Wildfire Impacts on Groundwater Aquifers: A Case Study of the 1996 Honey Boy Fire in Beaver County, Utah, USA

It is well known that wildfires destroy vegetation and form soil crusts, both of which increase stormwater runoff that accelerates erosion, but less attention has been given to wildfire impacts on groundwater aquifers. Here, we present a systematic study across the contiguous United States to test the hypothesis that wildfires reduce infiltration, indicated by temporary reductions in groundwater levels. Geographic information systems (GIS) analysis performed using structured queried language (SQL) categorized wildfires by their proximity to wells with publicly available monitoring data. Although numerous wildfires were identified with nearby monitoring wells, most of these data were confounded by unknown processes, preventing a clear acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis. However, this analysis did identify a particular case study, the 1996 Honey Boy Fire in Beaver County, Utah, USA that supports the hypothesis. At this site, daily groundwater data from a well located 790 m from the centroid of the wildfire were used to assess the groundwater level before and after the wildfire. A sinusoidal time series adjusted for annual precipitation matches groundwater level fluctuations before the wildfire but cannot explain the approximately two-year groundwater level reduction after the wildfire. Thus, for this case study, there is a correlation, which may be causal, between the wildfire and temporary reduction in groundwater levels. Generalizing this result will require further research.

Unintended Consequences, Loopholes, and Gibberish

This Article examines Congress’s decades-long attempt to ensure that securities class action lawsuits of national importance are litigated in federal courts. The intent is limiting strike suits. Congress attempted to curtail strike suits through the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (“PSLRA”). The PSLRA required heightened pleading requirements to ensure the validity of federal securities class actions. Instead of solving the dilemma, plaintiffs circumvented the PSLRA by bringing fraud cases as state law claims. To combat the circumvention of the PSLRA, Congress enacted the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act (“SLUSA”). SLUSA federally preempted state law claims based on alleged misrepresentations, untrue statements, or omissions of material facts, requiring them to be brought in federal court. However, SLUSA did not address the concurrent jurisdiction provision of the Securities Act of 1933. This created an anomaly whereby many federal claims under the 1933 Act were brought in state courts, while state fraud claims were required to be brought in federal court. Congress could have addressed this enigma when it enacted the Class Action Fairness Act (“CAFA”). Instead, CAFA, which reformed class actions generally, exempted most securities class actions from its rules. In 2018, the Supreme Court decided Cyan v. Beaver County and allowed 1933 Act claims covered by SLUSA to continue to be brought in state courts. The Court was silent on non-covered securities. This Article recommends how Congress can accomplish its goal of forcing important securities class actions into federal courts.