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Firenado? Bambi Bucket? A guide to wildfire vocabulary

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Amid a hellscape of glowing coals, a fiery column recently took flight in Northern California, spinning against a red sky. The name for it? Firenado.

“I had never heard of a fire tornado until today and I really kind of hope I never see a firenado again in my life,” music video producer Robby Starbuck said in a tweet that went viral.

Yes, a firenado is a real thing. Same with Pyrocumulus, Wildland-Urban Interface, and Bambi Buckets. This month’s rash of fires brought the wildfire jargon to the masses, and the masses (myself included) were pretty confused. I wondered what other fire words and concepts people were encountering for the first time as they read about the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history.

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What does it mean, for instance, when a wildfire is 45 percent “contained”? What the heck are the “Santa Ana winds,” other than a frequent crossword answer? And is there a difference between a “firenado” and a “fire whirl”?

To understand these bewildering terms, I turned to Andrea Thode, a fire ecologist at Northern Arizona University. She acknowledged that these new words could be daunting for outsiders. “Terminology in the fire world is … there is a lot,” she told me. To illustrate, she asked if I’d seen the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s 183-page glossary of wildfire terminology — yes, that’s 183 pages, not 183 words.

With climate change making wildfires worse, you’re sure to be hearing these pyro-specific words for the rest of your life. You might as well learn them now.

Bambi Bucket

No, it’s not an oversized pail to rescue lost fawns. A Bambi Bucket is a collapsible bucket that hangs from a helicopter to collect water and dump it on wildfires. What’s with the name? The inventor, Don Arney, made it up as a joke name for the bucket he planned to planned to call SEI-Flex after his company, SEI Industries. Then a friend pressured him into making it the real name. End of story.

A helicopter pours water on fires.aapsky / Getty Images

Containment

The Camp Fire was 45 percent “contained” as of Friday, according to Cal Fire. That doesn’t mean 45 percent of the fire has been extinguished. It means that firefighters have surrounded 45 percent of the perimeter around the fire with “containment lines” — rivers, trenches, and other physical barriers that prevent fire from creeping past. The percentage is a judgment call on the part of the fire teams, Thode says. Generally, they underreport the figure until the very end, because it would be embarrassing to call it contained and then have the fire run wild again.

Defensible space

If you live in a fire-prone area, it’s a good idea to take precautions to protect yourself. You want the area around your house, called “defensible space,” to be free of dead plants, wood piles, and anything that could turn into tinder so that wildfires bearing down on your belongings don’t get any help.

Jan van Rooyen

Firenado

A fire tornado — a spinning column of whirling, red-hot air — is nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term to 1871, shortly after the Great Chicago Fire. It’s also known as a “fire whirl,” though some experts maintain there’s a difference between the two, reserving “firenado” for a vortex so big and strong that it’s comparable to a typical, fire-free tornado. During the Carr Fire in California this summer, one of these twisters packed 143-mph winds — the equivalent of an EF-3 rating on the tornado-damage scale. Thode, for one, doesn’t make a distinction: “I wouldn’t say a fire tornado is different from a fire whirl.”

Fuel

Will it burn? If the answer is yes, it’s fuel. Anything flammable counts. So not just gasoline and trees, but also houses, hand towels, and non-dairy creamer.

Inversion

An inversion is an atmospheric imbalance that occurs when a belt of warm air sits over cold air. That’s the reverse of normal, stable conditions, in which it gets colder as you go up in elevation. Like a lid on a pan, an inversion can trap smoke. “It can make it really smoky for people underneath the inversion, because the smoke can’t punch out and get away,” Thode says.

Rising smoke is stopped by an overlying layer of warmer air due to a temperature inversion.S / V Moonrise

Prescribed fires

It’s a common forest-management practice to set fires on purpose — in a careful, planned way, of course. Indigenous groups did this for thousands of years. But until recently (like 1995), the U.S. actively suppressed any and all wildfires, leading to a buildup of fuel in our forests. Prescribed burns take out overgrown brush, encourage the growth of native plants, and reduce the risk of catastrophic fires.

Pyrocumulus

Evil-looking mushroom clouds sometimes form over a really hot wildfire. The name says it all. Cumulus clouds are those puffy, cotton-like clouds that people lying in the grass like to imagine are animals floating in the sky. Add fire (pyro) and you get the sinister name. As flames burn the moisture out of vegetation, they release water vapor and hot air that rise up and form a cumulus cloud. On rare occasions, rain falls from these clouds, snuffing out the flames below. Also known by the name “flammagenitus,” pyrocumulous clouds sometimes form over volcanic eruptions too.

A pyrocumulus cloud forms above a wildfire.Skyhobo / Getty Images

Red flag warning

Growing up near the Great Lakes, I thought red flags warned of dangerous currents in the water. But no. It’s fire lingo for when warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds lead to a high risk of fire.

Santa Ana winds

Speaking of strong winds … the infamous Santa Ana winds fanned the flames of the Camp Fire. These hot, dry winds roll from the Great Basin into Southern California in the fall, gusting over already-dry terrain and getting warmer as they go. They’re part of a larger category of pressure-based winds called “foehn” winds, which flow from high-pressure areas in the mountains down into low-pressure areas. “Typically you would see these Santa Ana winds, but you wouldn’t see fuels this dry,” Thode says. “Climate is definitely playing a role in this.”

Wildland-urban interface

This is the zone where the natural environment meets the built environment. Wherever you have homes, corrals, and powerlines butting up against undeveloped forests or grasslands, it could mean trouble for nearby towns and cities. That’s because fire can easily spread from vegetation to grandma’s house.

One final fire-tangential term to keep in mind: the “new abnormal.” A few months ago, California Governor Jerry Brown called the increase in destructive fires ‘the new normal,’ but he recently tweaked the term.

“This is the new abnormal,” he said at a press conference on Sunday. “Unfortunately, the best science is telling us that dryness, warmth, drought, all those things, they’re going to intensify.”

Seven of the 10 biggest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last decade. If we want to escape a future filled with firenadoes and pyrocumlous clouds, we’ve gotta get our act together on climate change.

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Firenado? Bambi Bucket? A guide to wildfire vocabulary

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California is preparing for a weekend of wintertime wildfires.

Forests in the American West are having a harder time recovering from wildfires because of (what else?) climate change, according to new research published in Ecology Letters.

Researchers measured the growth of seedlings in 1,500 wildfire-scorched areas in Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Across the board, they found “significant decreases” in tree regeneration, a benchmark for forest resilience. In one-third of the sites, researchers found zero seedlings.

The warmest, driest forests were hit especially hard.

“Seedlings are more sensitive to warm, dry conditions than mature trees, so if the right conditions don’t exist within a few years following a wildfire, tree seedlings may not establish,” said Philip Higuera, a coauthor of the study.

Earlier this month, a separate study found that ponderosa pine and pinyon forests in the West are becoming less resilient due to droughts and warmer temperatures. Researchers told the New York Times that as trees disappear, some forests could shift to entirely different ecosystems, like grasslands or shrublands.

You’d think the rapid reconfiguration of entire ecosystems would really light a fire under us to deal with climate change, wouldn’t you?

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California is preparing for a weekend of wintertime wildfires.

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‘Diablo Winds’ spark historic wildfires in California wine country

This post has been updated to include revised figures on the number of fires and death toll. 

It’s peak wildfire season in California, and Monday was one of the worst days in state history. More than 60 blazes are currently underway statewide.

At least a dozen wildfires sprung up Sunday night in and around Napa and Sonoma counties—also known as “wine country,” just north of San Francisco — prompting rushed evacuations of more than 20,000 people. In an attempt to speed the flow of relief and firefighting equipment and make the National Guard available, Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency.

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The Northern California firestorm has quickly burned nearly 100,000 acres, and is encroaching on neighborhoods in several places. At around 3 a.m. Monday, a Cal Fire official told a local television station that there was “no hope of containment right now.”

In total, the fires have killed 13 people and destroyed more than 1,500 structures as of Tuesday morning, making them some of the most destructive in state history. More than 100 people have been treated for burns and smoke inhalation at regional hospitals, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and more than 150 people are still missing. Nationwide, this year’s fire season has cost more than $2 billion, the most expensive on record.

Smoke from the fires is visible from across the Bay Area, with many residents reporting the smell of smoke and even ashes falling from the sky. The National Weather Service says that winds at higher elevations in some parts of Sonoma County exceeded hurricane force, with several areas reporting gusts greater than 50 mph.

Several of the worst wildfires in California history have sprung up during October, near the end of California’s months-long dry season. It’s this time of year when a combination of strong offshore winds and low humidity can quickly fan a seemingly innocent spark into a raging inferno.

These winds are usually formed by a strong inland high pressure center, which pushes air down mountainsides and through canyons, causing it to warm up and dry out — a perfect environment for fast-growing fires. In Northern California, they are generally called “Diablo winds,” after Mt. Diablo in the eastern Bay Area. A 2015 study said that climate change is making these wind events more frequent and more severe in California. According to the Bay Area branch of the National Weather Service, conditions will begin to improve starting on Tuesday morning.

One particularly frightening fire in Northern California, the Tubbs fire near Santa Rosa, jumped the 101 freeway, forcing a hospital to evacuate its patients. Officials report evacuation centers that have been set up have already filled to capacity. Aerial images of Santa Rosa on Monday showed widespread devastation of entire neighborhoods.

“People are running red lights, there is chaos ensuing,” Santa Rosa resident Ron Dodds told a local television station. “It’s a scary time. It looks like Armageddon.”

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‘Diablo Winds’ spark historic wildfires in California wine country

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Want to stop wildfires? Try logging, says Utah official.

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Want to stop wildfires? Try logging, says Utah official.

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In wildfire-riddled Tennessee, climate change is a hot topic

Daniel Hensley moved to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a month ago with his girlfriend and infant son. On Monday night, they found themselves on the balcony of their motel, watching flames spread down the side of the mountain and engulf a cabin across the street. They escaped the motel “with nothing but our little boy,” he said.

Hensley and his family were among 14,000 evacuees who fled from their homes and hotels as wildfires ripped through the eastern part of the state earlier this week. He and many others took shelter at Rocky Top Sports World, an athletic facility just outside of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Scolding headlines note the irony of wildfires worsened by severe drought, hitting a region that largely voted for denier-in-chief Donald Trump. But although Hensley and others on the ground might not come right out and blame global warming, they acknowledge that a connection could be there — and they’re worried about it.

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“It’s been real dry here for a while,” Hensley said. “It spread so fast because of how dry it was. And then you had high winds that brought it through and just made it even worse.”

Unusually dry conditions in eastern Tennessee spurred a ban on fires in the national park on Nov. 15. Despite that, officials now say that the Gatlinburg fire began in the park and was human-caused. It spread quickly Monday night because of high winds, downed power lines, and dry, parched woods.

This fall Gatlinburg, like much of the Southeast, suffered through months of severe drought, which has become more common in the last 30 years. In the Western United States science has shown that climate change contributes to worsening fire seasons. And as Columbia University bioclimatologist Park Williams told PBS Newshour earlier this month, eastern Tennessee looked a lot like the west this year.

“We’ve never been this dry,” said Anthony Sequoyah, 50, the public safety director for emergency management services in nearby Cherokee, North Carolina. Sequoyah arrived in Tennessee on Monday to help fight the blaze. It was the “biggest mass destruction I’ve ever witnessed,” he added. “The fire bounced from ridge top to ridge top, motels, hotels.”

Neither Sequoyah nor Hensley were willing to come right out and blame climate change as an underlying cause of the drought and contributor to the fires. But others weren’t so reluctant.

“The seasons aren’t the same,” evacuee Allysa Joyner of Gatlinburg said. “That’s where drought comes in. That could be part of it.”

Climate change is hard to believe, she added, “until you see it.” Monday night, she did.

Today Tennessee is one of four states, along with Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina, that allows teachers to “present alternatives” to the scientific understanding of climate change in the classroom. Trump won the state by a 26-point margin and carried Gatlinburg’s Sevier County with 79 percent of the vote.

Hensley said he didn’t know much about climate change. “I grew up in Florida and Mississippi,” he said, “and they didn’t teach it in school there.”

But he’d like to see more instruction about drought and its causes as part of Appalachian education. With a better understanding, he said, maybe local communities could “actually fix the problems, so this doesn’t ever happen again.”

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In wildfire-riddled Tennessee, climate change is a hot topic

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102 million dead trees in California since 2010 will make for one helluva wildfire season.

Sixty-two million trees perished in the state in the last year alone, mostly in the Sierra Nevada, according to the U.S. Forest Service. That’s a lot of kindling.

Trees killed by rising temperatures, pests, and sustained drought “elevate the risk of wildfire,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Oh goody: just what California needs!

The state this year saw its most expensive wildfire in history: Monterey County’s Soberanes Fire took out more than 132,000 acres, and cost more than $260 million. South of Monterey, San Bernardino’s Blue Cut Fire burned more than 36,000 acres, and destroyed nearly 100 homes.

Removing the kindling before it burns is not a silver bullet, according to environmental scientist Char Miller in the Los Angeles Times.

Even if foresters had unlimited funds, it would be unwise to remove all the dead trees. Charred, decomposing trees are a natural element of the landscape and can support other life, making forests healthier in the long run.

Western fires in general are now bigger, and fire seasons last longer than they did a few decades ago, due to extended drought and elevated temperatures.

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102 million dead trees in California since 2010 will make for one helluva wildfire season.

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Republicans and Democrats agree on at least one thing: Wildfires are a major threat

Republicans and Democrats agree on at least one thing: Wildfires are a major threat

By on May 30, 2016 6:06 amShare

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is teaming up to do away with preordained spending caps on emergency fire recovery efforts as the American West braces for another wildfire season. Drier conditions, likely driven by climate change, have turned vast swaths of the continent into veritable tinderboxes; last summer, for example, five million acres of Alaska and 1.7 million acres across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho burned.

“We need to call mega-fires what they are — disasters,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), in a press release. On Thursday, Crapo and Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), introduced a draft bill that would reform how the government pays for fighting wildfires on federal land.

The bill would effectively put wildfires in the same camp as other natural disasters by allowing government agencies — in this case, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forestry Service — to adjust limits on their firefighting budgets during a mega-fire emergency. Currently, those departments have to borrow from other programs when they max out their annual firefighting budget — a practice commonly known as “fire borrowing.”

Wildfire spending has become a critical issue in recent years as costly and devastating mega-fires throughout the West have become more frequent. In 2015, the Forest Service spent 50 percent of its annual appropriations fighting fires, compared to 16 percent in 1995. And the more of that budget that’s spent on emergency firefighting, the less resources are available for preventative measures that would minimize the impact of a crisis.

The draft legislation also proposes allocating an additional $500 million over the next seven years for communities at risk of wildfire damage, and includes funding for studying and executing better forest management practices.

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Republicans and Democrats agree on at least one thing: Wildfires are a major threat

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Climate change leaves trees out to dry

spoiler alert

Climate change leaves trees out to dry

By on 6 Jul 2015commentsShare

The drought may be killing lawns, but whatever — they’re useless. When drought starts going after trees, however, that’s another matter. As year four of California’s drought rolls around, the magical, shade-providing carbon sinks are starting to perish, thanks to a lack of rain and a more recent lack of lawn irrigation.

It turns out all that profligate sprinkling was feeding California’s trees — and when cities cracked down on turf, they inadvertently starved out the more useful urban greenery. And while this one’s partly on us — maybe we should have realized that all those trees need to drink, too — we can give climate change (which is ultimately on us as well) a lot of the credit for this fun development. Climate change, you’ve done it again! Everyone else: Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts.

Here’s the story from Al Jazeera:

Nature has already killed an estimated 12 million trees in California’s forests since the drought began four years ago — most falling victim to an outbreak of the bark beetle pests that attack trees weakened by drought.

Now, trees in city parks, along boulevards and in residential neighborhoods are dying because homeowners, businesses and municipalities have stopped watering.

“The reaction was to turn off irrigation in many locations,” said John Melvin, urban forester at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “If you do that, you lose a long-lived community asset. A tree is not something that can be easily replaced.”

Trees are a big part of what makes a city green — literally, but also figuratively, thanks to the energy they save on AC:

A recent report by the U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service show that the number of street trees in California have not kept up with population growth. The 9.1 million street trees make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the state’s total urban forest. The report also found that tree density has declined 30 percent since 1988 “as cities added more streets than trees.” Tree density fell from 105.5 trees per mile to 75 trees per mile in that period.

Despite that, the agency estimates that California street trees save the amount of electricity equivalent to what’s required to air condition 530,000 households every year.

The conclusion? Radically simple, says Melvin:

“It’s OK to appropriately water trees.”

Source:
Trees are latest victims of California’s four-year drought

, Al Jazeera America.

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Climate change leaves trees out to dry

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Always Be Prepared: 4 Ways Communities are Prepping for Severe Weather

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Always Be Prepared: 4 Ways Communities are Prepping for Severe Weather

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Colorado Wildfires Are So Big They Can Be Seen From Space

Image Credit:ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 36 crew

The fires in Colorado continue to rage through dry forest timber, damaging both forests and towns. Coloradans have already endured the most destructive fire in state history, and while that one has abated, others have sprung up in different corners of the state. Hundreds of firefighters are currently battling the West Fork Complex and the East Peak Fire. The blazes are so large that they can be seen from space. Astronauts on the ISS took these dramatic images of the smoke plumes from the West Fork Complex and the Wild Rose Fire.

Image Credit: ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 36 crew.

The smoke from these fires reached European airspace on Monday.

Firefighters trying to contain the East Peak fire got some help from the weather last night, in the form of less than an inch of rain. It wasn’t much moisture, but it was enough. The fire is now 75 percent contained, but its scars remain on the landscape. Satellite images form NASA’s Earth observatory show what kind of impact the fire has already made in the forested area.

On June 22, 2013, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this false-color image of the East Peak fire burning in southern Colorado near Trinidad. Burned areas appear dark red, while actively burning areas look orange. Dark green areas are forests; light green areas are grasslands. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Caption by Adam Voiland.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Here’s What $110 Million in Fire Damage Looks Like
Colorado Wildfire Forces Evacuations, Threatens World’s Highest Suspension Bridge
Fires Are Escaping Our Ability to Predict Their Behavior

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Colorado Wildfires Are So Big They Can Be Seen From Space

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