Fighting the fires

By Dr. Charles Keller

This year has been real wakeup call about the future of mega-fires in the Rocky Mountains. New Mexico had its two largest-ever fires, and Arizona suffered much larger ones.
Over the 10 years since the Cerro Grande Fire, the number and size of these fires has increased. We are being shown that the future will bring many more and perhaps even larger wildfires. In addition, the destruction of our forests and the resulting huge floods will irreversibly change our canyons and stream courses.

All this damage was made worse due to the record-breaking drought we experienced. University of New Mexico’s Dr. David Gutzler studied Southwest droughts for the past thousand years or so and matched expected ones with projected global warming. He found that, while the environment recovered from drought in the past, as the climate warms, recovery will be much less robust.

The meaning of all this is clear. Over the coming decades, we stand to lose nearly all our forests with little hope of recovery. The tempering effect forests have on temperature, wind speed and soil moisture will be gone with subsequent dramatic changes in our flora and fauna.

These changes in turn will impact our aesthetic, cultural and economic levels. This year Santa Clara Pueblo has lost much of its ceremonial and spiritual resources. Bandelier National Monument was closed due to danger of floods. One third of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is closed. Who wants to come to a state whose parks are charred stumps or whose towns are potential fire traps?

This raises the question: Can we stop these megafires? (Keep in mind that if we could, we could also decide whether to allow beneficial burns to proceed.)

The answer is clear: using present methods of suppression, absolutely not. Which makes one ask, why not change how we fight fires? Are there other ways that could do the trick? The answer is yes.

First, one needs to know how fires perform. In the Rocky Mountains, megafires are nearly always started by human intervention, from cigarettes to downed power lines, during high-wind events. Pre-settlement fires were mostly started by lightning during our monsoon season—a time without high wind events. Thus pre-settlement megafires were exceedingly rare. But high winds usually die down at night, and the fires slow to smokey quiet events. It is then that we can fight them most effectively.

A conference at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the fall after Cerro Grande brought together several agencies. One of its findings was that night-flying aircraft being directed by drones with infrared imaging of the fires could be vectored over the fires at 5- to 10-minute intervals during the “quiet” part of the day—8 p.m. to 10 a.m.

Directed by a fire boss to GPS locations dictated by the drones, these planes could easily and safely put some 2 acre-feet of water on the “slumbering” fires. Few fires could survive such an assault. They would cease to exist. Computer models such as the superb one at Los Alamos could assist in many ways to make this method more efficient.
Initially, such an effort might require the aid of the USAF, and it would be more expensive than current methods, but it appears we have no choice, for current methods are all but useless, as Las Conchas showed us. After its high-wind first day, it proceeded over a week or so to quintuple in size despite firefighting methods. (In addition, the huge number of backfires caused considerably more damage.)

Much study and work needs to be done to make these new methods a reality, but we simply have no choice. It’s time to get serious about saving our state.

Charles Keller is retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was head of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He is Pajarito Group Global Warming Committee chair.