The Lookout’s Zeke Lunder was on KQED’s forum on Friday, 8/2/2024 to talk about the Park Fire and wildfire resilience in California, in general. Here is a transcription of our conversation.
You can listen to the broadcast here:
Mina Kim
Welcome to forum. I’m Mina Kim. Hotter temperatures expected this weekend and possible dry lightning are raising fears that the massive Park fire could still grow. It’s already burned more than 397,000 acres and 540 structures, leaving nearby residents on edge. Here’s Mark Miller of forest ranch.
Mark Miller
Definitely no, no ability to just get comfortable and relax, since the the Napa fires in the car fire, then the then the campfire and the bear fire and the Dixie fire, it’s just like every year there’s these massive wildfires. And so you almost never, if you you can never really get comfortable. You’re always kind of like you’re either prepared or you’re not.
Mina Kim
California’s firefighters are battling more than a dozen active wildfires across the state, and this hour, we take stock of their impact. Joining me first is Isaac Sanchez, Deputy Chief of communications for CAL FIRE. Isaac, thanks so much for being with us.
Isaac Sanchez
Thank you for having us.
Mina Kim
So what conditions are fire crews fighting the park fire facing today?
Isaac Sanchez
Yeah, much of the same as what we’ve seen previously, right? Very warm, very dry conditions, and of course, that that lead does lead to, you know, significant fire growth.
Mina Kim
How challenging will this weekend’s forecast be for getting more containment on this fire. Isaac, you know, the weather plays always plays a critical role in our successes and in our challenges when we are assigned to fires or when we have brand new fires, right? You know, obviously the cooler it is, the more likely we are to make progress on fires like this. But essentially, what it comes down to is, is we have to be fully engaged whether the weather is going to cooperate or not. We’re always paying attention as to what’s coming our way. So, you know, of course, we make our plans accordingly.
Mina Kim
How are firefighters doing when it comes to fatigue, morale?
Isaac Sanchez
Boy, you know, that’s a great question. You know, we’ve clearly had a very busy year already this year, you know, we’re looking at at, you know, just under, excuse me, just over 770,000 acres burned this year. That’s a dramatic increase compared to what we had last year. And of course, fatigue is always at the front of our mind. We’ve been doing it for several weeks, consistently, if not a couple months that we’ve been on these large, large fires. And so yeah, fatigue does come in, but we also do have assistance from our cooperators, not only in the state of California, but coming from outside the state of California to offer assistance. But we have our WordPress cycles that are built into these assignments. So these large scale vegetation fires, and again, everybody’s fully engaged. Everybody’s, you know, obviously enthusiastic, if not tired. This is definitely a challenging year for everyone. Yeah,
Mina Kim
how far and wide are people coming from to help fight the fire? I know that there are states, other states, sending folks in, and even other countries. According to federal fire officials, people from Australia and New Zealand, where are you hearing folks are coming from? And is it true that this is earlier than typically needed in a fire year,
Isaac Sanchez
you know? Um, I’ll tackle that first one, you know, we were, you know, receiving assistance from from all over the country, and of course, you know, international support like you mentioned, is not unusual. When we have years like this. I know that our federal cooperators are able to pull from, specifically the US, Forest Service National Park, that those types of agencies are able to pull their own resources from wherever they have them, right? It takes a while to get here, but they’re able to do that. The unique, some of the unique stuff that I’m seeing out there is, you know, some of the state agencies, like the state of Texas has sent five task forces to the state of California to assist. It’s something that we do regularly. It’s something that we do willingly. We have agreements in place to execute these types of plans, and that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s it’s definitely an all hands on on deck effort. And I’m sorry, can you repeat the second question?
Mina Kim
It was just a question. There were some reporters pointing out that nations share firefighting resources. We have these agreements as you, as you say, but that having to ask for them in July is a bit unusual.
Isaac Sanchez
Well, you know, it’s, it’s hard to say what’s usual and what’s unusual anymore, right? We don’t, we don’t have to look too far back to see, you know, significant fire activity. When it comes to our fire history in the state of California, you know, it seems like it’s been forever ago, but back in in in 2020 we significant. We experienced a significant fire siege that began in the month of August, and that was the lightning fires that that rolled through that sparked hundreds, if not 1000s of fires across the state, essentially all within a very short amount of time, and we were battling fires for the rest of the year, and some of those fires that started in August burned through the rest of the year into December. It’s hard to really kind of put a finger on as to what is normal anymore? I try not to use that, that term anymore, because, you know, this year is going to be a busy year, and it already has been next year, maybe another repeat of the last two years that we had where where fires were down. Acres burned were down significantly.
Mina Kim
Isaac, what are you hearing in terms of how long this park fire could burn? We’ve had experts suggest it could even burn for months. What should the public be prepared for around that?
Isaac Sanchez
You know, the public should be prepared to react, to evacuate, to to to again, react to any fire, regardless of how of its size. You know, obviously the park fire is the biggest fire in the state of California. Right now it’s, you know, sitting just under 400,000 acres, that’s a significant incident. That’s a significant incident that’s having a large impact on the surrounding communities. How long this will take? We always try to give estimates when it comes to fires, regardless of the size, how long do we think it’ll take us to to put this fire out? And it comes down to a couple things, right? Is the weather cooperating? Are we getting the resources that we need? And so all these factors are going to contribute to how long it takes to put the park fire out. But when it comes to the preparedness of the public, you know, regardless of the size of the incident that’s burning, you should always be prepared. This is a message that we never stop delivering. Your fire departments are always prepared to respond, and we need the public to be prepared with us. This is a year round threat, and one that can you know obviously come knocking at your door at any moment.
Mina Kim
Well, this is our tweets. Thank you CAL FIRE. Thank you Isaac for coming on and talking with us today. Really appreciate it.
Isaac Sanchez
Thank you.
Mina Kim
I’d like to bring into the conversation now, Zeke Lunder, a pyrogeographer, founder of Deer Creek Resources, a wildfire management consulting firm, and of Lookout Media, a website providing real time wildfire information in California. Zeke, thanks so much for being with us.
Zeke Lunder
Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
Mina Kim
In addition to those things, you’re also based in Chico. So as someone who is living near where this fire began, tell me how it’s been for you these past several days. What conditions have been like, air quality, things like that.
Zeke Lunder
Yeah. Well, actually, the day the fire started, I was at work about three or four miles from where it started, and I saw the initial smoke, and I was kind of busy, and I did a couple things, and I thought, Okay, well, I have to go look, because it’s in the park. And we, we’ve recently wrote the wildfire protection plan for the city of Chico, and we’ve been burning a lot with the city of Chico in the park for hazard mitigation. So I was like, Well, I gotta get over there. And so I went and grabbed my son, and we went out and watched within about half an hour, we watched the fire, kind of going up the hill, and we spent the rest of the afternoon watching it. And then I had to get on a plane at five in the morning to fly to Missouri. So my son and I got up at two in the morning and went to the edge of the edge of the city and watched the fire backing down towards town, and then we went and jumped in a plane and flew to Missouri. And the rest of my interaction with the fire was through webcams. And, you know, all the tools I used to kind of keep an eye on things. So I got back here a couple days ago, and it was, it started to get smoky a little bit, but from town, basically, the fire threat to Chico passed pretty quickly. Within a day or so, it was, is pretty clear that the fire wasn’t going to impact Chico. So I wasn’t, I wasn’t, from the get go, I wasn’t super concerned about the fire actually burning down my house or anything. But I’ve been studying fire here in this landscape the last in foothills, since I was in college, basically. So I’ve kind of feel like I’ve been waiting my whole career for this, this to cover this particular fire. What
Mina Kim
do you mean by that? What has been so unique about this particular fire? Zeke,
Zeke Lunder
Well, it’s the geography of the Lassen foothills. I think that makes this an interesting fire. The Lassen foothills is the region between Chico and Red Bluff, really, between Mount Lassen and the valley. And so there’s about a million acres between the top of Mount Lassen and last national park down to the northern Sacramento Valley that’s got a lot of kind of unique characteristics for California, in that it’s a huge area that has very few roads, there’s very few structures, there’s a large wilderness area, and it’s just kind of a forgotten and not often visited part of the state, and it’s got A very interesting fire history going back, you know, in the 20th century, there were a lot of large fires in this region, just because it’s so inaccessible and so lightly populated. So there’s places out there that in the in the 20th century had, you know, seven or eight fires. So it’s a real kind of fire geography, I guess. And it’s kind of been quiet out there for about the last 30 years as far as large fires. So it’s just been really due for a large fire. And so I’ve kind of just been waiting to see it happen. I didn’t expect it was starting Chico, but, you know, I have been kind of expecting, eventually in my career, that we would see a large fire in this area?
Mina Kim
Yeah, well, Chico is a community very accustomed to nearby fire, and because of that, maybe they have some degree of resilience. But I am curious, we’re coming up on a break, but how the community seems to be holding up for. Your perspective, because, you know, fire, smoke, they can be difficult,
Zeke Lunder
Yeah, well, there’s, you know, our kind of sister communities, you know, forest Ranch, Cohasset, Paradise. There are a lot of people who work in Chico, who live up in the foothills in these small mountain communities. And so everyone in town knows people who’ve lost their homes in this fire in Cohasset – half the homes in Cohasset burned. And there’s kind of been this sense of inevitability since the Camp Fire and the the North Complex/Bear Fire. People have noticed that, ‘hey, Forest Ranch and Cohasset are the last two Foothill communities in Butte County that haven’t been decimated by wildfire, how long until that happens?’ So, yeah, I’d say everyone here is impacted. Chico’s a fairly small city when it comes down to it, and so everyone here, you know, has some direct connection to the losses in the foothills.
Mina Kim
We’re talking with Pyrogeographer Zeke Lunder. We were joined earlier by Isaac Sanchez, we’re taking stock of the wildfires burning in California and the impact they’re having, and you our listeners, join the conversation. What impact are they having on you, and what questions do you have about these recent fires, how they’re behaving? The email address is [email protected] you can find us on X Facebook, Instagram, at KQED forum. You can join our Discord community. Our number is 866-733-6786, more after The break. I’m Nina Kim.
Mina Kim
Welcome back to forum. I’m Mina Kim. We’re getting the latest on the wildfires burning in California, including the park fire, which has become the fourth largest now in California history. It’s burning outside Chico. There are other major wildfires burning as well, and we’ll get those updates to with us is Zeke Lunder, a pyrogeographer, founder of Deer Creek Resources and of Lookout Media, which provides real time wildfire information in California. He’s also a Chico resident as well. And I’d like to bring into the conversation Grace Toohey, a reporter for the LA Times who’s also been covering the park fire. Grace, thanks so much for being with us.
Grace Toohey
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Mina Kim
Hey, Grace, you had this very sad story about Christy and Michael Dano if I’m saying they’re lasting correctly, and please correct me if I’m not, who were once residents of Paradise and then became residents of Cohasset. What happened to them?
Grace Toohey
Yeah, it’s just really, really tragic tale, and they’re doing their best to stay positive in some really rough circumstances. But like you said, they lived in paradise when the Camp Fire rolled through, which, as we know, completely devastated that community. Their home was leveled back then. In 2018 they ended up relocating to Cohasset, and they really loved living in the mountains near Chico. They worked in Chico, like Zeke was saying, like so many people do, but they really loved living in the mountains. Unfortunately, their home was hit by, uh, by this massive Park Fire just a few days ago, and they found out. They found out it likely didn’t make it, uh, last week. And then they got some photos from a neighbor who was up in the area that showed it completely gone. I mean, you wouldn’t even be able to tell that their house was there. It’s that burned. So they have now lost two homes within six years, and this time, unfortunately, they didn’t have fire insurance, which is just really tragic. They said it was just unattainable in that area. They weren’t able to afford it anymore, and so they’re not really sure where they go, they go next.
Mina Kim
So they had fire insurance when the Paradise fire took their home, but they didn’t have fire insurance when the Park Fire took their second home,
Grace Toohey
Yeah, yeah, so and they talked about, they said they would, they never, would have ever thought they’d be living without fire insurance after living through Paradise, which you know that insurance helped them relocate to Cohasset, helped them buy. Their buy their new home, and they had fire insurance. Their first two years they were in Cohasset, they were paying, you know, a lot for it. They said it ended up their third year, the quote they got was more than $12,000 and they just could not afford it anymore. So they lived on edge. They said they never would have chosen it. They they wish they had another option, but their only option, they said, was the California FAIR Plan, and it was just too out of their reach. And so they’re, they’re, they’re really kind of scared about the future right now.
Mina Kim
We’re talking about towns leveled by Wildfire, and unfortunately, you’ve also been keeping track of what happened in the Burrell Fire. This is in Kern County, and of course, the reports are that it leveled most of Havilah. Can you tell us about Havilah?
Grace Toohey
Yeah. So it’s this historic mining town in Kern County, you know, in the, essentially the the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. And, you know, it has a lot of these historic structures, museums, old mining areas, things like that and and, like you said, unfortunately, a lot of it has been destroyed by this, by this fire. Luckily, the fire has is starting to be more contained there. It’s about 50% contained, but it just blew through this. This area called Havilah and a lot of families have lost homes, a lot of really historical architecture and and areas have also been lost. It’s interesting. We don’t know exactly how much has been lost there, so we’re still figuring that out, but, but it also a really, really sad situation.
Mina Kim
Yeah, I understand that they’re needing to wrap their minds around the extent of the damage and trying to get as much information as they can from evacuees, but that it’s really hard because so much of it is, in fact, gone. I heard that it has consumed more than 59,000 acres. Do we have any information about the cause of the Burrell Fire?
Grace Toohey
No, I don’t think that we have anything on that yet. You know, unfortunately, it happened right near where there were a lot of lightning fires. So that is, you know, a potential, something that might have happened, but we don’t, we don’t know. At this point
Mina Kim
again, we’re talking to the grace, to reporter for the LA Times about the Park Fire and Burrell Fire, and with Zeke Lunder, a pyro geographer as well, who’s been closely watching the Park Fire, among others. He is based in Chico, and you our listeners are joining the conversation. Let me go to caller Todd in El Cerrito. Hi, Todd, you’re on.
Todd from El Cerrito
Hi. First of all, I wanted to thank Mr. Lunder for the work you do on The Lookout. I follow. I’ve got family in Mendocino and Sonoma counties, and all the work there, just it helps educate everybody. My question was about control burning and how a community might access information. And, you know, work with their municipality or fire departments to kind of spur that and push it so that everything’s being done, that that can be done. I’m thinking specifically, my family lives in Ukiah, and I feel like the west side, outside of the west valley between Ukiah and Anderson Valley, is pretty thick. And I’m just kind of wondering how a individual might, you know, gain, kind of facilitate more control burning in their community. Todd, thanks.
Zeke Lunder
yeah. So we’ve been working a lot with the Butte Prescribed Burn Association. And prescribed burn associations are kind of a idea that’s come out of the southeastern US, where it’s a community led effort and people share skills and experience and resources to burn with each other. And that model kind of came to California in the last 10 years, and so now there’s a kind of a network of prescribed burn associations called Cal PBA. And they’ve got a website that’s Cal pba.org, and so it’ll help you connect with people who are in your area, who are already working on this. And this state, Cal Fire and other state agencies have been funding a lot of these, the formation these prescribed burn associations, often through the local resource conservation districts. And so that that’s kind of the easiest way to get connected local for our nurses, to look at the Cal PBA website. And so, like in Buttet County, we did some burning with the PBA in Cohasset over the last three years on a large forested property. And it looks like, potentially, a lot of the work that we did up there helped save at least half the upper ridge of Cohasset, the homes from burning, because as the fire boiled out of a big kind of ravine, it hit these projects that we’ve been thinning and burning for the last five years, and really took a lot of the momentum out of the fire.
Mina Kim
That is actually so interesting to hear in terms of the clear role that prescribed burns played in this fire, and for making it, I guess, less bad to some degree, I also understand that there had been, or there was a plan that you even worked on Zeke related to a prescribed burn in Bidwell Park, where the Park fire started, but that it didn’t actually get implemented. What tends to be the biggest challenge to getting prescribed burns done?
Zeke Lunder
Well, there’s a there’s a lot of them, lot of challenges, and it’s the same things that prevent anything from getting done, right? With prescribed fire, we’ve got a limited kind of window to hit the prescription. So, yeah, the prescription element of the prescribed fire is, you know, the recipe to get the desired effect – the prescription depends on the symptoms, right, just like human health. And so in the case of Bidwell Park, we’re trying to kill yellow star thistle as a primary consideration, and also, to reduce community welfare hazard. But you end up with these kind of narrow windows that are based on the biology and ecology, the fire ecology of this specific plant you’re trying to kill. So you know, in the case of burning in Bidwell Park, we’re trying to kill yellow star thistle, which is an invasive plant that is kind of taking over a lot of the grasslands in the park and detrimental to the native grasses, and also just not very nice if you’re out walking your dog or trying to walk through a meadow, and it’s just prickly and stinging you.
But the problem with burning star thistle is that it stays green until all the grass is dead, and so you have to wait until it starts to dry out to burn it. And then oftentimes that’s kind of late June or early July, and you start to get into wildfire season. We’ve burned in Bidwell Park outside Chico. We burned in June, and kind of met our objectives of getting into the star thistle. But then, you know, one of the big obstacles to getting burns done is that, as you get later into the fire season, a lot of the most talented people in the City Fire Department, when it comes to wildland firefighting, they’re on other crews that get called out to fires like this one. And so, for example, this Park Fire, our main burn leader for the city of Chico Fire Department is out on the fire as a Division Supervisor. And so in some ways, it kind of illustrates this problem where we put so many of our resources into fire suppression that they’re not available for prescribed fire. So oftentimes we’ll have a window in Chico where we could be burning, and we can’t, because our talent is off fighting a fire in the backcountry, somewhere that might be a, in the long run, not a great place to even be fighting fires. Last year, there were lightning fires burning in the Klamath National Forest that were doing a lot of ecological good, but politically, the Forest Service isn’t prepared to let fires burn up there, and so they called in a ton of resources to put out fires that were actually doing good ecological work. And those resources that they’re calling in, oftentimes, in our case, were someone that we could have used if they had been around to burn and protect our community.
Mina Kim
Amazing. So then you need to think about how the plant will behave when it’s set on fire. You need to think about whether you have the staffing and resources to do it. And you also need to have, like, perfect weather too, right in a way, or pretty good weather conditions.
Zeke Lunder
And you also have to have a park maintenance crew available to go and mow around the unit for the fire break. And so you have to line up all these things. And a lot of these municipalities and park departments and everything else are under-resourced as it is. So maybe they have two people that run the mower, and they’ve got a priority to go do the soccer fields, because there’s a tournament or something like that. Park managers in the state are under resourced, and our city governments are under resourced to manage anything. And so prescribed fire kind of falls into that same lump. So one of the things that’s being done to kind of try to resolve that is to build non-agency workforce around prescribed burning. And so CAL FIRE’s been funding a lot of through funding these PBAs (prescribed burn associations). They’ve also been funding trainings to try to increase the number of qualified burners who don’t work for agencies. So a unique, a unique thing about what we’ve been doing in the City of Chico is that what when we burn in Upper Park here, now, we burned maybe 150 acres. We had the City firefighters and their fire engines, but then we had probably twice as many participants who are not affiliated with the City Fire Department, that were from Chico State or the Natural Resources Conservation Service or other NGOs, private companies like mine who are out there through a variety of funding sources, or often as volunteers who are actually the city has built enough rapport and trust with this kind of militia (to use a loaded term), to the point Where the Chico State resources actually can run their whole own division of the prescribed fire – Chico State has their own fire engine. They have their own qualified firing bosses. We can’t count on Cal Fire and the agencies to do all this for us. And in some ways, we have to ask, since when did Cal Fire and Forest Service get to be the only people that were qualified to do things related to fire management?
Mina Kim
Lots of big questions to ask as we face fires that many are saying are quite extraordinary that we haven’t seen before, given the conditions that are also brought on by climate change. We’re also getting the latest on the impacts of the recent fires, the park fire, the Burrell fire, and I want to bring in MadisonAhment, a reporter for KBC, who’s been covering the Nixon fire. Madison, so glad to have you back on.
Madison Aument
Thank you for having me. Mina,
Mina Kim
What did you cover and find out in terms of how the Nixon fire has impacted nearby communities in Riverside County,
Madison Aument
yeah, the Nixon fire has been burning about 5200 acres, and it’s only 21% contained, and 2000 people have either been evacuated or under evacuation orders. Four structures have burned down, and I talked to Matthew Hendricks, who lives in Owenga, which is the community where that fire is burning. Owenga is a really rural community. There’s lots of brush. It’s really rugged terrain. And Matthew told me that he didn’t evacuate until the fire was about a mile from his house, and he loaded up his trailer, and he and his neighbor sat across the street and watched the fire just burn through his property. Oh, well, Matthew is back at his house with his neighbors, who have all lost their homes, but he was fortunate enough that just a chicken coop and a trailer burned.
Mina Kim
So are his neighbors staying with him at his house at the moment?
Madison Aument
They are and they don’t have electricity, they don’t have water. They’re kind of just camping out in his house with some of their animals. He said they’re, they’re there with a little piglet that was burned. So they’re just kind of waiting it out and hoping that they get containment of this fire soon.
Mina Kim
Yes, I know that it has threatened some 1700 structures, so then that means that evacuation orders are still in place for that area, Madison,
Madison Aument
they are and like I said, only four structures have burned, but that only includes houses, and a lot of people in this area have trailers and barns and chicken coops. It’s really rural. It’s a farming community, so we’re still kind of waiting to see how that affects how the number looks when they’re not eating
Mina Kim
and and then with this weather forecast, what have you been hearing in terms of concerns around the temperatures going up significantly, right this weekend? Yeah,
Madison Aument
so the weather there has kind of stayed in the high 90s, low hundreds, which makes firefighting very difficult. It’s going to be in the hundreds this weekend. And according to CAL FIRE, they’re kind of concerned about monsoon conditions, while the moisture from monsoons is welcome. The potential lightning could be detrimental to the firefighting efforts,
Mina Kim
as well as the winds that can come with monsoon conditions.
Madison Aument
Yeah, a lot. And it’s been windy all week. That’s also been a challenge for the firefighters there.
Mina Kim
Yeah, well, Madison, thanks so much for your reporting from there. Really appreciate it. And. Definitely keeping an eye on what happens this weekend. Madison ahment, reporter for kvcr Grace, a reporter for the LA Times. I know you need to leave us as well, but just in terms of what are you hearing? We had Governor Newsom over the weekend talking about the Burrell fire, and talking about how the state has a lot of resources available to help people, but that they need to think about this fire season as one that will last all the way through to the end of the year, in terms of the outlook for August, September. What are you hearing? Grace, yeah,
Grace Toohey
I think that you, you know, you hit a really important note. You know, I feel like for so long we’ve heard about fire season, and unfortunately, you know, we’re hearing this is now a year long issue that that Californians are facing, and we really
Zeke Lunder
it’s not, it’s not a year round thing. Can we talk about that?
Mina Kim
Well, we can right after the break you are listening to forum. I’m Mina Kim, thanks.
I’m Mina Kim. Here’s Governor Newsom speaking alongside emergency management officials at a press conference on Tuesday in Kern County after surveying damage from the Burrell fire,
“we have all kinds of resources at Cal OES in order to make you fire safe and fire ready, and to prepare you for the rest of a fire season that, with respect, may not even be a season any longer. Remember, campfire was in November. It’s not just August and September and October, but likely November, December, that will be fighting the ferocity of Mother Nature and these fires”.
Mina Kim
We are taking stock of the recent fires, fires like the park fire, the Nixon fire and the Burrell fire in Kern County, the Nixon fires in Riverside County. Zeke, we heard from that cut from the governor that there’s not really a fire season any longer, and grace was I’ve heard what Grace has also heard with regard to it being a year long thing, but you said it’s not. How should we be thinking about it then?
Zeke Lunder
Well, yeah, Newsom said that we could be fighting these fires through November and December and that it’s a year round thing. But last I checked, like January through May is still part of the year. And I think that that when we embrace this narrative that there’s a year round fire season. It doesn’t allow people to kind of relax into understanding the actual kind of dynamics of wildfire fuels and seasonality of fuels and all these things that play into the threat. And so we have it really creates obstacles for us to do a prescribed burn, say in May. If people have been all told that that you’re always at risk, and that there’s never a safe time, and you should always be packed up and ready to go and come May when the grass is all green in the foothills and we want to go and burn some oak litter we’ve got, people are kind of afraid all the time that there’s going to be a wildfire that burns their house down, and there’s like zero threat of us burning. Dry oak litter with surrounded with green grass in May. And so it doesn’t really serve the public, I think, to keep them in this kind of heightened sense of arousal around fire hazard when there’s very clear things about the kind of physiology of plants in California that affect when they’re available to burn in a wildfire. And climate change has changed things about the weather and the timing of fires and the behavior fires, but it hasn’t changed the basic physiology of plants, and it hasn’t changed the length of the days, and it hasn’t changed necessarily the effect that a dry wind has on a green plant. So I think when we try to tie everything that’s happening with fire back to climate change, we kind of lose the subtlety of the actual mechanics of how fire spread, and that it’s really important for the public to understand the basics of to have a decent level of fire literacy to help them understand when they should be really concerned about fire, when they can relax little, when they can maybe go out and burn a pile in their yard. And it isn’t that well served by a lot of the kind of oversimplified messaging that we get about climate change and fire and things like when we hear about a year round fire season, it doesn’t really serve any purpose in increasing the fire actual fire literacy of the population,
Mina Kim
yeah. I mean, so much of what we report also comes directly from people or officials at Cal Fire, so maybe there’s sort of a whole scale re evaluation of, as you say our literacy and language around how we talk about fires,
Zeke Lunder
Language is such an important thing, and I think that. I notice, in the tone of this broadcast you’ve got a somber tone, and it’s ‘this fire is big and it’s bad’ and it’s and so the typical script is that citizens are these helpless victims. Fire is the villain, and firefighters are the heroes, and as long as the coverage stays in that we don’t ask hard questions, like these folks that lost their insurance in Cohasset – why did they lose their insurance? There’s a reason that people lose their insurance – they live in places with a critical hazard, and the people who’ve done the math, they’ve penciled it out, and it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense to live there. And as long as these people are all going to be victims, it doesn’t help us kind of get to the bottom of like, should people live in some places like this? We’re not asking the hard questions.
Mina Kim
Well, the somber tone is certainly because it is heartbreaking when people lose their homes and when fire becomes something that forces people hundreds, sometimes 1000s of people, to flee a particular area. But I think one of the things that we try to do is also to ask people how they’re adapting, how they’re adjusting right what they’re doing to best prepare and address wildfires as well. And I think it’s really important to for sure, to talk about about that and also how to rethink the way that we frame what fire is in this state. Let me remind listeners, a pyrogeographer and founder of Deer Creek Resources, a wildfire management consulting firm and Lookout Media, a website providing real time wildfire information in California, who is based in Chico. Earlier, we were joined by Isaac Sanchez, Deputy Chief of Communications at Cal Fire, and Madison Aument, a reporter for KVCR who gave us an update on the Nixon fire. Grace Toohey has given us an update on the Park Fire and the Burrell Fire. And Grace, what I know I need to let you go. Sorry we’ve kept you so long. But what are you looking for or watching for your coverage.
Grace Toohey
Yeah, and I think, I think Zeke, you brought up some really important points about how we how we look at fires, how the state needs to look at fires. And really, a lot of these questions are policy questions. And like you mentioned, you know, this couple I interviewed, they said when they were trying to relocate there, there just weren’t housing options that were available, affordable, that that weren’t in fire zones, you know, that they could get this insurance. And so that’s it’s an issue that that overlays with with housing issues, with insurance issues. You know, we’re seeing this not just with fires, but with people living in flood zones, dealing with blizzards as well in some of our mountain regions. And so, you know, there’s a lot of really big questions, but, but I think, you know, just to to address the question I was just asked, we are seeing that there’s a really high risk for fires, you know, definitely this month and into September, but you know, through November and parts. Southern California as well. So, you know, we are going to continue to be watching these fires and how they develop. And also, you know, looking at how we can better respond, how officials can better respond, and what are the better ways that we we can really help protect people and protect our forests and you know, deal with, deal with climate change and all these really big, big issues.
Mina Kim
Grace to a reporter for the LA Times, thanks so much.
Grace Toohey
Thanks for having me.
Mina Kim
Let me go to caller Douglas in San Mateo. Next, Douglas, go ahead.
Mark Miller
Hi. Thank you for so much. I want to share, try to be brief and share a quick story about my experience in Lake Tahoe, the Meeks bay area with the US Forest Service stewardship program. If you folks haven’t spoken about this, I think you ought to consider it a little bit. I had a property in Meeks bay that was surrounded on two sides, not surrounded, but bordered on two sides by US forest land. I heard about the stewardship program. This is maybe 10 years ago. 11 years ago, I contacted the Forest Service down in South Lake Tahoe. They came up. They inspected the property. They were very impressed with all the work that I’d already done, so much so that they did two really cool things. A, they gave me my they did three really cool things. A, they give me the certificate saying that I was a steward and that I had passed all their defensible space stuff requirements, and they made sure that I was taught and instructed in the right way. And then second, the really cool thing was, they extended my ability, with permission on the certificate, to actually go two to 300 feet into forest service land to do the same thing I had done on my own property. And then the third thing they did was that there were some beetle bark trees that beetle dead beetle bark trees that were on the shared property line. There were five of them, very large, old pines, and they dropped the pines for me, and they deal in the Pines they made, kind of like this pyramid or conical thing they to prepare for burning, and then they let me buck up the wood to use in the boiler for the winter. So I would really encourage anybody that’s in a forest service us, forest service land situation to get in touch with their local forest service representative and get on and become a US Forest steward. Incredibly helpful, and I would encourage people think about that. Thank you so much. Yeah,
Mina Kim
Douglas, thanks so much. I’m glad you had such a positive experience. David writes, when people think about wildland firefighters in California, they think about Cal Fire, but they should know there are many 1000s of federal wildland firefighters working in California, including on the park fire, they earn about half of what CAL FIRE employees earn, and starting hourly base rates are below California minimum wage because many of our federal wildland firefighters are not provided with housing. They sometimes live in their cars and in tents. Let us remember to thank our federal wildland firefighters, our local and tribal firefighters, they too are risking their lives to battle wildfires in California. Let me go next to Shasta in San Francisco. Hi, Shasta, you’re on
Zeke Lunder
Hi, good morning.
Mina Kim
Go ahead.
Shasta
Okay. I was calling kind of to ask Zeke a question. Been following you on The Lookout. I was born in Susanville. Grew up in Paradise. Live in San Francisco now, parents are in the Forest Service, so I love like, how you’re connecting systems and everything that you’re sharing today, and as of come up, you’re just talking about, you know, January to May, being also not fire season sometimes. And a question that I’ve been getting from friends is, like, how to still go out into the wilderness during fire seasons, on how to like approach that. And so just wanted to, I’ve been giving advice, but I want to make sure giving the right advice that’s kind of like a thing that probably is what’s also on Bay Area people’s minds when the fire is like, not right here, but it affects everybody.
Zeke Lunder
Thank. So you’re asking knowing how to figure out if it’s safe to go hiking. Is that what you’re asking? Yeah, well, there’s some good resources for that. There’s, I would say, if you want to get a little more technical information, you can look up the geographic area coordination centers for Northern California. So it’s called the GACC. So if you look up Northern California Geographic Coordination Centers, they have a whole lot of Intel and kind of outlook and weather analysis on there. And you can kind of click through their site, and it’ll give you an idea of they have, like, a seven day forecast, and they’ll talk about kind of the upcoming weekend, what kind of things are going on? Like, if you look at it right now, it’ll say like, Hey, tomorrow there’s widespread lightning for the northern Sierra and down in the Sacramento Valley. And then it’ll say, and then after that, it’s going to be windy. But that seven day forecast is really good, and it often will tell you, like, areas that have potential for critical fire in the coming week, and in areas that are not as risky.
Mina Kim
So Zeke as you’re looking at Oh, let me remind listeners you’re listening to forum. I mean a Kim as you are watching this park fire and seeing the way that it’s been been burning. How concerned are you about its ability to basically grow significantly again, given conditions this weekend?
Zeke Lunder
It definitely has a lot of potential to grow up into the mountains, farther. I would say I’ve got, you know, my perspective on it is that a lot of the areas that the Park Fire is likely to spread into have had fire in the last 15 years. And as such, it’s it’s not outside the kind of range of historic variability. And when you look at the 400,000 acres that have burned so far, 320,000 acres of that, or 80% of the fire, are grass, brush and oak forests that are fire resilient and probably better off a year from now than they were before the fire, because this is an area that needs frequent fire, and a lot of it hasn’t had frequent fire, hasn’t had fire for 30 years. So of that, when you hear that 400,000 acres burned, you can think, well, 80,000 of that is kind of mature conifer forest that may have suffered, or a lot of it did suffer kind of devastation. But that 80% of the fire we’ve seen, it’s like it’s no big deal for the land. It’s going to be great for wildlife, for the Tehama deer herd. And so the fire does have potential to extend up into Deer Creek and the Mill Creek and a lot of these areas, it may eventually reach the Dixie Fire. And what we see on a lot of our large timber fires when the conditions are severe is that they often aren’t controlled until they reach another historic fire. And so in that way, having more fire on the landscape is not a bad thing. If you know, the reason the Dixie Fire burned a million acres is because it had hundreds of 1000s of acres of a contiguous forest that had not burned for 80 years or more. Yeah. And so in some ways, when we have a fire like this on the landscape, you know, it may burn into a Dixie fire, that doesn’t mean it’s going to devastate everything between where it is now and there. So, you know, if people want a little more nuance, and you know, a lot of what I’m saying is based on the history, the forest history, the fire history, the logging history of these landscapes. And that’s what we try to, that’s what we’re covering. On the lookout live stream, our nightly live streams, we try to kind of set the whole context, to help people understand what they’re seeing with the fire, increase their fire literacy
Mina Kim
and the vegetation, as you say, it’ll be good for the area. It will be resilient and come back after burning as well the type of vegetation that we have, typically, I do hear your thoughts and critiques about how we handle fire, how we frame fire, and so on. I’m wondering where fire modeling is in terms of its ability to really account for the conditions we’re seeing now. It’s not great.
Zeke Lunder
A lot of the math behind the computational models we use to assess fire potential are based on kind of back of the napkin calculations done in the 1970s and we still, it’s hard to believe, but we still don’t have a really good grasp on the kind of the fundamental physics of how fire spreads in different fuels of different sizes. So we understand really well how fire spreads in grass or in chemise or other kind of continuous fuels. But when you get into forests like what is burning right now, where we’ve got lots of standing dead trees, we’ve got a lot of big dead logs on the ground from recent kind of beetle mortality from the last 15 years or so. Like, we don’t understand the actual physics of how a forest burns, and so it’s really difficult for us to really put it into numbers and then have models we run. So you know, some of my work in the past few years has been to vet experimental models against the actual effects we observe on wildfires, and oftentimes, you know, we’re just not there.
Mina Kim
Well, tell me if at least this is true. Now that now that we have been through a lot of big fires recently, that we are becoming better, a little bit more aware, more proactive at at trying to address them every every year.
Zeke Lunder
I’m not sure. There’s so much work being done on mitigation, yeah, and I don’t want to throw shade on anyone who’s working hard to make their communities safer, but we’re still, we’re still kind of not addressing some of the real structural underpinnings of the wildfire crisis. You know, for example, Paradise; something over 20,000 structures burned in Paradise, and the measure of success that the Town of Paradise adopted in recovery was how fast they could issue building permits for people to rebuild. And so people rebuilt, the same urban footprint that has shown that it’s kind of completely set up for a catastrophe. And so until we see people responding to something like that by saying, Hey, we’re gonna, like, buy up all these lots and create a new city with a new footprint that actually takes fire in mind, we keep repeating the same mistakes, and 50 or 60 years from now, Paradise might burn again.
Mina Kim
Zeke Lunder, keeping it real and nuanced, he is with Lookout Media and Deer Creek Resources. Thanks, we really appreciate it.
Zeke Lunder
Thanks for having me.
Mina Kim
Thanks to Mark Nieto for producing today’s segment. My thanks to listeners as always. Thank you for listening to forum. Have a good weekend.
Funds for the production of KQED forum are provided by the John S and James L Knight found.