The Supertanker was used in Mexico in 2011 and in Israel in 2010. It’s not approved for use on federal wildland fires in the USA. It’s use is political and not tactical.
That last sentence is awesome, but I don’t know what it means. Could you expand?
What Telemark said. We recently built a house in the wildlife-urban interface in Montana and fires are a big concern. We used flame resistant cementacious siding, fire resistant asphalt shingles, and cleared a 40 foot perimeter around our house removing all trees and undergrowth. While that won’t protect us if a large wildfire is started anywhere near our property, at least we did what we could.
More importantly, sometimes we must let Mother Nature do her job.
Indians set fires in order to create landscapes that suited them best. The landscape that they managed looked different than what we see today and different than what the Pilgrims saw, as a good number of Indians died before even the English made landfall.
“Ecologists and archaeologists,” Charles Mann says in 1491, “agree that the destruction of Native Americans also destroyed the ecosystems they managed. Throughout the eastern forest the open, park-like landscapes observed by the first Europeans quickly filled in. Because they [Europeans] did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled with weeds, then bushes and trees.”
Mann, Charles “1491.” (Vintage Books: New York, NY. 2006) 371.
Right. The thick forests of the colonial era weren’t virgin primeval forests. They were new forests that had grown up in abandoned farmland. In 1491 most indians in North America were farmers, not hunter-gatherers.
Anyway, back to wildfires. Forests produce dead leaves, wood, bark, and so on. Those things accumulate, and are removed by various processes. Decay is one way debris gets removed. But generally in most parts of the United States debris accumulates faster than decay removes it. And as the debris gets thicker and thicker, it provides fuel for fires. Which means the longer a place goes without a fire, the more debris it has, and the hotter and more devastating the fire will be.
There will inevitably be a fire. The more you suppress small fires, the more debris accumulates, the greater the likelihood and severity of the next fire.
The introduction of non-native species doesn’t help either. California wildfires are much more intense than they used to be due to the introduction of eucalyptus, a species that sheds a tremendous amount of resinous bark, leaves and seeds, that creates intense fires. Eucalyptus can survive the intense fires, many other species cannot. This is how eucalyptus spreads itself–dump a bunch of hot-buring bark everywhere, burn out all your competitors, and then move in to the newly cleared land.
Another thing that doesn’t help are the people that cover their house in cedar shakes. You might as well paint your house with gasoline.
They already have airborne IR flights when there’s weather they suspect will cause starts. For the most part, the trouble isn’t detecting new starts, but predicting which ones are going to blow up into large fires.
To have satellites continuously watch one spot, they have to be in geosynchronous orbit which is 22,000 miles above earth, making it difficult if not impossible to locate small fires starting up. The other option is having a bunch of satellites in orbit so that one is always over the zone you want to watch, which is expensive. An alternative is to pass over the area several times a day. The MODIS satellite does this and apparently the Forest Service does use it to detect fires. But the IR resolution is 1000m, and since it passes a few times a day, it isn’t going to catch anything really small as it happens. But by the time a forest fire really erupts it should be easily detected.
Wildfires can also be detected by other meteorological satellites and smoke can be detected by weather radars which blanket the country. And then there’s people, who probably report 99% of fires before any of this technology detects it.
Like phreesh said, I think it’s a question of definition. “Forest management” implies intentionally maintaining their health over the long term, but Native Americans burned forests for a variety of short term reasons including destroying them for cultivation. I’d hardly describe that as management. Their practices resulted in preventing forests from becoming too old and susceptible to massive firestorms, but that happens naturally anyway, so crediting Native Americans for “managing” it seems misguided to me.
The trouble is that words like “health” and “management” are somewhat loaded and subjective. There is no such thing as an objectively healthy forest-- it’s all about what you want to get out of it. A forest that may be healthy by the standard of providing lots of timber is different from one that’s healthy by the standard of providing habitat for game or living space for humans. Management simply means doing anything to further those outcomes-- even clear-cutting is a form of forest management.
I’m not as familiar with what eastern Native Americans were doing, but in the west, the quasai-nomadic peoples wanted forests that could maintain game species and were easy to travel through. Periodic burning cleared the undergrowth and renewed grasses. They weren’t thinking short-term at all, since you would burn one year expecting not to reap the benefits until you passed through in later years. There is evidence in historic times that these were intentional fires, too, so these weren’t just accidental fires with coincidental impacts on the ecosystem.
A large amount of wildland fire in the USA occurs in places where the effective use of a supertanker isn’t safe nor feasible. It’s also very expensive to operate. On wildland fires within the USA where it has been used, the decision to use it was politically motivated by a Member of Congress leaning on fire officials. That Member all too often is more concerned with their district votes in the next election than a safe and effective fire management and control. Of the several large fires I participated in where the supertanker was considered, practicality, cost containment and suppression effectiveness ruled it out. Smaller aircraft was more effective, cheaper and safer.
A supertanker air drop is an impressive sight to watch. It makes for really good TV news, and political grandstanding. It’s tactical effectiveness just isn’t there most of the time.
Okay, you make a good point and I generally have to agree with it. I still think there can be a difference between “management” and “exploitation”, but I see now that that’s immaterial to the point I wanted to make. What I really wanted to do in the context of this thread was point out that preventing forests from becoming over-fueled tinderboxes wasn’t the purpose of the Natives’ burning. I don’t know if you were implying that or if I wrongly inferred it, but I wanted to be clear on that.
No, reducing fuel wasn’t the purpose of the native prescribed burns, but the forest ecosystems adapted to periodic fires and the sudden removal of them has caused the tinderbox problem. There are western forests that are not fire-adapted (or at least not adapted to such frequent fires), largely in areas where people didn’t live and travel during prehistory. Unfortunately, people live mostly in the same places they did during prehistory, so the most fire-adapted forests tend to be closer to where people live now.
This creates a bit of a feedback loop-- we can (and increasingly do) let fires just burn out on their own in the mountains and isolated backwoods valleys since those ecosystems were never adapted to frequent fires in the first place, and so tend not to burn out of control. We can’t do this around settlements, though, and those are the forests that most need to be allowed to burn periodically. The solution is probably some combination of mechanical fuel reduction (yes, including some logging), planned burns that can be made when weather conditions reduce risk of losing control and minimize the smoke hazard, and simply letting some fires burn out when practical. But we have about 100 years of catch-up to do.
Or intentionally setting fires in strategic areas and positioning themselves along likely escape routes for game and allowing them to bring down many animals that would have been difficult to hunt down otherwise.
To adress the OP, large wildand fires are not some kind of creeping along little brush fire. These are full blown wrath of God events like a minor hurricane or tsunami. We can through massive effort, slow them down and sometimes channel them, but decisively stopping one cold is right up there with ordering the tide not to come in.
Wild animals do get cooked now and then, but the vast majority of them are WAY ahead of the fire.
I remember during the massive fire here in Israel a couple years ago, the newscasters were saying that while in total, the smaller planes the Russians had sent were a lot more effective, the U.S. supertanker was damn impressive.
Sounds like delayed revenge by the Natives on us.
Add to that other factors like climate change and the pine beetle, and it sounds like these mega-fires are going to be more common now in populated areas. As much as I love mountains and forests, I’m kind of glad I haven’t built my dream house near one.
(And thanks for the info.)
That sounds entirely plausible. Plains Indians set grass fires to drive buffalo herds in a certain direction, so the same strategy likely worked in forested areas, too.
I had heard that in some areas of the rural south a large percentage of wildland fires are backwoods folks spooking out the game to bag several animals quickly rather than hunt them down individually. Easy way to feed the family for the winter.