'Order from chaos': As wildfire behaviors change, these experts work behind the scenes
They call themselves the Wildland Fire Science Club. In their own words, they are “the technical geeks, the nerds, the folks that are doing the figuring behind the scenes.”
Typically, there are four members, with some positions comprising a rotating cast: a fire behavior analyst, an incident meteorologist, a long-term analyst and a strategic operational planner. They’re obsessed with fire, a Fire Avengers brain trust of sorts, and they are charged with trying to outsmart wildfire to keep your house and public lands from burning down.
Byron Kimball is Arizona’s sole practicing fire behavior analyst. With a smokejumper older cousin and a family ranch in Santa Barbara that backs up against the fire-prone Los Padres National Forest, he was primed for a life in the hot seat. By the time he was in the 8th grade, he knew he wanted to work in wildland firefighting for the U.S. Forest Service. Had he not done that, he said, he would have become a teacher. He’s now found a way to merge both passions as an instructor at the state's Wildfire Incident and Management Academy training held in Prescott each spring.
Kimball was the fire behavior analyst on scene for the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which killed 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Though he was not held responsible, ensuring that would never again happen on his watch has fueled his career ever since.
More: Six years later, Yarnell and Prescott remember 19 fallen Granite Mountain Hotshots
Chuck Maxwell holds the title of fire meteorologist at the Southwest Coordination Center Predictive Services Program. He’s based in Albuquerque, but frequently coordinates with Kimball to use the best available science to thwart the progress of wildfire through southwestern habitats.
Maxwell was the fire meteorologist on call for the Cerro Grande Fire, the devastating 2000 Los Alamos blaze that started as a prescribed burn but got out of control and torched 43,000 acres, 235 homes and triggered a White House investigation that forever changed fire law, he said. His forecast held up under scrutiny, but he feels the experience heralded a new age of wildfire intensity and raised the bar on the importance of his life-saving work.
To learn more about the nuts and bolts of wildfires and what goes into combating this rising threat on the science end of things, The Arizona Republic asked Kimball and Maxwell about their backgrounds, roles and how the changing climate is influencing their face-off with fire. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your job titles are pretty unique. Can you describe your roles to me?
Byron Kimball: Officially, I’m the deputy program manager for prescribed fire. For the state of Arizona, there are two of us that are qualified as fire behavior analysts. But I am the sole qualified, practicing fire behavior analyst that works for the state right now.
It’s my job to try to figure out what the fire’s going to do. Where’s it going to go? How’s it going to get there in terms of rate of spread, intensity, flame lengths? Is it just creeping along the ground or it is blowing through? I’m the one who’s supposed to try and figure that out, to tell our operational folks: What’s the likelihood of success of the plan they have in place or are proposing, so that we can make sure their probability of success is that much greater. It’s about making those really hard decisions about how to protect property while maintaining the safety of our troops.
Expert explanation: Not-so-natural disasters are on the rise. What in the world is going on?
Chuck Maxwell: A fire meteorologist is somebody who is focusing on the weather and climate that specifically impact wildfire. So it's a combination of meteorology and social sciences decision support, but it's about working with people and fire sciences meteorology. Big picture, from Byron’s perspective, we would be helping him understand the weather inputs to put into his fire behavior modeling: cloud cover, temperature, wind speed, humidity, precipitation. Those are the basics we provide every day as variables. But the big picture are the patterns and the frequency with which they occur.
How did you get involved in this work? What’s your background?
BK: I have a four-year college degree in natural resources from Humboldt State in northern California. I knew I wanted to do wildland fire and I ended up doing that. I worked for the Forest Service in southern California for 28 years before I came to Arizona. I was lucky enough to get hired and stick it out and get picked up permanently. That was many, many moons ago. I've been doing this almost 40 years now.
I kind of just fell into fire behavior specifically when I got the opportunity to watch a large fire build up energy and blow up over a mountain. I got to sit on a rock and watch it do that for an hour and a half and just thought “that’s cool, I want to learn how to predict that.” Come to find out, we can’t predict fire. But we can pay attention to what things are in alignment and what the potential for extreme fire behavior is.
CM: I’ve wanted to be a meteorologist since I was a kid. I grew up in the northeast in Connecticut and I liked snow storms. I went to college to study meteorology, but I didn't know anything about fire weather.
When I got out of college, I worked at the Boston forecast office. Then there were a bunch of jobs out west in the mid-90s and I just applied. They were hiring for fire weather people and I thought "well, that sounds interesting." I came right to Albuquerque and was hired as an incident meteorologist, the person who goes out on the fires. So I got right out on fires, doing forecasts and I really enjoyed meeting the fire people, the whole crew.
How to talk about climate denial: He got booted for discussing climate change. But he's undeterred, with science on his side
Fire crews are very down to earth, very hard-working, kind of like the geeks I worked with. They wanted to learn more about weather and fire behavior. With marine forecasting, you’re doing it all in an office. It’s very enclosed and removed and sanitized. This is different. I would take my laptop out on fires for two weeks and set up a satellite. It was right into the frying pan. I like stuff like that. That might be why I took that risk. My family thought it was crazy. It was a major, major change.
What is your favorite thing about your job?
BK: I personally feel this is the best job in wildland fire, because they pay me to go sit on a rock and watch a fire burn. Yeah, I have to get up at 5 in the morning and stand in front of 1,500 people and give a briefing. But I’ve been able to travel all over the country with the Forest Service. I’ve been to every state west of the Rockies except for Washington.
I would love to go overseas. I have friends who have been able to go to Australia, and I’ve been on call when they were having serious fires over in Israel. That’s one of the things I love about wildland fire, that I have the opportunity to travel.
CM: I really like learning and sharing information in helpful ways. For me, it’s been one big journey learning about the weather and decision science, where the physical science interacts with the social science, and how to make sure the right people have the right information to make good decisions about fires.
Least favorite?
BK: Probably for me, the least favorite thing is standing in front of people and you’ve got to do a presentation. In this day and age, that’s usually just talking on the radio so it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. There were times on big fires that you’d be up at 6 o’clock in the morning and there’d be 1,500 people standing in the crowd looking at you and you’ve got to tell them what you think is going to go on. Then that night, doing the same thing with the command team for the planning meeting.
From the watchtower: How a 3rd-generation fire watcher sees the climate change from her tower in the pines
It used to be that there was a little bit of defending your position, but that’s gotten better. Most folks understand now that I know what I’m talking about, so I don’t get too much grief. But every once in a while, you get a crowd and they don’t know who you are or what you do and there’s a little bit of a feeling out process.
CM: Oh boy. I think we could be more of a learning organization. We don’t take up knowledge proactively and change our actions based on new knowledge. We resist new information and there’s a weird thing going on with that; there’s some politics involved. There are problems with fire occurrence data that some people don't want to acknowledge. I don't like the silo-ing of information, where we don't talk to each other. I try to stay engaged with the CLIMAS folks (at the University of Arizona) to keep learning because it’s not really a part of agency culture.
What is the thing you think people most misunderstand about what you do?
BK: I don’t know that people misunderstand my job so much as they flat out don’t understand what I do. They look at fire and see it as a state of ultimate chaos. This is Mother Nature having a very severe temper tantrum. I’ve been able to learn to look at that and make some order out of that chaos and learn what some of the factors are that govern that temper tantrum and what are the things we can change to reduce that to a manageable level. And there are some days I conclude there’s not a thing we can do about it — your best bet is to find a rock and watch that fire go.
CM: I think people often misunderstand the way that fire management uses what we do. It's a vast organization and there's a lot that's going on between us in the agency and then what happens out on the fire. People want to know why they aren’t seeing a response to the information they hear on the news. Why are we letting a prescribed fire burn on what appears to be a dry, breezy day, for example? Well, it depends. If the junipers are 20 feet apart and the grass is 4 inches high, you need those conditions to get the vegetation to burn through.
How has your job been affected by a warming climate?
BK: I stay away from the term climate change only because I’m not a climate scientist. I’m a fireman by training. I’m not a scientist by any stretch. But I do know that fuel conditions are much, much drier now. We are starting to get larger fires much earlier in the year. We’re getting much more aggressive fires now during the peak burning point of the season than we might have expected earlier in my career. The monsoons setting up don’t have enough moisture in them to rain, but they have enough energy in them that when things are this warm and dry it doesn’t take much to move fires around.
So there’s something changing, whether you want to call it climate change, whether you want to call it drought, whether you want to call it urban sprawl and people expanding into new areas, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to the experts. I focus on trying to explain what are the factors that help us know what to expect from this fire and what are the things they can do to keep safe on the ground.
CM: I’ve been sitting here for 25 years and the seasonal transitions are not the same anymore. And that’s a major part of fire. Hemispheric patterns. Continental patterns. Because of the heat imbalance, fires are stronger and different and more anomalous than they ever were.
More: What weird new parasites on Antarctic fish tell us about climate change around the world
The rapidity of change — when things happen, how fast — organizationally we’re not prepared for that level of change. The general warming you see, the patterns are changing. We know because we track that a lot. The patterns and amplitudes are occurring at different points in time than they used to. When I told people (in June) we were going to go from raging fires to floods, they thought I was kidding. Shifting the weather by three weeks is absolutely devastating. Imagine all the things: planting, water. And we started telling people that in early April when things started burning.
I do think there's been some over-messaging, attributing everything to climate change. Climate change is totally happening. The amplitude of extremes is increasing and we’re seeing a seasonal shift because of the changing climate. There’s more heat in the atmosphere and so it's more dynamic. The pattern that we’re in right now is so wacked out and bizarre, it just doesn't happen naturally. But our ability to manage any change is so poor, what the government is doing, it's not just about the climate.
Joan Meiners is the Climate News and Storytelling Reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in Ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com.
Please support climate coverage and local journalism by subscribing to azcentral.com at this link.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Wildland fire experts seek to understand changes in weather, behavior
