- This is the latest technology
in fire prevention.
No, no, the fire—
the fire is the technology.
Yeah, that.
- Fires are not going away,
and in fact, they're escalating,
and we need to become more proactive
about how we deal with them.
- Why do this?
Because for the past century,
we've tried to prevent nearly every forest fire
in the American West.
That has caused
a tremendous amount of kindling
to build up in our forests.
Now, when we have a fire, they're hotter and
more destructive than the natural fires
that these ecosystems evolve to bounce back from.
- Fire is inevitable.
There's no way out, except for more fire.
It can be more fire that's uncontrolled,
or it can be more fire that is controlled;
set under conditions we want,
and accomplishes objectives that we set.
- The goal is to use low-intensity fire
to clean the environment.
So when a wildfire happens,
when high-intensity fire comes,
it's not going to have a huge, destructive effect.
- These folks are betting that supercomputing,
AI, and prescribed burns can prevent the next mega fire.
- Fighting nature is probably a crazy idea;
nature will always win.
- In an increasingly complex landscape,
you can't rely on yesterday's experience anymore.
We have to be able to bring that next generation on faster,
and those tools are gonna be critical.
- This is "Hard Reset,"
a show about rebuilding our world from scratch.
More and more wildfires are reaching the status
of 'mega fire.'
- 'Dozens of major wildfires continue to burn-'
- 'Single largest in the state's history-'
- 'A mass-casualty event-'
- 'Over 12 million acres
of the country has burned.'
- That's bad,
but it has generated an incredible amount
of data about fire behavior.
We're at the UC San Diego Supercomputing Center,
where these folks are using AI
and cutting-edge sensor data
to help restore the natural balance of fire in our forests.
- You can click on anywhere here and its...
Growing up in the west coast of Turkey,
I've seen fire, but it wasn't anything like a wildfire.
In 2003, when the big fires in San Diego happened,
driving down, one side was fire, one side was sunset—
ashes falling down, and we couldn't see the sun.
I felt myself in this Heaven and Hell situation.
- This is İlkay.
She's one of the world's leading experts
in supercomputing,
and she's working to change how we manage wildfires.
She's also got one
of the biggest computer monitors I've ever seen—
by like a lot.
Makes sense: supercomputer, super monitor.
- Okay.
Fire and its behavior
and its effects in the environment is complicated.
The good news is if you know enough about weather,
vegetation, and fuel, and the topography,
it can be modeled.
- WIFIRE combines all this data about our forests
and allows researchers to simulate
how fires would behave.
And how that fire's behavior might be different
if things like humidity, wind direction,
or fuel levels change.
WIFIRE started out as a tool to help firefighters predict
how a fire would behave so they could find
the right way to fight it.
But, these simulations can
also proactively help forestry professionals plan
where and when to have prescribed burns,
so they can prevent the kind of wildfires we're seeing now.
Fire has long been used to get rid of stuff we don't want.
Movies have shown just how well it works on:
Aliens.
Spiders.
- 'Goddamnit, where are you?!'
- And, um, piles of money.
- 'Everything burns.'
- But is it really something we can use
in forests?
- So the answer is "yes."
- Oh cool. Tell us more.
- Using these kinds of simulation tools allows you
to explore the impact
of particular fire management actions on future wildfires.
- This is Rod, an expert
in simulating fire behavior.
Also, another huge monitor.
- When we talk about a proactive approach,
largely what that means is,
thinking about what can we change
in advance of these fires?
How can we manage them ahead of time?
By changing the fuel structure,
are you going to change the wind patterns,
which would actually cause the fire to spread faster?
- By the way, this isn't a new idea.
It's a really old one.
Native Americans were doing this for centuries
before Europeans showed up and, well, stole their land
and disregarded centuries of ecological traditions.
There's really no way to sugarcoat that.
- Indigenous practices and use of fire isn't new.
Ecosystems across the United States
have been well-managed
by Native peoples.
This is often called 'Traditional Ecological Knowledge.'
- Oh, I never introduced Kevin.
He doesn't apparently have a giant wall
of monitors behind him—
but other than that, he's pretty cool.
He's an expert in controlled burns.
- Recognizing that there are multiple ways
of moving from where we are
to a successful future with fire, is absolutely critical.
- If you drive north from Orlando, Florida,
past the truck stop that has a strip club,
but before you get to the discount gun warehouse—
ah, Florida—
you'll find the Osceola National Forest:
home to one of the longest-running experiments
with controlled burns.
- Alright, we're gonna walk around inside this burn unit.
It was completed about a month ago.
In less than a month, grasses,
such as this Native wiregrass, are coming back
already.
The objectives are always balancing the intensity
of fire needed to kill some things we don't want,
and to retain some things we do.
In this case, we're targeting shrubs,
but we want to retain an overstory
of Longleaf pine, Slash pine,
that is the foraging habitat
for Red-cockaded woodpeckers.
- We're not gonna change the topography.
We're not gonna change the winds.
So, one of the things that we can change is the vegetation.
We're hoping to increase ecological resilience,
but also manage the behavior
of future wildfires in a given location.
- Regular, prescribed burns mean less kindling
on the forest floor, and fewer smaller trees
and shrubs that might make it hard to get through.
And some plants and animals wouldn't even be able
to survive without fire.
But not this bird in particular;
this bird is just an actor.
Regular burns also mean
that if uncontrolled fire came through,
it wouldn't do as much damage.
Most of these trees could survive that fire,
and the fire would spread slower.
In fact, this forest has regular fires
in some places every year—
and it's thriving.
- Places like we burned today was one of the hardest places
to set a prescribed fire 20 years ago.
The success story of the Osceola,
it doesn't happen overnight.
It took a deliberate choice by the managers
at the Osceola National Forest to decide,
"We've had enough large fires."
They've ramped up prescribed fire over 15 to 20 years.
- Fire isn't the only tool
that can be used here.
Sometimes it might be better to cut trees down
or use other methods to reduce the buildup of fuel,
but WIFIRE simulations can show the relative risks
or benefits of various approaches.
- We've gotta think out of the box.
We've gotta think
what might fire look like
next year, or 10 years from now, or 20 years from now?
And if we can do those things right, then we can anticipate
how those future conditions will manifest themselves
in fire behavior.
- So, picture a scenario
where we completely rethought
how we managed our forests
in the Western U.S.
- If we were to start again,
we would
start with understanding fire behavior, truly,
and what it does for the environment.
And we would make policies
around living with fire in a safe way.
- Our ecology would shift to something
like it was before the Europeans got here, at all.
More fire-resilient species of trees, more open space.
It would look and feel and be very different.
And we wouldn't constantly be afraid
of the next raging wildfire
that might destroy our home or town.
We'd know they were coming, and we'd be ready for them.
- Fire is a natural event.
It's going to happen,
and we need to learn to live with it.
We need to learn to make peace with it.
- To get the forests in California alone
back to something closer to their natural state,
we'd need controlled burns for
over a million acres a year, for 10 years straight.
That's actually possible,
but not without employing an army of people—
thousands and thousands of people would need
to be employed in the forestry industry.
- Those repeated cycles of treatment
have to become part
of what we demand of ourselves,
both as land managers, scientists,
and a society, in order to really sustain the success
that we hope to get.
That initial step, restoration,
when you have a hundred years
of fuel accumulation is hard—
and it is going to be the hardest step
to take in this restoration process.
It's a once in a lifetime
opportunity to sort of change the game.
- Come back next time
for another episode of "Hard Reset."
Subscribe to Freethink to watch our other original series
and documentaries about technology
and people that are changing our world.