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California.
New Mexico.
Colorado.
London, and huge swaths of Europe.
Marauding fires have devoured landscapes and homes throughout history, but never with this range and intensity. Global warming and drought have, as they say, added fuel to the fires.
So the obvious question:
Could it happen here?
The short answer, without trying to be alarmist, is yes.
So says Dave Crary, and when Dave Crary says something about fire, take it as gospel. Crary recently retired after more than 33 full-time years at the Cape Cod National Seashore, focused on fire prevention and habitat management. The man is “legendary,” as Seashore Superintendent Brian Carlstrom puts it, a guru about such things, though you won’t see him sitting crosslegged meditating. He’d rather tromp around forests talking humidity and underbrush, double burns, flanking and backing, buffers.
“People want to say no way, but the fuel is here for a catastrophic fire,” he says. “So those who understand say, ‘It’s not if, it’s when.’”
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The Cape Cod National Seashore alone contains 42,000 burnable acres, pitch pine that torches hot and fast, rising above a lot of dead wood.
Then head to the other end, Joint Base Cape Cod. The military controls even more acreage, again stacked with fuel that would kindle in a heartbeat.
Add Nickerson and Shawme-Crowell State Parks, town and private conservation lands – you get the picture.
Fire is no stranger around here. Geologists core the earth and analyze layers, going farther back in time the deeper they go. They see many lines of charcoal every 30 years or so – proof positive that major fires swept through the area and left charred remains.
“Three a century, each fire creating enough charcoal to change the population in that watershed,” says Crary. “And that goes back 8000 years. Were they started by lightening? Native people clearing land? All of the above.”
That rhythm reduced any single blaze, and of course there were many fewer people and structures at risk. Plus we have natural advantages, for example summer humidity on Cape Cod that often “rebounds at night,” as Crary notes (and we all know of late). Humidity alone helps bigtime; “At 40 percent versus 70 percent humidity, a fire burns two to three times hotter.”
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Regular effort by the Friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore and the Appalachian Mountain Club to clear and pile dead wood mimic what small fires accomplish. If you cull fuel along a ribbon that’s 500 feet wide, parallel to roads or powerlines, you have a good chance of making a stand and stopping a blaze.
Controlled burns also play a part. The Seashore and the military conduct them periodically – although the Seashore has an enforced hiatus since the disaster in New Mexico when another federal agency’s “controlled” burn got way out control. There are multiple goals; protect residences, reduce fuel, open vistas, recreate natural habitats, build research data.
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Years ago the Seashore created a plan for burning 500 acres a year, but that hasn’t happened. There is an area in the Truro woods where for 36 years, a checkerboard of small plots (a tenth of an acre each) have been burned on different timelines to gauge how fast vegetation rebounds, define best strategies. In that area, medium-sized trees show lines of charcoal like external growth rings on trunks, in one case 28 years of repeated burning and struggling recovery.
“That’s living history, that’s a cultural artifact,” says Crary.
Almost all fires start on the surface; even when lightning strikes a treetop, sparks drop to the floor and then blaze. So the general idea is to “break that vertical arrangement, and interrupt horizontal continuity,” elegant ways of saying homeowners should prune and clear even if they love the look of trees and shrubs embracing their homes. Crary does slide show presentations with aerial images of clustered subdivisions hard against forests, looming pines over perimeters of gridded neighborhoods. “Asking for trouble,” he mutters.
So yes, we could experience terrifying fire. Given the return of woods to our peninsula, clearcutting a thing of the distant past, the prospect of “80-90-foot flames” crowning pines is not impossible. But given our scale, resources, and weather, we have a good chance of fighting back and controlling.
Push no panic buttons. But maybe we need to practice more preventive medicine.
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Here’s an interesting coda: Remember those charcoal layers? Crary’s theory, and he’s not alone, is that those periodic burns helped create the pure aquifer, pristine drinking water and ponds the Cape enjoyed for so long.
“Charcoal is the best filter,” he says. “We still use it in our water systems. It worked naturally as rain seeped through the ground -- then we took it out.”
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Interesting! Never gave much thought to wild fires surrounded by water.