The Paradise and Colony firestorms in hard-hit California have combined and threatens Sequoia National Park. The fire now named the KNP fire quintupled in size within 24 hours just two days ago. Sequoias, the largest trees by volume globally, are now threatened by fires even though the species evolved with fire for its very survival.
With climate change, though, fires today burn so intensely that they kill the towering trees in Sequoia National Park.
I wrote about this fire two days ago.
Fire-resistant blankets have been wrapped around trees for protection from the KNP wildfire.
Firefighters have wrapped the base of the world’s largest tree in a fire-resistant blanket as they tried to save a famous grove of gigantic old-growth sequoias from wildfires burning in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada.
The colossal General Sherman tree in Sequoia national park’s giant forest, some of the other sequoias, the Giant Forest Museum and other buildings were wrapped as protection against the possibility of intense flames, fire spokesperson Rebecca Paterson said.
The aluminium wrapping can withstand intensive heat for short periods. Federal officials say they have been using the material for several years throughout the US west to protect sensitive structures from flames. Homes near Lake Tahoe that were wrapped in protective material survived while others nearby were destroyed.
The Colony fire, one of two burning in Sequoia national park, was expected to reach the Giant Forest, a grove of 2,000 sequoias, at some point on Thursday. It comes after a wildfire killed thousands of sequoias, some as tall as high-rises and thousands of years old, in the region last year.
The General Sherman tree is the largest in the world by volume, at 1,487 cubic meters, according to the National Park Service. It towers 84 meters high and has a circumference of 31 meters at ground level.
For fifty years, the National Park Service used prescribed burns, and yes, even raking the floor of the world-famous grove of trees at the park for mitigating the danger of wildfire. The maintenance will also help buffer the trees from incineration. Not all the trees are safe, especially those in hard-to-access areas outside of the park.
A historic drought and heat waves tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. Scientists say climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
A national interagency fire management team took command of efforts to fight the 11.5-square-mile (30-square-kilometer) Paradise Fire and the 3-square-mile (8-square-kilometer) Colony Fire, which was closest to the grove. Operations to burn away vegetation and other fuel that could feed the flames were done in that area.
To the south, a fire on the Tule River Indian Reservation and in Giant Sequoia National Monument grew significantly overnight to more than 6 square miles (15 square kilometers), and crews had no containment of it, a Sequoia National Forest statement said.
The Windy Fire, also started by lightning, has burned into part of the Peyrone Sequoia Grove in the national monument, and other groves were threatened.
“Due to inaccessible terrain, a preliminary assessment of the fire’s effects on giant sequoia trees within the grove will be difficult and may take days to complete,” the statement said.
The fire led the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office to warn the communities of Ponderosa, Quaking Aspen, Johnsondale and Camp Whitsett, a Boy Scouts camp, to be ready to evacuate if necessary.
Steven Pyne writes in Grist on the Pyrocene.
Places that commonly burn, such as Australia, California, and Siberia, burned with epic breadth and intensity. Australia had established a historic standard for a single outbreak with its 2009 Black Saturday fires; its 2019–20 Black Summer burns broke historic standards for a season. California endured its fourth year of serial conflagrations, each surpassing the record set the season before. Like a plague, the fires spread across Oregon and Washington, and then leaped over the continental divide to scour the Colorado Rockies. Siberian fires moved north of their home territory and flared beyond the Arctic Circle. Places that naturally wouldn’t burn, or that would burn only in patches, were burning widely. The Pantanal wetlands in central South America burned. Amazonia had its worst fire season in 20 years.
The smoke and flames of last year’s fire season were a symptom, not a syndrome. Now they are back, like a revived wave of COVID. Greece and Turkey have replaced Australia as this year’s ground zero. Evacuations by sea beneath red skies on Evia and Mugla echo those from Mallacoota a year before. The West Coast fires have moved north into British Columbia. Siberia burned at an even larger scale. Algeria burned. Outbreaks follow migrating heat domes. What didn’t dry, drowned or flooded after burning. Wetting and drying is the climatic rhythm behind landscape fire; as each phase intensified into drought and deluge, so fires swelled. Smoke flowed across continents, like dust storms on Mars. But such rolling insurgencies were only half the story.
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
There is a third facet to this planetary fire triangle, one that looks beyond present and absent fires to deep time. Its combustibles come not from living biomass, but from lithic ones. With increasing frenzy, humans are binge-burning fossil fuels. They are taking fuel out of the geologic past, burning it in the present with complex (and little understood) interactions, and then releasing the effluent into the geologic future. Industrial combustion has restructured the dynamics of fire on Earth. Fossil fuel combustion acts as an enabler, as a performance enhancer, and by its disrupting effects on the atmosphere as a globalizer. It has ensured that little of the Earth will be untouched by fire’s reach if not its grasp.
