Outdoor Retailer - December 2020 - 30

Feature .01

Brent Wachter is a meteorologist who has served as the Forest
Service's fire weather forecaster for Northern California for the
past three years. That stint has afforded him unenviable access to
the fires that torched Sonoma in 2017, the Camp Fire that killed
81 people and destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018, and a 2019
wind event that Wachter says didn't end in tragedy only because
the utility giant PG&E shut down its power grid.
Taken together, these events form the
on-ramp for what Stephen Pyne, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University,
has dubbed the " Pyrocene " -the age of fire.
Wachter had predicted the outcome of those
fires and thousands of others with spooky
clairvoyance. But 2020 hit his blind spot.
" I thought the Northern Rockies were
going to catch the brunt of it, " he says. " Not
California. " Wachter studies the weather
like a gambler trying to predict when a slot
machine will hit the jackpot. It's only in a
combination of conditions-dry enough,
windy enough, or hot enough-that a single spark can kindle disaster. Aug. 16, 2020
was one of those days. It started offshore of
the Baja peninsula when, the week before, a
pair of tropical depressions began to degrade
and waft northward. That wasn't unheard
of; Wachter had seen degraded storms hit
NorCal often enough and knew they usually
generated no more than a few hundred onshore lightning strikes.
This time, though, a bubble of high pressure over superheated California sucked the
moisture farther inland. On the night of Aug.
16, between 10,000 and 12,000 lightning
strikes rained down on the parched earth.
The state woke to 650 burning outside Santa
Cruz, Redding, Santa Barbara, Big Sur, and
Chico. Like a virus in daycare, the flames
spread through an area populated by 15 million people, many sick with COVID-19. Over
the next two weeks, two wind events strafed
California. In just nine days, three times
more ground was torched in California than
burns in an entire average fire season.
Of those original 650 burns, 37 have
joined to form one blaze so big that science-having only recently coined the term
" megafire " to describe a single fire larger
than 100,000 acres-now gave us " gigafire, "

30 OUTDOOR RETAILER

/ December 2020

a single burn larger than 1 million acres. The
phenomenon, rare but known in Alaska, was
unheard of in the country's most populated
state until now.
California's air quality plummeted, becoming the worst in the world with airborne particulate matter hundreds of times more toxic than what the EPA deems dangerous. The
blazes sent smoke billowing out as far east
as Denmark. Thousands of homes burned.
Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated in the midst of a pandemic. Dozens lay
dead. Many firefighters and incident-command teams worked as long as 24-hour days
for weeks to try to wrangle the chaos.
Then in the first week of September,
Oregon caught fire. By week's end, 460
fires had destroyed more than 3,000 build-

The Glass Fire torches
trees as it moves across
the superheated
California landscape.

ings-the bulk of five rural towns-killing
11 in places that were usually wet and soggy. Older residents, standing outside homes
turned to ash, kept repeating in disbelief that
they'd never seen fires like this in their lifetimes. Fair enough. Nobody has.
At the outset of the season, most fire experts predicted COVID-19 would waylay
the firefighting service. Instead, the Forest
Service and other wildland fire agencies did
a remarkable job controlling the virus in
their ranks. What they couldn't control was
an environment becoming more and more
fire-prone. " That one week in September requires us as a nation to completely rethink
wildfire management and development in
the West, " one senior research forester at the
Forest Service said.

Outdoor Retailer - December 2020

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