Easy to discover, hardy and seemingly harmless, this plant is the cause of a growing number of large and destructive wildfires in the United States. Grass is as ubiquitous as the sun, and under the right weather conditions, it can start wildfires with just a spark.
Pollution warms the planet, increasing temperature and precipitation, which increases the size and frequency of fires. Grass becomes king because fires worsen environmental damage. As Adam Mahood, an ecologist with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Research Branch, once said, “Name a place and there’s a grass that can live there.” » “There will be some sort of grass over any 10 foot area that is not gravel.”
According to CNN fire experts, grass fires often develop more slowly and don’t last as long as wildfires. They can, however, spread much more quickly, evade firefighters, and burn newly constructed residences in fire-prone wilderness areas.
The number of homes destroyed by wildfires in the United States over the past 30 years has more than doubled as they got bigger and worse, according to a recent study. Most human-started fires have started in grass and bushes rather than in woods.
This is due to the fact that the West accounted for more than two-thirds of all residences that have burned over the past 30 years. Nearly 80% of them were damaged by grass and lawn fires.
The so-called “wilderness-urban interface,” which is adjacent to wildfire-prone areas, is seeing an increase in construction. The amount of land burned in this vulnerable area has increased significantly since the 1990s. There are also more homes now. By the same estimate, there will be more than 44 million homes in the interface by 2020, a 46% increase over the past 30 years.
While it is obvious that building in high-risk areas increases the risk of fire, it also increases the likelihood of a fire occurring, as most fires are started by individuals.
In the sparsely populated areas of Bill King’s properties in Kansas and Colorado, the border between wildlands and cities is home to more than 80,000 homes. According to the US Forest Service employee, residents who live near the environment should take precautions to prevent damage from occurring.
Even with a strong firebreak, King said homeowners “need to do their part too” because these fires can spread for miles. This is because fires become so large, so violent and sometimes wind-driven.
Excellent forest fire potential
Fires caused by climate change are attacking the western United States from all sides. According to John Abatzoglou, a Merced climate expert at the University of California, “the places that burn the most are those that receive average amounts of rain.” “It’s a bit like Goldilocks.” “Just right, not too wet and not too dry, with lots of sparkle.”
Perennials are ideal for starting a fire because of the variety of seasonal extremes that occur amid the American plains, which are typically windy and dry. This area of the United States has more grass than other areas, so fires can continue to fuel there. There are larger-scale fires in the region, such as the megafire Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas, as well as deadlier fires, such as the Colorado Marshall Fire in 2021 which destroyed more than 1,000 homes.
In spring, when it rains, the grass grows more. That winter, he slept, or “played dead,” as the saying goes. With less snow in the Northern Plains and warmer winters elsewhere, it is warmer and drier in late winter and early spring. Todd Lindley, a fire meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma, and King both say so.
Lindley says grass poses a particular risk because its conditions vary depending on the season. For brief periods, grass can catch fire more quickly than wooded areas. Plants can lose water in just an hour or even a day after a rainstorm. Invasive plants that burn hotter and longer than native plants, strong winds and a spark can all make a grass fire extremely deadly.
“If you get the sequence right of these multiple extremes happening one after the other, it can be a play for this type of wildfire,” Abatzoglou said. “Essentially, you’re making it easier for the fire to spread in that location.”
Grass development
According to King, years of neglect of forests and severe drought are causing increased size and intensity of fires in Western forests. “When I started, a big fire covered 30,000 acres, and now it’s just a small problem,” King said. “I would have one this big maybe once or twice a year, but now we’re hearing about 100,000-acre wildfires.”
Forests also contain grass, which functions as a sort of fuse, connecting finer, easier-to-ignite fuels with larger tree systems that endure drought to ignite and propagate more powerful flames. Where trees once stood, grass now grows. After a fire, grass grows back much more quickly than other plants and sometimes reappears after a few months. King has first-hand experience of this.
“It regrows so quickly that you could see green grass growing in burned areas in just a day or two,” King said. “Forests to recover could take years or generations, or they might not recover at all in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.
In the West, more and more burned plants are giving way to native and non-native grasses. According to the USDA’s Mahood, this is creating fires in the desert where there were none before. The same drought-induced fires that grow in desert regions occur because annual grasses do not thrive year-round like perennial grasses do on the plains.
These plants grow quickly after rain, dying and leaving a mat of fire fuel on the desert floor. Mahood cited two recent fires in California’s Mojave National Preserve as prime examples. Because red brome spreads quickly, these flames destroyed more than a million famous Joshua trees and hundreds of thousands of acres of the Mojave Desert.
Native plants then cannot revive as the weather becomes hotter and drier. The grass has grown considerably. The largest ecosystem in the Lower 48 states is the well-known Western Short Sagebrush. But half have been lost or destroyed over the past 20 years. An area of sagebrush the size of Delaware is destroyed each year by fire, grass and other reasons, according to a USGS study.
The risk of fire is higher today and in the future due to the proliferation of weeds and various climate-related causes. Mahood continued: “At the moment it may seem bad, but in ten years it won’t seem as bad. » “The fire season was horrible twenty years ago. It seems insignificant now.