Could be a fiery Fourth.

I hate to throw a wet blanket on the holiday, but a heat wave and fireworks are colliding with dry grass and shrubs to create what could become a fiery Fourth of July. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that firefighters are already battling a barrage of blazes. Fires in Los Padres National Forest, near Pyramid Lake, two in San Diego County and mop up in the Lake Tahoe area are keeping firefighters busy before the holiday even begins.

And the worst may be yet to come. A UC Cooperative Extension specialist at UC Berkeley, Max Moritz, teamed up with researchers at the University of Utah to create a new way to predict when vegetation dries to the point it is most vulnerable to large-scale fires in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles, according to a University of Utah news release.

This year's forecast says the highest-risk fire period will begin July 13 – weeks earlier than usual. The San Francisco Chronicle points out the date is Friday the 13th. The study found the amount of March-April-May precipitation can be used to predict the date at which high fire-risk thresholds are reached.

Several UC Cooperative Extension scientists are excellent sources of information on fires -- primarily on such topics as urban-wildland interface fires, biomass harvesting to reduce forest fuels and fire hazard, and wildland fire science and management. Contact information is available on UCCE's experts list.

UC Berkeley's Moritz has also conducted research that confounds conventional wisdom about managing wilderness for wildfire prevention. In a UC Berkeley news release writer Sarah Yang reported in 2004 that Moritz and his colleagues found that the age of vegetation in California's shrublands does not strongly influence the probability of wildfires.

"If the goal is to save people's homes and avoid loss of life, then treating extensive portions of the landscape to create a mixture of young and old vegetation is not money well spent," Moritz is quoted.

Moritz said fire management strategies should focus on more effective use of resources, like creating defensible space immediately around people's homes and communities, attempting to fire-proof structures, and developing better evacuation procedures.

"We also have to ask ourselves whether it makes sense to build homes in areas at risk for fire or natural hazards in the first place. Doing so is inherently dangerous, and it is at least in part an urban planning problem," he is quoted in the release.

I will be camping in the tinder-dry Sierra Nevada for a few days following the Fourth, so I will update this blog when I return (providing a forest fire doesn't close Highway 168 while we are enjoying the comfortable temperature at the 7,000-foot elevation.) Rest assured, I will suffocate the campfire after we're done roasting marshmallows.

Happy Independence Day!

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