In my town, there was a fire.
It exploded in the middle of the night, burning 86 acres in a hilly Urban Wildlife Interface Zone, destroying most of a park and damaging two homes at its edge. It could have been a lot worse, if not for the response of no less than 11 fire departments from nearby towns that rushed to help our overwhelmed local firefighters contain the blaze.
The proximal cause of this conflagration was two teenage boys who were smoking pot in the park on that extremely hot, early September night. On a dare, one boy lit some tinder-dry grass on fire just to see what would happen. They saw – and one of them called 911 on his cellphone. The call was traced, leading to the boys’ arrest.
All was confessed and revealed, and the community had its answer to: “How the heck did that happen?” No pot-smoking boys, no fire right?
Sure. But there will always be boys (and pot to smoke or illegally obtained alcohol to drink). There will always be the homeless guy with his cigarette stub, the barbecuer with too many beers in his belly, the random spark from a passing truck.
So, what’s different? Why, when most sparks simply die out, was there a near disaster this time? (The fire was a disaster for some local wildlife, just not for many people and their property.)
Three weeks after the fire, I attended a lecture about the future of water availability in our region of Oregon. The talk, given by a renowned hydrology expert, covered the essential aspects of water supply and demand: the supply, in our case, being from local rain and snowfall, the demand being primarily from the region’s many forests; and then from agricultural and urban use, in that order. Not surprisingly, because of a variety of factors, the supply – specifically the amount of water available during the hot, dry summer and early fall months – is predicted to diminish as the demand grows.
Population growth and expansion of the agricultural sector are anticipated to increase demand. No surprise there.
But on the supply side, we have climate change, and its pernicious effects – already being felt – will affect water availability in surprising ways indeed. Although common sense tells us, and scientific predictions confirm, that as global temperatures rise we can expect longer, hotter dry seasons, our particular region should actually get more wet-season rainfall as the decades pass.
However, more rainfall doesn’t necessarily translate into more available water. It works like this: With higher temperatures we can expect more precipitation, but less snow – and our mountain snowpack is our main water storage “facility.” (Most of the rest is stored in dams.) So the rain will come down hard in the winters, but their water will flow to the ocean. That means that there will be less water in the streams and rivers in the summer, increasing the severity of the dry season.
Although the hydrology expert didn’t draw this conclusion, possibly because he ran out of time to speak, common sense tells us that significantly diminished stream flow and a drier environment will make wildfires – both “out in nature” and in Urban Wildlife Interface Zones – more likely and more destructive. (The lecturer did jokingly mention cutting down our forests as one way to reduce water demand. However, he didn’t mention burning down our forests, a specter that appears grimly inevitable.)
We’re already in a prolonged and worsening drought. It was 95 degrees the morning after 12 fire departments and some lucky changes in the wind’s direction saved the possible destruction of hundreds of homes.
But what if there had been simultaneous fires in other towns, requiring each department to fight its own battle? The day is not far off when dry-season temperatures frequently will exceed 100 degrees. Water for fighting fires will be scarcer, and resources to enhance water availability – new dams and reservoirs, for example – will be stretched past the limit as similar problems engulf the entire West.
When will we pass the point of no return? Let’s hope we have time to adapt – the topic of my next column – before there’s another fire near your ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.