Consider This from NPR - Prescribed Burns Started a Wildfire, But Experts Say They're A Crucial Tool

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

After a prescribed burn became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service put a ninety day ban on controlled burns.But while these kinds of burns do carry risk, very few escape, and they are a crucial tool in reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Forest ecologists are worried the ban added to the wildfire risk in areas that desperately need maintenance.An investigation by CapRadio and the California Newsroom found that proper fire mitigation could have protected the Northern California town of Grizzly Flats from the Caldor Fire last year. CapRadio's Scott Rodd reports on how the U.S. Forest Service failed to execute its own mitigation plan in time, despite recognizing the danger decades ago.KCRW's Caleigh Wells looked into all of the obstacles that stand in the way of prescribed burns and fire preparation in California's Big Bear Valley, which could be the next disaster.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. At the end of summer, heavy monsoons roll across New Mexico. They usually bring welcome relief to the dry landscapes, especially after the intensifying wildfires and droughts of recent years. But for communities in northern New Mexico, the rains have brought disaster after an already harrowing year. Everything from pine needles to logs and boulders and trees coming down from the burn scars into the river. So the river has been rendered unusable. That is Luis Trujillo, the mayor of Las Vegas, New Mexico. The town has battled a water crisis

after the Calf Canyon Hermits Peak fire burned a large portion of their watershed. The heavy rains then washed charred debris into the river and reservoir. It's yet another obstacle on the path to recovery for communities impacted by what became the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. Todd Abel is a federal operations chief for Southwestern Fires. That fire had a lot of energy. It throws spots out in front of it and moves extremely fast. There's no way to get people in front of it to do anything with it. We couldn't even get aircraft to drop retardant in front of it. The fire began from a prescribed burn by the U.S. Forest Service near Hermits Peak on April 6th. These kinds of burns are used to clear out brush and leaves from at-risk areas

so that they don't build up and become instant fuel for extreme fires. But this one jumped its burn area. Winds picked up and the blaze took off. It merged with the nearby Calf Canyon fire, which was started by a dormant burn pile from a previous prescribed burn. The blaze took almost five months to contain and burned nearly 350,000 acres, destroying hundreds of homes, including a centuries-old house that Bernice Naranjo and her husband Tito had been renovating since 1971. From nothing, building that one little tiny room that was not even a room became a beautiful home. Naranjo is one of many residents who say a planned burn during a windy dry spring was just a bad idea.

And she blames the U.S. Forest Service. I actually wanted to send and get a bucket of ashes from our house and send it to the Forest Service because they are accountable. Shortly after that fire, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, Randy Moore, put a 90-day ban on prescribed burns. And that concerned many forest ecologists. Because prescribed burns are seen by experts as a crucial tool for reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires in areas that aren't too dry to burn. Prescribed fires that jump the burn zone, like what happened with the Calf Canyon Hermits Peak fire, are incredibly rare, fewer than 1% escape. Fire advisor Barbara Satink-Wolfson was one of dozens to sign a letter to Chief Moore urging him not to make the prescribed burn pause nationwide. There's basically a small window in which they can conduct the prescribed burn,

and we definitely missed opportunities. The Forest Service also released an internal review of the Calf Canyon Hermits Peak Fire, and essentially it said that they failed to take climate change into account when conducting an intentional burn during a historic drought. Matthew Herto, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, says that is a systemic problem. A lot of the planning tools that fire managers rely upon for planning prescribed burns were built under a climate that no longer exists. Last year, the U.S. government spent a record $4.3 billion on fire suppression, something that has actually worsened wildfire conditions. Meanwhile, from 2009 to 2018, just over $500 million were spent per year on treatments to

reduce wildfire fuel like prescribed burns. Experts like fire ecologist Timothy Inglesby argue the agency should rethink its priorities. If we were to shift those resources and that funding into prescribed burning, that would be a big help. Now, with hundreds of millions of dollars from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last fall going to fire mitigation projects, help might finally be on the way. The Department of the Interior is pledging to finish hazardous fuel reduction projects like tree thinning and controlled burning on 2 million acres of forest land. But there is much more to be done. And the window in which it can be done safely is shrinking. Fernando Rosario Ortiz is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The fire season you keep hearing that used to be so many months over the summer, now we're getting to be year round. Consider this. The Forest Service says at least 234 million acres of forest are at a high risk of dangerous wildfire. But in the last decade, controlled burns have treated less than 1% of that total. As wildfires intensify with the growing climate crisis, that work becomes even more critical. After the break, we'll look at two California communities, one that could have been saved with proper mitigation efforts, and another that could be the next disaster if crucial work is not completed. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Wednesday, October 5th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. 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. It's Consider This from NPR. New Mexico is not the only state to have seen historic fires in the past two years. The Marshall Fire that broke out near Boulder on December 30th last year

was Colorado's most destructive on record in terms of property loss. Last July, California saw its second worst fire when the Dixie Fire burned nearly one million acres. It became the first fire to spread from one side of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the other. The second fire to do that followed just one month later. The Caldor Fire destroyed over a thousand structures and burned through the town of Grizzly Flats in Northern California. It destroyed about two-thirds of the community there. California Fire Assistant Fire Chief Eric Schwab said there was no way to control that blaze. We don't have any tools out there to stop the fire, so we result to hurting the fire away from structures and away from people, and that's what we're actively doing.

Steve Bardem, a firefighter, echoed the challenge the Caldor fire proved for crews. It was burning pretty high there, 13, 14-foot flame lengths, and then you get the ember cast off it, and it gets grass, and the pine needles get going, and it goes over the houses. An investigation from CAP Radio and the California Newsroom found that the U.S. Forest Service could have done more to protect Grizzly Flats. Here's what CAP Radio reporter Scott Rodd learned. Mark Ulmer's house stands out amid the devastation. It's robin's egg blue and looks untouched, as if the Caldor fire's flames just skirted past.

It's kind of lonely around here now. It's kind of strange. The 60-year-old former fire inspector is standing in his garage, gazing at the hollowed-out neighborhood. He says his home survived because he spent years fireproofing it. He swapped out flammable siding for concrete and replaced his wood deck with fire-resistant material. I think ultimately that's what saved us. Embers scorched the deck, but it never ignited. Ulmer says the threat of wildfire became clear after a warning from the Forest Service nearly two decades ago. The agency gathered residents at the community church and presented fire modeling that predicted a blaze similar to the Caldor fire. They showed a fire that could potentially wipe out our community within 24 hours.

Ulmer helped create a volunteer group called the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council to protect the town. They began clearing excess vegetation from around homes and removing brush near evacuation roads. But as the volunteers hustled, the Forest Service idled. The history of the Forest Service in the time that we lived there was that everything took forever. Kathy Melvin is a former Fire Safe Council member. She lost her home in the Caldor Fire and shared a property line with the Forest Service. After the meeting in the community church, the Forest Service tackled some smaller fire prevention projects,

but it took 10 years to announce a comprehensive plan to protect Grizzly Flats. It was called the Trestle Project, and it promised to reduce overgrown brush and set prescribed fires on 15,000 acres of federal land around the town. That would create a protective buffer, but as Melvin recalls, It would take years and years and years for anything to get done. The Forest Service originally said it would finish the Trussell project by 2020. However, that timeline fell apart. Our investigation found the agency finished only 14 percent of the planned work before the Caldor fire, which burned through

the unfinished project and then devastated Grizzly Flats. Forest Service officials cite a number of reasons for the stalled effort. Staffing shortages, pushback from environmental groups, too many days when prescribed burns would be dangerous due to hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change. And maybe the biggest hurdle of all, we do not have the funding to do the level of work that needs to be done out there. Chief Randy Moore leads the U.S. Forest Service. He's optimistic that billions of dollars recently allocated by Congress will jumpstart other planned projects around the country. There are a number of communities that are at risk.

Does the Forest Service bear any responsibility for the outcome in Grizzly Flats? Well, I mean, I don't know what kind of question that is. I mean, you know, do anybody bear any responsibility for not having a budget to do the work that we need to do? It's sad to think about what could have been. Michael Wara is a climate policy expert from Stanford University. If all this work was done by 2020, Grizzly Flats might still be there. That's also the opinion of former District Ranger Dwayne Nelson. He was one of the trestle project's key architects. I think there would have been a very high probability that Grizzly Flat would not have burned in the Caldor fire. He says finishing the ambitious fire mitigation plan

could have meant survival for the 400-plus homes destroyed here last year. CAP Radio's Scott Rod in Grizzly Flats. In the Southwest, wildfire preparedness projects are underway. Federal land managers have already begun to survey forests in need of maintenance. Millions from the infrastructure package will help fund that work. But money is only one of many obstacles for fire mitigation strategies like prescribed burns. And the clock is ticking. If the U.S. Forest Service fails to complete this critical work to prevent fires, things could get worse. In the ski resort town of Big Bear, about 100 miles east of L.A., Kaylee Wells from member station KCRW reports on the challenges ahead to protect that community. On the day I met up with Forest Service burn boss Christina Barba,

she was supposed to be setting a prescribed fire to help clear out flammable brush in the San Bernardino National Forest. But she had to call it off. The weather made it too risky. And therein lies the paradox of being a burn boss. Her job of setting safe, controllable fires is often too risky now because they could spread into major problems. It's like you want to burn enough that it is meaningful and you're improving large parts of the landscape, but then are we ever going to have the resources to do it? Barba says she should be burning 3,000 acres a year to protect Big Bear.

This year, she burned just 20 acres. She says there's a saying in her line of work. You could always find a reason not to burn. There's a long list of fire mitigation projects that have been proposed and then canceled. The list of obstacles is even longer. Let's start with the biggest one, climate change. Yeah, it's going to get hotter, but it also gets drier. And the window of opportunity for controlled burns shrinks.

Barba had only 13 safe burn days last year, but most of those days, she still couldn't set a fire. Which brings us to problem number two, air quality. Big Bear shares an air basin with Los Angeles and the suburbs east, known as the Inland Empire. Because the Inland Empire has ozone or some days they have more particulates than they should, it shuts down burning in the entire basin. Barba lost five of her 13 burn days because of air pollution in the larger region. Then comes problem number three, resources.

Some days she doesn't have the people or equipment to burn safely. There's been times where I've had my organization and then I get a call from the fire management official, like three of your engines got sent on a strike team for a fire, and then that is the end of that. And even on a perfect day when the weather is right and the air is clear and the firefighters have nothing better to do, prescribed fires still burn up money. The San Bernardino National Forest would not disclose its budget after months of multiple asks and a Freedom of Information Act request. But Barba gives a hint. I think my house is worth more than the Phil's budget this year. All those obstacles made for a close call earlier this month when the Radford fire forced some residents to flee their homes.

Patrice Duncan spoke to me as she drove down the burning mountain. I've seen too many just horror stories of people being stuck trying to evacuate, waiting too long to evacuate. And I just didn't want to make the news that way. Luckily, there were enough firefighters and equipment to prevent any damage to town. And the remnants of Hurricane Kay brought helpful rain. But that luck might run out. I can make sure my home is safe, but if the forest is coming at me because it wasn't managed well, there's not a whole lot I'm going to be able to do about it.

There are still thousands of acres in Big Bear Valley ripe for the next wildfire. And a lot of the community still isn't ready. That's KCRW's Kaylee Wells reporting from Big Bear. NPR's Eric Westervelt and KUNM's Alice Fordham contributed reporting at the top of this episode. From NPR, it's Consider This. I'm Elsa Chang. 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.

Kauffman.org.