Wildfires, hurricanes, and lessons on cooperation from Florida Panhandle

Jody Daniels has witnessed a fire or two in his life spent in the Florida Panhandle. He spent years fighting back flames at the side of his father, who was the volunteer fire department chief in unincorporated Kinard for four decades. Now he’s the fire chief himself.

But Mr. Daniels had never witnessed anything like the Bertha Swamp Road Fire that erupted in their region in early March. The fire broke out on a Friday, he remembers. In less than a week, it spread across roughly 34,000 acres, according to state estimates. As aircraft dumped fire retardants on the inferno that week, Mr. Daniels realized their small crew of volunteers and emergency personnel was among the last lines of defense between the flames and their neighbors’ homes. 

“Next thing you know, it’s knocking at your back door. It’s coming,” Mr. Daniels says.

Mercifully, the crisis in Kinard was averted when rains came and the fire died down. But even so, the Chipola Complex fires – composed of the Bertha Swamp Road Fire and two others – were a conflagration that state fire managers had long feared. Fast burning and hard to fight, they fed on a tremendous swath of dry timber felled by Hurricane Michael in 2018. Fuel available for the fires to burn was 10 times greater than normal.

In other words, the wood wreckage from one climate-related disaster had lain in the Panhandle for years, waiting for a spark to produce another. It’s the sort of complex interaction between environmental events that could become more common as climate change leads to more extreme weather. Cooperation across government agencies and within communities can help, but the challenges are considerable. 

“It’s very difficult to prepare for something so catastrophic,” says Erin Albury, director of the Florida Forest Service, in an email.

Fire and wind

Globally, wildfires are becoming more frequent. A February United Nations report projected as much as a 50% increase in wildfires breaking out worldwide by the dawn of the 22nd century.

In the United States much of the attention drawn by fires focuses on the burning American West, a dry region subject to fierce summer storms. For several weeks California firefighters have been battling the Oak Fire, which has spread across more than 19,000 acres and destroyed more than 100 homes since igniting near Yosemite National Park in late July.

But the threat of wildfires is not exclusive to the West, scientists warn. Already, threats of wildfires are on the rise in the southeastern U.S., despite the region’s long history of using prescribed burning to control forest undergrowth, which helps manage wildfire threats.

Researchers say the trend is likely to continue as droughts increase in severity. In fact, a report produced this year by the climate-risk modeling group First Street Foundation found that the risk of wildfires in the Panhandle is projected to increase from low to moderate to borderline major over the next 30 years.

Meanwhile, the threat of hurricanes and other powerful storms also appears to be increasing. The warming of bodies of water like the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico due to climate change is making storms more powerful, say scientific experts.

The Florida Panhandle is one of the regions of the U.S. most susceptible to this growing threat, due to its location on the turbulent Gulf of Mexico. Annually, the Panhandle’s coastal counties have a 34% to 35% chance of getting hit by a storm powerful enough to be named by the National Weather Service, according to a forecast by the Colorado State University Tropical Weather and Climate Research group. Annual average probability of being hit by a major hurricane is 3% to 4%.

This summer in the Panhandle, where the annual fire season runs from March through June, storm damage and fire combined to produce an explosive result.

A tinderbox

Hurricane Michael set the scene a few years earlier. It made landfall in the region near Tyndall Air Force Base in the Panhandle on Oct. 10, 2018, as a Category 5 storm – the highest rating – with maximum sustained winds of 160 mph.

By some measures it was the third most intense Atlantic hurricane to ever hit the U.S. The area it struck contained some of the most forested counties in Florida, and Michael went through them like a giant chain saw, leaving 72 million tons of trees broken or blown over across a swath of 2.8 million acres, according to Florida Forest Service estimates.

Ordinarily, in Florida, the fuel load of a forest – the amount of burnable material it contains – is less than 10 tons per acre. After Michael, the area it churned over contained upward of 100 tons per acre. In most fires in the region, ground cover and understory vegetation burn. Michael left entire forests dead and drying on the ground.

Four years later, most of that debris remained. In the early days of March, three different wildfires sparked up in the region. Driven by strong winds, they grew quickly. Florida authorities named them the Chipola Complex.

A tinderbox was waiting in its path, forestry experts say.

“The severity that you saw and the track that it followed, it was directly related to Hurricane Michael,” says Ajay Sharma, a University of Florida researcher who focuses on silviculture and restoration to inform forest management. “It would not have otherwise been that severe.”

Forestry officials admit their lack of options in responding to such a crisis. Nearly four years after Michael made landfall, costing Florida’s timber industry an estimated $1.2 billion, officials say it remains difficult to assess just how much of the storm debris has been removed.

Mr. Albury, the state Forest Service’s director, notes that only 10% of the debris felled during the storm was removed within six months of Michael making landfall. And since most of the impact occurred on privately owned lands, calculating what remains has proved difficult.

Along with fueling the flames, debris on the ground makes fighting fires more difficult.

“The size and volume of the fuels on the grounds make tractor operation and fire line establishment more difficult and extremely dangerous,” Mr. Albury says.

He notes how a typical 20-acre fire needs perhaps two tractors and two hours to contain. In terrain such as that left by Hurricane Michael, personnel need upward of a half-dozen bulldozers and as long as two or three days to get the same result.

“The Chipola Complex fires earlier this spring were a worst-case scenario,” Mr. Albury says.

Curbing double-pronged threats

State forestry departments face a daunting task in curbing double-pronged threats like the Panhandle’s Chipola Complex fires. Whereas post-hurricane cleanups are mandated for public lands – and government funding is allocated to pay for them – private landowners have little incentive to haul away debris. Many don’t live near the land in question.

To better understand how to meet in the middle of forestry management and private landowners’ needs, Dr. Sharma and his colleagues are currently conducting a survey of nonindustrial, private landowners in the region’s 10 rural counties directly impacted by Hurricane Michael. So far, they’ve learned that the average private landowner is 68 years old and retired. Only half live on their property, and almost all of the private landowners included in the survey are uninterested in harvesting timber. Roughly three-quarters of private landowners lack a forest management plan.

“Think about it,” Dr. Sharma says. If a powerful storm makes landfall and damages a forest area, retired landowners who don’t depend on timber investment will not be inclined to spend money to clear the land.

But “if there is a timber-recovery block grant that pays for it, they might do it,” Dr. Sharma says.

“It should fall under FEMA,” he adds. “Infrastructure needs to be in place.”

Already, state officials are attempting to fill that gap before next year’s fire season. One example Mr. Albury notes is the Florida Department of Agriculture’s $380 million timber-recovery block grant, allocated in 2019. So far, roughly $200 million of the grant has been distributed.

The Florida Forest Service also launched a public service campaign earlier this year to help residents better prepare their yards, their homes, and supply kits before the next season.

“We weren’t just going to cower down”

Fire season is a part of life in the Florida Panhandle. It’s been part of Mr. Daniels’ entire life so far.

As the Bertha Swamp Road Fire barreled toward homes in March, jumping through patches of forest and burning so hot it seared the cool, moist soil, small-town Kinard didn’t run. Rather, the community leaped into action. Those who owned a tractor raced into the outskirts of the inferno to plow dirt paths around folks’ homes, in an effort to divert the fires if they spread farther in their direction. Those who couldn’t run a tractor passed out drinks and brought food to the fire station.

Mr. Daniels realized he could lose everything if they failed to contain the fire. He fought harder.

“As a community, we weren’t just going to cower down and run from it,” Mr. Daniels says of how the community took up arms to contain the fire.