- [Jeff] Production funding for "American Grown" provided by James G. Parker Insurance, protecting agribusiness in the valley for over 40 years.

Brandt Professional Agriculture, discovering, manufacturing and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California.

Keeping Valley Ag connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, trusted by builders to wire thousands of Valley homes, now bringing that trust direct to you.

By Wawona Frozen Foods, fruit as it should be, family owned since 1963.

By Harris Farms, a legacy of growing.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms insight to make the best possible financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years, dedicated to supporting Valley agriculture and families that grow food for the nation.

Another hot summer morning in California's Central San Joaquin Valley and once again the sky fills with smoke.

Another plume, another wildfire, another reminder that fire season is no longer a season at all.

It's been five years since the Creek Fire.

a wildfire that changed lives, changed landscapes and forced an entire region to rethink forest fire response and forest management.

- But the goal is to keep 95% of our fires 10 acres or less.

- [Jeff] But five years later, the question remains, did it change the way we respond?

Did it change the way we manage our forests?

Did it change what we're doing to prevent the next disaster?

- Fresno Air Attack Base was the first unit to actually get a C-130 assigned to a local air base.

- [Jeff] Because on this day, above the Kings River, in the Sierra National Forest, the Garnet Fire is burning and by the look of the towering smoke, the answer may be we're not doing enough.

- Thank you.

Hello, everybody.

Thank you for joining us today.

- [Jeff] Since the Creek Fire, some things have changed.

Initial attack strategies are evolving, new technologies are emerging, and new ideas, including new ways to fight fire from the air, are proving effective around the world.

- It slows and descends and then pours it out.

- [Jeff] But here in the Sierra National Forest, the condition of our forests suggest we may not be doing everything we can.

- We didn't manage the forest very well, but when we stopped so abruptly due to environmental lawsuits, things got a lot worse.

- [Jeff] Five years later, the forests remain loaded with deadened down fuel.

In some places, the risks look even worse than before.

So what have we actually learned?

Are we managing these forests the way they need to be?

- I feel like the tide's turning a little bit 'cause people are seeing the effect that they've been screaming was going to happen.

- [Jeff] Do the people making the decisions truly understand what's happening on the ground?

Or has decades of neglect created a problem that's simply too big to fix?

- Managing your forest in the long run reduces the cost to the taxpayer.

- [Jeff] This is a story of remembrance, of frustration, of hard questions and uncertain answers.

Five years after the Creek Fire, what has changed?

And more importantly, what hasn't?

- Hi, my name's Joe Denham.

I'm a board member of the Sierra Resources Conservation District and we are on the a hundred acre forest that my family and I own and we manage ourselves.

- [Jeff] Do you remember when you heard about the Creek Fire the first time and your heart sinking, or were you here when it happened?

- The next time I looked in that direction from here I could tell that there is nothing stopping it coming around the corner with the million dollar mile and then Jose Basin, I'd fought fires there 25 years ago and it wasn't good in there then and there's no good fuel breaks running up and down the side of the San Joaquin River Canyon, there's roads at the top and the bottom and maybe the middle, but there was nowhere really to stop it from moving this way.

- I started getting involved a little bit more with their forestry program and that was in about 2019.

So I got to be part of watching some of the challenges of fuel reduction, log deck removal.

There was a program funded through the California Fire Safe Council that I got to be part of helping with the management team and stuff and then 2020 hit and my job over at the church in town kind of shut down.

It was like, we're not gonna be doing as much as we were.

While over here, it's outdoor work and it started to pick up.

So there was that and then a few months later the Creek Fire broke out and I was just completely changed by that experience.

It was absolutely remarkable.

Amazing what that fire did.

I just never seen anything like it in my life and I go, "Oh!

"This thing we've been working on is a big problem."

- [Jeff] Five years after the Creek Fire, questions remain, and for many, so does the frustration.

Questions about how the fire started still circulate around the foothills and mountain communities.

Was it lightning?

Was it human caused?

Was it something that was never fully explained?

Rumors have taken on a life of their own and even as investigators share their findings, for some, doubt remains.

But beyond the question of how the fire began, a larger question continues to surface.

What has changed?

The Creek Fire burned nearly 400,000 acres.

It destroyed homes, reshaped communities and forever altered the landscape of the Sierra National Forest.

So five years later, has anything been done to reduce the risk of it happening again?

The answer is complicated.

Forest management is a patchwork of federal agencies, state policies, environmental protections, funding limits and lengthy approval processes.

Understanding that system, and its limitations, is key to understanding what has and hasn't happened since the smoke cleared.

Because on the ground, across much of the burn scar, the change is hard to see.

Standing dead trees still dominate the skyline.

Forest roads remain choked with fallen timber and in many areas, both inside the burn footprint and beyond it, heavy fuels still blanket the forest floor.

In some of California's most fire prone terrain, the risk remains.

So why does it look like so little has changed?

Part of the answer lies where the work can actually happen.

On federal land, projects often face years of environmental review, and, in many cases, legal challenges that can stall or stop work altogether.

But on private land, a different effort is taking shape.

Non-profit fire safe councils and local organizations are working to secure grants, raise funding and reduce fuels where they can, creating defensible space and protecting the communities that sit closest to the next potential fire.

These groups are now on the front lines and their work may be one of the most important pieces of the region's fire future.

- Nobody wants to see a forest get clear cut or even a good timber sale can be pretty ugly.

But when we don't thin forests properly, we lose the whole forest, you lose all the trees, you lose all the endangered species.

The soil gets super heated to the point where it is hydrophobic and instead of water soaking in, it runs across the surface and creates erosion.

There's good fire, but when you have an overgrown forest, typically you don't have good fire, you have these overly hot, catastrophic wildfires.

- Well, I like to make sure that they can see what the Creek Fire did and, you know, where it hasn't burned.

I think the biggest thing people don't understand is that there's a role for us to play.

I think a lot of people think, "Oh, it's the forest.

"I can just go up here and enjoy it and then leave."

Even people, they purchase homes up here and think, "Oh, I'm gonna have my nice landscape."

And they don't realize that they also took on a big responsibility in stewardship and that's really what the district steps up to do, help educate people, get them situated with resources and help them better steward their landscapes.

We have a big role to play.

It's funny to see, after a while, folks that have lived here for a long time really understand what needs to be done and then the folks that don't live up here, but they end up making a lot of the decisions and policy and funding and how those two things can be at odds just because of experience.

Because folks don't know what it takes unless they live up here, unless they take on that mantle, that role, that there is to play.

I think that's the biggest disconnect and there's a whole lot more we could be doing for education.

I'm amazed that some of our schools don't even teach about fire, they don't teach about forest management and they have some of the most amazing forest resources in the world right there in their backyard.

- Basically, I'm just trying to yell from the rooftops about it on my own and there's a great number of people doing that and it's so unfortunate, but these tragedies help raise awareness and even more so, like the terrible fires down south in Palisades, 'cause those people didn't realize, probably, that they were really in a wilden area where these things can happen.

Or when the wind cut the fires and it went all the way through, you know, Santa Rosa, those kind of things just aren't supposed to happen, but we used to manage our properties differently than we do now and unfortunately it can happen.

But so many more people are becoming aware.

- Why weren't we moving faster?

Why weren't we doing more?

And everything I heard from residents up here and people up here is we've been screaming this since 1960.

We knew this was gonna happen.

We saw it coming and nothing happened.

And that broke my heart.

You know, you see these logging families that have been here for generations since before our national parks were national parks and they've passed this, like, mantle of caring for the forest for a long time and it hurt to hear that they've been feeling so unseen, so unheard for so long.

And now I feel like the tide's turning a little bit 'cause people are seeing the effect that they've been screaming was going to happen.

- [Jeff] Five years after the Creek Fire, the conversation isn't just about how we manage our forests, it's about how we fight the fires we know are coming.

Because even with better thinning, better planning and better prevention, California's fire seasons are growing longer, hotter and more unpredictable.

And when the next major fire ignites, speed from the air can mean the difference between a fast stop and a fast moving disaster.

In the years since the Creek Fire, Cal Fire has made significant changes to strengthen its aerial response, including new aircraft, new capabilities, and a major expansion of air power right here in the Central Valley.

And those changes are already reshaping how California fights fire from above.

- Fresno Air Attack Base was the first unit to actually get a C-130 assigned to a local air base.

Last year we had a air tanker that was assigned to the McClellan Air Base as the test bed for this product and concurrently we have a third one and a fourth one in process that'll be outfitted for Paso and Ramona as we continue to build out our C-130 fleet.

And so this resource has added a significant impact to our IA capabilities.

It holds 4,000 gallons of retardant, it can split loads multiple times.

So if you need a short run across the head, come back, capture both flanks, you're almost able to box it in with one plane on the initial attack and so we've seen a tremendous impact on our initial attack capabilities locally, but the other capabilities of this plane is it can be anywhere in California basically within two hours.

The amount of fuel they're able to go and make a drop and then go back to a base and refuel and so as we see more of these, it takes the place of six to eight S-2 air tankers.

And so, as we see the effectiveness of this plane, when they can lay a half mile retardant line without a start on a stop like the S-2s do, those little gaps of the start and stop sometimes cause, you know, the areas where fire can squeak through or it chews through the retardant, but when you have a continuous line, it makes it really difficult and it gives the firefighters on the ground the ability to get in and do some work.

- Ultimately, yes, we operate in the air and we do ensure that the operation goes well in the air and for the ground, but we work for the incident commander who's on the ground.

So several years of firefighting and gaining experience on that, obviously, fire behavior and weather and always monitoring the activity around you.

Either if it's monitoring what's happening in your local county, monitoring if there's aircraft dedicated to other incidents and then you're topography, if the fire is on flat ground and it's going to, you know, it's burning in the grass and it's gonna be a few hundred acres of of grass, then that's definitely changing your tactics than getting a fire in the grass oak woodland that starts at the toe of the slope and now you have a 40% slope climb and it's going up to the ridge, now you gotta definitely change your tactics.

- [Jeff] In the summer of 2025, as the five year anniversary of the Creek Fire approaches, a summer lightning storm hits the Central Sierra.

(thunder banging) Multiple fires start across the Sierra National Forest, but unlike Cal Fire, and they're expanding budget and resources, the US Forest Service, tasked to respond to the lightning fires on federal land, is in trouble.

Shrinking budgets and low pay for firefighters has led to a federal firefighter shortage across the west.

One fire takes hold north of the Kings River Gorge and begins to spread.

The Forest Service response to the fire is fast, but with limited resources and personnel, the fire has the upper hand and begins to rage.

The incident is named the Garnet Fire and here, for many who live in these mountains, is where the problem remains five years after the Creek Fire.

Why didn't the Forest Service ask Cal Fire with its growing resources and capabilities for help while the fire was still small?

The jurisdictional divide between who fights which fire is still a major weakness in the system.

Yes, some resources are shared and we hear in press conferences that everyone is working together, but the truth and facts show otherwise, and a painful irony remains, the Forest Service ability to fight fire is limited.

Cal Fire's ability and resources are growing, but Cal Fire effectively sits on the sidelines as the Garnet fire grows.

Incident command is performed by an agency grossly outmatched for the problem it helped create.

Jurisdictional pride, drives the system again and the cycle repeats.

A fire that should have been stopped at 300 acres burns nearly 60,000, destroying a sensitive section of forest called the Teakettle Experimental Range in the process.

I reached out for an interview from Sierra National Forest supervisor, Dean Gould, to talk about what he's learned and changed on the Sierra since the Creek Fire.

His office has still not responded to my request.

- Now, just to summarize real quick.

- [Jeff] Meanwhile, in the shadow of the Garnet Fire's pyro cumulus cloud that towered over the Sierra last summer, a Fresno based company has quietly developed a new way to fight fire from the air.

A system now being used in countries all over the world, one that turns any cargo plane into an aerial firefighting platform.

- Caylym Technologies International was started in 2009 on an idea that maybe we could build a better mousetrap to enable any cargo configured aircraft to fight wildfires and where that came from was really, I was working for a very large paper company that was at the time the largest private landowner of timber in North America and we were suffering some pretty bad fires and we had already done some inventing to be able to deliver cargo in the military without any metal being involved and one thing led to another and so we developed this package, this system, to fight wildfires and it was really born out of that idea.

- So as the box travels in the aircraft, it's traveling at the speed the aircraft is, somewhere between 140 and 160 knots, and when the unit is released from the aircraft, it actually falls out as though it's tipping over a shelf, it's kind of rolling on a slant, it tips over a shelf, when it enters the wind as it's descending, the cap is gonna come off of the aircraft, just by the wind, just pulls it right off, the cap is tied to the box in a specific way such that it changes the rotation of the box and you could think of it like a cup of water as you're driving, if you're holding it out the side of your car and as you drive along, you pour that cup of water out and what's gonna happen is it's gonna create a stream or a little cloud of mist that's then going to settle and drop onto the ground.

- So one of the advantages of having a simple system like this is when we're putting it together, it is, first of all, it's agnostic to who's looking at it.

No color coding or anything else.

It's just white and black stripes.

It's easy.

The other aspect that helps to do is because it's the same protocol that the Air Force has been teaching since the 1950s, we go to any one of these countries and tell 'em it's a container delivery system, they know what to do.

- Columbia.

Columbia calls us and says, "Can you get us Guardian Systems to South America "tomorrow by 9:00?

"We are on fire and we have no way to deal with it."

We said, "Well, we're up in California.

"That's not probably going to happen in time for your needs, "but your good neighbor Peru "has the product and they know how to use it."

And so in an incredible effort that they call brother countries working together, Columbia flies a C-130 and crew over to Peru.

Peru loads a bunch of the Guardian into the back of their C-130 collapsed, teaches them how to do it, how to use it, does a great big handshake, we're helping you out, Columbia flies back over having gotten the training from the folks we trained in Peru two, three years earlier, they set it up, they drop it on their wildfires, like, this is amazing.

- And the system is built on container delivery system protocols, which is the standard air delivery protocol for the Air Force.

It has been named containerized aerial firefighting, actually, by the Air Guard, US Air Guard came up with that acronym, and it enables, again, these aircraft to be able to fight fires at night because you can drop at a higher altitude from a generally level flight profile, so you can fly faster and higher and that gives you the night capability and taking back the night is the real opportunity here that we saw.

- Israel is obviously smaller than most countries.

It's certainly smaller than the US, it's smaller than California, and they live in an environment where there's lots of things that are getting set on fire.

They have to be able to deploy readily available resources and respond.

Just a few months ago they had an incident where nearly 50 to 70 different ignition points occurred at the same time in the wild landscape and they needed to be able to respond and deliver retardant materials to those ignition points quickly.

Because they have the Guardian System, their existing ready aircraft could be filled and loaded and deployed to those fires without any significant delay.

Because of that capability and because they could fight it every hour, day and night, they were able to extinguish all of those ignition points and the fires they started in less than two days.

- Well, with regard to the Creek Fire and the lightning strike on that tree and the giving back the night to the fire, that second evening I believe it was, I think we could have made a difference there.

Again, if you had five or six aircraft that could blanket an area, even if you had one or two aircraft, but that could blanket an area all night long, I think you would've changed the outcome.

- [Jeff] Five years after the Creek Fire, the question remains, what have we really learned?

Are the systems we rely on to manage our forests and fight wildfire too rooted in the mindset of that's how it's always been done?

In part two of "The Creek Fire: Five Years Later," we look beyond the damage and the response and take a deeper dive into the real solutions for forest management.

Because in California's Central Valley, the story doesn't end in the mountains, it flows downhill.

The health of our forests is directly tied to the water that sustains our farms, our communities and the food that feeds the nation.

Our forests and our fields are connected, by snowpack, by rivers and by a fragile balance that depends on how we manage the land above it all.

Protecting agriculture on The Valley floor begins with restoring resilience in the forests that tower above it.

That connection demands more than discussion, it demands action, because we cannot keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

There's a word for that and the stakes are far too high to live it.

- The challenge with resource management in general is, like, we can spend so much less money if we just focus on prevention and having people, you know, invested in doing the work 9:00 to 5:00 and, you know, managing our public areas, managing our private lands and investing resources in prevention, than the flip side of reacting in suppression, like, there's a lot of money in fire suppression and a lot in the reactionary.

I mean, I could get personal and say I think that's the way God created it.

You know?

We have to work together.

These challenges affect all of us and I think that was part of his design, that it forces us to work together 'cause no one person or even one group could solve these issues on their own and no one person can claim they have the solution.

I think it does take a lot of people, a lot of different minds, a lot of different skill sets for us to actively manage our resources and to do it well and I think that's just the challenge of being human and living on the Earth.

So, there you go.

(Kelly chuckling) - [Jeff] Production funding for "American Grown" provided by James G. Parker Insurance, protecting agribusiness in the valley for over 40 years.

Brandt Professional Agriculture, discovering, manufacturing and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley Ag connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, trusted by builders to wire thousands of Valley homes, now bringing that trust direct to you.

By Wawona Frozen Foods, fruit as it should be, family owned since 1963.

By Harris Farms, a legacy of growing.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms insight to make the best possible financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years, dedicated to supporting Valley agriculture and families that grow food for the nation.