117 - Global wildfire emergency and the key role of FSEs with Albert Simeoni

Understanding the Global Increase in Wildfires

Speaker 1 0:00

Hello everybody , welcome to the Fire Science Show . If you're following the mainstream media , you probably see a lot of coverage of different wildfires happening around the world Tragic fires that endanger local populations to risk and it's my feeling that this year is really nasty . There's a lot of them and observing this trend of more and more media stories related to wildfires and wildfires becoming somehow recognized consequence of global warming , I wonder what's actually happening around this . Is there an explanation of this increase in number and size of these fires and the reasons why we are exposed to them more and more ? For this I've invited renowned professor Albert Simoni from Worcester Polytechnic Institute . Albert is definitely one of the most known scientists dealing with wildfires , so I've asked him some difficult questions on what's happening around , why some fires are getting media attention and if these fires are actually the worst ones we have . And maybe , more importantly , to figure out if there's a space for fire engineers . Can fire engineers do anything about it ? So , hopefully , a very interesting talk for you all . Kind of sad that it's relevant to what's happening around the world . But yeah , it's a rapid commentary from one of the world's best experts on what's happening around . I hope you enjoy this . Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode .

Speaker 1 1:33

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Speaker 1 2:37

And now back to the episode on wildfires . Hello everybody , welcome to the Firesize Show . I'm today with Professor Albert Simione from Worcester O Technic Institute . Hello , albert , hello , good to be here , good to have you in the show . We've talked about doing this episode a few months ago at SFP Berlin I was in March and the talk that we've discussed back then was about the global phases of wildfires , and in the meantime , we had a massive wildfires in Canada , we had massive wildfires in Greece , we just had massive wildfire in Hawaii and then just yesterday , a massive fire in Tenerife . So many different parts of the world are burning , so many different ecosystems are burning , so , indeed , the talk is perhaps more needed than ever before . So let's try to start with how different parts of the world create the very similar looking scenario , like how different ecosystems around the planet end up in a very , very similar scenario of a massive wildfire and dangerous humans and being huge loss . I'm used to seeing one of those headlines like this year this part of the world will burn , but this year it's crazy .

Speaker 2 3:52

Yeah , and this year is pretty bad . I mean , we know that we have the anigno phenomenon and if you listen to a climate scientist , it's a very unusual one , because we are compiling climate change with these cyclic phenomenon and it's behaving differently . So what we're seeing now , I mean it's due to different effects . We are past eight billion on this planet , so we're present in any ecosystem , and then we have a climate change and it's impacting all ecosystems . As our life on this planet is carbon based , it's very flammable . It's just that you need to have the right conditions , and this year they're happening in many places at different times , in different ecosystems , like you say , but they're happening all over the world . This is pretty , pretty scary this year .

Speaker 1 4:44

So all plant based materials are flammable in some conditions . What conditions are expected to promote this size of wildfires ? Because , I mean , wildfires were always there , we always had fires , but very rarely you have so many such huge or so devastating fires at the same time . So is there any specific set of conditions that promotes this type versus , like I don't know , smaller , normal , non-catastrophic wildfires ? What's the trigger that ?

Speaker 2 5:16

pushes that far . So there are different things . First , we have to define normal , because , as human beings , normal is our experience and maybe what our parents told us and we like to say , oh , this has never been on , this was always this way . But we're actually living in an environment which is changing very , very quickly , very quickly , for nature is in the span of a century or centuries . For human beings , it's a very long time . So I'm going to take an example .

Speaker 2 5:50

We are saying that , oh for the I think it was in 2016 , the Gate Lindbergh fire in Tennessee . You know we were saying , oh , it burned over there , but it never happens . You know it happens , and it's just that the return time for fires in Tennessee is a slightly short than a century . So how do you accumulate knowledge about that ? You know you have what happened in a century People left their crops , forests grew back and people now are growing in the forest for leisure , to enjoy that time and for their memory . Nothing has ever happened .

Speaker 2 6:30

And then you have this big fire . People died . The town of Gate Lindbergh is erased . You know , which was a very small town before , now is a big touristic resort and we're like , oh , this is a big catastrophe I mean fire is coming back . The problem is frequently . Another example is California , where we're saying , oh , there are big fires every five to 10 years . You know it's almost every year and several times a year . So we're in the changing environment . We know that we have more fires , but it's a compound of the return time of the fire and also urban sprawl and the fact that humans are impacting the ecosystems more and more .

Speaker 1 7:10

If you say the return time is this many years , that's assumed on statistical distribution of past fires or some models that allow you to estimate the probability of a fire of given size in given layout of fuel , weather patterns , human presence .

Speaker 2 7:27

No , it's historical and we know . You know , I'm a mechanical engineer and in my mind it's very simple . You take a system , you put it outside of its equilibrium positions and you have big oscillations , and that's what we see with the weather pattern , that's what we see with the climate . We have catastrophic floods , we have catastrophic drought and the return time is what was documented historically by fire ecologists , who are looking at a longer time here , where Leon beat in the unknown , and those models are very difficult to establish .

Speaker 1 8:02

There is some research in Canada , there is some research in the US that I'm aware of because it's not directly my field where they're dicting more frequent fires and more intense fires and now for the fuels themselves , not being in that many parts of the world , but I can imagine that Greece looks a little different than Hawaii and that looks a little different than forest in Tenerife . Is there the same pattern of accumulation of fuel ? Specific forest management characteristics that lead to the accumulation that eventually becomes a good setting for a large wildfire ? Can we identify those and perhaps act on those ? How do you view ?

Speaker 2 8:43

it . So actually it's very different , very different contexts . For instance and I'm not very much aware of what's happening in Tenerife beyond what we had in the news recently yeah , that's very recent , yeah , pine forest and scrubland which has burned . But if you look at Hawaii , it's on the side of the island which is actually not getting much precipitation because of the mountains . So on one side , on the eastern side of the island of Maui , you have the rainforest . On the other side , you have grassland , and this grassland is also due to the fact again , it's not only the climate , it's also the people , it's all the sugarcane fields and they're not now abandoned and they're completely choked by invasive grasses which are becoming very dry . But again , grass burns and it's not something that people will make the news .

Speaker 2 9:43

Grass is burning all the time . What you need to have that in the news is you need that to impact people , and so the grass is igniting , the first houses and then the first houses burn and there is a big wind because it's coming down from the mountains and you have this effect . They talked about a hurricane south of Hawaii which was kind of with a big depression north of Hawaii creating this kind of a venturi effect , and so you have big winds and it's hitting the first houses . The first houses burn , and then it's creating a lot of firebrands and it's landing on other houses and then you have a catastrophe . So in this case , grass becomes very , very dry in the dry season and if you have drought it's even worse .

Speaker 2 10:27

You know , but you need to ignite houses for the fires in Canada . Canada is burning a lot . It's burning as much as the US and very often more than the US , but when it's not in California , it's in the burial forest . It's not making much of the news , you know , it's just a small article . Now you have the smoke coming to all the south of Canada and all the eastern US and coming on top of Washington DC , and then it's all over the news . So it's a compound of climate change , of the fuel availability , which is different in different places , and the effect on people .

Speaker 1 11:03

You mentioned there being drought

Risks and Challenges of Widespread Wildfires

Speaker 1 11:05

. I usually connected this wildfire season , to the extent I've perceived it , with summer season or hot days . I had the imagination that I hear about the fires , at least in the South and Europe , in the similar times where I hear about heat waves . But then the Canada fires that occurred this year . It was before the summer , it was before the climatologists were posting every day that again we have beaten the record temperature of July for the 17th day in a row . It was before that . So it's not necessarily heated , that it's necessary . It's just the precipitation and then the moisture in vegetation that triggers those . Am I correct ?

Speaker 2 11:48

Yes , it's driven by the vegetation , of course , the immediate conditions at the time of the fire if it's raining that day there will not be any fire but it's triggered by the trance in the vegetation . And actually , if you're looking at Canada , you saw that the fire started in the east and burned in the east and then they moved west and now it's British Columbia which is burning and actually Washington State in the US . So when I moved to the US from France , I'm used to exactly what you describe . Fires happen in the summer , when it's past 30 degrees and very dry and the vegetation has dried .

Speaker 2 12:27

Actually , in the northeast of the American continent the fire season is in spring . What's happening there is as soon as the snow is up the ground , the vegetation hasn't grown back and it's very dry from the winter and you have usually dry conditions at this time and that's when you have fires and it can be I don't know 10 degrees outside and still you have very intense fires because the vegetation is dry and the air is dry and of course , if you have wind , you have the drought , little precipitation in the winter it's happening . Then when the summer comes , it's humid and it's not very flammable anymore . So now the eastern shore of the American continent is pretty humid , you know , so the fires moved west , where it's more light , following the Mediterranean pattern . Then you need really the summertime to have things dry .

Speaker 2 13:26

I know that in the past you also studied ecosystems that are pretty far like Siberian wildfires , for example , so in this case the human presence is much less so here , when you're really in a remote area like the north of Siberia , like , I would say , not only the Tamara but really the Boreal Forest , where I remember talking to a Russian firefighter who was telling me oh , at the north of my oblast , you know , we have big fires , and I was like , oh , what are you doing to find them ? He was like we don't . We're like why ? He told me , because our helicopters don't have enough potential to reach there , not to come back just to reach there .

Speaker 2 14:09

So when you're in huge places like that and you have no humans , you can see more what's happening with climate change . And so one of the problems we have with climate change is that in the past we used to say you know , if the forest is burning up there , it's going to grow back and the emissions will be zero because it's coming back . But now , with climate change , the ecosystems are weakened . You know the droughts , the heat . The forest needs the winter to recover , you know . And if there is no much of a winter or less of a winter , the ecosystem is unbalanced and vegetation is drying , it's more sensitive to pests and invasive spaces , and so you have these huge fires , for instance in the far east , in Russia and the forest is not coming back , and here it degrading the ecosystem . It's impacting all the species , from vegetation to animals , and it's also creating a net emissions of carbon .

Speaker 1 15:08

And observing all of those . If we base some of our future predictions on statistics , like the fires here do not happen , and yet we see the conditions that are required for those wildfires to evolve to the size where they are very difficult to deal with and very dangerous to large amounts of people . Are we seeing like ? Is any part of the planet actually safe at the moment ? Do we see more and more parts of the globe entering hazardous areas ? Are we going to have wildfire season everywhere ? I think we are at risk of that ?

Speaker 2 15:44

yeah , unless there is some place that is changing to desert . We were used to say that the return time in the northeast I'm talking about New England , so Massachusetts , vermont , new Hampshire , maine , connecticut , rhode Island , these states we used to say the return time is 70 years , and 70 years is a very long time and that's not the future , that's the past . And the last big fire we had in New England was in Maine in 1946 , and we'll do . But on top of that , if you're looking at the area where the fire was , it was an area that has houses and some settlements , but now it's plenty of secondary houses with people who don't really know what to do with fire . If now the return time becomes 30 years or 25 years or even less , it becomes a very big problem . Actually , the northeast of the US is the biggest wine on the Red Interface and nobody thinks about fire . So we have a big vulnerability and we have more people , we have more urban scroll and we're penetrating more the ecosystems .

Speaker 1 16:55

And are we capable of predicting the immediate hazards ? We have this fire weather allows in Poland , and I assume similar systems of similar magnitude would be everywhere . But to my understanding they give you the probability of a fire , of a cure or how easy it is to set the fire , not the probability that a mega fire that will cost $50 billion will happen next toss .

Speaker 2 17:23

So that's the difficulty . And you see that it's difficult even for other things , right ? You see that for floods , hurricanes , even earthquakes , you know it's very difficult to prepare for something which is happening not very often , telling people , hey , the next fire may be in 10 years or in 50 years , they will be okay , what can I do for that ? And then you have a catastrophe like in Hawaii . So it's very difficult to prepare for that . And one of the problems we have with fire is that you know we're thinking about a house fire . You know we can put in place certain measures preparing for the catastrophe . You have your smoke alarm , you evacuate . We know that your house will burn With one fire .

Speaker 2 18:09

The problem is that the fuel is changing all the time . If you have no fires , you have an accumulation of fuel and you have to deal with that . And if your wind-underband interface is very big , then you have a lot of fuel to take care of . And so we decreased the ignitions and we were telling people hey , look , there is a big risk of fire , don't do anything , and it's just waiting for the next ignition to get out of control with the bad weather conditions , and it will happen . So , even acting on the ignitions , telling people hey , today is a catastrophic fire risk , don't go in the forest , don't do anything . It's just delaying the inevitable , you know .

Speaker 1 18:49

While we were talking , I was wondering how long before you could actually issue a warning that it really looks like it's going to go to a catastrophic level before the fire ignites .

Speaker 2 18:59

But in the US you'll have red flag warnings , for instance , and they based on the methodology . So it's the drought index , so the condition of the fuel plus the weather conditions , it's the time you can predict the weather . So if you're lucky , two weeks , if you're less lucky , just a few days . But again , I think it's very important , how do you quantify your risk ? That didn't happen . So if you're doing a good job basically at preventing fire , it's playing against you in a way .

Fire Protection Engineers in Wildfire Preparedness

Speaker 2 19:32

And we still have to understand the other benefits that we're having all the ecosystem services , all the things we're benefiting from living next to the forest , having a cabin in the woods or nature close to your house , and everything . People don't give that very easily and anyway , with the big population , we're pushing people to these areas . I think a lot is really to be prepared and to try to be less vulnerable to that . But again , if it's happening every 70 years , how do you even invest your money and your time for something which will happen once in 70 years ? And you know how people are If things go wrong , they will ignore you and then , if there is a big catastrophe , they will look for scapegoats and they will come after you .

Speaker 1 20:21

How could you miss that ? How in the earth do you have not foreseen such a fire to happen ? I guess every fire expert was asked with such a question when , after a large fire happened in their country , like how was it not obvious that it's going to happen , right ? So , albert , in this ever-changing world , how do you view the role of fire protection engineers ? Like OK , we're not forest managers , we're not dealing with wildfires directly , we are burdened with designing buildings . Some of our buildings will end up in this interface areas , of course , but what role do you see for FPEs in this ever-changing environment ?

Speaker 2 21:01

So when you talk about the wildland urban interface , you have urban in it . So that's again about the buildings and I think that here we can really play a role . There is another aspect also that people have the tendency to discard , but we know well-fired . So we can also estimate an impact on a community , an impact on structures and things like that , like we do for , for instance , a spread from building to building , a building separation .

Speaker 2 21:29

So with FPE we have this big initiative about fires and we really want to integrate that as our practice as fire protection engineers . So we can consider a lot of things the impact of a fire in terms of heat and fire brands . We can consider structure hardening . We can consider community design to stop the spread of the fire in the communities , and I think that's down our alley , it's pretty a fire protection engineering thing . We then have tools that we use to make our cities safer , to prevent fires to spread in our cities , that we could , of course , adapt and adjust and make evolve . But to deal with this problem , I really think that being safe and especially the wider and urban interface fires we need to play a role . It's not only about forest and vegetation management , it's very much about the built environment and how to make it safer and more resilient to fires .

Speaker 1 22:30

Fire protection engineers' work is usually related to designing new buildings and erecting new structures At least that's my experience with fire protection engineering but having realization that environment is changing around you , that wildfires are literally closer to you now more than ever before , there's also a space of preparing the cities or buildings for what to come . So I guess there's also if you use structural hardening as a term , I really guess that the research on how can we prepare our buildings , neighborhoods , communities , cities for the threat and prepare them to have , once the fires arrive , they're lesser of a damage . I guess that that's an interesting direction where fire protection engineers of the future may play absolutely fundamental role at .

Speaker 2 23:22

Yes , and we're in a context and again I'm going to talk about North America because this is what I know best but there are new codes coming , a new version of codes for the wild and urban interface . So it's , of course , new buildings , but it's also renovations , retrofit and things like that . It's also protecting important assets like hospitals for heuristic areas , hotels and places with a lot of people's , schools and things like that , not only from directly fire , but also from smoke . We mentioned that before . I think it's something where fire protection engineers have the skills and need to develop the ones we don't have from the moment to deal with this problem .

Speaker 2 24:06

We're extracting smoke from buildings already when the smoke is inside . We can also do work on not letting the smoke get into building . It's based on the same fundamental skills and knowledge . We just have to integrate that better . But it's really down our alley and I think we're actually the missing link to make our communities safer . You have people doing fire management , you have people doing firefighting , but in terms of fire protection engineering , especially specifically for wildfires , we're still missing , and even things like fire resistance .

Speaker 1 24:42

It both works , both directions . The spread of fire on your facade or external walls or your roofs . I mean , of course , in our methods we usually consider that from the inside to the roof and how it can spread further . But it's also from firebend that maybe , perhaps landed on the roof , can it ignite or not ? And also very simple things like how to manage your own garden , how to build a divisible space for your own .

Speaker 2 25:11

I think here when do you put your shed , your fences ? Where do you park your car ? All of that has an importance , and it's coming back to community design , and community design in this case is what ? What do we want to prevent Fire spread ? I mean , we know a bit about fire spread . We should be able to contribute to that .

Speaker 1 25:30

So perhaps you can give me some examples of fires that happened in which a good fire protection engineering could make a difference .

Speaker 2 25:38

Yeah , and so here we're going to talk about fire spread and fire impact , which is what we do as fire protection engineers . So , for instance , you take the Tufts Fire in 2017 in Northern California , north of Francisco . It was a Sonoma County , and so the Tufts Fire was a classical Diablo wind fire which is pushed by the wind , and it's created this big tong of fire which came from the mountains and hit Santa Rosa and downtown Berre . And this fire happened in the mid 40s and was almost the same fire perimeter , but with much less impact . What happened this time ?

Speaker 2 26:17

This time you had a mixed forest of oak and grass , so the grass is burning very quickly , pushed by the wind . That's very , very quickly , and the oaks they will torch . They will not create this big run fire and the vegetation was not continuous enough . There was some chaperon which is creating fire brands , but the oaks are not creating much fire

Wildfires' Impact on Communities and Economy

Speaker 2 26:39

brands . But what's happening is now you have all these houses which are getting into the countryside . Then you have the houses which are close to the city and it's denser . So you're moving from what's called an intermix to the wui and you're increasing the density of houses . So the grass fire is coming , not very much fire brand and it's hitting the first houses . The first houses burn because they're in the wild , they're in contact with the vegetation .

Speaker 1 27:05

So there's continuity of the grasslands to the garden , from garden to the house .

Speaker 2 27:11

Yeah , they're in the countryside so they burn . And now they burn and with the construction materials and everything , they burn very intensely and they do a lot of fire brands . These fire brands are pushed by the wind and they're going to land further ahead and they're going to ignite more houses where it's denser but it's not the city yet . And now you have plenty of houses burning and they're above the city , in the mountains and pushed by the wind , and now you have the storm of fire brands landing in the city and the city is burning . I turned the fire across the city , burned the whole city and became a wildfire again past the city .

Speaker 2 27:47

So that's the kind of things where , first , we created this problem and , secondly , I think that's where fire protection engineers can play . They can say , hey , look , your house is not only a danger to itself because it's in the forest and it needs to be protected , but they can tell communities look , you have all these row of houses . If they burn , they're gonna ignite more houses downwind . So we have to protect them more , we have to do more . We have to clean more fuel , we have to make them more resistant , to harden them more , but those houses would be the trigger of the domino effect of the catastrophe , and so that's an example where I think , as FPEs , we can estimate the exposure of the houses and we can design them or help design them so they will not burn and become a source of fire burns .

Speaker 1 28:39

So that's an example . So this is like stopping the chain reaction , like developing solutions , protection measures that would prevent from this chain of events by railing out of control . And you can also . There's only one direction If there is a very sharp boundary , there's a forest , then you have some cabins in the woods , then you have the city outskirts , denser populated area than the city itself . You can quite well identify the layers where certain measures should be introduced as perhaps a community policy , not just the burden of the owner of the city , because it's in the community best interest that these first houses are protected .

Speaker 2 29:22

That's just Something which was completely overlooked is that the houses inside of the city , they were like oh , you're not at the one underbody interface , you don't really need to do that , but actually the firebrands landed there and it was a system where we have to break this domino effect and we have to identify the risk and the potential of a fire to spread this way , and that's what fire protection engineers can do .

Speaker 1 29:48

What you said is not just fuel management , it's not just drought , it's not just vegetation , but civil engineering , community design . Fire protection engineering has a big space to go , and we may not be the most helpful assets for forest managers , but we're a critical asset for managing communities and buildings . So that's very good .

Speaker 2 30:10

Yeah , and even in forests you have national parks where you have people . You need chapter areas , you need to protect assets . For instance , at WPI we're sending people to protect buildings in Yellowstone . It's our students who projects from that and that's again a fire protection engineer thing . Actually , the National Park Service is hiring our students , our graduates , so I think we can participate in so many aspects . But of course , we're more involved when there is a structure and infrastructure and access people to manage . That's really what we do , not looking at only the fires up in the mountains . There are plenty of places where we can play a role and we can help . I think we're the missing link actually in wildfire management nowadays . You manage the vegetation , you have your coats and standards and you're not making the link between the impact to the fire-spirited communities to the north .

Speaker 1 31:13

Another thing that I had on my agenda is how much damage different fires do , because there definitely is a difference . Imagine if Central Park in New York burns . That would not be a huge area burned , right , but what a devastating fire that would be . And then you compare it to areas in boreal forest in Russia , when guys cannot fly that far with the helicopter to even see the fire , and then there perhaps could be square kilometer burning at the same time and no one bats an eye . So tell me what makes fires get to the headlines and which fires are the worst from this medial perspective and perhaps from other objective measures that we can apply to them .

Speaker 2 31:55

So you have different factors playing . The obvious one is climate change , so it's making a difference . Maybe you have more fires in Poland than you've had before . I know about Sweden now being concerned about fires . There is another thing , and here I'm going to be a bit cynical . Look at , for instance , the fires in Brazil under the past president , who actually had a catastrophic policy about managing the Amazon . You know the pressure of agriculture and conservation and fire prevention actually , and there were huge fires and it took a very long time for associations to raise the alarm . It came to the United Nations but at the end of the day , the concern on the day today for most of the people was very little . You know it's like these big fires in Russia and devastating the Borel Forest , their net emitters of carbon , but people don't really fathom that . Now , if it's impacting people , it'd be the smoke coming to Washington DC and there was a joke saying that you need smoke in Congress for actually the politicians to really really care , but that's the reality of it . You need smoke in Brazil too and in other capital , but that's the reality of it .

Speaker 2 33:16

You know it's really making the news when it impacts people . For instance , the damage on the ecosystem is being California , but it's less than in Brazil , but it's impacting more people and also , unfortunately again , richer areas , you know . And then it's making the news . So the impact on people , the impact on their life , on their activity , is very important , you know . So why is burning ? You know , and it's making the news and everything . Imagine if it's happening in Indonesia or in Guatemala . How long will it make the news ? It will make the news , but maybe a couple of days . So I'm sorry to be a bit cynical here , but it's when it's impacting people that it's very important . And also it depends where it impacts . You know , if you have a big fire which is completely destroying the Verde Hills , I can tell you that it will make the news for a very long time , at least three movies about the heroic firefight , exactly three movies With no smoke , just flames .

Speaker 1 34:14

But you're correct . I think the first time I've heard about the Canadian fires was when the pictures start showing from New York with orange sky . Exactly that's when you heard about it . In a similar way , a few years ago , when we had the devastating California fires , people started talking about it when you had pictures of Golden Gate Bridge in orange everywhere . So you know these signs of wildfire , that it's near , that it's actually damaging . People started caring about the quality of the air surrounding them . It triggered an impressive response of the public in general , but those fires are not necessarily the biggest by economic loss , right , it depends .

Speaker 2 35:01

I mean . So you can imagine , for Maui , for instance , the economic loss will be tourism and actually people were . It's like the tsunami because in the end it's a natural disaster , defined natural right . Even the flood is a disaster because there are people and economic activities in there . If you're flooding , you're floodplain , and there is nobody will care . Maybe we'll look at the ecosystem and everything , but again , sorry for being cynical , but it's going to make the news for one day , you know . So it's impacting people and you have these .

Speaker 2 35:35

The people were saying , hey , there are still tourists coming to the island and they shouldn't come . And even like local people , even the movie star Jason Boa , say don't come to Maui . And now they're like , yeah , but please come , because we need the economic activity , because for us it's a double whammy not having the economic activity . So that's a very important aspect and it's very difficult to quantify . I mean , I know that there is some research in Europe , but there is some research in the US at least , for instance , looking at the impact on the economic activity , because it's also a driver for policy . The politicians , of course they're looking at the loss of life , the loss of property , but if there is an economic impact long-term . It's also a motivator to plan better .

Speaker 1 36:23

The second thing you mentioned that when we had the chat before the impact on economy of regions , like closing down airports , long-term economic loss , sustained damage because some facilities have to be closed , evacuated .

Speaker 2 36:37

And for the little story , I remember we're having a lot of our activities in the northeast of the US because WPI is close to Baseland and so we're doing a lot of burns with the Forest Service in New Jersey . And I remember a few years ago a colleague sent me a photo of , actually , manhattan and there are a blanket of smoke , you know . And my question to him is like , did they close New York , which is the airport between New Jersey and New York City ? And he was like no , and I was like okay , so we're still gonna struggle for funding . You know , that's the reality , you know . So , when you see this big impact on the economy and I remember the fires around Moscow which closed the airport , so it's the fires in Indonesia which closed airports in neighboring countries in was it in 1997 ? So it's happening and that's where you have an incentive to do more .

Speaker 2 37:32

Of course , when it's happening to another country , it's very difficult to do , but you have other effects which are more difficult to quantify . That's for the fires in Canada this year . That was for the fires in Northern California . You know , in 2017 , we're talking about these fires and the big number is $13 billion .

Speaker 2 37:52

Sorry , and that's very big , but because of the geography and the fact that the wine county over there Sonoma and Napa the smoke stayed for a very long time and so we know that not only the short term people with asthma , but even longer term people are starting to study the increase in cancer rate in these places . So you have the short term impact , like tourism and people can't see me and you have the long term impact and that's very difficult to quantify . And if you can add more things , for instance , in California you have insurance companies leaving the state Imagine the impact on that . Now people are leaving California and they're citing not only the wildfires but now you just have big floods in Southern California but they're citing the environment and the problems as one of the reasons for them to leave California . So that's an enormous economic impact .

Speaker 1 38:48

You know you mean that they people cannot insure the houses anymore .

Speaker 2 38:52

In some places you cannot find insurance , to the point that the state of California had to have actually an insurance system which is made by the state , because the private companies are not insuring anymore . And in some places you can insure your house , but if you have I don't know a small house which is $150,000 . And your insurance premium is like $20,000 . How will you ensure that ? And of course it impacts also inequalities , right , if you have your big mention again in Berlin , it's several millions that your welfare insurance is $100,000 . You're going to pay it , you know . But if it's $20,000 and you have a small salary and a small house , you're not going to pay . So this impact is changing the way people live and are resilient to this catastrophe . People lose everything .

Speaker 1 39:45

I think you have perhaps now answered my previous question . How can we foresee a massive fire coming if insurance companies put premium of 20% of your net value of a house as an insurance or they leave completely ? That's perhaps a sign a big fire is coming , and now I have urged to interview some risk profilers from such companies to understand how would they establish enormous risks ?

Agricultural Practices and Wildfire Impact

Speaker 1 40:15

We've touched a little bit about the forest management and accumulation of vegetation , the drying process , the conditions in which it happens . Are there any general good practices that you see lacking throughout the world that jump every now and then in those places , or it's pretty much individual situation in each country ?

Speaker 2 40:39

I mean the local situation has an impact . You know that . You see trends , that you see in different countries . So let me cite a few trends . So let's take Europe and Southern Europe in particular , but Europe in general the abandonment of rural areas . You have vegetation growing where you had natural not natural but manmade fire breaks , you know , with crops . So people in the countryside I mean in my place my grandparents were talking about the balance of the village you know ringing when there was a fire and everybody going to try to help . Now I don't know if the bell would ring or maybe chest automatic and it will not ring from the fire .

Speaker 2 41:21

You know just ringing from the hour because there are nobody left in the villages . So you see that that's also a bit similar , in a different context , with Hawaii , when you had sugarcane fields and they were abandoned not saying that sugarcane may have the best thing to grow in Hawaii , but that's a fact .

Speaker 1 41:41

So you'd have previously well managed farmlands where people would be living off them . They would rotate crops , they would grow things , manage them , blow clean up , maintain . The vegetation can grow only this high , because then you just take a crop and sell it . So there is no overgrowing for years and suddenly these people , for some reason , are gone or this process is no longer sustained by them . Vegetation is growing . Vegetation is growing without control and there's like no people in there , and they've created an ecosystem which is very easy to invade by certain invasive species , for example .

Speaker 2 42:22

With Flymate Chance where they may get a competitive edge . So you have continuous fuel which becomes very flammable because if it burns , the vegetation which will come back is the vegetation which is adapted to fire . So you get ecosystems where actually the species which are thriving are the species which are doing very well when there is fire , and so that's one of the examples . Another example is fire exclusion , and that's again a compelling effect . But I remember when I was a firefighter in France the policy was to extinguish every fire , and then you have again fuel growing .

Speaker 2 43:00

In the US we had until , let's say , the mid 90s or the end of the 90s , the 10am fire policy which happened after the big burn in the beginning of the 20th century in the Rockies , where basically the policy from the forest service and I'm talking in the wide lens here , not close to the cities and everything like in the mountains , in the big pine forest that we all think about when we think about Montana or Colorado and everything so every fire which started one day had to be extinguished by 10am the day after , and if you miss that deadline you aim that the 10am the other day , the next day . So we excluded fire from the ecosystems , but fire was there for a very long time . If you look at the news in the last few days , some paleontologists say that actually the saber tooth tiger in North America and some of the big mammals disappeared because people burned actually in the land and that's how they disappeared Also something which is becoming a research topic in the US and in Canada and in other places . Looking at the practice from the native populations and the historical practices where they were keeping the ecosystem open with a low fuel , especially in the forest , in the undergrowth , to avoid the surface fuel to burn and then flames to reach the canopies of the trees and to maybe have less tree densities and so on . It's something which becomes more and more a concern of today . One of the problems is the cost of doing that , because you're talking about very huge areas of fire and press crime .

Speaker 2 44:43

Burns are a cheap way to do it , but there are other ways . You can masticate fuels , you can prune trees , you can do a lot of things , but one of the things which is sure is that fires were always in the ecosystem . Now our ecosystem is unbalanced and it's generating more fires . It's compounded with climate change . There are more people in contact with the ecosystem and we're going to remove the natural fires and we don't want them in many places . I mean , we don't want fires in Canada or even in New Jersey blanketing New York with a slog every season . So we have to reintroduce fire or something similar , but artificially by people , by burning , by removing fuel and doing all of that . It's expensive . We just have to do it and accept that .

Speaker 1 45:33

I know about trying to reach to indigenous practices , also in management of forest and fuels . In Europe we have a fire life project which is also going to that and also sharing the experiences from the south to north . Actually , I'm very deal with update on fire life because I've been baited . I've interviewed Catalina when she was starting the project then . I know the PhDs are finishing now , so perhaps a good moment for a catch up .

Speaker 1 46:00

One more question regarding the agriculture practice . We also see significant industrialization of agriculture . At least it's something that I observed with my own eyes in Poland for last 20 years . The farms looked very different 20 years ago when we were entering the European Union and it looks like factories nowadays Big machines . They can handle much bigger areals . It's not anymore someone who would invite their whole family to pick up potatoes . There's a machine that does that anymore , to rejoice of the children of Poland of modern times , because that would be inevitably a part of your summer some decades ago . But now less people handling more ground , doing it in a more mechanized way . Is this also having some sort of an impact on how transform wildfires are appearing and changing ?

Speaker 2 46:58

Yes , so wildfires are an issue , for instance in Victoria in Australia . I visited over there and they cut the wheat and they leave the bottom of the stems and it can burn very quickly and very intensely . And also I have the same experience . I visited my family in the northwest of France and my aunt was complaining about the fact that there are no hedges anymore . You cannot hear the birds because basically the machines are crossing the road and just like harvesting continuously and they removed all the obstacles , so it's all this big one crop open land everywhere . And we know that when ecosystems are basically weakened like that , you have less diversity , which is a horrible , even excluding fire , but you also make the bed for a very unbalanced thing .

Speaker 2 47:52

You have a weakened ecosystem which is very continuous , which can burn in an easier way , which is also making the bed for invasive species and all of that . And if you stop growing crops over there because I don't know where in the globalized world and the price of wheat is collapsing because of other reasons , then it becomes a catastrophe . You have all these open land which is going to grow wide or completely unbalanced and it's going to be a huge fire .

Speaker 1 48:23

I really foresee that if you have , it's not longer a single farmer working to make a good being for his family , but rather a large specialized food manufacturing company and in a given year they foresee that , for example , wheat prices is not justifying the cost of running operations . They could perhaps just leave the field stay for a year because it's going to be cheaper .

Speaker 2 48:52

If there becomes an economical reason for not doing anything , they will and they will not worry about the local birds or other elements , including and then you generalize that , you talk about the Amazon or you talk about Indonesia , and then that's happening at a very huge scale , these world fields of plantations , and what happens if it's not productive anymore ? And already they're not only changing , and then we are getting into very complex problems , but they're not only changing the fuel , they're even changing the climate . For instance , the Amazon is becoming the place where you have plantations . It's becoming drier because you don't have the humid forest anymore . You don't retain the water .

Urban Park Fires

Speaker 1 49:41

And for the final part , I was one . I've started , or at some point of the interview I have mentioned Central Park on fire , but I really wonder is it a possibility that fires are not only in danger in the wildland urban interfaces , but the beautiful green cities that we have , with multiple parks , buildings with beautiful green facades ? Like I have a feeling that it's a space we have not explored yet , but , boy , we will at some point . Yeah , your point is your view .

Speaker 2 50:10

And there are already some research . I remember Edimbro doing research on facades of buildings , with the vegetation and the flammability of that . Other people have done such research and then we're coming to another fire problem . By the way , I'm forgetting about that , but in Australia we sent a group of students from WPI . We have these international centers and we go and they do like undergrad projects , and in Australia there is a definition because it's a very flammable ecosystem about urban parkland interface , so the parks inside of cities , but they're much more flammable than Central Park . You know .

Speaker 2 50:49

And again , like you see , for weed fires , if your park burns and it's igniting enough houses with weed , the houses will be the fuel and they will create the firebrands and spread the fire , even without vegetation . You see a lot of the fires in . I'm going to take the example of California again , because there are a lot of photos of that in 2017 , 2018 , where houses are burned and the vegetation is untouched . So you have that and you have the vulnerability of these systems and the fact that it's also when you're talking about these green cities , when you're talking about these parks . It's coming back what I meant to say before , to the problem we had in Europe after the 2008 crisis . You know where a lot was based on passive fire protection in buildings and then the maintenance decreased and you had buildings with some I don't know spraying on the frame , on the beams and everything , and it was not sprayed well because the companies had lots of skills . It was not maintained and then the danger was increasing .

Speaker 2 51:55

What happens in very rich places , where we are developing all of that and then there is an economic crisis and we cannot maintain . We're not watering our parks , our facades anymore , there is climate change and all of that , and then we're creating a problem for the future . So that's good . I mean we all want sustainable cities . We have to do something . I mean we're at 8 million on these planets . We're like crickets right and crickets actually in the US it was like that the blockers played in the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 20th century . It's creating very unbalanced ecosystems . So we want to be more sustainable , but also we have to be careful about what we wish for . We have to think about the future and we know that human beings , we're not very good at that .

Speaker 1 52:45

We're also doing research on green facades and I clearly see the evolving risks with this systems drawing , but also see the general trends to put more of those in the cities . So that's a subject for a future discussion . But are the urban mega fires a thing of the past or just temporarily on hold ? That's a big question for me .

Speaker 2 53:10

You know how it's happening and we see that for many things , we think we have solved the problem and we just don't even consider it anymore . We have the smoke and arms in houses Now , we put sprinklers in some and we think it's solved , and then it's coming back and then we react . So we are unfortunately we're a catastrophe driven fields , like some other fields . Talk about Europe and the UK , france and other places . I'm sure you'll have a similar example for Poland about building in food planes oh , we have levies and dams and we're good . And now we have these enormous rains and we're not good anymore .

Speaker 2 53:53

And talk about Japan and when there was the big tsunami , you know people running for their life and passing old stores when it weren't was built in old Japanese . Don't build beyond this point . So we're doing that . And with fires , with one fires , we're already seeing that happen . You know , in the US we thought that we had excluded fire from our cities , like we had the great Kagofire , the great Baltimore fire , all the latest at the beginning of the 20th century , and we designed our cities to resist to fire from the inside . And no fire is coming from the outside and cities are burning again In 2017 , downtown Santa Rosa , north of San Francisco , burning was a big surprise .

Speaker 1 54:39

Well , that's an unfortunate conclusion for the podcast . There are many things that we are perhaps not considering today and perhaps we should consider for the future , because it's not looking like the trend will revert and we will be seeing less and less of those fires .

Speaker 2 54:56

And I don't want to finish on a negative note . Okay , I'm an engineer . I think that we could design our way out of this problem , you know . We just have to work on that . We have to do more research , we have to develop the engineering tools to do that , you know . But I think humans are also very inventive . But we need some pressure to start to look at the problems . You know , and we know that , for instance , NSF issued a call for rapid research on the how-wild fires . So we're reacting to the catastrophes , but then people find solutions . We just have . It's just a difficult time because the problem is multifaceted , you know , and very complex . But we just have to put our human ingenuity and human thinking , problem solving and through our solutions , I think , and we'll get out of that . I don't want to be all negative . I think even the concern of people for the ecosystem and everything before it was burning back in the woods . We care , you know .

Speaker 2 55:57

So we are more mindful of the problems . We want to find solutions for the good of the future generations . We just need to step up our game . You know and do more , but we can design our way out of these problems .

Speaker 1 56:11

Albert , thank you very much for your insights on the events happening around the world and the broader context of the wildfires , and hope to see you again in the show .

Speaker 2 56:22

Thank you , Thank you very much . Bye-bye .

Speaker 1 56:26

And that's it . Well , what an episode . A very difficult discussion with Albert and to some extent , very sad one , but with an optimistic end that engineers have a role to play and there are things that we can do to improve the solution worldwide In general . I really loved how Albert brought the engineers into the equation and shown pathways for fire safety engineers on how we can be the missing link in wildfire prevention and helping our communities fight against wildfires . It was also quite interesting when he mentioned that you need to smoke in Washington to make legislation happen . Accidentally , as Albert mentioned , the fires were moving to the west and as I am doing this edit , the wildfires are in Washington . It's just the wrong Washington . Come on wildfires . You need to attack the DC . So we have solutions for our problems noticed by the politicians .

Speaker 1 57:23

Anyway , I hope you , as a fire engineer , feel empowered after this episode . There are things that we can do as fire engineers in helping our communities , in driving our research , in providing our expertise to provide fire safe communities . There are a lot of manmade issues that lead to wildfires that we've intensively , we thoughtfully discussed agriculture and how changes in this field lead to increasing in fire risk and fire hazards , so perhaps that's a place where we can act and in general , it feels like the fires are there , they're not going anywhere . We're going to hear more about them . Hopefully they won't be that devastating . There are things we should do to make sure they're not as devastating , and let's hope for a better future and let's be part of that better future altogether . Thank you for listening to the Fire Science Show and hope to see you here next Wednesday . Cheers , bye . This was the Fire Science Show . Thank you for listening and see you soon .