- Fire began on this planet back,
way back before humankind even existed.
And yet, there's plenty we still don't know
about how fire actually works.
- We've used it, we've tamed it, we cook with it.
But there's so much of it
we still don't understand.
As scientists, we're still arguing over
some of the basic questions, like:
What makes a fire spread faster when the wind blows?
What makes live fuels flammable?
Why fires burn faster when they go uphill?
So many unknowns... I call it job security.
- For all that we don't know,
what we do know is the main model that we use
to determine how quickly a fire will spread
is 50 years old.
- We don't have the tools sufficient
to meet the challenge of today's fire.
- So they're making a new model.
- The hope is the model would represent
a leap in understanding of fire behavior.
- What if we could reverse-engineer wildfires,
and replace a model known as “the backbone of all
fire behavior models” for a new one?
I mean, it could go up in flames,
or it could completely change what we know about fire.
This is “Just Might Work,”
a show about surprising solutions
to our biggest problems.
- Mark interview—
- I lead the Fire Behavior Team, that's correct.
I want to put that in context though—
I lead the Fire Behavior Sciences Team
here at the Missoula Fire Lab.
Our team consists of about 15 people.
- Mark Finney hired me right out of grad school.
So the short answer of what I do is that I get paid
to think and burn things for a living.
Jason Forthofer is a mechanical engineer,
and he is the one that's responsible
for bringing all the things that we learned
and putting them into the model.
- Jason kind of started this whole effort,
and all it took was a live pine needle on fire.
- When I started doing the original coding
that became the fire spread model,
I wanted to look at how a pine needle reacts to heating.
I started programming that out.
Then I started working with Mark
and realized it'd be cool to put together
a fire spread model based on this idea.
- When you think of wildfires,
news reports of devastating flames
like the ones in Australia and California
might flood your mind.
But our first introduction to wildfires
on a national campaign level
happened in a more child-friendly way—
and his name is Smokey Bear.
- ‘One day these rats were playing in the woods-
- One lit some matches and that's no good
- Listen to Smokey before you give it a try.
- Only you can prevent wildfires.
- Don't play with fire (fire).’
- The original message was to prevent careless fires.
As all messages, eventually, are consumed and
simplified in their understanding,
it became simplified to the point
where it's not about careless fires anymore,
it's about all fire.
- Smokey Bear is specific to human-caused fires.
But other fire management decisions
and climate change over the past century
led to the fires that we see today.
You know we’ve, you know, had a
unintended consequence of putting all those
fires out for the last hundred or so years.
And now our fires are getting
bigger and worse and more intense
than they've ever been before.
- ‘Fire!’
- The work that we're doing right now
is going back and questioning
everything we ever thought
we knew about fire, and finding out that
the things that we thought we knew, were wrong.
- Wildland firefighters and fire planners
all around the country
use a 50-year-old model called the ‘Rothermel model’
to predict how fire spreads.
This model is the foundation for the ‘Fire Danger System,’
which determines how we deploy resources
to fight fire.
It gives reasonable calculations for expected fire behavior.
The problem is, it wasn't meant to actually
explain how fires spread.
- Dick Rothermel was a scientist here at the fire lab
from the very earliest days.
Prior to 1972,
there were no practical, mathematical
models or relationships
to do any kind of quantitative prediction about fire.
- It was the first of its kind, so not only did it
give us a good picture of what a fire is going to do,
but it also told us a lot about how fires work.
- Wow! This thing will predict fire behavior.
I'm really onto something.
- The ‘spread equation’ that Dick Rothermel
developed was exceedingly useful as a modeling tool,
but it came with a host of assumptions and limitations.
It never intended to explain how fires spread.
The difficulty of producing a substitute
for the Rothermel spread equation—
it's to produce something that is so much better,
it compels us.
- The new model is available in beta form for now,
and it's made to run on any computer
so anyone in the field can use it.
Firefighters will have to add in simple measurements
that reflect the weather, fuel, and topography of the area,
and then by entering in a bunch of
variables like air temperature,
wind speed, and fuel type,
it'll give an estimate of how long it'll take for that fire to spread.
- And what you're going to see is a pretty crude
depiction of the fire spreading.
So this is like a side view of the fire, and we're going to be
looking at the flame represented by this triangle right here.
What you also see is
the temperature of the fuel particles out in front of the fire,
and that's really the essence of
how this fire spread model works.
- If it works,
the new model will be used by the
Forest Service and Fire Management
to essentially become
what the Rothermel model was— but more of a 2.0 version.
- So the goal is eventually to have this model to the level
where a firefighter could pull up a map on a computer,
drop a point in ignition of a fire,
and then see how the fire spreads over time.
Then we'll move a really nice user interface
where people can easily
simulate fires anywhere across the United States.
The ultimate goal of anything that we do here
is to make positive impacts on what happens on the ground.
- My name is Faith Ann Heinsch,
and one of my tasks is to develop
curriculum that is taught all over the U.S.
to firefighters, dispatchers, and fire planners.
We do want to make sure that we're always
teaching the best available science,
and we're doing it in a way that reaches
the audience that needs it,
whoever they are.
All of them are going to need training in the new model.
- We've actually assumed responsibility for
explaining to people, ‘Here's how fire actually spreads.
Here- how’s it represented in the model
with fidelity to those real processes.’
And that means that responsibility
translates to training materials
and the way we teach it.
So that's equally as important than just some model.
- The new model is projected to be
in the hands of firefighters and fire planners by about 2027,
and their priority is making sure that what they've built
is giving accurate results.
- It's really important that we focus in, now,
on making sure that our model is comparing
well to our lab data,
and so then we have confidence to use it out in the field.
I feel like it's going to work.
For the first time in years,
I see the light at the end of the tunnel.