Armed with red torches, dozens of volunteers set fire to ferns, dead branches and dried leaves in a California forest. Don’t panic: it is simply a “controlled fire” that is responsible for cleaning the ecosystem and making it more resistant to flames.
• Also read: 100mm of rain and 60cm of snow are expected in California this week
As in this natural park on the outskirts of the city of Santa Cruz, near San Francisco, California is organizing more and more operations of this kind.
The aim is to use prevention to limit the intensity of forest fires, which have killed more than 200 people in the last decade and are getting worse due to climate change.
AFP
“The best way to fight fires is with fire,” reminds AFP Portia Halbert, the California State Parks scientist responsible for overseeing the exercise. The vegetation “will burn anyway.” That’s why we want to burn it (…) in a way that’s not too extreme to prevent the fire from attacking houses and claiming lives.”
Before lighting the undergrowth, everything is carefully prepared. The soil is dug up with a spade to create a line that can contain the flames, branches and pieces of wood that are too close to the trees are moved, and hoses are used to water them if necessary.
The fire thus consumes the forest floor without spreading to the oaks, sequoias and other American strawberry trees that live there. In the event of a future fire, the flames will have much less fuel to spread to the treetops and reach catastrophic proportions.
Native American practice
Drought-ravaged California has seen a proliferation of record-sized megafires over the past decade. These massive fires attracted “attention,” summarizes Ms. Halbert.
This state realized that its forest management policies, aimed at preventing fires at all costs, were proving counterproductive. If undergrowth is over-preserved, global warming will cause it to dry out more quickly, turning forests into powder kegs that can fuel uncontrollable fires.
To reduce the danger, California rediscovered the Native American practice of controlled fires, which it had banned in 1850.
By 2025, the state wants to burn around 160,000 hectares annually in this way, which is equivalent to 220,000 football fields.
In California, around twenty associations dedicated to fighting fires have emerged in recent years. In addition to the operations of firefighters and forestry services, they train individuals to carry out such operations.
But despite these efforts, the state is still far from achieving its goals.
“We need to change the scale,” said Jared Childress of the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association, which was involved in the controlled burn in Santa Cruz. “We have to have fires like this all over California, all fall, winter, spring and even into the summer.”
Shortage of workers
The time frames granted by the authorities for these operations are currently very narrow.
Because even if the vast majority of them go smoothly, the practice remains delicate: in the fall of 2022, a controlled fire in the state of New Mexico degenerated and turned into a historic fire that destroyed hundreds of homes.
But the need is enormous, according to Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a specialist in the field at the University of California.
“There is a cruel lack of fire in our landscapes,” she emphasizes, recalling that before the arrival of settlers, Native American tribes were accustomed to burning between 1.6 and 4.5 million hectares of land in the region each year.
To encourage citizens to take action, California—nearly half of the land is owned by private individuals and remains beyond the reach of public services—just created a fund dedicated to ensuring controlled fires.
However, according to Ms Quinn-Davidson, the biggest obstacle remains the lack of labour. Between the advanced skills needed to keep controlled fires safe and the administrative background needed to organize them, “thousands of people need more training,” she estimates.
Among the volunteers in the Santa Cruz Forest, Ian Cook learned to deliver a weather report to his teammates. Thanks to several associative events, the ecology student has acquired skills equivalent to those of a firefighter.
“The fire department doesn’t care what organization you belong to,” he states. “We have to work together because this is a problem that affects us all.”