Wildfires can be as destructive as they sound. They take light unexpectedly and fiercely. With stunning frequency they threaten communities, scar national forests, and wreak havoc across our Western landscape for decades afterwards.
But it doesn't have to be this way. At least not this bad, says Scott Abella.
Abella has made it his life's work to understand how fires occur in Western forests. He has devised ways to prevent them and championed programs to help forests recover. A research professor and director of the UNLV's Desert and Dryland Forest Research Group, Abella travels throughout the West each summer to study firsthand the devastation that wildfires deliver.
As he puts it, fires will always happen, but steps can be taken to reduce their severity.
We caught up with Abella to learn more about what's causing mega fires in the West.
On why Western forests are out of whack: Many forests in the West, over evolutionary time, adapted and became accustomed to frequent, low-intensity surface fires. Under natural conditions, small surface fires kept forests in check, recycled nutrients, and prevented the accumulation of the fuel that feeds the massive wildfires.
But in the last century, preventing fires in these 'frequent fire' forests resulted in much thicker tree cover and ballooning populations. It's similar to how deer populations exploded when their predators were eliminated in national forests.
So, if a forest burned naturally every five years before 1900, the past 110 years of fire suppression means the forest has 'missed' 22 fires.
What about Nevada? Nevada's forests are located on more than 300 isolated mountain ranges, many with desert in between. Though Nevada might not have a mega fire -- on the order of 500,000 acres like we've recently seen in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona -- we could lose a forest on an entire mountain range in a single fire.
In Nevada, fires affect the entire landscape, not just the mountains. Our deserts have a major fire problem because nonnative grasses, like cheatgrass, have become well established and provide fuel for fires caused by humans and lightning strikes. As a result, fires are now starting in the desert and burning into the forest.
What needs to be done: Our best hope is to start large, collaborative landscape-scale projects with tree thinning and careful, strategic reintroduction of fire. An example for thinning is mimicking natural forest patterns like clumping of trees.
This will reduce density and the accumulation of fuel sources, including pine needles, twigs, branches and logs. Some of this is already happening in the Spring Mountains outside Las Vegas.
Fires will continue to occur, through both human causes and lightning, and that's actually fine. What we can control are the fuel conditions present when a wildfire starts.
Is it too late? Several fires have already occurred in the Spring Mountains, but diligent fire suppression and careful evacuation of people from their homes and recreation sites have limited the damage. But prevailing fire suppression practices will make it hard to prevent a large fire in the future. Even if the fires are relatively small, they can nickel-and-dime the forest to the point that in 20 years, we realize very little forest is left.
