'We don't have a season anymore': How climate change has affected wildfire preparedness

Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the size of a fire-protection buffer around a person's house. The buffer should be 5 feet wide.

Saturday is the National Fire Protection Association's Wildfire Community Preparedness Day. It is held in the United States and Canada each year on the first Saturday in May in an effort to "come together on a single day to take action to raise awareness and reduce wildfire risks."

This year, given limited in-person gathering due to the pandemic, the focus is on helping homeowners create defensible space around their homes.

But as of April 23, two weeks before the observance, 30 homes in Arizona had already burned to the ground in the 19,000-acre Tunnel Fire outside of Flagstaff.

“Climate change is increasing the length of the fire season," explained Christina Restaino, an assistant professor and fire ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno. "Snow is melting earlier and the rain that is falling is drying up sooner. It used to be that the rain and the snow would keep the plants moist until July. Now things are already melted by then, and it makes it so you have this time period when things can be even more dramatic with fire."

Restaino runs a wildfire awareness program in Nevada called Living With Fire. The group organizes information campaigns to help the public prepare for the threat of wildfire or the need to evacuate, track prescribed burns or fire hazards in their specific communities and tune into webinars, podcasts and blogs about topics such as smoke health risks, wildfire science and native vegetation.

Action needed: Democracy can create climate change solutions, but states may have to act first

The group launched its 2022 wildfire awareness campaign on May 1, with a theme of "being wildfire ready." But Restaino knows that seasonal awareness messaging is no longer enough.

"It used to be just the month of May and now it’s a campaign that will last until November because we’re seeing that just doing wildfire awareness in May isn’t doing the trick, we need to be talking about this all year long," Restaino said.

One of the challenges to the preparedness education effort, she says, is that some of the partner agencies and fire protection districts they work with to raise awareness about wildfire risks hire outreach staff seasonally, with minimal educational specialists employed year-round.

“We have so much money going to wildfire suppression and we need more money going to some other parts of the problem," she said, such as teaching people how to create a buffer of space around their home, cleared of anything flammable to reduce ignition risk year-round. Restaino said she has replaced grasses and trees with mostly gravel in the 5 feet surrounding her home in Reno.

Is awareness keeping pace with advancing fire dates?

This pattern of earlier wildfire starts and longer wildfire seasons is something that experts from agencies like NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency have been documenting — and tying to climate change — for years.

Data from a 2021 U.S. Department of Agriculture publication that compiled wildfire occurrence information for the United States between 1992 and 2018 show, at a state-specific level, how the dates when "wildfire season" kicks off each year are trending earlier over recent decades.

In 1993, for example, the first wildfire in Arizona in the size category "F," the second largest at between 1,000 and 4,999 acres, was reported on the 70th day of the year, or March 11, and the first Arizona wildfire in the largest size category, "G," for fires over 5,000 acres, was reported on the 119th day of the year, April 29.

Best idea: New book on climate change in national parks pleads for action

Twenty-five years later, in 2018, the last year for which information is available in this dataset, the first fires in both of those size categories in Arizona occurred about a month earlier.

This year, as of April 19, two wildfires in the largest size category had already been recorded in Arizona on the list of 2022 National Declared Disasters maintained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency: the Tunnel Fire outside of Flagstaff, currently 95% contained at 19,075 acres, and the Crooks Fire outside of Prescott, currently 83% contained at 9,402 acres.

Speaking from the incident management tent at the Crooks Fire this week, Tiffany Davila, a public affairs officer with the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, said the entire idea of "wildfire season" isn't really even relevant in the Southwest anymore.

“We’ve been saying for years that we don’t have a season anymore. We can have a wildfire start any day of the year in Arizona," Davila said. "That’s why we prepare all year-round and push our prevention messaging 365 days per year because we don’t want to get complacent."

Messaging from the front lines of climate change

Still, Davila said, officials target their wildfire awareness messaging for the time of year when they see activity peak in Arizona. The Division of Forestry and Fire Management recognizes Southwest Wildfire Awareness Week in late March or early April each year.

As part of this effort, the agency reminds Arizonans to make sure campfires are out cold, that vehicles are properly maintained and not parked on dry grass and to be aware that target shooting and fireworks are prohibited on state trust land. There's also a wildfire prevention group that meets once a month to come up with ideas and themes for getting the word out about avoiding the worst impacts of wildfire.

Northern Arizona University also observed Southwest Wildfire Awareness week this year with a list highlighting 10 things it is doing to make the West more resilient to wildfire.

Meanwhile, the American Red Cross has labeled all of May as National Wildfire Awareness Month, advising visitors to its website to "prepare now for wildfire threats" by assembling an emergency preparedness kit ready to grab during evacuation with items like a battery-powered radio, flashlight, important documents and extra medication.

The U.S. Fire Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, also maintains a webpage with Wildfire Outreach Materials, which it updated with new information on March 10. And the National Fire Protection Association will complement its Awareness Day Saturday with another separate event called Fire Prevention Week in the fall, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2022 on Oct. 9-15.

More on messaging: We can’t purchase our way to a cooler climate, experts say. Not even on Earth Day

Of course, Smokey Bear has been at it since 1944. The U.S. Department of Agriculture website dedicated to his legacy traces his wildfire prevention campaign back to fear that exploding shells from Japanese submarines during World War II would ignite large wildfires along the Pacific Coast. By 1952, an act of Congress removed Smokey from the public domain, placed his image under the control of the secretary of Agriculture and cemented his position as a figurehead for official wildfire education in the United States.

Today, Smokey's fire science website asks, "Why has the number of acres burned remained so high over the last few years?" One of the answers, according to the bear mascot and scientific experts around the world, is that the changing climate is contributing to drier, hotter weather patterns and longer “fire seasons.”

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a Ph.D. in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: It's almost Wildfire Community Preparedness Day. Is it too late?