Too Much Fire, Not Enough Rain

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | April 30, 2022

We recently celebrated another Earth Day with various festivities around the country complete with bloviating politicians making promises they either won’t or can’t keep. Meanwhile, wildfires, drought, and water shortages are the norm out west.

Wildfires are a normal part of many of our ecosystems. Several species of pine, eucalyptus, and even cypress trees need fires to reproduce as their seeds only open with the heat of a wildfire. But even those remarkable adaptations aren’t prepared for the frequency and intensity of today’s wildfires.

The wildfire season used to coincide with summer, part of a natural cycle: snow and rain, plant growth, heat of summer, lightning strikes, fire, repeat. We now have a nearly year-round fire season and a new and deadly cycle: too little snow and rain, drought, plants turning to tinder, lightning strikes and human ignorance, massive fires…repeat and repeat and repeat. Cal Fire, the agency tasked with somehow dealing with California’s wildfires, recently said their fire season now runs from January through December.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, since the start of 2022 we’ve already had some 20,000 wildfires in 14 states consuming nearly 900,000 acres, about 50 percent above the 20-year average. Fires in Texas and New Mexico alone have burned nearly 600,000 acres, and a 90,000-acre burn in Nebraska killed one firefighter and injured three others just last week.

The recently ignited Tunnel Fire in Arizona has already consumed nearly 20,000 acres, and, as of April 26, was only 3 percent contained. Just so we understand, that fire, which is considered small by today’s standards, has already burned an area about three times bigger than Traverse City.

Compared to just 50 years ago, we now experience twice as many wildfires burning four times the area and destroying 10 times the homes and other structures. The risk to humans is at least partially the result of our insistence on living “in nature” without doing anything to mitigate fire risk. It’s also quite likely that our centuries-old, cavalier attitude toward our environment has led to the cycle that now creates drought that exacerbates fires.

That drought is more than a wildfire problem. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) map—a function of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska—New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, and Wyoming are all experiencing “severe drought conditions.” That means less snowpack and subsequent run-off and less consistent rainfall which equates to less water for drinking, for crops, and to generate power.

The Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers are fine examples of the problem.

Most of us associate the Rio Grande with the border of Mexico, but it starts in Colorado and bisects New Mexico from north to south before it even gets to Texas. It provides drinking and irrigation water for more than six million people. But according to the USDM, a whopping 99 percent of the Rio Grande watershed is considered “abnormally dry” and more than 10 percent “exceptionally dry.” The upper reaches are typically flowing with spring snowmelt, but the runoff is minimal this year, and some sections of the upper Rio Grande are already nearly dry.

Things are considerably worse for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, irrigation, and power. Lakes Mead and Powell, the giant reservoirs that impound Colorado River water, are at all-time lows. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, low water levels have already reduced Hoover Dam’s power producing capacity by 25 percent. If Lake Mead levels fall another 80 feet—a possibility if the current drought cycle continues—Hoover Dam won’t be able to produce any power at all.

Seven states—Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California—plus Mexico and 29 tribal nations all have rights to the water. Not everybody got what they wanted last year, and they’ll get less this year. Based on a remarkably complicated document called the Colorado River Compact, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico all had their 2021 water allotments reduced. In Arizona, those reductions were significant: 200,000 less acre-feet of water last year and an additional 500,000 acre-feet reduction this year. It means many farmers will either reduce the size of their crops considerably or not grow at all in 2022.

(As the name implies, an acre-foot of water is the amount of water required to cover an acre of land one foot deep, or about 325,851 gallons. So, Arizona has lost 700,000 times 325,851 gallons…or a lot of water.)

Twice the wildfires and half the water isn’t part of a natural cycle; it’s a human-made catastrophe if you live where there is way too much of the former and not nearly enough of the latter.