October 28, 2024
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Wildfires are moving faster and causing more damage
A small number of fast-moving wildfires cause nearly all property damage, forcing firefighters to focus on saving lives.

Vicki Matthews, a 23-year Louisville resident, is surveying the damage to the Wildflower apartment complex in Louisville, Colorado, which was destroyed by the Marshall Fire in 2021. Researchers say the wildfire was so destructive because it spread so quickly.
Matthew Jonas/MediaNews Group/Boulder Daily Camera (via Getty Images)
Climate Wire | The fastest-growing wildfires are the most destructive because they force firefighters to focus on saving lives rather than protecting property.
Now, researchers have received more bad news. The idea is that the scale of wildfires is accelerating as a result of climate change.
This is according to a new analysis that used satellite data to examine tens of thousands of wildfires between 2001 and 2020. Researchers found that the fastest-growing fires caused nearly 90% of damaged and destroyed homes, even though they accounted for only 3% of all fires. During the period.
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And that phenomenon is accelerating. The paper was published last week in the journal scienceAs climate change accelerates the warming and drier climate, fire spread is accelerating in the western United States, increasing the threat to already-at-risk communities near forests and grasslands. I am warning you that you are doing so.
“We are the first to document this trend,” said report co-author Jennifer Balch, a fire ecology expert and associate professor at the University of Colorado. “The reason this is so important is that some of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires occurred incredibly quickly, but they were also relatively small geographical events.”
“At some point, the fire progresses faster than the suppression team can actually operate, and the suppression team shifts from managing the fire to rescuing people,” Balch added.
Take Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as an example. The fire burned a relatively small area in the Boulder County suburbs north of Denver, Balch said. But the disaster, fueled by 160 mph winds, killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history.
“The deadly and destructive effects of large fires are fundamentally determined by their speed,” the researchers wrote.
The study comes as natural disasters are taking a toll on communities across the country, forcing property owners, emergency planners and policy makers to rethink how they prepare for extreme weather events.
As the atmosphere warms due to climate change, research shows that hurricanes are becoming stronger, wetter and stronger faster. Scientists said record water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, were a major factor in Hurricane Milton’s explosive strength earlier this month.
Balch said the new research highlights significant gaps in wildfire-related modeling, risk assessment, resilience efforts and emergency planning, which have historically focused on the intensity and size of wildfires rather than their speed. He said that
“We really need to shift from just talking about megafires and their size to talking about how fast they’re moving,” Balch said.
Researchers used satellite data to investigate more than 60,000 fires between 2001 and 2020. By looking at individual pixels in the satellite data, they determined how quickly each fire spread. Researchers emphasized “rapid fires” based on how many acres burned each day and determined how many buildings burned during each event.
According to the data, 89% of homes damaged and destroyed over the past 20 years were caused by “rapid fires.” However, of the more than 60,000 incidents included in the study, only 2.7 percent involved rapid fires.
The data also revealed that fires are starting to spread more rapidly in the western United States. The authors looked at the earliest fires in the dataset that grew by more than 4,000 acres in a day and found that the earliest fires in 2020 grew on average 2.5 times faster than in 2001 . Between 2001 and 2020, the average maximum growth rate of fires in the region increased by 250%.
“Rising temperatures are increasing the likelihood of wildfires across the United States, and more rapid fires are expected to occur in the future,” the paper said.
Reprinted from E&E News Published with permission of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides news that matters to energy and environment professionals.