Our parents told us not to play with fire. Thankfully, these scientists didn’t listen.
By Jayme Moye
On the morning of November 8, 2018, in California’s drought-ridden Sierra Nevada foothills, residents of the mountain hamlet of Concow awoke to a firestorm. Hot embers rained down from the sky, gale-force winds blasted sparks in through open windows, and anything that could catch fire did. The inferno consumed 95 percent of the structures in Concow and nearby Paradise, including 14,000 homes. It killed 85 people. The Camp Fire, as it became known for its ignition point at a faulty powerline on Camp Creek Road, was the deadliest and most destructive wildland fire in California’s history. Lives and property were lost, in part, because no one knew just how badly weather conditions in the state lent themselves to extreme fire spread. But Matt Jolly, a research ecologist in Missoula, Montana, hopes that the next time, they might.
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Jolly’s workplace, the Fire Sciences Laboratory—or Fire Lab, for short—develops new technology to help communities manage wildfire. Jolly hopes their latest, a computer program called the Severe Fire Danger Index (SFDI), will elevate wildfire preparedness to the same level as hurricane preparedness. “The idea with SFDI,’ says Jolly, who earned his Ph.D. in Forestry from the University of Montana, “is that a family living in a fire prone community knows ahead of time that they need to have their bags packed and their keys ready. If [a fire starts] in the vicinity of their community, they need to get out now.”
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SFDI can pinpoint the location of severe fire danger down to a 1.5 square-mile area. It uses the U.S. National Weather Service’s National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD), which produces gridded forecasts at least twice daily in a 1.5-mile grid spread across the country. Weather in each location is then compared against 40 years of climatology data to determine whether it’s normal.
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In the case of catastrophic fires like the 2018 Camp Fire, Jolly says SFDI absolutely would have saved lives. The extreme weather conditions that turned a spark from an electric transmission line into a firestorm so quickly and furiously that downhill communities had no time to react before they were consumed would have shown up as red. Concow and Paradise could have been evacuated.
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