#wildfire

[crabussy]

I'm really curious about this!! in aotearoa, every classroom I was in growing up had posters up on how to respond to an earthquake. "drop, cover, hold" was drilled into me from a very young age. I experienced a few growing up, but they were mild because I don't live in areas where they are more extreme. One of our major cities, christchurch/ōtautahi, gets hit by earthquakes very frequently. if you look at a global seismic hazard map, aotearoa is fully lit up in the colour indicating high hazard chance. wild!!!

for reference, in the UK (similar size country) there are around 20-30 noticeable earthquakes per year. in aotearoa, that number is around 100-250!

[politijohn]

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Historic wildfires blaze through LA months after the Democratically-run city cut fire service funds.

News headlines rhetorically ask us to consider what happens when CA inmates - working as firefighters for roughly $6 per day - cannot contain unprecedented fires.

Billionaires drain the already water-starved state of its supply as hydrants dry up when needed most.

This system has to go.

[yuumei-art]

Lofi Cali Girl

I painted this in 2020 when the California sky turned red from wildfire and smoke choked the air for months. Right now there's a small local wildfire near where I live and the air is unbreathable again 😭my throat is all raspy and my eyes sting

[cosmonautroger]

California, 2025

[thatdisasterauthor]

Put the light out. | Turn the light on.

I started this painting about this time last year, finished it a couple months ago, and then promptly forgot to post it. WHOOPS.

Anyway. Awhile ago I was hit by the similar but opposing natures of fire towers and lighthouses, and I wanted to explore that more. Both lonely, out of the way stations worked in isolation in sometimes extreme conditions, both tasked with protecting large swathes of people they will never meet or probably even see. Yet one is about spotting light in the distance and putting it out, while the other is about turning on the light within and shining it out.

I'm doing a special run of prints of this illustration on high quality poster canvas paper, at multiple sizes and starting at just $10usd, to help with the fact that I've been caught in the government hiring freeze, so I'm not sure when I'll be back to work at my day job at this point.

You can pre-order a print here.

[goblinparty]

if you're living in the western half of the u.s. and worried about forest fires, i cannot recommend the app "watch duty" enough. it's up to date with its fire tracking, sends alerts about evac notices, and even told me about a community meeting re: an encroaching fire that idk i would have heard of otherwise

[reasonsforhope]

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Article | Paywall free

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”

Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated [aka losing all their needles], mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.

Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.

Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.

Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.

Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.

It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”

... “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”

-via Science, December 1, 2023

[hope-for-the-planet]

This underground coal seam fire had been smoldering since possibly as early as the late 1800s, but was finally fully extinguished thanks to recent excavation and restoration of the site. The surrounding area can also now return to vegetated wildlife habitat, as before the fire was extinguished the vegetation had to be severely cut back to reduce wildfire risk.

Coal seam fires contribute to climate change by releasing methane and carbon dioxide, and they can potentially spark forest fires which are a particularly high risk in dry, fire-prone climates like much of Colorado.

From the article:

“We all remember so well the devastation of the Marshall Fire not too long ago, right here in our community,” said U.S. Representative Joe Neguse during a press conference. “And to know that this particular threat will now be resolved long into the future is an important preventative step that I think the state of Colorado and our local government partners should be deeply proud of.”

[2001hz]

Canadian wildfire smoke creates hazy skies and unhealthy polluted air quality in New York City (2023)

The sun is shrouded as it rises in a hazy, smoky sky behind the Empire State Building, One Vanderbilt and the Chrysler Building in NYC.

[artechoceneexplorer]

Decided to retouch a bit of this old paleoart piece, featuring a pair of Andalgalornis taking advantage of a bushfire to hunt and scavenge for easy pickings, for no particular reason 👀

Anyways hope you like this small bit of content, it's not much but I think this is one of the best pieces I've made :>

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada's emergency preparedness minister says Canadian military personnel, their equipment and another 250 firefighters stand "ready to support our American neighbours" as wildfires devastate parts of Southern California.  Harjit Sajjan says in a social media post that "Team Canada, with Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta, is ready to deploy 250 firefighters, aircraft equipment, and other resources as early as" Thursday night.  Sajjan's pledge comes as the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre said Thursday that the U.S. National Interagency Fire Centre asked for two of its CL-415 Skimmer Airtankers to join the fight against the fires. "The request is being actioned but the delivery timeline is currently unavailable," the agency said in an email to The Canadian Press. "We are also proactively working to identify potential resource availability, should more requests come in.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[2022dirt]

Aerial view of the wildfires in Los Angeles.

[cosmonautroger]

California, 2025

[thatdisasterauthor]

Over on Bluesky the other day I mentioned how working in wildland fire makes it very hard to look at real estate without immediately thinking about how the house would burn (since I look at a lot of woodland properties), and @gallusrostromegalus mentioned how they miss my weird real estate series and that it might be fun to bring that back a bit with "bad fire environment choices."

So! I'm gonna start sharing those when I come across them. I don't really look as much anymore, since I did finally buy a house last year, but I do still poke around sometimes to see what's out there.

The new series will be tagged as "Firey Real Estate".

Now, let me preface this on saying that I'm not, like, a full on expert in house safety when it comes to wildfires, but I know the basics. So. Let's kick it off with a few places I found poking around Colorado today!

I actually really love the look of this house, and it isn't the WORST. But it has some issues. Two big structural issues stand out to me: the house has open eves (the area under the edges of the roof where you can see the beams) which provides A LOT of places for floating embers to get stuck and start your house on fire. Also, some of the roof slopes are too shallow to effectively shed embers that land on them.

Second issue is the deck, a very large surface area that embers can get caught. They also haven't extended the gravel all the way to the edge of the underside of the deck, which means fire could get up under the deck, especially to those few wood poles that aren't encased in stone.

They've also stacked firewood against the house, which is a big no no.

[389]

A horse tries to escape a wildfire burning in the eastern part of Cleveland County in Slaughter, Oklahoma by Jerry Laizure

[reasonsforhope]

"When Canada was fighting wildfires in Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia in 2023, blazes that would go on to eventually burn more than 45 million acres, more than 2,000 American firefighters helped extinguish the flames.

Now, Canada has returned the favor. It is sending air tankers and dozens of its own battle-tested wildland firefighters to Los Angeles, its government said. Air tankers can deliver thousands of gallons of fire retardant or water to wildland firefighters on the ground.

More personnel and equipment from Ontario, Quebec and Alberta are ready to be mobilized, according to government officials. And a team of senior technical staff members from British Columbia will fill specialized roles, the government said.

“We both know that Canada and the United States are more than just neighbours,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on X on Friday. “We’re friends — especially when times get tough. California’s always had our back when we battle wildfires up north. Now, Canada’s got yours.”

Mexico quickly followed, dispatching a crew of firefighters early Saturday to help the huge deployment already underway.

“We are a country of generosity and solidarity,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said on X. Ms. Sheinbaum said that the group was carrying “the courage and heart of Mexico.”

Before departing Mexico City for California, the Mexican firefighters held the flags of California, Mexico and the United States on the runway.

Mexico’s civil protection agency said that “cooperation has no borders” and that the mission reaffirmed “its solidarity with the people of California.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that he was grateful for the support from both countries."

-via The New York Times, January 11, 2025