Can we end megafires? These companies are trying to | Hacker News Reader

Can we end megafires? These companies are trying to

fastcompany.com

41 pointsbillclerico47 comments

I think the article (unintentionally) makes a better argument that these companies are trying to create megafires?

It presents a bunch of startups, most about detecting forest fires earlier, coordinating faster fire department responses, preventing ignition sources, etc. Then it goes on to explain how Megafires are largely caused by a buildup of fuel because we extinguish every small fire and prevented people from doing what we now call prescribed burns.

Of course any tool can be used for good or evil, but aren't most of the described startups more likely to make the situation worse, giving people more tools to prevent fires until so much fuel builds up that an uncontrollable fire develops?

Most experts agree that 3 things are required to end megafires: Landscape management, community resilience and fast & aggressive suppression. It's a layered approach - similar to infosec models. No one layer is an effective solution.

Some of the examples in the article are focused on suppression (since that is a bit easier to grasp) - but there are some really exciting examples that exist outside of that. BurnBot, for example, is a robotic device that helps make fuel management more efficient. Overstory uses satellite imagery to help utilities prioritize line trimming and avoid ignitions.

Disclaimer: I am mentioned in the article as a Firetech investor

firetech has been heavy on the 'suppression' here in California. Its step-children include aggressive surveillance, controlling the movement of people whether they own property or not, increase in fines and legal entanglements for those in fire-prone areas, and I would argue a fertile breeding ground for secretive behind-closed-doors deals regarding public information and public budgets.

ref: https://www.amazon.com/Scorched-Worth-Destruction-Government...

so what to do? Please support and develop public information within the spirit of the Law. California and the US has 'default to public' government data for hundreds of relevant layers. Please do not support "my keys, my data" portal gatekeeping by spatial information handlers for public data. Be explicit about the difference between 'public by default' layers and commercial value added layers. Please do not encourage "onboard AI for drones" without checks and balances for the content and filtering. Please build clear bounds between civilian matters and uniformed services matters -- "we are the Army Corps and we have this handled; please move along" is not an acceptable stance in 2022.

The tragic and catastrophic fires in the Western USA and elsewhere in the past five years are a very large challenge. Let's combine forces and synergize, defeat gatekeeping that is so common in government contracting, and 'secret by default' information handling (e.g. 30x30) so common in the armed forces.

Together we are stronger.

What about prescriptive burns? Or is that part of landscape management?

Seems like figuring out how to do it right would be the best answer, as what happened recently in New Mexico for when it goes wrong: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-prescribed-...

important tool for landscape management

Such a beautiful article and really covers the root of the issue. I know we skim a lot of articles but this one really deserves to be read in full.

The issue being that natural fires have been suppressed for so long that when they do burn there is so much fuel available that they get way hotter than is natural and end up sterilizing the soil so nothing grows for years. Prescribed burns and thinning are the answer to prevention. Let nature happen, and even encourage it so it can be controlled.

The problem is that we don't allow stuff to burn naturally, so the answer is we should mess with nature even more.

Amazing how humans just can't let anything alone. In 100 years the whole planet will just be one giant bonsai.

We often can't, without displacing humans and damaging property.

So you're saying that protecting property is more important than a sensible fire policy?

I’m saying that the solution wont be a simple one dimensional solution that makes for a great soundbite. Because damage to private property does need to be considered in any governmental policy.

If in 100 years the earth is a giant bonsai... wow, that sounds like a pretty amazing outcome given the other very likely alternatives. Honestly, it seems pretty unlikely that given the enormous human population and our incredible appetite to consume, that the earth will survive in any state we'd be happy with, without some pretty aggressive management.

Are you suggesting we depopulate the westen US then?

No. But there are obviously places where humans simply should not live, and we should respect that.

Reminds me of how governments "solve" problems. ie, we introduced regulation A to solve problem A, which unintentionally causes side effect B and C. So we create regulations B and C which create market distortions E F G and H....

How about when a wild fire (emphasis on wild) breaks out, we quickly extinguish it and note the location to come back in a few months and do a controlled burn in the same area without the risk to human life that letting a fire run free creates.

I've hiked forested areas in California that haven't seen fire in 120 years. The forest is NOT healthy, it feels choked and cluttered. Gives off a creepy feeling like I'm hiking inside a barrel of TNT.

One thing I find frustrating in the discussion of wildfire is that it frequently dumbs down to one thing vs another, usually "We must treat the landscape with thinning and prescribed fire" vs "We need better firefighting resources and equipment". This is a false choice and we need both.

The principle of Defense in Depth in infosec is illustrative. No one would debate whether or not you need secure passwords vs role-based permissions. You obviously need both and they reinforce each other.

The same is true in fire. To end megafires, we need: 1) Landscape Management 2) Community Resilience 3) Fast & aggressive suppression

Better technology can help play a role at all three levels.

I guess it takes a lifetime of wisdom to truly realize companies will never 'end' anything, as their whole existence depends on the thing happening at least enough to keep selling the cure.

wait so you're telling me that every political organization that claims to be fighting against e.g. discrimination and inequality is actually wholly dependent on the existence of e.g. discrimination and inequality in order to continue functioning, such that they'll never put an end to the thing that gives them reason to exist in the first place?

OP said:

>I guess it takes a lifetime of wisdom to truly realize companies will never 'end' anything...

You said:

>wait so you're telling me that every political organization...

A company is fundamentally different from a political organization, especially in the context of this conversation.

how so? do political organizations differ from corporations in that they somehow don't have an inherent need to perpetuate their own existence, so as to keep people employed?

They are somewhat analogous, though. Not to mention intertwined. What keeps our dominant political parties running? Money from big business. Where do they get their money? By selling stuff. All the better for their profits if they can externalize costs. Which the politicians they bought will be reluctant to do anything about.

This is a shallow take. Even on its face it’s wrong. Ending mega-fires would be an ongoing expenditure, since you constantly monitor and manage smaller fires to achieve that.

Plenty of juicy government dollars to sustain vendors in that space indefinitely.

I partially agree, but you are ending the reasoning one level short. The government budget is a tradeoff. People react more to recent events than those far past, even if rationally they should not. So sadly, if no mega-fire had disastrous consequences, over the years there would be cutbacks, neglect and denial on mitigating this particular threat as opposed to so many others that required our recent attention.

There are plenty of economic models that can support cures to recurrent issues. For example, internal sprinklers & smoke detectors have dramatically improved survivability of structure fires, but that "cure" supports a whole industry of sprinkler and alarm system companies.

New buildings are continuously built as we developer new land or redevelop old land. These need sprinklers.

The companies mentioned in the article are all about detecting/managing a mega-fire once detected. If we "end" mega-fires, there's no business in detecting/managing them.

But, that's a pretty cynical view of these businesses. Maybe I'm just not jaded enough yet.

Pano will have a great business even if megafires are ended, since fire will always be a part of the landscape. One of their major usecases is monitoring controlled burns.

I never said things will not 'improve', even drastically, just not 'end' as the article touts. If sprinklers and smoke detectors truly ended fires happening (as opposed to mitigating the consequences), over time we would neglect them and de-prioritize them in the budget. Wy spend money on tings no-one has heard of in two generations when we have more pressing needs? Psychology and game-theory go hand in hand.

Fire is a natural part of the forest lifecycle. We shouldn't try to end it, we should build our housing and infrastructure to minimize the effects of fire on us.

There are fires, and there are megafires. They are NOT the same.

The Western landscapes are evolved for regular normal fires. But decades of fire suppression have left us with a massive amount of fuel, so now fires come with a heat and size that the landscape is not evolved to handle. So, for example, trees with thick bark designed to survive fires, instead succumb to the intense heat and burn.

Yes, we need to get back to having regular fires. But we also need to end the artificially created danger of megafires.

I remember when we had the huge wildfires in the Santa Cruz mountains in the 80s, and they said if they did the same practices afterwards as they had prior, there would be similar fires in 40 years. I don't live there anymore, but what are the fire prospects in the Santa Cruz mountains? It's about exactly the time those forestry guys said fires would become a thing again as I am pretty sure nothing was changed, and that even worse more risky housing was added.

There was an enormous & destructive lightning fire in the Santa Cruz mountains in 2020 called the CZU complex: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/16/two-years-later-czu-f...

I was looking at the California Wildfire History Map (https://projects.capradio.org/california-fire-history/#9.62/...) a while back and remember noting that the CZU fire was the first recorded burn for most of the affected area.

I am not sure how complete the map is, but I suspect that the GP means the fires (such as the 1985 Lexington fire) further east mapped in red? Of those, I think I only see two meaningfully overlapped by newer fires (2009 and 2016 Loma fires overlapping 1985 Lexington, 2020 Park within the footprint of the 1985 Finley fire).

Edit: looks like the Finley/Park fires are technically just east of the mountain range, at least per http://www.scmbc.org/map-of-bioregion.

First, we are not the only players here, and second, the more care we take to keep the natural cycle as normal as possible, the better the natural system will take care of us.

Megafires are an entirely different kind of fire, and merely expecting and avoiding them is insufficient. Managing the forest a little bit, and using controlled fires both almost eliminates the danger of megafires, and reduces the damage of fires on the ecosystem and on the human systems. Just one paragraph in the article encapsulates that nicely.

Please re-think your human-centric approach to problems with nature. At least read this one paragraph.

>>In Southern Oregon in 2021, when the massive Bootleg Fire reached a 30,000-acre nature preserve managed by the Nature Conservancy, flames were shooting 200 feet in the air. But when the fire got to an area that had been carefully managed, it suddenly changed. The flames dropped down and moved more slowly. For years, researchers in the area had been testing different “treatments” for the forest, thinning out trees in some areas and conducting prescribed burns. When the fire came through, it demonstrated what worked: In photos taken a few months after the fire, trees were still alive in the area that had been both thinned and treated with controlled burns. Across a road, in an untreated area, nearly everything had burned. (When a fire is so extreme, it can also sterilize the soil in some cases, making it hard for any new trees to grow back.)

> Fire is a natural part of the forest lifecycle.

Apart from ecosystems with Eucalyptus trees, I can't think of another environment where fire is a natural part of the forest lifecycle.

I'm curious, with such giant swathes of forest being burnt off annually, and large contiguous chunks being burnt up, leaving only smaller contiguous areas;

1) given the average size of a megafire, how many more megafires can happen (assuming regrowth to current fuel levels takes 50 years)

2) what is the largest megafire that could still happen, given the forested area unburnt for at least 50 years

The chronicle has a map somewhere that lists all the wildfires that have happened in the last 30-40 years, at a casual glance it is looking like any forest areas that haven't burnt yet, are getting increasingly smaller. According to the USDA california has about 101 million acres of forest[1], and the august complex (2020) alone burnt 1 million acres, almost 1%, dixie fire was also almost 1%. The next 18 largest fires burnt another 5% (4.7%) [2]. Since 2001 We've burnt up 22% of all the forests in california [3]

7% in ~12 years seems like a lot, but it takes a long time to grow that much fuel, also the space in between those burnt spaces is going to be increasingly smaller and smaller, or at least so it would seem.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm8_037652.h...

[2] https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/4jandlhh/top20_acres.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires#A...

I think it's a false assumption that when something burns in a high severity fire, it returns to a healthy state afterwards. Historically, natural fire was low severity because it was high frequency, burning through once a decade (or even more frequently). This left large trees and soil intact, and so dense regrowth was limited, since there was still shade.

With high severity fire, two things can happen. Trees can be totally wiped out (called a stand-replacing fire) which causes extremely dense, brushy regrowth (prone to another high severity fire). Or in really bad conditions, the soil can be damage so no regrowth happens, causing strange moonscape-like forests that are completely dead. This affects watersheds, causes mudslides, etc. Neither is good.

If we could burn large swaths of landscape with low severity fire, that would be a huge step in the right direction but is extremely difficult. We are treating only a small fraction of the acreage in that manner.

Note: This varies from landscape to landscape but is directionally correct. For example, in some climates, stand-replacing fires are healthy and normal. But in most climates, bad.

I was in the Colorado Springs area following a very bad fire about a decade ago, a fire hot enough to scorch the soil and cause issues with regrowth later.

This was followed by a very wet fall, causing massive amounts of runoff, erosion, and mudslides, blocking culverts and drainages, flooding roads, etc. It started with a fire, but the damage and follow on effects continued long after it was extinguished.

I suggest you read this. It's the seminal work on the subject. https://megafirebook.com/

For those who are (truly) interested in the topic, bothered to read this whole article, and want to know more - the seminal work on the subject is https://megafirebook.com/

This is a peeve of mine that I see absolutely everywhere, none of our recent fires hold a candle (so to speak) to what was going on before humans started managing forests. Take a look at this chart from the UN[1], specifically pre-1960.

I guarantee every chart of wildfires you'll see on a major news site will begin after 1960. Typically they want to push the narrative that climate change is causing wildfires when in fact wildfires have everything to do with forest management and nothing to do with climate change. They are of course also ignoring the fact that climate models predict a _wetter_ planet, not a drier one, if current trends continue.

[1] https://www.fao.org/3/ai412e/ai412e09.jpg

Wait, I thought most of the mega fires had been caused by un/badly maintained electrical infrastructure?

Are they advocating for intentional burns? Because if not they're doing it wrong.

Yes they are. It's a good article and not very long. If you are interested in this stuff I recommend reading it.

Yes, the article does advocate for intentional burns and is educational to the public about it.

Betteridge’s law of headlines…

Better headline: These companies are trying to end megafires

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