Managing a Texas fire

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Wildfires and climate change.

The Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas Panhandle is now the largest in recorded state history and among the biggest in recent U.S. history. The fire has consumed more than one million acres of cattle country and is about 44% contained. Thousands of cattle are dead, and two people have lost their lives as of Wednesday.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Well, not long after the wildfire made national headlines, explanations for why the blaze was so bad came fast and furious as in these reports from ABC affiliate WFAA and CNN.

WFAA: The climate changes we’re experiencing are quite demonstrably making wildfires worse and harder to control.

CNN: We are seeing an increase in bad wildfires, and that is, for us, a clear sign of climate change.

REICHARD: So is climate change to blame, or is there more to it than that?

Well, joining us now to talk about it is David Legates. He’s director of Research and Education at the Cornwall Alliance, and previously served as a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

David, Good morning.

DAVID LEGATES: Good morning.

REICHARD: Well, let’s just start with the weather, shall we? What conditions led to this fire?

LEGATES: Well, we had a lot of rain last year, which particularly towards the end of the year caused the grasslands to grow quite a bit. Then over the winter, they go dormant. Effectively, then what you have is hay on the ground and a spark coupled with a lot of high winds, fire gets whipped up, and all of a sudden, the Texas panhandle is on fire.

REICHARD: Based on all that then, do you think this fire was preventable…or do wildfires just come with the terrain?

LEGATES: Well, it's a combination of factors. It could have been preventable. We don't know how it started. But it comes with the terrain. I mean, you know, we can start fires naturally from lightning strikes, for example. And fire is a natural process that occurs in the climate system. We would like to say we never want to have fire of any kind. But that's not how the real world works. Nature creates fires because it's sort of a rejuvenating, a changeover, allows for refreshing of forests, grasslands—they're always going to happen. You know, we like to take more precautions, so we don't create an excessive number, but they are part of the natural biosphere process.

REICHARD: Well let’s talk about the research then. Some research says that the number of natural disasters is rising… other data shows a flat line, if not a decrease. So, why the discrepancy… and how should we think about disaster data?

LEGATES: Well, it depends on the time series in which you look. I mean, if you go back, say 100 years, it was much higher back then. And the reason it was much higher is we now have things like airplanes, satellites. We can see what's going on. We can get a spatial representation of how it's developed. We can move people to where we need them to be to fight the fire. We can fight the fire from the air by dropping water on it—didn't have any of that back in 1920. So you were sort of standing on the ground, seeing a fire not realizing where it is, being able to only fight it that one way, not move people around as necessary. And so fires burned a lot longer, a lot more area got burned. Even though the number of fires remains about constant, there was a lot more back then. So it depends on the timescale that you always look at as to whether you see a rising trend, a falling trend, and if we go back to the 1920s, it's definitely been falling.

REICHARD: Yes, having the long view is really helpful in looking at the data. I know wildfires raged in Canada last year, then in California in prior years…and part of the problem had to do with forest management that prevented logging and didn’t clear away the dead growth, which of course, that meant fuel for fire.

But Texas is a conservative state and I imagine that means it manages things differently. Can you compare the Smokehouse fire with the fires in Canada and California?

LEGATES: Actually, it's apples versus oranges, because this is going on in the northern Texas Panhandle. And the problem there is we don't have a lot of trees in that region. It's mostly grasses. And grasses burn as well. But it's easier to handle trees and undergrowth and things like that, than to simply go in and kill off a lot of grasses on the ground. So it's a grass fire here, whereas it would be a forest fire say in California or in Canada. They're different, but once they get started they're fought mostly the same way.

REICHARD: I’m wondering, when it comes to stewarding the land and using proper dominion, are there policies that help mitigate so-called climate disasters that lawmakers should focus on?

LEGATES: Well, that's one of the things we've learned or should’ve learned in the 40s, 50s, and 60s is how to better maintain our natural environment. The idea is you create fire breaks, you keep the underground growth removed. I mean, this is done regularly in California, because they know that if you don't, a lot of houses will burn. So they keep that and take care of it. Like I said, it's very difficult to have done that here. You've got large expanses of the Midwest that are just simply covered by grasses that dry out naturally. Usually, they dry out in August, September, but in this case, they’re dormant. We got a lot of wind, we've got dry conditions, they become fire fodder I should say.

REICHARD: David, what aspect of this story do you think is misunderstood by the general public and needs more attention?

LEGATES: Generally that fire is somehow human-induced and is bad. Fire is also naturally induced, and fire is part of the climate system, part of the ecosystem that keeps it going. So we tend to think of fire as always being bad, and always being created by human beings. But even if we didn't have humans at all, fire would still replenish the natural ecosystems, it would still be with us. It's been with us since the world was created and will still be with us, even if we are gone.

REICHARD: David Legates works with the Cornwall Alliance, and previously served as a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. David thanks so much.

LEGATES: Thank you.

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