A few days after the Park fire tore through Cohasset, a small forest community in Northern California, in late July, Dallas Koller drove out to inspect the damage.
He passed destroyed buildings, trees charred to black matchsticks and smoke rising from smoldering vegetation. But amid the destruction, there was a heartening sight: The homes at the four properties where Mr. Koller, volunteers from Butte County and a few fire professionals had intentionally set blazes to burn excess vegetation had survived.
Mr. Koller, 34, said there was no way to know for sure if the intentional burns, which occurred periodically in the years before the fire, including two in March, had made the difference. “But prescribed fire was part of that puzzle,” he said.
Federal and state agencies, as well as other groups that work with them, including private citizens and businesses, are setting fires that burn the dry grasses, small trees and other vegetation that could otherwise fuel an intense wildfire. Research has shown that these burns reduce wildfire risk, potentially saving lives and property.
While the state is increasing its use of beneficial fire, as the method is called, officials and experts alike say it is far from enough to meet the threat posed by catastrophic wildfires.
Land managers in the state, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and federal agencies have set a target of intentionally burning 400,000 acres annually by next year, an amount of land that when combined would be larger than the city of Los Angeles. The goal is to chip away at the 10 million to 30 million acres that officials estimate would benefit from some form of fuel reduction treatment. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is data publicly available, about 96,000 acres were burned by these land managers.
“The state is struggling to get anywhere close to the targets they have for prescribed fire,” said Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford who has studied controlled burns. “It’s clear that there would be real profound benefits of reaching the target and ultimately going beyond it.”
According to one study from researchers at Columbia and Stanford, low-intensity fires, a category that includes mild natural fires and prescribed burns, reduce wildfire risk by about 60 percent. Experts also say that prescribed burns have reduced the severity of previous wildfires, including in Yosemite National Park, where researchers found that they helped protect giant sequoias during the Washburn fire in 2022.
Most of California’s ecosystems have evolved to adapt to or depend on fire, which can rejuvenate forests and help nutrients return to the soil. But federal and state land management agencies banned intentional burns for many decades, arguing that all fires were dangerous and could hurt the timber industry. This, along with aggressive efforts to suppress wildfires, allowed vegetation to accumulate, a condition that could supercharge blazes.
Since then, intentional burn practices, including planned fires and cultural burning by Native American tribes, have been gradually reintroduced. Nowadays, these efforts are carried out by various entities across the state, including Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, tribal organizations and private citizens.
Mr. Koller, for example, runs Butte County’s prescribed burn association, a group with about 400 members that carries out controlled fires for private landowners. Groups like these now operate in about half of the counties in California.
“The state can’t possibly burn everyone’s land,” he said. “The task is too large.”
While all forms of intentional burns reduce the fuel for future blazes, they are sometimes ignited for other purposes, such as managing rangelands or for cultural reasons. Other parts of the country, particularly the Southeast, also have a history of doing regularly prescribed burns.
In California, recent devastating fire seasons have propelled interest — and investment — in controlled burns. In 2020 alone, wildfires killed 33 people, destroyed thousands of buildings and caused over $12 billion in damages, according to a report from the state.
This year’s fire season got off to a furious start after two relatively quiet years. The Park fire ignited in late July and has burned about 430,000 acres, making it the largest blaze in California this year. It was almost entirely contained as of Friday, and overall fire activity slowed in California in late August, but forecasters say fires could pick up again across much of the state in September.
Fires that sparked this week in Northern California and the Central Valley have led the authorities to order hundreds of residents to evacuate.
Cal Fire has steadily increased the number of acres it has burned over the past few years, and now it has an annual target of 50,000 acres by next year. It burned about 36,000 acres during the 2022-23 fiscal year. Cal Fire said in a statement that the department was taking “numerous positive, if incremental, steps” toward increasing that number.
The state’s budget maintains $2.6 billion in funding for tackling wildfires and improving forest health. An additional $200 million per year is designated for healthy forest and fire prevention programs, which include prescribed fire projects.
The money is most likely not enough, especially because it is spread across a number of initiatives, said Mark Schwartz, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who has studied controlled burns and other wildfire management methods.
In addition to the need for more funds, Mr. Schwartz said, controlled burn programs face a number of other hurdles. Already limited in number, firefighters who would staff a prescribed fire are often called away to battle an active blaze. There are also only so many days in a year that conditions are right for a fire, and access is a challenge in some locations. And local communities may oppose a controlled burn, he said.
“It’s hard to wag a finger too much at agencies,” he said. “Getting prescribed fire on the landscape at the scale we’d like is very difficult.”
Some of these concerns are rooted in fears of what could go wrong in a prescribed fire. The U.S. Forest Service has said that over 99 percent of these fires go as planned, but mistakes can be destructive. In 2022, the agency lost control of two prescribed burns in New Mexico. The fires merged and grew to become the largest recorded fire in the state’s history, destroying hundreds of homes.
However, experts say that avoiding these burns can also have consequences. The Sacramento Bee reported in early August that the authorities in Chico, the college town where the Park fire ignited, had planned but not carried out a prescribed burn that could have curbed the giant blaze.
But the fire chief in Chico, Steve Standridge, disputed that account. He said a patch of land across the road from where the Park fire ignited had been identified as a site that could be advantageous to burn, but that a formal plan was never made, and that there were other higher-priority sites. He added that such a burn would have had a “marginal impact” given the way the Park fire started and spread.
In Cohasset, where about a third of the structures in the community burned down, Sheri Simons, 69, and her husband, Paul Wellin, 69, said they had a controlled fire done on their property in March. The fire was managed by a group of about 20 people from the prescribed burn association that included friends and neighbors.
When the Park fire was approaching, the couple were away from home; they learned of the fire while on a plane and landed in California after Cohasset had already been evacuated. When an official drove them to their property a few days later, they passed one burned house after another, and believed theirs was lost, too.
The couple were dropped off at the end of their driveway and told they had 10 minutes to survey everything. Ms. Simons and Mr. Wellin ran past downed power lines, burned ponderosa pines and ash that Ms. Simons described as “ankle-deep.” To their shock, their home was still standing.
“It was crazy that it was still there,” Ms. Simons said.
Mr. Wellin said the prescribed burn had increased the odds that their home would make it through. The prescribed burn association there said it had not carried out a burn on a property where a home was later destroyed, but that does not mean the method saves homes 100 percent of time.
Mr. Koller said he was happy to see that the homes treated had survived, but the feeling was short-lived. He knew of other landowners who had requested a prescribed burn but did not receive one and subsequently lost their homes.
“It’s hard not to think about it,” he said. “You just wonder if maybe we had burned it, if that would have been enough.”
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