TAKEAWAY
A model developed at USU helps managers to predict which reservoirs are most vulnerable to flooding and erosion from wildfires.
Utah reservoirs are at risk for filling with ash, mud, and sediment following a wildfire.
There’s just no getting away from the fact that we live in a highly flammable landscape; fire is inevitable in the West. The challenge before us is how to best manage the risks. Decades of fire suppression have caused forests to become overgrown, and a warmer and a drier climate has profoundly changed wildfire timing and severity. Since the mid-20th century (when land managers still assumed they could suppress fire indefinitely), we’ve built hundreds of large reservoirs and millions of homes in places that are highly prone to wildfire. Many will be very difficult and expensive to defend when a wildfire occurs. The task now is to better plan future development and prioritize available funds to reduce existing risks.
A research group at USU has developed a model to predict where high-severity wildfires are most likely to occur, how floods and erosion will increase because of fire, and how far downstream those impacts are likely to spread. The goal of this model is to identify which of Utah’s reservoirs are most at risk for filling with ash, mud, and sediment from the severe erosion and flash flooding that can occur in the years following an upstream wildfire.
Of Utah’s 137 large water supply reservoirs, modeled results show a wide range of vulnerability, depending on differences in potential burn severity and how a fire scar is connected to the reservoir downstream. Leaders can use this information to allocate resources toward actively managing landscapes where it can do the most good toward minimizing negative repercussions of unplanned fire and protecting Utah’s most vulnerable reservoirs.
