New Wildfire Realities

As a Mississippian and a resident of the Gulf Coast, I know a thing or two about natural disasters and the critical role that government must play in either reducing the risk of these terrible events or mitigating their destructiveness. Both Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill are examples of failures by federal, local, and state governments that cost people their lives and wreaked havoc on local economies and communities.  

While the Gulf Coast is likely in for a long hurricane season this year, it’s the ongoing wildfires in the western United States that have been on the minds of all Americans over the last few weeks. The deaths last week of four Air Force pilots flying C-130 tankers, fighting wildfires in the Black Hills of South Dakota, are a terrible reminder about the awful costs associated with these infernos.

Additionally, these fires portend  that our nation may be entering a period in which dangerous wildfires begin to realign old state and federal government politics and policies regulating forest health, climate change, and wildfire management. Wildfire is now also a homeland security risk. Terrorists no longer need dirty bombs to cause chaos; by setting fires in the right places at the right time they can harm many American communities.

America experienced over 77,000 wildfire events in 2011 that burned some 8.5 million acres. Wildfire is costing federal taxpayers over $3 billion per year in suppression alone. One in three homes in the U.S. today is now situated in an area called the wildland-urban interface.

Millions of lives and homes are at risk of cataclysmic disaster in areas of the South and West. On Labor Day of 2011, nearly 2,000 homes were lost in Bastrup County, Texas, in the worst wildfire in that state’s history. The 2012 Gila New Mexico fire was the largest in that state’s history. Colorado’s 2012 High Park Fire has destroyed the most homes in Colorado history.

While our firefighters and first responders have become the true examples of American heroes, droughts, forest fuel levels, winds, pestilence, and record heat have pushed agency planners to uncharted territories of wildfire prediction and management. In the midst of growing federal deficits it will be imperative to find new technologies and methods to prevent fire and to detect it early to avoid these monstrous fires.

Americans may do well to take a lesson from the German government. The old forests of northwest Germany faced many wildfire threats a decade ago. Working with the German Space Institute, or DLR, the Germans deployed early wildfire detection technology from space, using its work with Mars Pathfinder and Rossetta in monitoring comet gas, asteroid ice, and dust particles.

The result was an invention called ‘FireWatch,’ a tower-based sensor system that sees the earliest signs of wildfire smoke with pinpoint location. After eight years of deployment, the FireWatch System has reduced the acreage burned in Germany by 85 percent; saving lives, property, and tax dollars. This technology was recently awarded the Space Foundation’s 2012 Hall of Fame Award for technology this past April in Colorado Springs. This technology should be explored for deployment here in the United States.

Wildfires emit more carbon each year on Earth than all the cars and trucks of the planet combined. Homeowners are paying higher premiums to be insured against these destructive blazes. Our federal labs at Los Alamos and Idaho have been threatened by wildfire. Even our military bases have been affected by wildfire. Wildfire arson is on the rise. Recently, Al Qaeda published manuals to its minions exploiting the setting of wildfire as a terrorism tool here in the United States.

While no technology exists to prevent a hurricane, there are science-based opportunities to deal with wildfires before they get out of hand. No doubt, the issue of wildfires will continue to dominate the news and tax the resources of our citizenry for years to come. Congress, the president, and governors must seize this moment and take new steps to control this growing threat to our people and landscapes.