Consider This from NPR - As A Destructive Fire Season Rages On, What Might Prevent The Next One?

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

The good news is that firefighters in California have regained control of the Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe and tens of thousands of evacuated residents can now return to their homes. The bad news is the Caldor Fire is the second wildfire this season to burn through the Sierra Nevada Mountains from one side to the other. Something that never happened before this year. The other fire to do it is the Dixie Fire further north, which is on pace to be the largest California wildfire on record. And while thousands have been impacted with evacuations, millions of people in western states have been living with the smoke for weeks. The general guidance when living with hazy and polluted air is to stay indoors. But NPR's Nathan Rott reports on new research that shows the air behind closed doors may not be much better. And NPR's Lauren Sommer reports on a region of the country that is leading the way with fire prevention that may surprise you. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. We'll start with the good news. Good evening, Dusty Martin, one of the Unified Incident Commanders on the West Zone. Last week, the 22,000 residents of South Lake Tahoe, a city in Northern California, were told to evacuate as the Caldor Fire threatened their homes in an area not typically vulnerable to wildfires. Each and every day, we're getting more of the citizens back into their communities.

Over the weekend, firefighters gained control of the spread and roads began opening up. And as we've talked in the past, that is one of our number one priorities is to continue to populate the communities and get people back into their homes. Still, a lot of people won't have homes to return to. Over in El Dorado County off of Highway 50, you can see cabin after cabin after cabin is leveled. All that remains is stone and rubble at this valley overlooking the Sierra Nevadas. Before this year, no wildfire had ever traveled from one side of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the other. And now the Kaldor Fire is the second to do so this season. With the Dixie Fire to the north doing it first and still spreading. It may soon become the largest California fire on record. We are seeing fuel moistures that are so dry that every single time an ash or amber drops, fire's starting. Here's Cal Fire Chief Tom Porter speaking with CNBC over the

weekend. We are doing absolutely everything we can to protect as much as we can, but the fire is doing what the fire is going to do. Consider this. With the West straining under historic drought and fire, experts say it's time to rethink how we prevent fire in the first place and how we live with the effects. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, September 7th. It's Consider This from NPR. Clearly, worsening fire seasons are putting more and more lives and homes at risk. But while that impacts thousands of people every year, millions live with the smoke. Now the advice for those Americans who face weeks and even months of haze and poor air quality? Well, public officials say, stay indoors, shut your windows. But that might not be enough to keep you safe.

What matters from an exposure perspective is not what's happening outside, but really what's happening inside. Marshall Burke is an Earth System Scientist at Stanford University. And last summer, when the country was under COVID lockdown orders and the Bay Area was covered in wildfire smoke, he was concerned about the air his family was breathing. I have young kids, one who's asthmatic, and so I'm really, really worried and thinking about what those exposures look like. So Burke bought a low-cost purple air monitor for inside his home. And our indoor pollution was sky high during these wildfire events. Oftentimes, the air inside was just as bad as it was out, no matter how many windows he shut.

NPR correspondent Nathan Rodd spoke with Burke and other researchers who are rethinking what exposure looks like during wildfire season. Purple air monitors allow users like Burke to post their data publicly online, almost like an exercise app. Yeah, it's like the Strava for air pollution, basically. So being a researcher, he went through all of the data and found that bad air was the case in households across the smoke-covered West. His research is scheduled to pre-publish soon, and while it hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, his findings are consistent with what others are

seeing. Another study scheduled to publish later this year by the Environmental Protection Agency looked at air quality in western Montana during wildfire smoke events with a focus on the types of buildings that public health officials would usually recommend that at-risk people go to. We would say, you know, hey, if it's smoky outside, go to the library. This is Sarah Cofield, an air quality specialist in Missoula, Montana, who's helping with the study. And she says of the schools, daycares, businesses, and other publicly accessible places they looked at. We did not have a single building with air that was significantly better than outside. Some of the buildings, you might as well have been outside.

Now, if you live in the West, this might not come as a surprise. Wildfires and smoke are becoming far more frequent as human activities warm the world. Last year, at least one in seven Americans experienced dangerous air quality from wildfire smoke alone. This year, tens of millions more, including people hundreds of miles away from the fires. So this new research has major implications for public health officials like Sarah Cofield, who's now pushing... To have the public messaging during a smoke event change from go inside to go inside and clean your air. Filter it. Remove the fine particulate matter that drifts through windows and doors and so deep into your bloodstream that it can trigger cardiac events.

That's why Mason Dow is at the food bank in Missoula, Montana, handing out box fans with air filters duct taped to them. So this is a self-contained air filtration system. So tight seal on like doors and windows and stuff, middle of the room, and it filters the air pretty darn well. Fancy air filters can cost hundreds of dollars. And for a lot of people, like 67-year-old Janet Freedy, who's been sick from the wildfire smoke this summer,

that kind of money isn't just laying around. So she says outside, she's just been dealing with the smoke. It makes me have a headache and stuff and tired, real tired. She's not alone. As people come through the food bank grabbing these free DIY air filters, they mention sore throats, kids with asthma, headaches like Freedy's. Forty fans are gone in 20 minutes. It feels a little bit maybe like a Band-Aid. Amy Sillenberg is the director of Climate Smart Missoula, the small nonprofit that's providing these air filters.

Typically, they deal with climate policy, trying to get people to cut their emissions, limit warming. But Sillenberg says this work is a reflection of the reality. Climate change is here. It's happening. The reason we're doing this is because we have longer, hotter, drier, smokier summers. So we need to adapt, she says, not down the road, but right now. NPR correspondent Nathan Rott. The fact that massive wildfires are becoming more commonplace doesn't make them any less devastating.

We're not talking about one family losing a house. We're talking about one family, their grandfather's house, their grandmother's house, their cousin's house, they're all gone. Margaret Alicia Garcia lives in the small northern California town of Greenville, or rather she did, before the Dixie Fire destroyed nearly all of it earlier this summer. And so where normally you would lean on, you know, the one person in your family whose house was saved, like there's no one to lean on. Garcia wrote a eulogy for Greenville. It's a tight-knit community in what she calls the Lost Sierra, a gorgeous slice of mountain and forest. There's a lot of us from Southern California, from the Bay Area, and we live side by side, you know, hippies, ranchers, self-proclaimed rednecks. I'm not

saying that pejoratively. That's a self-identifier for people. And we just all make this beautiful place our home. And some of her neighbors recently moved from another small town, Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the Camp Fire of 2018. So they were buying up here, feeling like it was a more secure area. This new reality of communities effectively being erased off the map has Western states wondering how they can stop the next wildfire before it begins. And to do that, they need to learn from a region of the country that's not often in the headlines during fire season, the southeast. NPR science correspondent Lauren Summer has more. Back in May, Morgan Barner watched as flames crept along a forest floor.

We're burning in a shortleaf pine woodland. It burned about two years ago. This fire was set on purpose. It's what's known as a prescribed fire. The idea is to clear out the brush and leaves so they don't build up and become the fuel for extreme fires. The hazard is very low. The risk is very low. But this isn't California or Montana. Varner is in Tallahassee, Florida. The southeast burns about almost three quarters of all the prescribed burning in the U.S. annually. Florida is far and away the number one state. Varner is the director of fire research for Tall Timbers, a research station and land conservancy in Tallahassee.

He says forests and woodlands in the West and South have a lot in common. Fire used to happen regularly. Before colonization, they were burned really frequently through lightning and the really high density of Native American populations. Then came the era of fire suppression. Federal agencies like the Forest Service had mandates to extinguish all fires. Smokey Bear taught generations that fire was the enemy. Only you. But in the South, landowners found the forests were getting overgrown. So in 1990, Florida passed a law to encourage prescribed burns. It set up a certification training program for burn managers, also known as burn bosses.

As long as the weather conditions are safe, getting a burn permit is quick. So it's a single permit, a single call. And, you know, in California or some other places, the approval for a fire starts not minutes, but months ahead of time. The key thing, Varner says, is that burning has become part of the social fabric. Landowners encourage each other. There's a little bit of one-upsmanship or one-up-womanship where they will talk about sort of like, have you even burned your property lately? You know, that sort of thing. That's the model that Western states are starting to copy.

We have this generational gap in fire knowledge in the Western U.S. that we're trying to rebuild now. But Florida and the southeast still have it. Lania Quinn-Davidson is a fire advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. So far this year, Florida has done controlled burns on 45 times more land than California, mostly private land. In California, Quinn-David Davidson says private landowners get little support. They are managing and taking care of the lands around our towns and communities. They're critical in this larger vision of California living with fire. She says one big problem in California is liability. It's rare for a prescribed burn to get out of control, but it has happened. In the Southeast, burn bosses are protected from liability lawsuits unless they're grossly negligent. When I go out and burn, I have no liability protection.

I'm assuming full responsibility for those projects. And most of the time, we're doing those projects for public benefit. California state legislators are now considering a bill that would provide some liability protection. Oregon and New Mexico passed similar laws this year. And all three states are setting up certification programs to get more burn bosses on the ground. That's how we're going to rebuild a fire culture in California is letting people actually touch it and have a hands-on connection with it and to know that it doesn't all have to be bad. Quinn Davidson says it may take time to build that social license for fire again. Even now, the U.S. Forest Service stopped prescribed burning on federal land this month

because the agency is overtaxed fighting extreme fires. But with smoke from catastrophic fires now clogging the skies for weeks, more and more Westerners are seeing controlled burns as part of the solution for the future. NPR Science Correspondent Lauren Summer. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Audie Cornish. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.

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