s start with this one:
Pete Smoot: What should a normal forest fire year look like? How many acres should be burning?
Danielle Venton: I love this question because it recognizes that fire is this natural, necessary component of the California landscape. We are amid fire adapted ecosystems! And also because this is a really key question for California to come to grips with. But it’s kind of hard and complicated to answer because even if we reconstruct the past, we live in a different reality now. And so the past can’t be a perfect guide of the future but it can be a good place to start considering.
Olivia Allen-Price: Let’s look at California … pre-settlement. What was the scene like then?
Danielle Venton: There was a lot of fire. Both because native people intentionally set fires and because lightning generated fires didn’t get put out. Early accounts of people from European descent visiting the area mention a constant light haze in the sky from the wildfire smoke. So crystal clear skies– not normal. And because there was frequent fire, forests had this open, park-like feeling. You could ride through on horseback, stretch your arms out and not get tangled in anything.
Olivia Allen-Price: Wow, it’s hard to imagine that. Haha. Do we know how many acres would have burned?
Danielle Venton: Yeah. We have an estimate from fire researchers at Berkeley whose work shows an average of around four and a half million acres burned each year. Certainly some years there would be a lot more, some years a lot less. But that number really points to how important fire was in California
Now, should that be our goal? Well, I asked Scott Stephens, one of the principal researchers behind this work if that’s a number we should strive for and he said definitely not. He said: “I would never use that number as a goal today, there’s been too much land use change in the state. Including that the whole Central Valley now in agriculture, other valleys used for housing, agriculture, and so on.”
So, we shouldn’t strive for 4 million acres. This year we’re closing in on a million acres. Last 5-year-average is around 370 thousand acres a year, so a whole lot less. This number can be all over the place. In 2020 it was over 4 million, so that’s the closest in recent historic long, long-term average.
Olivia Allen-Price: I mean I remember the 2020 fire season and it felt … apocalyptic, really. I mean. That was the year we had the notorious “orange skies day,” with ash raining down all over the region. So it’s wild to think of that as a normal year, if you take the long view into our past.
Danielle Venton: Yeah well, California is so different now that I don’t think it’s fair to consider that a normal year, even if the acreage approached the historic average. Those fires were not burning like they would have 200 years ago. They were burning hot, they were damaging, they were killing mature trees. They were sterilizing soil. We shouldn’t hold up 2020 as something to aspire to, by any means. How the land burns, the effects of the fire, are crucially important.
Olivia Allen-Price: Ok, but is there a sense of … land should burn every 20 years, every 50 years or 100 years, or anything like that?
Danielle Venton: Yeah, it depends on the dominant vegetation is where you are. Scientists have made incredibly detailed estimates of average fire return intervals for certain areas.
Oak woodland, maybe one of my favorite ecosystems, the sort of average fire return interval should be around every 12 years. So pretty frequent. Redwood forests, a little bit more, it’s about 23. Lodgepole pine – 37. Dry mixed conifer – 11. Interestingly, chaparral should only get fire about once every 100 years. We’re seeing chaparral burn way too frequently. So it’s all in what’s natural for the area.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, that has me thinking about the redwood forests near me, when was the last time they burned. It definitely wasn’t within the last 23 years. So how far we’ve gotten from some of these regimes, basically how often and intensely an area burns regularly, it’s pretty dramatic really.
Danielle Venton: Yeah, absolutely.
Olivia Allen-Price: OK, so circling back to Pete’s question about how many acres should burn in California. It sounds like the answer is obviously not 4 million acres, like once burned pre-colonization, because we’ve converted a lot of how we use land. It’s farmland, or we’ve developed it in other ways. But Is there a number of acres that’s kind of like … what should be our goal given how land is used today?
Danielle Venton: Well, I asked Scott Stephens, one of the researchers who found the 4 million acre number. And he pointed out that the state of Florida burns over a 1 million acres a year with prescribed fire. Mostly that’s in forests on private land by private people… and that the state’s doing this for decades. Maybe, he suggested, maybe we could use 1 million acres of healthy burning as a reasonable goal for CA. This year, we’ve done only a fraction of that in prescribed fire. Around 150,000 acres, which is not nothing, but there’s a long way to go still.
Olivia Allen-Price: Wow! And I’m imagining that since California is about two and a half times the size of Florida, is 1 million acres even like pretty conservative– a low goal?
Danielle Venton: That’s true, but in Florida the laws and culture are oriented towards this good fire… this prescribed fire. But let’s be clear that even in saying ‘1 million is a nice goal’…we’re talking about a sort of fantasy scenario, where we have healthy forests that have caught up with fire that’s been deprived to them. And again, the effects that fire is having is more important than trying to reach certain numbers.
Olivia Allen-Price: Can you take us through one of these prescribed fires and how they work?
Danielle Venton: Yeah! I’ve observed a couple and they are really fun. They’re even joyful. It feels very different from being out at a wildfire.
There’s always a burn boss in charge and sometimes they’re a bit stressed because if anything goes wrong they’re responsible.
So here’s how this works: There’s a lot of planning ahead of time, studies, permits, weather forecasts, smoke mitigation plans – often you want to do a fire at a time when the weather is calm, but you’re expecting some wind in the next day or two to carry the smoke away from the area.
And then the day of the fire a line is built. Which is basically a box that the fire is supposed to be in, and supposed to stay in. A line is cleared of anything that can burn, like a literal line on the ground, so it’s scraped down to mineral soil. And then sometimes wetted with a water hose.
There are different teams. There’s the firing team and they have drip torches. They actually put fire on the ground and I hear that’s the most fun. They kind of look like painters brushing along the ground. They use different patterns depending on what they want to do. The most experienced know to use no more than they need. Newbies can be very enthusiastic, and have a tendency to overdo it.
[Sounds of crackling fire and footsteps in the forest]
Danielle Venton: I went to a fire, it was a training fire, along the Klamath river in the town of Orleans.
Scot Steinbring: So our objective is, is one: we’re learning and working together. Number two is that we want to burn something. This is 12 acres. It’s divided into three sections…(fades under)
Danielle Venton: So there’s the firing team, and then there’s this other team, the holding team, and they’re at the line making sure the fire doesn’t cross over, ready to stamp it out if it does.
And throughout all of this the burn boss is watching everything, she or he is noting how long the flame lengths are, how far embers are traveling, what sound the fire is making. And they’re doing any adjustments on the fly as they need.
Olivia Allen-Price: Now our listener, Pete Smoot – who I spoke to in late July – he mentioned that he hikes at Quicksilver Park in Santa Clara County, and that it hasn’t burned in his recent memory. And he’s lived in his house for 30 years. nearby
Danielle Venton: Right and since we spoke, there were actually two fires. One was in the park and one was close to it. So, I wanted to know about that fire that was in the park, and what the fire history of the park is, so I called up Captain Brian Christensen.
Brian Christensen: I’m Brian Christensen with the Santa Clara County Parks and Rec department. I’m the captain for one of our regions and a fire liaison for our agency as well.
Danielle Venton: I asked him how often fire was seen in the area pre-western settlement. And I was surprised about how much detail they know about this…
Brian Christensen: There’s a few historical documents that are out there when it comes to Santa Clara County. And there’s a 5 to 7 regime, sometimes there’s a 7 to 10, and then a 10 to 15 that usually occurs, depending on where it’s at.
Danielle Venton: So basically the county is supposed to burn somewhere every 5 to 15 years. A whole lot more frequently than it really has.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, that really surprises me. Way more than they’ve seen. You know Pete also asked if Quicksilver Park was “due” for a fire — so sounds like the answer is yes, but with the recent fires… maybe it got some?
Danielle Venton: It did get some. You could say it was due for a fire in strictly an ecological sense. But fire is not welcome in this land. The fires pop up from time to time. Christensen said he can remember two from this year, three from last year…
Danielle Venton: But those fires are being suppressed, right? This park is not getting burned every 5 to 10 years.
Brian Christensen: No, not at all. And there isn’t really a fire regime that’s in there. And we do partner with our partnering agencies like Cal Fire, City of San Jose and County Fire. Just for a few of them to put those fires out in those areas, just like we had a recent one that started within the park, and we kept it within the park, where it did not get outside of those areas and threaten any type of subdivisions or other structures in the area.
Danielle Venton: He says right there, there is no fire regime in the park now. When I asked him about the use of prescribed fire he said it could be something they might consider in the future, but there are no current plans for it. So it’s been a long time since the full area burned. Christensen said it probably hadn’t burned since the 1800s.
The recent fire that happened in the park was really small. So the Hicks Fire burned about 4 acres in a canyon. It was suppressed quickly. But Christiansen says it behaved mildly. It cleaned up some dead trees, and left the big ones alive. It was very helpful.
Brian Christensen: Yeah. It’s definitely good for that land. It burns that small stuff, that understory. And it takes care of that ladder fuels. Right. You have to have that nexus for fires to go big.
Danielle Venton: Ladder fuels are the brush, and twigs and branches that act like mid-size kindling and allow a fire on the ground to climb up into the canopy. Getting up into the canopy is what leads to crown fires, and the types we want to avoid.
Brian Christensen: And the grasses will be back to it next year, along with their flowers and forbs. And it’ll be a beautiful wildflower display underneath those areas.
Danielle Venton: So! Our listener Peet Smoot might be in for a real treat next spring if his hiking brings him near this area, which is the southeast side of the Guadalupe Reservoir.
Olivia Allen-Price: Well in all this, at least there’s some wildflowers to look forward to. Danielle – KQED science reporter – It is always a pleasure. Thanks so much for stopping by!
Danielle Venton: Thank you Olivia.
Olivia Allen-Price: One note, Danielle and I had this conversation in mid-August and since then more than 1 million acres have burned by wildfire in California.
Olivia Allen-Price: Big thanks to Pete Smoot for asking this week’s question. If there’s something you’re been wondering about the San Francisco Bay Area – head online to BayCurious.org and ask!
Pete Smoot: Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.
Olivia Allen-Price: This episode was produced by Annie Fruit, Amanda Font, Christopher Beale, Ana De Almeida Amaral and me, Olivia Allen-Price. We get additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED Family.
I’m Olivia Allen-Price and I hope you have a great week!
