LFM stands for live fuel moisture, a critical metric in wildland firefighting that measures the water content of living plants compared to their dry mass. When LFM drops below certain thresholds, living brush and trees stop acting as heat sinks and become highly flammable fuel. Fire behavior analysts track this percentage to predict how explosive a fire might become in a given area.
Heard on the job
The chamise LFM is down to 60 percent, so expect extreme fire behavior if it reaches that slope.