Rampant Wildfires Will Affect Our Drinking Water
In a world of bigger, hotter fires, it is time to think of forests as vital infrastructure, and to invest in preserving these resources for the future.
If you live in the northwestern half of the continent, as I do, there has been no escaping this year’s extraordinary wildfire season.
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes. Tourists and hikers destined for national parks such as Glacier, Waterton, Yosemite and Mount Rainier have had to cancel plans or suffer through noxious smoke drifting in from fires, some hundreds of miles away. Hardly a day goes by when a public health official isn’t warning people to stay inside or reduce physical activity.
Once the smoke clears, a more enduring problem will emerge. Forests play a large role in regulating climate change and rainfall patterns over land. They also act as filters for water consumed by hundreds of millions of people.
But once trees catch fire, they unleash ash, sediments and various noxious chemicals. And heat from fires undermines soil stability. Then, when heavy rain falls, tainted water slides into rivers rather than seeping into underground aquifers. If it rains hard enough, flooding often follows, especially when there are no trees to take up what moisture is absorbed into the soil.
The inevitable overload of carbon and sediment coming from a big fire can interfere with a water treatment plant’s disinfection process, just like a dishwasher with a plugged drain. When that happens, carbon reacts with chlorine and produces undesirable chemical byproducts, including known and suspected carcinogens.
The science of wildfire hydrology has been around for some time. But most government agencies wouldn’t consider funding research into this field until the 2002 Hayman fire burned nearly 138,000 acres of forest in the Colorado Rockies, producing catastrophic results.
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