Wildfires

As our climate changes and wildfires become a larger part of living in the West, one local artist’s work looks at our relationship with changing landscapes.

Brian Fennessy has nearly 50 years of fire experience, which began in the late 1970s on elite federal hotshot crews and other wildfire teams.

Momentum is building toward deployment of respirators to protect wildland firefighters from a long list of toxins. But researchers argue that the workforce’s practical concerns would need to be addressed for implementation to be successful.

A consumer advocacy group is asking top insurance companies to adopt a list of nine protections aimed at increased transparency and fairness.

A group of mostly Western U.S. Senators is demanding answers on why the U.S. Forest Service has fallen behind on efforts to reduce hazardous wildfire fuels. The 12 senators – all Democrats – are from Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and other wildfire-impacted states.

The Healthy Lungs for Heroes Act was introduced by Democratic California Senator Adam Schiff and Republican Utah Senator John Curtis. If passed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal officials would have one year to develop a plan to make “commercially available appropriate respiratory personal protective equipment for wildland firefighters and supporting staff in settings in which smoke exposure surpasses covered permissible exposure limits.”

Data analyzed by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters shows that prescribed fires and other hazardous fuel reduction efforts have fallen by nearly 40% across the West this year.

In January, the world watched in horror as fires marched through multiple Los Angeles neighborhoods, leaving behind blocks of smoldering foundations. A recent report tried to calculate how much it would cost to rebuild the structures lost to better withstand the next blaze.

Wildfires have grown substantially in size in recent decades, but they’re also burning much more intensely, with high severity areas growing much faster than fires overall. New research projects additional significant jumps in the scale of wildfires that kill most trees unless major management measures - like prescribed fire - are carried out.

The U.S. Senate version of the Fix our Forests Act (FOFA) is advancing with strong bipartisan support. If signed, it would bring big changes to the country’s approach to wildfires.