There is a new blog post out at the Southern Plains Perspective. Read below! The Southern Plains Perspective is authored by Clay Pope- who farms with his wife Sarah and is a contractor for the USDA Southern Plains Climate Hub in the area of outreach.
Wildfires-It’s no surprise that this is the topic that comes up again and again when you talk about adapting to the changing climate. After all, wildfires are pretty scary and unlike tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms and the like, you rarely have the advanced warnings about how weather conditions are developing just right for an extreme event (although that is changing—actually wrote about the developing early warning systems for wildfires not to long ago. You can read it here). Wildfires are horribly destructive and are definitely on the rise as our rainfall patterns change. And no recent tragedy shows this more than the fires that plagued Maui, Hawaii in August.
It’s been two months since fires broke out on Maui and decimated the historic town of Lahaina, leaving 115 dead and a community changed forever. This catastrophic wildfire is now considered the deadliest in the U.S. in over a century. And while many factors contributed to this terrible event, one thing clearly stands out—the presence of large amounts of invasive vegetation that created a fuel source for the fire.
In 2014 the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization conducted a study on wildfire hazards around Maui. Their finding designated Lahaina as being at “extreme” risk of fire danger largely due to dense and unmanaged vegetative fuel loads, high likelihood of fire ignition, strong winds, and frequent periods of drought.
Large levels of vegetative fuel loads? Strong winds? Frequent periods of drought? Sounds a lot like the Southern Plains, doesn’t it?
For nearly 200 years, Hawaii’s economy was highly dependent on sugar cane and pineapple agriculture. But starting in the 1990s these industries declined. Large swaths of farming acreage were abandoned, and in 2016, Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation shuttered. Without anyone managing this land, non-native species such as guinea grass, molasses grass and buffel grass moved in. These species, native to Africa, were introduced to Hawaii in the late 18th century and today cover almost a quarter of Hawaii’s land including thousands of acres of former sugar and pineapple plantations and roadside shoulders.
Former farm ground covered with invasive species? Again, this all sounds familiar….
You can guess the rest of the story. Strong winds and dry weather combined with this high fuel load created conditions eerily similar to those we have seen to many times in our neck of the woods. And just as it has been with wildfires in the Southern Plains, the devastation caused by these blazes could have been reduced if there was less fuel load for these fires to consume.
That is why it is so important that we take steps now to better harden our farms, ranches and homes to the danger of wildfire. This includes reducing wildfire fuel loads with tools like prescribed fire, mowing and livestock grazing. Oklahoma State University has some great wildfire preparation information here as well as a link to additional resources put together in partnership with Kansas State University, Texas A&M University and others. The tragedy in Maui is just the latest in what continues to be a growing list of horrible wildfire events. We need to remember that there is a lot of similarity between the wildfire challenges we are seeing in the Southern Plains and the conditions that led to these blazes. We need to do all we can to keep our farms and homes off that list.
