Interview with Veteran Wildland Firefighter Jim Klump

Zeke sat down with Jim Klump, a veteran wildland firefighter and old-school Redding smokejumper who was the District Fire Management Officer on the Plumas National Forest for 25 years. They talked about the intersection of fire and forestry, land management, people, leadership, and history. The interview took place in May 2022.

 

They also talked about PTSD, firefighting tactics, landscape-scale backfiring operations, climate change, immigration, the culture of the Forest Service from the 60s to the present, and the survival prospects of our wildfire-threatened rural communities.

This video features Google Earth map animations, historic aerial photos, historic photos from UC Davis and Chico State and aerial video from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center.

 

 

Full Interview with Daniel Swain, PhD

  Daniel Swain, PhD is one of the world’s foremost experts in the interactions between climate, wildfire, and flooding. He joined Zeke at The Lookout to talk about the Dixie Fire specifically and how weather affects wildfire in general. He also had some interesting things to tell us about the Marshall Fire, flooding and climate … Read more

Good Fire Out There

As things move slowly here during winter, I thought I’d take some time and share some of the materials that are out there about Good Fire. Here are a few worthy offerings. The first is a short video about fire-adapted forests in Oregon and a prescribed burning TREX in Oregon put out by The Nature … Read more

Forest Management and the Dixie Fire Video

This video shows how a major wind event in early August, 2021, created extreme fire behavior west of Chester, California. We use satellite-derived forestry data to investigate whether past forest management had any effect on survival of trees in the approximately 100,000-acre area affected by the firestorm. This video is focused on forest conditions and fire behavior in the area around Chester and Swain Mountain. Fire behavior throughout the almost 1,000,000 acre Dixie Fire had a large amount of variety.

We’ll look at other parts of the fire in other videos. This video is a production of The Lookout (the-lookout.org), a user-supported wildfire journalism and education initiative run by Zeke and Erika Lunder, in Chico, California.