A double whammy: Wildfire debris pollutes drinking water

February 5, 2023 / activist360

(Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture / CC BY 2.0) — *Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture / CC BY 2.0*

Wildfires, which have intensified with climate change, litter the ground with debris that can contaminate drinking water supplies after a heavy rain.

By Alex Urquhart and Tanya Petach, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s state history burned over 300,000 acres in the summer of 2022 and came within a mile of the town of Las Vegas. The flames ultimately spared the town of 13,000, but months later, ash and soot left by the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak wildfire fouled drinking water there when monsoon rains blanketed the region, paradoxically slamming Las Vegas with both flooding and a municipal water shortage.

Four people drowned in flash floods, and residents were forced to erect sandbag barriers to protect their houses. Meanwhile, the inundation overwhelmed the town’s water filtration system with ash contamination, forcing mandatory restrictions to cut water consumption by about two-thirds. Swimming pools went empty, and restaurants resorted to disposable dishes and utensils to cut back on dishwashing.

In September, New Mexico spent $2 million to rapidly install a temporary pre-treatment system. It is still propping up the overstrained filtration system while the town applies for federal funds for a permanent water treatment facility that the mayor estimates could cost as much as $100–200 million.

Climate change is worsening wildfires

Around the world, more extreme wildfires have become a shocking signal that the effects of climate change are here. Wildfires are now more common and more destructive, making their damage more expensive.

Climate models have predicted this worsening trend for years and suggest it will continue as long spells of hot and dry weather become more common. In California, 12 of the 20 largest fires since 1932 occurred in the last five years. In the Mediterranean, the frequency of so-called “fire weather”—hot and dry weather that leads to large wildfires—is projected to increase by up to 30% by the end of the century.

Toxic runoff dirties drinking water

Although the dramatic violence of wildfires attracts intense media coverage, long-term impacts on water quality have gone largely unreported. The problem is alarming in the U.S. West, which has wrestled with regional water shortages for years. Researchers are finding that heavy rains in areas affected by wildfires can contaminate watersheds and overwhelm municipal drinking water systems. Municipalities must often pay astronomical costs to augment, repair, or replace entire water distribution systems. With risks growing, researchers say at-risk areas must plan ahead to act quickly and communicate clearly about water issues to fire-hit residents.

Wildfires lead to increased flooding and sediment erosion into rivers because a healthy forest is no longer there to slow stormwater runoff and increase water absorption. During storms, ash from the wildfire will be carried unchecked directly into streams, where it can easily flow to a municipal water intake and overwhelm treatment plants, leading to water shortages or even total failure of municipal water systems.

Following the Rocky and Wragg fires in California, researchers studying the affected watersheds recorded drastic increases in dissolved organic carbon, dissolved organic nitrogen and ammonium. It took over a year for these levels to return to normal.

When fires burn through developed areas, toxic runoff is created from the destruction of building materials, electronics, appliances, and vehicles. Rain transports these dangerous chemicals into groundwater, contaminating private wells and municipal systems. This can force months of boil water advisories, or even do not drink/do not boil orders, where drinking water must be brought in from other areas.

Even the water distribution system itself can become a source of contamination. Following the Tubbs Fire and the Camp Fire in California, both of which burned through developed areas, researchers found that municipal drinking water exceeded exposure limits for volatile organic compounds such as benzene. The source of this contamination may have been fire damage to plastic pipes and other synthetic components of the distribution system. With so many potential sources and causes of contamination, it is challenging for public officials to define an appropriate response. This has led to conflicting or variable recommendations in the aftermath of a fire, damaging public trust in official guidance.

Can we build fire-resilient water systems?

As wildfires worsen globally, water quality problems will affect millions of people who live in threatened watersheds. In addition to cutting planet-heating emissions, specific solutions are needed to protect public health and safety from the inevitable fires to come.

Researchers who studied the aftermath of the Tubbs and Camp Fire have called for standardized and streamlined water quality monitoring following wildfires. They recommend a “do not use” order following any wildfire that burns through developed areas. Other recommendations include updated building codes to limit the spread of contaminated water within damaged distribution systems.

Clear health and safety guidance in the aftermath of a fire is crucial. In the months following the Camp Fire, surveys of 233 households within the affected community showed 54% had some level of anxiety about water contamination, and 85% were seeking alternative water sources. The public needed clear recommendations about drinking water safety, including how to conduct at-home testing. Following a fire, clear and regular communication may be required for months or years, depending on the scope of contamination.

Municipalities may also identify standard operating procedures and fire response policies before disaster strikes. A new study examining the 2021 Marshall fire in Colorado outlined potential mitigation procedures that municipalities could implement, from emergency planning to post-fire flushing protocols.

“There are very simple straightforward actions that municipalities can take today to prevent wide-scale water distribution system contamination,” said Andrew Whelton, a lead author of the study. For example: “isolating your water distribution center into zones so that if one part of the system is damaged it doesn’t spread to the other parts of the system.”

Having a plan in place will reduce confusion and increase trust and efficiency in the wildfire response, recent research suggests. One vital consideration is the level of water contamination that constitutes acceptable or unacceptable health risks.

“There are certain conditions that would indicate that your water is lightly contaminated and you should not use it,” Whelton said. “The Marshall Fire case study identifies those conditions, and another study identifies conditions of contamination in private wells. Your water can be chemically contaminated after a fire, and you have to do testing to determine if it is safe or not.”

Understanding these thresholds will lend clarity and speed to post-fire decision-making. And with climate change accelerating, the need for standardized practices that will educate the public about water safety and ensure access to clean water will only grow.

Alex Urquhartis the research and modeling manager at Energy Innovation Policy and Technology LLC® and Tanya Petachis the Climate Science Fellow at the Aspen Global Change Institute. Both organizations are Yale Climate Connections content-sharing partners.

*This post was updated Feb. 3, 2023, to reflect the correct spelling of Andrew Whelton’s name.

Wildfires could release radioactive particles from nuclear sites

August 14, 2022 / activist360

Internationally recognized symbol. Warning sign of Ionizing Radiation. Created by Cary Bass using Adobe Illustrator on January 19, 2006. — *Internationally recognized symbol. Warning sign of Ionizing Radiation. Created by Cary Bass.*

And global warming is making wildfires more frequent and intense.

By YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

Nuclear disasters can release widespread, dangerous radioactive fallout. Research facilities and nuclear weapons tests can also leave behind varying levels of radioactive particles in soil and plants.

Christine Eriksen of ETH Zürich warns that at some sites, wildfires could later release those particles into the air.

“Locally, in the area of the fire and where the smoke travels to, the particles will travel with that,” Eriksen says.

She says global warming and changing land use are increasing the threat of wildfires near many nuclear sites.

“We’re seeing more wildfires in areas that are either bordering onto or actually are contaminated areas,” she says.

That includes land near Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico and other sites around the world.

She says some of these areas have a lot of vegetation ready to burn because it’s dangerous to work in contaminated areas cutting grass or trimming trees.

Eriksen says more research is needed to understand how much radioactive material is released during fires, how far it travels, and how best to protect those who are exposed to the smoke, so a nuclear event of the past will not endanger more people in the future.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media

Moving Beyond America’s War on Wildfire: 4 Ways to Avoid Future Megafires

October 17, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Tools for a prescribed burn conducted in the Sierra Nevada in November 2019. Susan Kocher, CC BY-ND*

By Susan Kocher, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Ryan E. Tompkins, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, The Conversation (CC BY-ND 3.0).

Californians have been concerned about wildfires for a long time, but the past two years have left many of them fearful and questioning whether any solutions to the fire crisis truly exist.

The Dixie Fire in the Sierra Nevada burned nearly 1 million acres in 2021, including almost the entire community of Greenville. Then strong winds near Lake Tahoe sent the Caldor Fire racing through the community of Grizzly Flats and to the edges of urban neighborhoods, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people – including one of us. Those were only the biggest of the 2021 fires, and the risk isn’t over. A wind-blown fire that started Oct. 11 was spreading quickly near Santa Barbara on the Southern California coast.

As foresters who have been working on wildfire and forest restoration issues in the Sierra Nevada for over a quarter of a century, we have found it painful to watch communities destroyed and forests continuing to burn to a crisp.

The main lesson we gather from how these fires have burned is that forest fuels reduction projects are our best tools for mitigating wildfire impacts under a changing climate, and not nearly enough of them are being done.

*Thinned areas like this one in California’s Genessee Valley were more resistant to 2021’s Dixie Fire. Ryan Tompkins, CC BY-ND*

Two historic policies, in our view, led the western U.S. to the point where its forests have become so overgrown they’re fueling megafires that burn down whole communities.

Fire suppression

The first policy problem is fire suppression and exclusion.

Fire is an essential ecological process, and many of the ecosystems in the West are adapted to frequent fire, meaning plant and wildlife species have evolved to survive or even thrive after wildfires. But most people arriving in California during colonization, both before and after the Gold Rush of 1849, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of frequent fire forests.

As state and federal agencies evolved policies on forest management, they considered all fire to be an existential problem and declared war. The U.S. Forest Service kicked off a century of fire suppression in the West after the devastating fires of 1910, known as the “Big Blowup” or “Big Burn,” by implementing the 10 a.m. policy. It aimed for full suppression of all fires by 10 a.m. the day after they broke out.

Native people who practiced prescribed fire to manage forests were removed from their homelands, and burning was criminalized. California made prescribed fire illegal in 1924, and it remained illegal for decades until a better appreciation of its importance emerged in the 1970s.

Past harvesting practices lead to regulations

The second policy issue is the regulatory approach that grew out of past logging practices.

Foresters and early California communities were interested in forests for lumber and fuel wood. They sent the largest – and most fire-tolerant – trees to mills to be turned into lumber, which was used to build California’s cities and towns.

Poorly executed logging in some areas led to concerns from residents that forest cover and habitat was shrinking. As a result, state and federal regulations were developed in the 1970s that require managers proposing forest projects to consider a “no action alternative.” In other words, maintaining dense forest habitat in the long term was considered a viable management choice.

A few walls of buildings are standing but most of the town is burned and melted rubble. — *Little remained of downtown Greenville after the Dixie Fire. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images*

On private land, few owners today thin the forest to levels that would mimic the more fire-resilient forests found in the Sierra at colonization. The California Forest Practices Act until recently required replanting after timber harvest to levels much more dense than were found at colonization. In other words, our current regulatory framework promotes maintaining high levels of forest density, when much more drastic removal of vegetation is needed.

Taken together, these policies have promoted 21st-century forests that are younger, denser and more homogenous – making them vulnerable to increasingly severe disturbances such as drought, insect outbreaks and fire. This new reality is exacerbated by a changing climate, which turns the regulatory assumption that active and widespread forest management is riskier than no management on its head.

Agency priorities change as the crisis grows

Just as forests have changed, so too have the agencies that manage and regulate them. The U.S. Forest Service has seen its budgets for fighting fires balloon while its capacity to proactively manage forests has been shrinking. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as CAL FIRE, has also seen large increases in firefighting budgets, though the state legislature has recently moved to increase fire prevention funds, too.

Living in communities threatened by wildfires this summer, we are very grateful to firefighters who have saved our homes. Yet we also are concerned that more large, high-severity wildfires burning across the landscape mean less funding and staff will be available for proactive fuels reduction projects like forest thinning and prescribed fires.

*The Caldor Fire burned on both sides of Christmas Valley, but was stopped from burning into the community by firefighters using areas where fuels were reduced before the blaze. Susie Kocher, CC BY-ND*

How do we get out of this mess?

The Dixie and Caldor fires that destroyed Greenville and Grizzly Flats provided evidence that forest fuels reduction projects can work.

Both fires burned less severely in areas with proactive forest restoration and fuels management projects, including near South Lake Tahoe and near Quincy.

Fuels reduction projects include thinning out trees, burning off woody debris and reducing “ladder fuels” like small trees and brush that can allow fire to reach the tree canopy. They create more open forests that are less likely to fuel severe megafires. They also create strategic areas where firefighters can more easily fight future blazes. And, because fires burn less intensely in thinned forests, they leave more intact forest after a fire for regenerating new trees and sequestering carbon. Prescribed fires and managed ignitions paid huge dividends for containing the Dixie and Caldor fires.

During the Dixie Fire, firefighters used an area that had been strategically thinned in the past to set backfires to prevent the wildfire from spreading into the community of Quincy. Ryan Tompkins, CC BY-ND

To manage fires in an era of climate change, where drier, hotter weather creates ideal conditions for burning, experts estimate that the area treated for fuels reduction needs to increase by at least an order of magnitude. We believe government needs to accomplish these four things to succeed:

Drastically increase funding and staff for agencies’ fuels reduction projects, as well as outreach, cost-sharing and technical assistance for private forestland owners. Although the Biden administration’s proposal for a Civilian Climate Corps proposes funding to bring in more young and unskilled workers, funding more federal and state agency positions would recruit more natural resource professionals, provide career-track opportunities and better add forest restoration capacity for the long term.
Reduce regulations on forest and fuels management efforts for both public and private land. While California and the federal government have made recent strides to streamline regulations, land management agencies need to acknowledge the biggest risk in frequent fire forests is doing nothing, and time is running out. Agencies need to drastically cut the time needed to plan and implement fuels reduction projects.
Invest in communities’ capacity to carry out local forest restoration work by providing long-term support to local organizations that provide outreach, technical assistance and project coordination services. Funding restoration through competitive grants makes development of long-term community capacity challenging at best.
Provide funds and financial incentives for at risk communities to retrofit homes to withstand wildfires and reduce fuels around homes, communities and infrastructure.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.