Written By: Genevieve Hammang
Edited By: Michelle Sosa and Adina Vega
High winds and fire in the Los Angeles Pacific Palisades neighborhood on Tuesday, Jan. 7. Credit: Ethan Swope, AP Photo.
In January of 2025, the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles County dominated much of the US news cycle. Starting in the Santa Monica mountains and fueled by intense Santa Ana winds, the wildfire burned over 23,000 acres across Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu in 24 days. While by far the most destructive of the California wildfires in recent memory (and in fact, is the third-most destructive California wildfire on record), it was only one of 17 that tore across Southern California that month.
Wildfires are nothing new in California, but global warming has aggravated both heat and drought conditions for decades. These fires are more common and deadlier than they used to be. Consequently, a lot of effort has gone into tracking them – not just in the Golden State but across the globe. Most of these fire tracking projects focus on the location of the fire, how recently it started, and the damage it’s caused.
A record of average fire size across the globe, compiled via NASA satellite imagery from January 1, 2003 – December 31, 2016.
The Wildland Fire Library is a little different. It’s not a real-time tracker of ongoing fires. Instead, it’s an online, historical collection of documentation and data about past fires in the United States: long-term assessments, fire progressions, reports on fire behavior, and other resources that might aid modeling and evaluation. The library focuses on long-duration fires – any blaze lasting over three days.
The library currently has 1,836 incident files that can be navigated by pins on an interactive map or via a text list. Every incident has a list of associated tags about the data it contains: Fire Progressions, Critical Fire Weather, Videos, Long-term Assessments, Season-ending Analyses, Structure Protection Plans, “WindWizard” Library, Fire Danger & “PocketCards,” Reports Review & Case Studies, Risk Management Assistance (RMA) Fires, and Fatalities or Entrapments. The library is updated yearly in the spring, with the most recent incidents from 2024 and the oldest as far back as 1871.
The collection contains all the information needed to identify long-term patterns and develop a comprehensive analysis of wildfires in the US. In fact, that is precisely what it is for. The Wildland Fire Library is run by Rick Stratton and Jim Edmonds, a fire analyst and wilderness character monitoring data analyst, respectively, as part of their work for the Office of Wildland Fires in the US Forest Service. Since May 2014, Stratton and Edmonds have painstakingly uploaded and organized information in an effort to assemble a retrospective analysis of long-duration burns.
Though publicly accessible, the Wildland Fire Library is not the most appealing or transparent record. Visitors are not given much explanation because it’s a library intended for people who already understand the basics of fire tracking. The only information provided appears in a pop-up window that welcomes visitors with a brief mission statement and a list of tags. It concludes with a quote from the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Wildland firefighters in Oregon congregating as part of a survey.
Like any library, the Wildland Fire Library is meant to document knowledge. In this case, that knowledge is not just tied to a history of wildfires in the United States, but also to its management. That retrospective, historical knowledge is an essential component of modern wildfire management strategies and complements real-time fire tracking.
Here’s the thing about wildfires: they’re a natural part of our world. They cannot be eliminated completely, just like hurricanes or earthquakes. But unlike other weather-related disasters, there’s a lot that people can do to manage a wildfire’s outcome.
The key is prevention. This can come in the form of identifying weather patterns, clearing out brush that can serve as tinder, and starting controlled burns as necessary. It also requires looking to the past. How many fires have occurred and where? How were they handled, and what could have been done differently?
That’s where collections like the Wildland Fire Library come in. They provide a historical record and context for what we’ve tried and under what conditions to improve our strategies for the next time. If you have some time, take a look at this remarkable historical record in progress.
0 Comments