Nova (1974–…): Season 46, Episode 8 - Inside the Megafire - full transcript
Scientists try to determine the cause for the increasing megafire threat by exploring the physics of fire, how firestorms move and travel, and by analyzing aerial drone and satellite data to catch fires before they start.
This has got potential
for a major incident
A wildfire races toward
a sleeping California town
Right now, guys,
Paradise is on effin' fire
Residents awaken to a nightmare
I don't want to die here
Scientists speed
toward the danger zone
Yes, that's a scan we want
risking it all to unlock
the mysteries of fire
It's not something
that you can just observe it
and figure out how it works
Paradise is lost
We have witnessed literally
an entire community gone
It's the worst fire
in a season of worsts
But why?
A history of mismanagement
Everywhere, foresters
were trying
to do the same, silly thing
A warming climate
I think we're moving
into uncharted territory
And a building boom
in the forest
We're literally putting homes
in the line of fire
The stakes... and the flames...
grow higher
Right now, I'm wondering
if we're in a good spot
♪♪
"Inside the Megafire,"
right now, on "NOVA"
♪♪
Another sunny day
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains
north of Sacramento
November 8, 2018
Skies are clear over Northern
California today,
but it is going to be a very
dangerous day for fire danger
It's been more than 200 days
since there was any rain
worth measuring
The forest is bone-dry
♪♪
And now the wind season
has arrived...
With a vengeance
The strongest winds are expected
across the Sierra,
where gusts could reach
60 miles an hour
The stage is set for disaster
♪♪
Then, 85 miles north
of Sacramento,
in a tiny hamlet called Pulga,
the wind blows a high-voltage
power line off a tower
near the Camp Creek
Sparks fly
In 15 minutes, the first reports
of fire come in
It is 6:30 in the morning
The Camp Fire has just begun
When first responders arrive,
the flames are already
so fierce,
and the winds so strong,
they have trouble getting close
to the fire
Eyes on the vegetation fire
It's going to be very difficult
to access
Camp Creek Road
is nearly inaccessible
It's got about a 35-mile-an-hour
sustained wind on it
It's moving incredibly fast,
with a speed that stuns
even veteran firefighters
This has got potential
for a major incident
By 7:30, authorities issue
an evacuation order for Pulga,
where the fire funnels
up a canyon,
picks up speed,
and explodes out over the rim
The fire is now burning
an acre of forest every second
Firefighters cannot fight
the flames
Instead, they focus
on rescuing residents
In Pulga, it's already
crossing that area,
heading towards the Concow area
The fire consumes
the small community of Concow
and heads toward
Paradise, California,
where residents have
just received immediate orders
to evacuate
This fire starts,
and within minutes,
it's hundreds of acres
The man in charge of the state's
wildfire fighting force,
Cal Fire,
is Ken Pimlott
He's never seen anything like it
Within an hour, it is
in the town of Paradise
Paradise
Nestled in the woods
high in the Sierra
A close-knit community
of 26,000,
many of them retirees drawn
to the charm and beauty
of life in a small mountain town
But along with it
comes a looming vulnerability
about to be made
hellishly evident
by the firestorm
stampeding toward them
Right now, guys,
Paradise is on effin' fire
I'm just going to get
the out of Dodge
This is getting heavy
Residents attempt to flee
Everything is burning
Oh, my God, I mean everything
forced to run a gauntlet
through flame
There are only four roads
that lead off the mountain,
and all of them are perilous
Come on!
Just go!
Chaos captured
in harrowing cell phone videos
Oh, my God,
there's fire everywhere
I don't want to die here
I don't want to die
A tense escape from hell
I'm scared!
It's Armageddon
It's so hot
Keep going!
HART Holy!
People are leaving their cars
Oh, my God It's okay
What should we do?
We got to get out of here
First responders race
to rescue hundreds of people
trapped in their homes
Are they coming for us?
Come on
Watch out! Watch out!
Jess!
Cars
Be advised, on Clark Road
at Skyway,
there's a woman in labor,
she's in a beige Honda Pilot
She's going to be honking
her horn
We have to get this traffic
moving, now!
Even a hospital
All patients now out
of Feather River Hospital
All patients out and en route
♪♪
Go get 'em, boys
Be safe
It's now 9:30
Just to the north,
in the neighboring community
of Magalia,
George Gold would normally be up
by now,
but today he sleeps in
What woke me up was the wind
We often have wind here;
I think, "Oh, how nice"
I open the door, and it's windy
♪♪
I look up, and it's dark
I thought,
"Oh, it's going to rain"
I smell the smoke
I said, "It's not going to rain"
I get dressed, I go outside,
I look around
At that point,
the street wasn't burning
But I could see fire,
and I thought,
"Oh, this is the real thing"
He's lived here for 11 years,
drawn by the quiet
and the beauty
It is his dream home
for retirement
Now he must leave it all behind
in a hurry
♪♪
Please, get out of town
And as you're going out of town,
please be careful
But the roads are clogged
with traffic and obstacles,
downed power lines, and trees
Crews are racing
to clear the way
So George decides to wait
He drives his prized convertible
to a nearby parking lot,
hoping it will be safe there
He records these images
as the fire closes in
on his community
You know, you stand here,
and you just look around,
and the next thing, I see that
the high school is on fire,
and it is just going up
♪♪
Just after noon,
the fire is still raging
Many of George's neighbors
are gathering
in another parking lot,
wondering if they are safe
I couldn't get in at 9:00
John Roberson has lived here
eight years
Now, this is kind of spooky
So that's what I'm looking at
As you can see,
that's black smoke
Our home right now is safe
If it jumps up here to
South Park Circle and Andover,
it's gone
Nearby,
Mike and Alice Nutt are packing
whatever they can fit
in their cars
I got soda,
blankets, pillows, food,
my animals
Oh, my dogs
They're my babies
And then, I'm, I'm just scared,
I am very scared
We got our cars loaded up,
don't know where to go
♪♪
6:00 p m,
less than 12 hours
since it began,
and yet so much damage,
so many lives changed forever
Oh, my God,
half of our town is gone
55,000 acres burned;
at least 1,000 structures
destroyed
The Nutts' house?
Gone
And so is the Robersons'
♪♪
George Gold is mesmerized
by what is unfolding
before his eyes,
but now he knows
it's time to get out
He decides to check on his house
When I came down here,
everything was still burning
So I came here, turned around,
I shot a couple of pictures,
and I took off
But the house was already
completely engulfed in fire
♪♪
There is no hope
for Magalia or Paradise
And the Camp Fire keeps growing
While George is driving
toward safety,
meteorologist Craig Clements
is headed
in the opposite direction
He and his team
are on an urgent mission
to shed some light
on how wildfires spread
Oh, look at that... beautiful
Yes, that's a scan we want
It's dangerous work
But the risk comes
with the possibility
of a big scientific payoff
That's interesting,
we're coming
into some smoke here
Perfect, perfect, perfect
They are driving
a one-of-a-kind custom rig
They hope to peer into the fire
in a way
that no one else has before
We need to better understand
fire spread,
and the meteorological data
is one of the key components
And yet we never measure things
on an active wildfire
We usually use a satellite
We see plumes in the radar,
which is great, but, you know,
we're not really seeing
what's going on right here
Plumes...
The columns of smoke and gas
that rise from the flames...
Are more than a sign of fire
They also create
their own weather
And Craig suspects that
they actively spread the fire
But how?
To understand,
he aims a sophisticated lidar
right at the plume
♪♪
Lidar is like radar
that uses a laser beam
It bounces off
the smoke particulates
as they are propelled
by the wind
in and around the plume
and returns information
about speed and direction
We've been able to slice
through a plume with our lidar
And we've been able
to measure rotation
and the wind field associated
with a rotating column,
and so that's pretty exciting
The plumes at fires like these
are complicated systems
As hot air rises,
cooler air rushes in
It's called fire-induced wind
We don't know
how that fire-induced wind
from the plume interacts
with pushing the fire front
If the plume goes up,
does any air or smoke
come back down?
And if it does come back down,
can that spread the fire
in different directions?
It's these interactions
that we call
fire-atmosphere interactions,
and we don't have a great handle
on how they propagate
fire spread
♪♪
The Camp Fire continues
to spread without slowing down
Cal Fire says
the town of Paradise
is pretty much destroyed
48 hours after it began,
it has burned
more than 100,000 acres...
A grim milestone
It is now officially
a "megafire"
Eventually, 86 lives are lost,
nearly 19,000 structures
destroyed
in the most destructive fire
in California history
It stands apart,
but it is not an isolated event
♪♪
One year earlier,
the second-most
destructive fire, Tubbs,
burned
more than 5,600 structures
and killed 22
Little more than three months
before Paradise is destroyed,
the Carr megafire devoured
a quarter-million acres
and a thousand homes
in and around Redding
Eight people perished
And on the same day
the Camp Fire began,
the Woolsey Fire started
in Los Angeles
and Ventura Counties
It burned 97,000 acres,
killing three
Of the ten most destructive
fires in California history,
six occurred in the 13 months
prior to the Camp Fire
We are doing everything we can
to respond and protect citizens,
but fire is part
of the landscape in California
This is the normal now
♪♪
And it's not just California
Across the U S,
an area larger than the state
of Maryland burned in 2018
In the last 40 years or so,
the amount of forest that burns
in any given year
in the Western United States
has increased by about 1,000%
♪♪
That means
there's about ten times
more forest burning this year
than there was in a year
in the 1970s or 1980s
♪♪
All over the world,
wildfires are bigger,
more frequent,
and more destructive
In July 2018, fires killed
nearly 100 in Greece
In Sweden, fires burned
above the Arctic Circle
in the midst
of an unusual heat wave
And huge fires burned in Canada,
Russia, and Australia
Why are we living
in an age of megafires?
♪♪
The big question is,
"Are these giant, destructive
megafires we're seeing today
"just the way forests burn,
"or is this somehow a new normal
"that we've created
by our own actions,
forest management,
and climate change?"
♪♪
♪♪
Near Paradise,
firefighters have more pressing
questions on their minds
Like how best to stop a fire
driven by fierce wind
and steep terrain...
A major factor
in its relentless spread
Researchers are studying this
at the
U S Department of Agriculture's
Missoula Fire Sciences
Laboratory
If you are going to do
fire research,
this is the place to do it
This entire building is devoted
to fire
It's actually
a pretty complex phenomenon
It's not something
that you can just observe it
and figure out how it works
Forest Service scientist
Mark Finney
showed us how they unlock
the mysteries of fire
So this is the burn chamber
right here
Everything we do in here
is designed to look
at how fires behave
On this day,
he and a dozen of his colleagues
are preparing for a test
on a large, tilting burn bed
of precisely cut cardboard
What we can do is put these
on the burn bed
in any kind of density
that we'd like
to engineer whatever kind
of fire we'd like...
How long we want it to burn,
how long the flames are,
how fast it spreads
The burn table brims
with instruments
that measure pressure
and temperature,
taking samples 500 times
a second
And there are cameras everywhere
Today, they are trying
to understand more
about how a fire spreads uphill,
as it did near Paradise
Okay, go ahead
Line of fire, guys, good line
Okay
The flames are the visible sign
of rapid oxidation, or fire
Fire requires dry, flammable
material, or fuel,
oxygen,
and a heat source to create
this chemical chain reaction
Wildfires add
two additional elements...
Weather and topography...
That determine how the flames
will grow and spread
The reason we're measuring this
is that you can actually
get fires
to accelerate extremely quickly
going uphill
Unlike the humans
that fight them,
wildfires move much faster
uphill
When you have a slope,
you can't get air in
from the uphill side
as easily as you can get it in
from the downhill side
If the slope
is sufficiently steep,
all of the air is coming in
from the downhill side
With air fanning the fire
exclusively
on the downhill side,
the flames get pushed
into the slope,
putting them in contact
with more fuel
The tilted, climbing fire
transfers a lot of heat
to the trees and brush
ahead of the flames,
preheating and drying them,
making them more combustible
You get very, very effective
heat transfer
and a much faster-spreading fire
This is what happened
when the Camp Fire started
The wind funneled the flames
into a steep canyon,
and they rapidly accelerated
uphill,
right toward Paradise
On the morning
after Paradise is lost,
the Camp Fire is still spreading
♪♪
Time for firefighters to report
for the daily briefing
Engine 83 Here
36-31-Charlie Here
Engine 25 Here
All right, good morning,
everybody
I got 7:00, we're going
to go ahead and get started
with the operational briefing
Thousands of firefighters
are here,
and more are on the way
Okay, up here in Cresta area,
the fire has progressed
to the east
It's on both sides of the river,
continuing to eat its way
downcanyon
Good morning, everyone
Incident meteorologist Alex Hoon
is worried about what lies ahead
There's going to be
a lot of shifting winds,
very dry conditions
Use your lookouts,
use your communication,
make it a safe day
He taps into a suite
of instruments
on the ground, in aircraft,
and in space
Orbiting 22,000 miles
above the Earth,
the two-year-old
GOES-16 weather satellite
captured visible and
infrared images of the Camp Fire
from the beginning,
the big picture of a big fire,
an eerily remote vantage point
to utter chaos, death,
and destruction
This particular image,
it covers a time period
from about 6:00 a m
in the morning
all the way
until about 5:00 p m
when the sun begins to go down
Within that 11 hours,
we estimate,
it went from zero
to about 50,000 acres
And then the following 12 hours,
it grew another 40,000 acres
It released just
an exponential amount of energy
And that's
what we're seeing here
on the satellite image
♪♪
A big factor in the exponential
spread of the Camp Megafire:
spotting
Hot embers,
also called firebrands,
launched and carried
by 50-mile-an-hour winds,
landed as much as a mile ahead
of the fire front
New spot fires started again
and again,
rapidly, randomly
But exactly how spotting fuels
the growth of megafires
is one of the big unknowns
in wildfire science
So it's still blowing
northeasterly
Craig Clements hopes his work
might lead to some answers
This is a real strong
low-level jet
coming down off the mountains
Right now,
wildfire prediction models
are not sophisticated enough
to factor in
all of the complexities
of the atmosphere and terrain
And they don't account
for spotting at all
We are trying to forecast
how many spot fires
there will be,
and that's something
no model right now can handle
Better models would help
right now
to keep firefighters safe
as they battle the Camp Fire
♪♪
But for people in Paradise,
there was no time
for predictions
Having gone through Paradise,
I... I words don't describe it
♪♪
I mean, it, um
A lot like the road to Baghdad
during the first Gulf War,
when vehicles were abandoned...
That's literally
what it looked like
And we know some people perished
on those roads,
and what those people went
through,
and they really had no warning
♪♪
I think this is the first time
we've ever seen an entire town
in California
wiped off the map
by a wildland fire
♪♪
We have witnessed literally
an entire community gone
♪♪
The megafire that wiped Paradise
off the map
is more than just a big wildfire
At this scale,
the physics of fire changes,
greatly increasing the intensity
But why?
At the Missoula
Fire Sciences Laboratory,
mechanical engineer
Sara McAllister
is seeking an answer
When you have
a really wide plume,
you're not pulling in air
into the plume
as effectively as you are
if it's a much smaller diameter
In any fire,
colder air flows in
to replace hot air as it rises
Most of the time,
the air can come in
from almost any direction,
chaotically
It's what makes flames flicker
and dance
But the flames at the center
of a megafire
are not fed by colder air
from the sides or from above...
The surrounding fire and plume
stand in the way
So the only source of air for
these flames is at ground level
When that happens,
the plume changes
♪♪
Sara McAllister conducts
an experiment
to simulate that restriction
of air from the side
using something you might find
in your own home:
a chimney
We were wondering,
"Does that restriction in air
influence the burning
of the fuel underneath it?"
The idea is that
we are scaling big-fire behavior
into a small-fire, lab-based
experiment
and trying to understand
what's different
She douses a uniform bed
of fuel,
in this case wood blocks
Smells good, doesn't it?
With isopropyl alcohol
Burns very nicely
In the open, the flames are
about five feet high,
as the air streams in
from all directions
Now watch what happens
when she slides the burning wood
underneath the chimney,
blocking sideways air flow
So we're looking at
15-, maybe 16-foot flame heights
off of a fuel bed
Quite the increase
There's a feedback
When the fires get big,
all of that air
that can't come into that plume
has to come in on the ground,
which is basically
just stoking your fire
♪♪
The chimney effect created
by giant plumes
makes megafires grow bigger,
which further fans the flames
It's a frightening feedback loop
that gets even scarier
when a plume becomes
a fire whirl
♪♪
Fire whirls that form
on your average fire,
you see them for a few seconds,
and they're gone
And normally, they don't prompt
too much concern
But the biggest ones,
literally fire tornadoes,
cannot be ignored
♪♪
Scientists used to think
they were rare, even unlikely
But as megafires become
more common,
that is no longer the case
Three months
before the Camp Fire,
this is what happens
in Redding, California
The Carr Megafire spawns
a deadly fire tornado
that generates winds
approaching 165 miles an hour
But what causes the flames
to start spinning?
Wow
This here is
a fire whirl generator
It's an apparatus that allows us
to study how fire whirls form
and the structure of the vortex
that's produced inside the whirl
Mark Finney says they begin
with turbulent, strong winds
that send a lopsided current
of air into the flames
He demonstrates
what happens next
You'll notice at the beginning
that the flames
are very disorganized
But as the inflow
begins to come in
in a swirling fashion,
the flames themselves
become quite organized
The air streams in faster
and faster from the bottom,
fanning the flames,
strengthening the whirl
The burning rate of the fuel
increases
by three to eight times
as the whirl begins to develop
♪♪
The fire tornado in Redding
develops after the wind starts
blowing inland from the Pacific
When it collides with the fire,
it creates powerful,
swirling winds
All the ingredients
of an epic fire tornado
are now in place
This was ranked as an E F -3,
Enhanced Fujita scale tornado
I believe this is the strongest
documented fire-induced tornado
Temperatures reach
2,700 degrees Fahrenheit,
hot enough to melt steel
It lasts for 30 minutes
We saw things like pipes
wrapped around trees,
flipped-over cars,
power lines that were broken off
from 90-foot towers
that were taken down
The winds to do that are extreme
♪♪
Extreme: a word redefined
by megafires
as they grow in size, frequency,
and impact
But the destruction they create
makes it easy to overlook
an important point:
fire is an essential part
of a natural cycle
that keeps a forest healthy
What fire does is,
it essentially releases
nutrients, precious nutrients,
into the ground
so that new plants
can grow and thrive,
and it creates a cycle
where once plants grow enough,
essentially,
they are setting the system up
for a future fire
♪♪
The concerted effort to stop
that cycle of fire
began more than a century ago
The modern fire story
in the U S,
wildland fire story,
begins in 1910, really
The spring of 1910 brings
severe drought
to the northern Rockies
In April, hot coals spewed
from a chugging locomotive
spark fire in western Montana
In short order,
there are hundreds
of small fires burning there
and in Idaho
As spring becomes summer,
the drought persists,
the winds pick up,
and the fires grow larger
3,000 men are
on the front lines,
trying to beat back the flames
There was an organization,
the U S Forest Service,
barely five years old,
that was now charged with
dealing with these large fires
1910 overwhelmed the system
completely
Three-and-a-quarter million
acres in the northern Rockies,
most of it concentrated
in a two-day period
called the Big Blowup
♪♪
The Big Blowup is triggered
when hurricane-force winds turn
those smaller fires
into several giant firestorms
♪♪
They leave a path
of devastation,
charring an area
the size of Connecticut
78 firefighters are killed
And the history
and ecology of U S forests
would be forever changed
The thinking was,
"We could have stopped
these fires
"If we'd had more men,
more telephone lines,
"more lookout towers,
"we could have caught
those fires early
and there would not have been
a Big Blowup"
President Roosevelt's attack
on the Depression began
with his emergency conservation
project
During the Great Depression,
Forest Service chief
Ferdinand Silcox
deploys New Deal workers
and money
to reshape the national forests
with roads, lookout towers,
and phone lines
Then, in 1935,
he announces something
called the 10:00 a m policy
It meant that by 10:00
the morning following
the report of a fire,
you would have that fire
controlled
So if you found the fire
at 10:00 p m Tuesday night,
you would have it controlled
by 10:00 a m Wednesday morning
If you failed Wednesday morning,
then you'd plan
to have it controlled
by 10:00 a m Thursday morning
Washington gives
the Forest Service the money
to make the 10:00 a m policy
a reality
So you develop smoke-jumpers
You develop organized crews
You put in trails
"We're going beat
back the fire menace"
Over time, the American public
becomes enamored
with the heroic narrative
of smoke-jumpers and hotshots,
while being fed a steady diet
of public service announcements
from Smokey Bear
Remember, only you can prevent
forest fires
The message seems clear:
Forest fires are the enemy,
to be avoided or attacked
at all costs
All of the science,
all of the officials,
are very keen to eliminate fire
They see no purpose to it
It's dangerous, it's a nuisance
"We will find
a modern alternative"
But the war on fire creates
some unforeseen consequences
With the natural cycle
interrupted,
forests become dense
with fuel for fires
So in the 1960s and '70s,
the seeds of a new kind of
thinking begin to take root
It was realized in 1978 or so
that we weren't going to win
by suppressing fire
We were having more fires,
no matter how much money
we spent,
no matter how much technology
we threw at the fires
The 10:00 a m policy
was abandoned
and a new fire policy
was introduced,
where fire was supposed to be
incorporated more integrally
into wildland management
Instead of all-out war,
it is a more nuanced approach:
prescribed burns encouraged;
wildfires not attacked,
but managed,
allowed to burn
whenever and wherever possible
But in the real world,
it proves much easier said
than done
It's hard to find a place
where the new policy isn't
at odds
with a building boom
in the forest
♪♪
In August 2018, a case in point
in the Cascade Mountains,
90 miles east of Seattle
The Cougar Creek Fire is ripping
through the Okanogan-Wenatchee
National Forest
The area is sparsely populated,
and the fire began
with a lightning strike
It might seem
like the perfect place
to let a fire burn
But the fire has gotten
very big, very quickly,
and it is heading
toward the small communities
nestled in the forest
♪♪
So the man in charge
really has no choice
Morning, everybody
He has to draw a line
in the woods
and stop the fire
from moving beyond it
Today is going to be
a busy fire day
So I ask that mentally
we be there
and be ready for that
Noel Livingston is
a veteran incident commander
for the U S Forest Service
He first started fighting fires
36 years ago
How do we manage
this fire problem that we have?
Because we have a fire problem
We have landscapes
that are out of sync,
and we have people living
in those same landscapes
The easy solution of,
"Well, let's just let it burn,"
isn't realistic
Today, nearly 100 million
Americans have made the decision
to live in the woods,
what scientists call
the wildland-urban interface
We love these places,
and yet we're living
with a certain amount of risk
that they will go up in flames
We're literally putting homes
in the line of fire
There are hundreds of thousands
of homes
that have been threatened
over the last several decades
by wildfires,
and we expect that to go up
♪♪
Every firefighter here
at Cougar Creek
knows the bitter irony:
Their success in the short term
might make the people nearby
feel safe living here
and encourage even more building
But it is a false sense
of security
Each time they stop a fire
in its tracks,
fuel for the inevitable
builds up,
and fires are more likely
to become megafires
Because we've excluded fire
for the past hundred years
or so,
particularly
in heavily wooded stands,
we're getting more of a
continuous, high-intensity event
in those types of stands
This ups the ante
for firefighters
already doing very risky work
As the fire grows in strength,
safety officer Jennifer Rabuck
is on a scouting mission
near the fire line
♪♪
She aims to strike a balance
between saving homes
and protecting
firefighters' lives
This is our primary
containment line
that we're walking on
The fire is off to our right
Ideally,
we'd like to hold this line
Hot embers from the wildfire,
launched and carried
by the wind,
are flying overhead, landing
in what amounts to kindling
You look at some of this,
it's all dry and dead,
and it just flakes off
in your fingers
There's nothing in here
that has got any sort
of resistance to take
If an ember lands in here,
this piece of wood is going
to catch fire
The dead, dry wood
is where spot fires start,
but not where they end
With the temperature high
and the humidity so low,
everything here is dehydrated
and highly flammable
This is what we call
tree torching
or even group torching
Single tree would be one,
group torching would be
pockets of trees
When it's torching,
it starts out on the bottom
And as those flames grow,
it's sending that heat up
into the live part of the tree,
the green part of the tree,
preheating it,
so it's more receptive
to that build-up and build-up,
and it reaches
a certain combustion point,
where the entire tree will go up
And you can see the ember wash
coming off of those,
and you can see how far
it's going over the ridge
Oh, this is a living tree
that's gone up?
This is a living tree
What goes through your mind
when you see this?
Right now I'm wondering
if we're in a good spot
The Cougar Creek Fire will burn
more than 42,000 acres
before it stops spreading
But no structures are damaged
Another victory for the nation's
wildfire fighting force
They succeed 97% of the time
♪♪
A century of excluding fire
has created some unhealthy,
dangerous forests
all over the United States
♪♪
But how best to allow forests,
fire, and people to coexist?
Fire ecologist Sharon Hood
is testing some alternatives
in western Montana
Oh, got the pith
Nice
This 30-acre plot is part
of a long-term study
to see if there's a better way
to manage our forests
It hasn't burned in 100 years,
and it is filled with fuel
for a fire
It's hard just to plow through,
much less do their work
You basically can't see
through it,
and when you're trying to walk
through it,
you're weaving
through very small trees,
you're stepping
over a lot of logs
It's the density that strikes me
The dead and small trees
and the shrubs
are the ingredients, the fuel,
for bigger, more intense fires
This forest is a tinderbox...
A consequence of a misguided
forest management philosophy
Our ponderosa pine forests
evolved
with very frequent fires...
On average, every seven years
So removing fire for 100 years
allows all these little
seedlings to get established
If fires were coming
through here routinely,
they would kill those seedlings,
creating open conditions
And she has the scientific proof
in the plot next door,
where they thinned out the trees
in 2001,
then started a prescribed burn
in 2002
You're looking at
this open ponderosa pine forest
16 years later
The thin-and-burn forest
is all open space
There's not a lot of fuels,
and you see the larger trees
♪♪
Back in her lab in Missoula,
Sharon and her team carefully
slice and analyze
the core samples
from the thinned and burned
parcel
The tree rings tell a story,
if you know how to read them
Here we have a close-up
of a tree core,
and each light and dark band
is one year's worth of growth
And you can see, between 1990
and 2000, in this section,
you've got narrow growth rings
Narrow rings mean less growth,
nature's record
of how the trees were faring
before the experiment began
And then, here in 2001,
there was a thinning, where
we cut about half the trees,
and then in 2002,
there was a prescribed burn
And you can start seeing really
fat growth rings after that
♪♪
A forest that is more open
and trees that are larger
and healthier
Thinning and controlled burning
clearly works
But is it practical
beyond an experiment?
This type of treatment
that you see here is scalable
There's no one-size-fits-all,
but thinning is a major tool
that we have
to be able to re-introduce fire
in a safer way
It isn't the answer
in every forest landscape
And prescribed burning faces
a lot of opposition,
ironically, from the people
most in harm's way,
worried about changing
their view
or breathing the smoke
When we put a little bit
of smoke in the air
under prescribed fire,
sometimes it can meet a lot
of resistance from the public
There have been
some prescribed burns
that were supposed to be
small forest treatments,
and then a gust of wind came
at the wrong time
and turned that prescribed burn
into a wildfire
And what about the expense?
Thinning and burning can cost
about $1,000 an acre,
and it's not a one-time fix
But compared
to the cost of a megafire,
maybe it's an ounce
of prevention
I think by now,
people who live in the forest
or near the forest recognize
that there's going to be a fire
now
or there's going to be a fire
later,
and you can have it
under controlled conditions,
when you can go away
for the weekend,
or you can be running
for your life
watching your house burn down
Humans have created
the megafire monster,
but enlightened
forest management alone
won't stop the infernos
Because there is another factor
at play,
also with our fingerprint...
Climate change
♪♪
The Camp Fire has broken
records,
and yet it is only one
of three major incidents
in California right now
We've been going
from fire to fire to fire,
and every time we see it,
it's, like,
"That, that's unbelievable
"That's unbelievable
I can't, can't believe
we're seeing this"
And in the land
of endless summers,
there is now
an endless fire season
We're in November... this is
This is not historically when we
would see fires still occurring
It would be closer to
the hotter part of the summer,
but they're, they're lasting
into December now
So it's, it's a fire year
There's no fire season
♪♪
A fire year,
year after year after year
What role do rising temperatures
and changing
precipitation patterns
play in this trend?
In California,
the record wildfires occur
after a historic
six-year drought
Climate change
is taking a pretty bad drought
and actually causing it to be
on par with the biggest droughts
over the last millennium
♪♪
To better understand this link
between climate and fire,
paleoecologist Cathy Whitlock
spends a lot of time
in Yellowstone National Park
It's a nearly pristine ecosystem
where we can really see
these things going on
This is Blacktail Pond
The layers of mud
beneath this ancient lake bed
have their own story to tell,
going way back in time
♪♪
Lakes are great repositories
of environmental information
Pollen grains land
on the surface of the lake,
and they get buried
in the sediment
Charcoal from fires gets carried
in the air
and then sinks to the bottom
And those sediments
are undisturbed,
and so you get a continuous
record of environmental history
One, two, three
Keep it straight,
keep it vertical
All right
So let's pull it up
Let it drain, turn it sideways
Okay, now we're going to extrude
Here it comes
Nice!
Whoo!
Using two types of clues,
she can learn a lot
about the ancient landscape
Pollen tells us about the plants
that are growing here,
and the vegetation is
one of our best indicators
of what the climate was
So we can use the pollen record
to reconstruct past climate,
and then we can compare it with
the charcoal record of fires
to see how periods of fire
relate
to periods of climate change
The sediment at Blacktail Pond
allows Cathy to look back
15,000 years,
when the glaciers
from the last ice age retreated
from this area
Back in her laboratory,
Cathy slices the cores in half
and begins to take a closer look
♪♪
There's a lot going on at
this time period in this lake
The light-colored layers
are calcium carbonate-rich
They probably were deposited
by algae
that were producing
this calcium carbonate,
and when that happens,
usually, it happens because
the lake's a little bit warmer
The dark layers,
I'm seeing little blips of
what look like charcoal to me
But I suspect there's going
to be a lot of charcoal
all the way through this core
We just have to look
under a microscope to find it
♪♪
After they chemically treat and
sift sediment from the core,
they can clearly identify
and tally the charcoal
and the pollen
♪♪
I'm seeing
some large pine pollens
They kind of look
like Mickey Mouse hats
And some of them, like that one,
is a lodgepole pine, for sure
She has documented
a long relationship
between fire and temperatures
Over the past 7,500 years,
fire activity closely correlates
with the climate
As temperatures cooled,
fire activity
gradually decreased
But as humans have warmed
the planet in the last century,
fire frequency
has dramatically increased
During the warm, dry,
windy summer of 1988,
800,000 acres,
one third of Yellowstone Park,
burned
Her analysis shows
it was one of the largest
fire seasons here
in the past 6,000 years
If current temperature trends
continue,
fires of that magnitude
will likely be more frequent
in the future
I think we're moving
into uncharted territory
We're seeing warming
at rapid rates,
we're seeing extreme fire events
We're seeing things that we
just haven't seen in the past,
and that's my big concern
Cory, do you have all the vials?
Ecologist Monica Turner
has the same concern
She and her team
study Yellowstone's breathtaking
lodgepole pine forests
In Yellowstone,
what I do is try to understand
how fires affect the forest
and then how the forest recovers
♪♪
The fires here in 1988
were part of the normal,
100-to-300-year burn cycle
for lodgepole pines
Although the fires
were big and severe,
the forests of Yellowstone
recovered
in spectacular fashion
But in 2000 and again in 2016,
new fires hit some of the
same areas that burned in '88
Monica wonders if climate change
is making it hard
for the forest to bounce back
once again
So that's something like
104 degrees Fahrenheit
Whoa
Just below the surface here
That's hot
Too much heat, too little shade
And what happens
when forests burn again so soon,
before there is time to recover?
To find out, they systematically
count and measure
tree seedlings
D8 is dead
And they determine
how far they travel
What we are hoping
to find out here is,
"Will they germinate?
Are the conditions suitable
for them to grow?"
In this plot,
where only 16 years
separate two fires,
young trees
are completely destroyed
Only stumps remain,
and there is on average
a 60% reduction
in the number of tree seedlings
More frequent, more severe fires
and warmer temperatures
mean new generations of trees
will have a much harder time
taking root
We are now questioning
how the frequency
and the severity of fires
may overcome the ability
of the forests to recover
If we have future fires
that happen every 15 years,
I don't know
♪♪
Fire may be integral
to the evolution of forests,
but the scale and frequency
of today's megafires
appear to be something new
The landscape is changing fast,
a symptom of climate change
that is more sudden than most
Going into the future,
I think we're going to have
more fires
And if we continue to have
more fires,
it will gradually shift
the composition of the forests
In some places,
we may lose forest
and get more grassland
♪♪
The Camp Fire is still burning,
but in Paradise,
embers are starting to cool
George Gold is headed
through town
on his way to Magalia,
just to the north
He already knows
his house is destroyed,
but what happened
to the sports car
that he left a mile away
in a parking lot?
Finding out is his main goal
today
There is my car!
I see my car!
It's there
Can you believe it?
My Miata is alive
A-ha, she lives!
It's time to see
if there's anything
worth salvaging at home
This was my neighborhood,
and there's nothing left
There's, there's no neighborhood
here
There's just debris
I mean, it was gorgeous here,
just gorgeous
Peaceful, quiet
My shed's there,
so I can do my gardening
And this is my front door,
right here
Open the door
I mean, I never considered
myself a materialistic person
I mean, if you went in my house,
you would say,
"Gee, you're kind of living
a spartan life," right?
No fancy stuff, just basic stuff
But the stuff I had,
I loved it, right?
Every time I walked in the door,
I thought,
"Oh, wow, this is my house
I've made it, I'm in heaven"
And I had all these tool boxes
You know, I spent 30 years
gathering tools
Here we go
They may live again
Maybe
I think not
It's really hard
I don't know what to do...
I don't know what to think
I've never experienced
anything like this
I don't know what to think,
I don't know what to do,
I don't know what to feel
♪♪
I don't know...
I'm no youngster anymore
I don't know
if I'll ever recover
♪♪
♪♪
for a major incident
A wildfire races toward
a sleeping California town
Right now, guys,
Paradise is on effin' fire
Residents awaken to a nightmare
I don't want to die here
Scientists speed
toward the danger zone
Yes, that's a scan we want
risking it all to unlock
the mysteries of fire
It's not something
that you can just observe it
and figure out how it works
Paradise is lost
We have witnessed literally
an entire community gone
It's the worst fire
in a season of worsts
But why?
A history of mismanagement
Everywhere, foresters
were trying
to do the same, silly thing
A warming climate
I think we're moving
into uncharted territory
And a building boom
in the forest
We're literally putting homes
in the line of fire
The stakes... and the flames...
grow higher
Right now, I'm wondering
if we're in a good spot
♪♪
"Inside the Megafire,"
right now, on "NOVA"
♪♪
Another sunny day
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains
north of Sacramento
November 8, 2018
Skies are clear over Northern
California today,
but it is going to be a very
dangerous day for fire danger
It's been more than 200 days
since there was any rain
worth measuring
The forest is bone-dry
♪♪
And now the wind season
has arrived...
With a vengeance
The strongest winds are expected
across the Sierra,
where gusts could reach
60 miles an hour
The stage is set for disaster
♪♪
Then, 85 miles north
of Sacramento,
in a tiny hamlet called Pulga,
the wind blows a high-voltage
power line off a tower
near the Camp Creek
Sparks fly
In 15 minutes, the first reports
of fire come in
It is 6:30 in the morning
The Camp Fire has just begun
When first responders arrive,
the flames are already
so fierce,
and the winds so strong,
they have trouble getting close
to the fire
Eyes on the vegetation fire
It's going to be very difficult
to access
Camp Creek Road
is nearly inaccessible
It's got about a 35-mile-an-hour
sustained wind on it
It's moving incredibly fast,
with a speed that stuns
even veteran firefighters
This has got potential
for a major incident
By 7:30, authorities issue
an evacuation order for Pulga,
where the fire funnels
up a canyon,
picks up speed,
and explodes out over the rim
The fire is now burning
an acre of forest every second
Firefighters cannot fight
the flames
Instead, they focus
on rescuing residents
In Pulga, it's already
crossing that area,
heading towards the Concow area
The fire consumes
the small community of Concow
and heads toward
Paradise, California,
where residents have
just received immediate orders
to evacuate
This fire starts,
and within minutes,
it's hundreds of acres
The man in charge of the state's
wildfire fighting force,
Cal Fire,
is Ken Pimlott
He's never seen anything like it
Within an hour, it is
in the town of Paradise
Paradise
Nestled in the woods
high in the Sierra
A close-knit community
of 26,000,
many of them retirees drawn
to the charm and beauty
of life in a small mountain town
But along with it
comes a looming vulnerability
about to be made
hellishly evident
by the firestorm
stampeding toward them
Right now, guys,
Paradise is on effin' fire
I'm just going to get
the out of Dodge
This is getting heavy
Residents attempt to flee
Everything is burning
Oh, my God, I mean everything
forced to run a gauntlet
through flame
There are only four roads
that lead off the mountain,
and all of them are perilous
Come on!
Just go!
Chaos captured
in harrowing cell phone videos
Oh, my God,
there's fire everywhere
I don't want to die here
I don't want to die
A tense escape from hell
I'm scared!
It's Armageddon
It's so hot
Keep going!
HART Holy!
People are leaving their cars
Oh, my God It's okay
What should we do?
We got to get out of here
First responders race
to rescue hundreds of people
trapped in their homes
Are they coming for us?
Come on
Watch out! Watch out!
Jess!
Cars
Be advised, on Clark Road
at Skyway,
there's a woman in labor,
she's in a beige Honda Pilot
She's going to be honking
her horn
We have to get this traffic
moving, now!
Even a hospital
All patients now out
of Feather River Hospital
All patients out and en route
♪♪
Go get 'em, boys
Be safe
It's now 9:30
Just to the north,
in the neighboring community
of Magalia,
George Gold would normally be up
by now,
but today he sleeps in
What woke me up was the wind
We often have wind here;
I think, "Oh, how nice"
I open the door, and it's windy
♪♪
I look up, and it's dark
I thought,
"Oh, it's going to rain"
I smell the smoke
I said, "It's not going to rain"
I get dressed, I go outside,
I look around
At that point,
the street wasn't burning
But I could see fire,
and I thought,
"Oh, this is the real thing"
He's lived here for 11 years,
drawn by the quiet
and the beauty
It is his dream home
for retirement
Now he must leave it all behind
in a hurry
♪♪
Please, get out of town
And as you're going out of town,
please be careful
But the roads are clogged
with traffic and obstacles,
downed power lines, and trees
Crews are racing
to clear the way
So George decides to wait
He drives his prized convertible
to a nearby parking lot,
hoping it will be safe there
He records these images
as the fire closes in
on his community
You know, you stand here,
and you just look around,
and the next thing, I see that
the high school is on fire,
and it is just going up
♪♪
Just after noon,
the fire is still raging
Many of George's neighbors
are gathering
in another parking lot,
wondering if they are safe
I couldn't get in at 9:00
John Roberson has lived here
eight years
Now, this is kind of spooky
So that's what I'm looking at
As you can see,
that's black smoke
Our home right now is safe
If it jumps up here to
South Park Circle and Andover,
it's gone
Nearby,
Mike and Alice Nutt are packing
whatever they can fit
in their cars
I got soda,
blankets, pillows, food,
my animals
Oh, my dogs
They're my babies
And then, I'm, I'm just scared,
I am very scared
We got our cars loaded up,
don't know where to go
♪♪
6:00 p m,
less than 12 hours
since it began,
and yet so much damage,
so many lives changed forever
Oh, my God,
half of our town is gone
55,000 acres burned;
at least 1,000 structures
destroyed
The Nutts' house?
Gone
And so is the Robersons'
♪♪
George Gold is mesmerized
by what is unfolding
before his eyes,
but now he knows
it's time to get out
He decides to check on his house
When I came down here,
everything was still burning
So I came here, turned around,
I shot a couple of pictures,
and I took off
But the house was already
completely engulfed in fire
♪♪
There is no hope
for Magalia or Paradise
And the Camp Fire keeps growing
While George is driving
toward safety,
meteorologist Craig Clements
is headed
in the opposite direction
He and his team
are on an urgent mission
to shed some light
on how wildfires spread
Oh, look at that... beautiful
Yes, that's a scan we want
It's dangerous work
But the risk comes
with the possibility
of a big scientific payoff
That's interesting,
we're coming
into some smoke here
Perfect, perfect, perfect
They are driving
a one-of-a-kind custom rig
They hope to peer into the fire
in a way
that no one else has before
We need to better understand
fire spread,
and the meteorological data
is one of the key components
And yet we never measure things
on an active wildfire
We usually use a satellite
We see plumes in the radar,
which is great, but, you know,
we're not really seeing
what's going on right here
Plumes...
The columns of smoke and gas
that rise from the flames...
Are more than a sign of fire
They also create
their own weather
And Craig suspects that
they actively spread the fire
But how?
To understand,
he aims a sophisticated lidar
right at the plume
♪♪
Lidar is like radar
that uses a laser beam
It bounces off
the smoke particulates
as they are propelled
by the wind
in and around the plume
and returns information
about speed and direction
We've been able to slice
through a plume with our lidar
And we've been able
to measure rotation
and the wind field associated
with a rotating column,
and so that's pretty exciting
The plumes at fires like these
are complicated systems
As hot air rises,
cooler air rushes in
It's called fire-induced wind
We don't know
how that fire-induced wind
from the plume interacts
with pushing the fire front
If the plume goes up,
does any air or smoke
come back down?
And if it does come back down,
can that spread the fire
in different directions?
It's these interactions
that we call
fire-atmosphere interactions,
and we don't have a great handle
on how they propagate
fire spread
♪♪
The Camp Fire continues
to spread without slowing down
Cal Fire says
the town of Paradise
is pretty much destroyed
48 hours after it began,
it has burned
more than 100,000 acres...
A grim milestone
It is now officially
a "megafire"
Eventually, 86 lives are lost,
nearly 19,000 structures
destroyed
in the most destructive fire
in California history
It stands apart,
but it is not an isolated event
♪♪
One year earlier,
the second-most
destructive fire, Tubbs,
burned
more than 5,600 structures
and killed 22
Little more than three months
before Paradise is destroyed,
the Carr megafire devoured
a quarter-million acres
and a thousand homes
in and around Redding
Eight people perished
And on the same day
the Camp Fire began,
the Woolsey Fire started
in Los Angeles
and Ventura Counties
It burned 97,000 acres,
killing three
Of the ten most destructive
fires in California history,
six occurred in the 13 months
prior to the Camp Fire
We are doing everything we can
to respond and protect citizens,
but fire is part
of the landscape in California
This is the normal now
♪♪
And it's not just California
Across the U S,
an area larger than the state
of Maryland burned in 2018
In the last 40 years or so,
the amount of forest that burns
in any given year
in the Western United States
has increased by about 1,000%
♪♪
That means
there's about ten times
more forest burning this year
than there was in a year
in the 1970s or 1980s
♪♪
All over the world,
wildfires are bigger,
more frequent,
and more destructive
In July 2018, fires killed
nearly 100 in Greece
In Sweden, fires burned
above the Arctic Circle
in the midst
of an unusual heat wave
And huge fires burned in Canada,
Russia, and Australia
Why are we living
in an age of megafires?
♪♪
The big question is,
"Are these giant, destructive
megafires we're seeing today
"just the way forests burn,
"or is this somehow a new normal
"that we've created
by our own actions,
forest management,
and climate change?"
♪♪
♪♪
Near Paradise,
firefighters have more pressing
questions on their minds
Like how best to stop a fire
driven by fierce wind
and steep terrain...
A major factor
in its relentless spread
Researchers are studying this
at the
U S Department of Agriculture's
Missoula Fire Sciences
Laboratory
If you are going to do
fire research,
this is the place to do it
This entire building is devoted
to fire
It's actually
a pretty complex phenomenon
It's not something
that you can just observe it
and figure out how it works
Forest Service scientist
Mark Finney
showed us how they unlock
the mysteries of fire
So this is the burn chamber
right here
Everything we do in here
is designed to look
at how fires behave
On this day,
he and a dozen of his colleagues
are preparing for a test
on a large, tilting burn bed
of precisely cut cardboard
What we can do is put these
on the burn bed
in any kind of density
that we'd like
to engineer whatever kind
of fire we'd like...
How long we want it to burn,
how long the flames are,
how fast it spreads
The burn table brims
with instruments
that measure pressure
and temperature,
taking samples 500 times
a second
And there are cameras everywhere
Today, they are trying
to understand more
about how a fire spreads uphill,
as it did near Paradise
Okay, go ahead
Line of fire, guys, good line
Okay
The flames are the visible sign
of rapid oxidation, or fire
Fire requires dry, flammable
material, or fuel,
oxygen,
and a heat source to create
this chemical chain reaction
Wildfires add
two additional elements...
Weather and topography...
That determine how the flames
will grow and spread
The reason we're measuring this
is that you can actually
get fires
to accelerate extremely quickly
going uphill
Unlike the humans
that fight them,
wildfires move much faster
uphill
When you have a slope,
you can't get air in
from the uphill side
as easily as you can get it in
from the downhill side
If the slope
is sufficiently steep,
all of the air is coming in
from the downhill side
With air fanning the fire
exclusively
on the downhill side,
the flames get pushed
into the slope,
putting them in contact
with more fuel
The tilted, climbing fire
transfers a lot of heat
to the trees and brush
ahead of the flames,
preheating and drying them,
making them more combustible
You get very, very effective
heat transfer
and a much faster-spreading fire
This is what happened
when the Camp Fire started
The wind funneled the flames
into a steep canyon,
and they rapidly accelerated
uphill,
right toward Paradise
On the morning
after Paradise is lost,
the Camp Fire is still spreading
♪♪
Time for firefighters to report
for the daily briefing
Engine 83 Here
36-31-Charlie Here
Engine 25 Here
All right, good morning,
everybody
I got 7:00, we're going
to go ahead and get started
with the operational briefing
Thousands of firefighters
are here,
and more are on the way
Okay, up here in Cresta area,
the fire has progressed
to the east
It's on both sides of the river,
continuing to eat its way
downcanyon
Good morning, everyone
Incident meteorologist Alex Hoon
is worried about what lies ahead
There's going to be
a lot of shifting winds,
very dry conditions
Use your lookouts,
use your communication,
make it a safe day
He taps into a suite
of instruments
on the ground, in aircraft,
and in space
Orbiting 22,000 miles
above the Earth,
the two-year-old
GOES-16 weather satellite
captured visible and
infrared images of the Camp Fire
from the beginning,
the big picture of a big fire,
an eerily remote vantage point
to utter chaos, death,
and destruction
This particular image,
it covers a time period
from about 6:00 a m
in the morning
all the way
until about 5:00 p m
when the sun begins to go down
Within that 11 hours,
we estimate,
it went from zero
to about 50,000 acres
And then the following 12 hours,
it grew another 40,000 acres
It released just
an exponential amount of energy
And that's
what we're seeing here
on the satellite image
♪♪
A big factor in the exponential
spread of the Camp Megafire:
spotting
Hot embers,
also called firebrands,
launched and carried
by 50-mile-an-hour winds,
landed as much as a mile ahead
of the fire front
New spot fires started again
and again,
rapidly, randomly
But exactly how spotting fuels
the growth of megafires
is one of the big unknowns
in wildfire science
So it's still blowing
northeasterly
Craig Clements hopes his work
might lead to some answers
This is a real strong
low-level jet
coming down off the mountains
Right now,
wildfire prediction models
are not sophisticated enough
to factor in
all of the complexities
of the atmosphere and terrain
And they don't account
for spotting at all
We are trying to forecast
how many spot fires
there will be,
and that's something
no model right now can handle
Better models would help
right now
to keep firefighters safe
as they battle the Camp Fire
♪♪
But for people in Paradise,
there was no time
for predictions
Having gone through Paradise,
I... I words don't describe it
♪♪
I mean, it, um
A lot like the road to Baghdad
during the first Gulf War,
when vehicles were abandoned...
That's literally
what it looked like
And we know some people perished
on those roads,
and what those people went
through,
and they really had no warning
♪♪
I think this is the first time
we've ever seen an entire town
in California
wiped off the map
by a wildland fire
♪♪
We have witnessed literally
an entire community gone
♪♪
The megafire that wiped Paradise
off the map
is more than just a big wildfire
At this scale,
the physics of fire changes,
greatly increasing the intensity
But why?
At the Missoula
Fire Sciences Laboratory,
mechanical engineer
Sara McAllister
is seeking an answer
When you have
a really wide plume,
you're not pulling in air
into the plume
as effectively as you are
if it's a much smaller diameter
In any fire,
colder air flows in
to replace hot air as it rises
Most of the time,
the air can come in
from almost any direction,
chaotically
It's what makes flames flicker
and dance
But the flames at the center
of a megafire
are not fed by colder air
from the sides or from above...
The surrounding fire and plume
stand in the way
So the only source of air for
these flames is at ground level
When that happens,
the plume changes
♪♪
Sara McAllister conducts
an experiment
to simulate that restriction
of air from the side
using something you might find
in your own home:
a chimney
We were wondering,
"Does that restriction in air
influence the burning
of the fuel underneath it?"
The idea is that
we are scaling big-fire behavior
into a small-fire, lab-based
experiment
and trying to understand
what's different
She douses a uniform bed
of fuel,
in this case wood blocks
Smells good, doesn't it?
With isopropyl alcohol
Burns very nicely
In the open, the flames are
about five feet high,
as the air streams in
from all directions
Now watch what happens
when she slides the burning wood
underneath the chimney,
blocking sideways air flow
So we're looking at
15-, maybe 16-foot flame heights
off of a fuel bed
Quite the increase
There's a feedback
When the fires get big,
all of that air
that can't come into that plume
has to come in on the ground,
which is basically
just stoking your fire
♪♪
The chimney effect created
by giant plumes
makes megafires grow bigger,
which further fans the flames
It's a frightening feedback loop
that gets even scarier
when a plume becomes
a fire whirl
♪♪
Fire whirls that form
on your average fire,
you see them for a few seconds,
and they're gone
And normally, they don't prompt
too much concern
But the biggest ones,
literally fire tornadoes,
cannot be ignored
♪♪
Scientists used to think
they were rare, even unlikely
But as megafires become
more common,
that is no longer the case
Three months
before the Camp Fire,
this is what happens
in Redding, California
The Carr Megafire spawns
a deadly fire tornado
that generates winds
approaching 165 miles an hour
But what causes the flames
to start spinning?
Wow
This here is
a fire whirl generator
It's an apparatus that allows us
to study how fire whirls form
and the structure of the vortex
that's produced inside the whirl
Mark Finney says they begin
with turbulent, strong winds
that send a lopsided current
of air into the flames
He demonstrates
what happens next
You'll notice at the beginning
that the flames
are very disorganized
But as the inflow
begins to come in
in a swirling fashion,
the flames themselves
become quite organized
The air streams in faster
and faster from the bottom,
fanning the flames,
strengthening the whirl
The burning rate of the fuel
increases
by three to eight times
as the whirl begins to develop
♪♪
The fire tornado in Redding
develops after the wind starts
blowing inland from the Pacific
When it collides with the fire,
it creates powerful,
swirling winds
All the ingredients
of an epic fire tornado
are now in place
This was ranked as an E F -3,
Enhanced Fujita scale tornado
I believe this is the strongest
documented fire-induced tornado
Temperatures reach
2,700 degrees Fahrenheit,
hot enough to melt steel
It lasts for 30 minutes
We saw things like pipes
wrapped around trees,
flipped-over cars,
power lines that were broken off
from 90-foot towers
that were taken down
The winds to do that are extreme
♪♪
Extreme: a word redefined
by megafires
as they grow in size, frequency,
and impact
But the destruction they create
makes it easy to overlook
an important point:
fire is an essential part
of a natural cycle
that keeps a forest healthy
What fire does is,
it essentially releases
nutrients, precious nutrients,
into the ground
so that new plants
can grow and thrive,
and it creates a cycle
where once plants grow enough,
essentially,
they are setting the system up
for a future fire
♪♪
The concerted effort to stop
that cycle of fire
began more than a century ago
The modern fire story
in the U S,
wildland fire story,
begins in 1910, really
The spring of 1910 brings
severe drought
to the northern Rockies
In April, hot coals spewed
from a chugging locomotive
spark fire in western Montana
In short order,
there are hundreds
of small fires burning there
and in Idaho
As spring becomes summer,
the drought persists,
the winds pick up,
and the fires grow larger
3,000 men are
on the front lines,
trying to beat back the flames
There was an organization,
the U S Forest Service,
barely five years old,
that was now charged with
dealing with these large fires
1910 overwhelmed the system
completely
Three-and-a-quarter million
acres in the northern Rockies,
most of it concentrated
in a two-day period
called the Big Blowup
♪♪
The Big Blowup is triggered
when hurricane-force winds turn
those smaller fires
into several giant firestorms
♪♪
They leave a path
of devastation,
charring an area
the size of Connecticut
78 firefighters are killed
And the history
and ecology of U S forests
would be forever changed
The thinking was,
"We could have stopped
these fires
"If we'd had more men,
more telephone lines,
"more lookout towers,
"we could have caught
those fires early
and there would not have been
a Big Blowup"
President Roosevelt's attack
on the Depression began
with his emergency conservation
project
During the Great Depression,
Forest Service chief
Ferdinand Silcox
deploys New Deal workers
and money
to reshape the national forests
with roads, lookout towers,
and phone lines
Then, in 1935,
he announces something
called the 10:00 a m policy
It meant that by 10:00
the morning following
the report of a fire,
you would have that fire
controlled
So if you found the fire
at 10:00 p m Tuesday night,
you would have it controlled
by 10:00 a m Wednesday morning
If you failed Wednesday morning,
then you'd plan
to have it controlled
by 10:00 a m Thursday morning
Washington gives
the Forest Service the money
to make the 10:00 a m policy
a reality
So you develop smoke-jumpers
You develop organized crews
You put in trails
"We're going beat
back the fire menace"
Over time, the American public
becomes enamored
with the heroic narrative
of smoke-jumpers and hotshots,
while being fed a steady diet
of public service announcements
from Smokey Bear
Remember, only you can prevent
forest fires
The message seems clear:
Forest fires are the enemy,
to be avoided or attacked
at all costs
All of the science,
all of the officials,
are very keen to eliminate fire
They see no purpose to it
It's dangerous, it's a nuisance
"We will find
a modern alternative"
But the war on fire creates
some unforeseen consequences
With the natural cycle
interrupted,
forests become dense
with fuel for fires
So in the 1960s and '70s,
the seeds of a new kind of
thinking begin to take root
It was realized in 1978 or so
that we weren't going to win
by suppressing fire
We were having more fires,
no matter how much money
we spent,
no matter how much technology
we threw at the fires
The 10:00 a m policy
was abandoned
and a new fire policy
was introduced,
where fire was supposed to be
incorporated more integrally
into wildland management
Instead of all-out war,
it is a more nuanced approach:
prescribed burns encouraged;
wildfires not attacked,
but managed,
allowed to burn
whenever and wherever possible
But in the real world,
it proves much easier said
than done
It's hard to find a place
where the new policy isn't
at odds
with a building boom
in the forest
♪♪
In August 2018, a case in point
in the Cascade Mountains,
90 miles east of Seattle
The Cougar Creek Fire is ripping
through the Okanogan-Wenatchee
National Forest
The area is sparsely populated,
and the fire began
with a lightning strike
It might seem
like the perfect place
to let a fire burn
But the fire has gotten
very big, very quickly,
and it is heading
toward the small communities
nestled in the forest
♪♪
So the man in charge
really has no choice
Morning, everybody
He has to draw a line
in the woods
and stop the fire
from moving beyond it
Today is going to be
a busy fire day
So I ask that mentally
we be there
and be ready for that
Noel Livingston is
a veteran incident commander
for the U S Forest Service
He first started fighting fires
36 years ago
How do we manage
this fire problem that we have?
Because we have a fire problem
We have landscapes
that are out of sync,
and we have people living
in those same landscapes
The easy solution of,
"Well, let's just let it burn,"
isn't realistic
Today, nearly 100 million
Americans have made the decision
to live in the woods,
what scientists call
the wildland-urban interface
We love these places,
and yet we're living
with a certain amount of risk
that they will go up in flames
We're literally putting homes
in the line of fire
There are hundreds of thousands
of homes
that have been threatened
over the last several decades
by wildfires,
and we expect that to go up
♪♪
Every firefighter here
at Cougar Creek
knows the bitter irony:
Their success in the short term
might make the people nearby
feel safe living here
and encourage even more building
But it is a false sense
of security
Each time they stop a fire
in its tracks,
fuel for the inevitable
builds up,
and fires are more likely
to become megafires
Because we've excluded fire
for the past hundred years
or so,
particularly
in heavily wooded stands,
we're getting more of a
continuous, high-intensity event
in those types of stands
This ups the ante
for firefighters
already doing very risky work
As the fire grows in strength,
safety officer Jennifer Rabuck
is on a scouting mission
near the fire line
♪♪
She aims to strike a balance
between saving homes
and protecting
firefighters' lives
This is our primary
containment line
that we're walking on
The fire is off to our right
Ideally,
we'd like to hold this line
Hot embers from the wildfire,
launched and carried
by the wind,
are flying overhead, landing
in what amounts to kindling
You look at some of this,
it's all dry and dead,
and it just flakes off
in your fingers
There's nothing in here
that has got any sort
of resistance to take
If an ember lands in here,
this piece of wood is going
to catch fire
The dead, dry wood
is where spot fires start,
but not where they end
With the temperature high
and the humidity so low,
everything here is dehydrated
and highly flammable
This is what we call
tree torching
or even group torching
Single tree would be one,
group torching would be
pockets of trees
When it's torching,
it starts out on the bottom
And as those flames grow,
it's sending that heat up
into the live part of the tree,
the green part of the tree,
preheating it,
so it's more receptive
to that build-up and build-up,
and it reaches
a certain combustion point,
where the entire tree will go up
And you can see the ember wash
coming off of those,
and you can see how far
it's going over the ridge
Oh, this is a living tree
that's gone up?
This is a living tree
What goes through your mind
when you see this?
Right now I'm wondering
if we're in a good spot
The Cougar Creek Fire will burn
more than 42,000 acres
before it stops spreading
But no structures are damaged
Another victory for the nation's
wildfire fighting force
They succeed 97% of the time
♪♪
A century of excluding fire
has created some unhealthy,
dangerous forests
all over the United States
♪♪
But how best to allow forests,
fire, and people to coexist?
Fire ecologist Sharon Hood
is testing some alternatives
in western Montana
Oh, got the pith
Nice
This 30-acre plot is part
of a long-term study
to see if there's a better way
to manage our forests
It hasn't burned in 100 years,
and it is filled with fuel
for a fire
It's hard just to plow through,
much less do their work
You basically can't see
through it,
and when you're trying to walk
through it,
you're weaving
through very small trees,
you're stepping
over a lot of logs
It's the density that strikes me
The dead and small trees
and the shrubs
are the ingredients, the fuel,
for bigger, more intense fires
This forest is a tinderbox...
A consequence of a misguided
forest management philosophy
Our ponderosa pine forests
evolved
with very frequent fires...
On average, every seven years
So removing fire for 100 years
allows all these little
seedlings to get established
If fires were coming
through here routinely,
they would kill those seedlings,
creating open conditions
And she has the scientific proof
in the plot next door,
where they thinned out the trees
in 2001,
then started a prescribed burn
in 2002
You're looking at
this open ponderosa pine forest
16 years later
The thin-and-burn forest
is all open space
There's not a lot of fuels,
and you see the larger trees
♪♪
Back in her lab in Missoula,
Sharon and her team carefully
slice and analyze
the core samples
from the thinned and burned
parcel
The tree rings tell a story,
if you know how to read them
Here we have a close-up
of a tree core,
and each light and dark band
is one year's worth of growth
And you can see, between 1990
and 2000, in this section,
you've got narrow growth rings
Narrow rings mean less growth,
nature's record
of how the trees were faring
before the experiment began
And then, here in 2001,
there was a thinning, where
we cut about half the trees,
and then in 2002,
there was a prescribed burn
And you can start seeing really
fat growth rings after that
♪♪
A forest that is more open
and trees that are larger
and healthier
Thinning and controlled burning
clearly works
But is it practical
beyond an experiment?
This type of treatment
that you see here is scalable
There's no one-size-fits-all,
but thinning is a major tool
that we have
to be able to re-introduce fire
in a safer way
It isn't the answer
in every forest landscape
And prescribed burning faces
a lot of opposition,
ironically, from the people
most in harm's way,
worried about changing
their view
or breathing the smoke
When we put a little bit
of smoke in the air
under prescribed fire,
sometimes it can meet a lot
of resistance from the public
There have been
some prescribed burns
that were supposed to be
small forest treatments,
and then a gust of wind came
at the wrong time
and turned that prescribed burn
into a wildfire
And what about the expense?
Thinning and burning can cost
about $1,000 an acre,
and it's not a one-time fix
But compared
to the cost of a megafire,
maybe it's an ounce
of prevention
I think by now,
people who live in the forest
or near the forest recognize
that there's going to be a fire
now
or there's going to be a fire
later,
and you can have it
under controlled conditions,
when you can go away
for the weekend,
or you can be running
for your life
watching your house burn down
Humans have created
the megafire monster,
but enlightened
forest management alone
won't stop the infernos
Because there is another factor
at play,
also with our fingerprint...
Climate change
♪♪
The Camp Fire has broken
records,
and yet it is only one
of three major incidents
in California right now
We've been going
from fire to fire to fire,
and every time we see it,
it's, like,
"That, that's unbelievable
"That's unbelievable
I can't, can't believe
we're seeing this"
And in the land
of endless summers,
there is now
an endless fire season
We're in November... this is
This is not historically when we
would see fires still occurring
It would be closer to
the hotter part of the summer,
but they're, they're lasting
into December now
So it's, it's a fire year
There's no fire season
♪♪
A fire year,
year after year after year
What role do rising temperatures
and changing
precipitation patterns
play in this trend?
In California,
the record wildfires occur
after a historic
six-year drought
Climate change
is taking a pretty bad drought
and actually causing it to be
on par with the biggest droughts
over the last millennium
♪♪
To better understand this link
between climate and fire,
paleoecologist Cathy Whitlock
spends a lot of time
in Yellowstone National Park
It's a nearly pristine ecosystem
where we can really see
these things going on
This is Blacktail Pond
The layers of mud
beneath this ancient lake bed
have their own story to tell,
going way back in time
♪♪
Lakes are great repositories
of environmental information
Pollen grains land
on the surface of the lake,
and they get buried
in the sediment
Charcoal from fires gets carried
in the air
and then sinks to the bottom
And those sediments
are undisturbed,
and so you get a continuous
record of environmental history
One, two, three
Keep it straight,
keep it vertical
All right
So let's pull it up
Let it drain, turn it sideways
Okay, now we're going to extrude
Here it comes
Nice!
Whoo!
Using two types of clues,
she can learn a lot
about the ancient landscape
Pollen tells us about the plants
that are growing here,
and the vegetation is
one of our best indicators
of what the climate was
So we can use the pollen record
to reconstruct past climate,
and then we can compare it with
the charcoal record of fires
to see how periods of fire
relate
to periods of climate change
The sediment at Blacktail Pond
allows Cathy to look back
15,000 years,
when the glaciers
from the last ice age retreated
from this area
Back in her laboratory,
Cathy slices the cores in half
and begins to take a closer look
♪♪
There's a lot going on at
this time period in this lake
The light-colored layers
are calcium carbonate-rich
They probably were deposited
by algae
that were producing
this calcium carbonate,
and when that happens,
usually, it happens because
the lake's a little bit warmer
The dark layers,
I'm seeing little blips of
what look like charcoal to me
But I suspect there's going
to be a lot of charcoal
all the way through this core
We just have to look
under a microscope to find it
♪♪
After they chemically treat and
sift sediment from the core,
they can clearly identify
and tally the charcoal
and the pollen
♪♪
I'm seeing
some large pine pollens
They kind of look
like Mickey Mouse hats
And some of them, like that one,
is a lodgepole pine, for sure
She has documented
a long relationship
between fire and temperatures
Over the past 7,500 years,
fire activity closely correlates
with the climate
As temperatures cooled,
fire activity
gradually decreased
But as humans have warmed
the planet in the last century,
fire frequency
has dramatically increased
During the warm, dry,
windy summer of 1988,
800,000 acres,
one third of Yellowstone Park,
burned
Her analysis shows
it was one of the largest
fire seasons here
in the past 6,000 years
If current temperature trends
continue,
fires of that magnitude
will likely be more frequent
in the future
I think we're moving
into uncharted territory
We're seeing warming
at rapid rates,
we're seeing extreme fire events
We're seeing things that we
just haven't seen in the past,
and that's my big concern
Cory, do you have all the vials?
Ecologist Monica Turner
has the same concern
She and her team
study Yellowstone's breathtaking
lodgepole pine forests
In Yellowstone,
what I do is try to understand
how fires affect the forest
and then how the forest recovers
♪♪
The fires here in 1988
were part of the normal,
100-to-300-year burn cycle
for lodgepole pines
Although the fires
were big and severe,
the forests of Yellowstone
recovered
in spectacular fashion
But in 2000 and again in 2016,
new fires hit some of the
same areas that burned in '88
Monica wonders if climate change
is making it hard
for the forest to bounce back
once again
So that's something like
104 degrees Fahrenheit
Whoa
Just below the surface here
That's hot
Too much heat, too little shade
And what happens
when forests burn again so soon,
before there is time to recover?
To find out, they systematically
count and measure
tree seedlings
D8 is dead
And they determine
how far they travel
What we are hoping
to find out here is,
"Will they germinate?
Are the conditions suitable
for them to grow?"
In this plot,
where only 16 years
separate two fires,
young trees
are completely destroyed
Only stumps remain,
and there is on average
a 60% reduction
in the number of tree seedlings
More frequent, more severe fires
and warmer temperatures
mean new generations of trees
will have a much harder time
taking root
We are now questioning
how the frequency
and the severity of fires
may overcome the ability
of the forests to recover
If we have future fires
that happen every 15 years,
I don't know
♪♪
Fire may be integral
to the evolution of forests,
but the scale and frequency
of today's megafires
appear to be something new
The landscape is changing fast,
a symptom of climate change
that is more sudden than most
Going into the future,
I think we're going to have
more fires
And if we continue to have
more fires,
it will gradually shift
the composition of the forests
In some places,
we may lose forest
and get more grassland
♪♪
The Camp Fire is still burning,
but in Paradise,
embers are starting to cool
George Gold is headed
through town
on his way to Magalia,
just to the north
He already knows
his house is destroyed,
but what happened
to the sports car
that he left a mile away
in a parking lot?
Finding out is his main goal
today
There is my car!
I see my car!
It's there
Can you believe it?
My Miata is alive
A-ha, she lives!
It's time to see
if there's anything
worth salvaging at home
This was my neighborhood,
and there's nothing left
There's, there's no neighborhood
here
There's just debris
I mean, it was gorgeous here,
just gorgeous
Peaceful, quiet
My shed's there,
so I can do my gardening
And this is my front door,
right here
Open the door
I mean, I never considered
myself a materialistic person
I mean, if you went in my house,
you would say,
"Gee, you're kind of living
a spartan life," right?
No fancy stuff, just basic stuff
But the stuff I had,
I loved it, right?
Every time I walked in the door,
I thought,
"Oh, wow, this is my house
I've made it, I'm in heaven"
And I had all these tool boxes
You know, I spent 30 years
gathering tools
Here we go
They may live again
Maybe
I think not
It's really hard
I don't know what to do...
I don't know what to think
I've never experienced
anything like this
I don't know what to think,
I don't know what to do,
I don't know what to feel
♪♪
I don't know...
I'm no youngster anymore
I don't know
if I'll ever recover
♪♪
♪♪