Climate Point: A wildfire history lesson
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. From Palm Springs, I'm Janet Wilson, where nearby national forest personnel are bracing for fire season, after a wet winter yielded thick undergrowth that's pretty now, but will dry up soon.
So what's the largest wildfire in U.S. history? Despite today's mega-blazes fueled by warming temperatures, the answer might surprise you. The Great Fire of 1910 raged through 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana virgin forests. All told, 86 people died, mostly firefighters caught in a 30-mile-wide wall of flames.
"Appalling desolation was everywhere," wrote a federal historian.
An official cause was never identified, but hot coals and embers from rail locomotives snaking through the dry woods sparked hundreds of blazes that gale winds likely propelled into a single firestorm. The Great Fire led to suppression policies that lasted more than century, before being re-examined as a new round of huge blazes has beset us in recent years. It also tops the list of the nation's 35 largest wildfires from 1825 until now, compiled by Paste BN's Dinah Pulver in a fascinating dig through old maps, history books, and interviews.
"Evidence found at the heart of centuries-old trees, in the stories of Indigenous peoples and yellowed journals and newspaper clippings bear record of the massive fires that ravaged landscapes across North America in the past," writes Pulver. But as she notes, comparing those fires to modern day monster blazes like Texas' Smokehouse Creek fire in February isn't simple.
Past records "can be conflicting, haphazard and rely on anecdotal observations." she notes. "Cowboys riding the range on horseback in the 1800s to measure a blaze isn’t quite the same as measuring by satellite the acres burned."
We have entered a new era of major blazes. That Smokehouse Creek fire two months ago? Number 9 on the list, charring more than 1 million acres. The coal that likely caused 1910's inferno is also a prime driver of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is leading to more frequent big wildfires than ever, fueled by warmer, drier temperatures.
Great balls of fire. To ready for this year's fire season, a helicopter crew is raining fireballs over Arizona's Tonto National Forest this week, igniting prescribed burns in 5,500 acres of brush and dense woodlands to try to protect woodland homes and summer cottages. It's part of a massive Four Forest Restoration Initiative, a project that is intended to improve forest health and reduce the specter of catastrophic wildfire in the world’s largest expanse of ponderosa pines, reports Brandon Loomis for the Arizona Republic.
Take to the skies. Northern California firefighters were joined by more from Oregon, Washington, Florida, Minnesota and Australia for aerial firefighting training, marking the completion of a $28 million upgrade to a federal firefighting air base, and increasing by 132% the amount of fire retardant that can be loaded onto aircraft.
Muddy waters. Faced with new constraints on reinjecting oilfield wastewater underground that spurts up along with crude petroleum during drilling, companies are seeking to release the treated wastewater elsewhere in Texas. These days the Pecos River barely fills its dry, sandy bed, write Martha Pskowski and Dylan Baddour in Inside Climate News and the Caller Times, but the river could flow again — with treated oilfield wastewater.
Companies say they’ve developed ways to purify that "produced water" and release it safely in the Pecos and other watersheds. But scientists and environmentalists note forever chemicals and other toxics can persist in the fluid. Water quality standards do not cover many of them, they note, and pollution problems related to produced water have been documented in Pennsylvania and Wyoming, among the few states that allow such discharges. In New Mexico, regulators will wait for more scientific study before issuing permits to let the wastewater flow.
Read on for more, including hurricane names being retired this year. Some of the stories below may require a subscription. Sign up and get access to all eNewspapers in the Paste BN Network. If someone forwarded you this email and you'd like to receive Climate Point in your inbox for free once a week, sign up here