- It was shocking.

I think that's the way to describe it, it was shocking.

- It was scary, it was very scary.

(radio chatter) - The calamity that was to come was completely unforeseeable.

- It's very hard to figure out what you need to take with you when the helicopter flies over and announces, "Get out now."

- This megafire is very much related to climate change.

- I mean, it really was like Armageddon.

(tense music) - [Narrator] Bay Area Bountiful is about agriculture.

It's about feeding us.

It's about land and water.

It's about the health of our planet.

It's about stories that matter.

(upbeat music) Bay Area Bountiful.

Cultivate, Celebrate, Connect.

- [Narrator] Bay Area Bountiful is made possible in part by Rocky the Free Range Chicken, and Rosie the Original Organic Chicken, the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, Made Local Magazine and Sonoma County GO LOCAL, and through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] One of the few temperate rainforests on the planet, runs right through the Bay Area's Santa Cruz Mountains.

Often wrapped in chilly fog, coast redwoods thrive here.

But a freak summer electrical storm ignited a blaze among the trees that quickly grew into an unprecedented megafire.

What happened, and what can be learned from the CZU Lightning Complex fires?

(gentle music) (lightning crackling) - So typically when we have an event like this, the fires are very small because it usually has some type of associated rain with it.

This was unique in the fact that it had very little rain.

At early morning, numerous fires started both in Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties.

Cal Fire is still the Department of Forestry.

Our true name is the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

CZU is a short three letter identifier that identifies the San Mateo, Santa Cruz unit.

We started to dispatch resources to all these fires that we had.

A lot of these fires were in remote areas, so it made it very difficult to try to access these fires.

(wind whooshing) Moving into the next few days, resources were drawn down very quickly because we had over 500 fires throughout the state.

(plane engine roaring) - [Man] What the fuck?

As time progressed, we had a larger wind event that actually pushed the fires down from San Mateo, merged together and then accelerated into Santa Cruz County which caused a large growth of the fire, 43,000 acres, anywhere from 12 to 14 hours, we estimate that that fire burnt that 43,000 acres.

(helicopter engine roaring) - [Narrator] As the wind turned, firefighters watched in disbelief as the burn grew.

- A fire of the size that we had, 86,000 acres, at the end, we had a total of about 2,600 people.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] Mobilizing a response to the North, were the communities of Pescadero, San Gregorio, LA Honda and Loma Mar.

- Well, this fire, I think it really showed how incredibly valuable these local fighters are.

- These people take it upon themselves to help protect their community.

They know where the old logging trails are, if you need to cut off a burn that's accelerating.

- [Narrator] Kate and Jeff Haas, have revitalized the historic Loma Mar Store.

- We found that a lot of the teams were starting to congregate at the store.

And it was actually Kate that said, "Hey, let's show 'em how appreciative we are "and let's throw open the store, "and if they need something, let's give 'em coffee, "and ply them with whatever."

We created a base of operations.

- [Narrator] An outpouring of support, materialized as beloved local restaurants and stores donated food and supplies.

- A very lovely thing that happened out of Pescadero's Duarte's restaurant and the canteen at the gas station produced food and volunteers brought the food up here every night.

- The people that in La Honda were sending food.

- Yes.

- The people Woodside we're sending food, everybody just wanted to help.

- [Narrator] Despite its own reduced numbers, Cal Fire ordered local volunteer firefighters to stand down, a controversial decision.

Some residents dubbed renegades by authorities, chose to stay and take a stand on their own.

- Yeah, hard for me to talk about too, 'cause I was a Renegade.

So many people stayed to protect their homes and property and banded together as neighborhoods.

It's not a good idea to stay behind in a fire.

Many people did, and they were extremely lucky.

But we stayed because there were no firefighters present.

- Thank God for them, because honestly, we would have had a lot more devastation if it hadn't been for them.

- Heidi McRae had a stable of horses to evacuate from Bonny Doon.

(gravel crunching) - During the evacuation, we were surrounded by people fleeing.

I decided that we were getting out and we had orchestrated everything down to the point where we knew where each horse went in each trailer.

We got eight horses out, and I took one last look and I thought, I'm coming back to this place, you know, I will be back here.

And I didn't know, for 30 days.

(somber music) - I mean, we evacuated 77,000 plus people in a matter of three-and-a-half days.

- [Narrator] with offices and Pescadero and LA Honda, social services agency, Puente, is uniquely positioned to provide emergency assistance to the entire community.

- Puente has been working in this community for now more than 20 years.

We were contacted by San Mateo County to assist the opening of the evacuation center.

Puente means bridge, and it is our desire to be that bridge for people that have been here for many years and people that are recent arrivals.

In the Latinx community are mostly farm workers, so we assisted staff in the evacuation center itself, helping families registered to get a voucher so they could have a place to spend what we felt was a few nights that eventually became, you know, a couple of weeks, three weeks and for some people months.

And we translated the notifications that Cal Fire was sending out.

Normally, county and emergency responders will open a shelter, but because of the pandemic, that was not an option and that's why the members of our community ended up in hotel rooms.

There's some families that stay at hotels for a long, long time, because as renters, they didn't have any other place to go, or a second home to go to.

This particular group of immigrants have been here for a long time.

I know farm workers that have been doing that job for 20, 25 years.

We'll all eat the food that they help grow, and I think it's time for us to recognize more of the work that they do and how we are completely related to what they do for the health of everyone.

I think at the end, people were very joyous to come back to their community, as the evacuation orders were lifted.

(guitar strings strumming) - Eventually we had firefighters come up from Southern California and from other States too.

I remember looking out the window and a fire truck drove by and it said, "Montana."

(laughs) Yes, it was coming from Montana.

- All in all of the agencies worked very well together and protected the communities to the best of the ability that we had at the time, with the resources available to us.

- So unfortunately, there was one fatality that occurred as a result of the CZU August Lightning fire.

That fatality occurred in the community of Last Chance.

The members of that community were evacuating basically with the fire on their heels.

(somber music) - [Narrator] Now, after several months, the CZU Fire has finally ended, but recovery has just begun.

The decision to rebuild is not an easy one.

- I think there were 1,000 homes lost in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Those people are definitely suffering.

(somber music) - The not knowing if your house was...

Exists is really heart-wrenching.

And driving back in here was like driving through a war zone.

I'm just trying to hold back the tears, it was very emotional.

And just seeing the burned down site was really... You just don't know what you're gonna do.

- Fire took this entire neighborhood, I think 13 houses on this particular little road are lost.

(somber music) I felt a self-preservation that we needed to get out, that nothing inside that house was important as our own safety.

And Ron wasn't ready to go, and wasn't-- - I wasn't ready to go.

- And, you know, we tragically lost everything.

(somber music) A whole house full of beautiful art that Ron had made, that my mother had made, that my children had made.

(gentle music) - How the fire moved, it's just hard to imagine how it travels around.

- The box has broken pottery and we want to remember the beautiful things we lost by building a ceramic tile wall, (mumbles).

So then these generous neighbors say, "Anybody need a barbecue?"

I was like, "Yeah, we need a barbecue."

The fire is really what connected us intimately to our neighbors because we all been through a horrific experience together.

The weirdest thing is what survived, was wherever we had prayer flags.

We had prayer flags by this little hot tub that survived.

So, my neighbor and I are planning to make prayer flags and hang them everywhere.

We're gonna make our own prayer flags.

- For protection.

- Yeah.

- Then see, there are the prayer flags (chuckles).

It's taken six months since the fire to get our power pole put in and we only just got electricity yesterday (laughs).

The one thing that remains is my vegetable garden.

I'm so happy that that wasn't completely destroyed.

I just wanna be back here, it's like, you know-- - It's home.

- It's home, exactly.

(peaceful music) - [Narrator] San Vicente Redwoods is privately owned and managed, by an Alliance of Conservation Agencies.

- San Vicente Redwoods is managed by four land trusts and it takes all of us working together to make it work.

Before the fire, it was incredibly lush and just absolutely gorgeous to visit.

The intensity of the CZU fire was through a variety of factors.

It had been dry for a while, fire suppression, the history of fire suppression, just all the vegetation and the growth that let the fire get as hot as it did.

(gentle music) - My heart was with this property as it burned.

This fire was extreme, would call it catastrophic in nature in places, and there was a lot of mortality, but it hasn't destroyed the forest.

So far, I can hardly identify the little green nubs poking out of the black ash crust.

I think that that is the entire Californica.

But there will be a lot of plants that we haven't seen in quite some time.

Those seeds had been lying in the seed bank waiting for this trigger to germinate.

(gentle music) - There's a lot to learn.

Everything from the types of plants we might be seeing to learning more about how the forest will respond, that will inform our management and also hopefully help others.

- An important element to understand with fire in this state is that, it's not a matter of if the land will burn, it's when the land will burn and we have the option of choosing how it burns.

In light of the last 200 years of fire suppression, prescribed burning and fire are very critical for managing these lands.

But this isn't a new thing that has been discovered, it's merely to reinforce what is already known by a lot of these native groups who had been burning the land for thousands of years prior to Western settlement.

(tense music) - [Narrator] Amah Mutsun Chairman, Val Lopez, has overseen a return to traditional ways.

- Our ancestors didn't look at land ownership, there is no such thing as land ownership.

Creator owns the land, and still believe that.

However, we had the responsibility to restore and to take care of those lands.

And that's what our ancestors learned over those thousands and thousands of years about how to take care of the medicine plants, the food plants, the basketry plants, how take care of the wildlife, the bear, the deers, the rabbits, et cetera.

That's the knowledge that we working on restoring today.

The day that we burned at San Vicente, the PBS crew was doing a documentary and they said that they'd like to include our tribe.

And so we talked about that at tribal council and we said that we would allow it.

(gentle music) (twig tapping) We look at fire as being sacred, that's why it's so important to our ceremonies and to our prayer.

(gentle music) - The ability to steward with fire and have that connection to the landscape is something that is fundamentally at the core of what makes us indigenous people.

We have an inherent responsibility that's been handed down to us generation after generation to steward our lands, to have the responsibility to care for what we call our relations.

Those are the plants, those are the animals.

(fire crackling) - The reason California is so beautiful, the reason why we see it as a beautiful garden, is because indigenous peoples have been managing the land with their ecological values and their management systems, such as managing the land with fire.

(fire crackling) - But whenever the Spanish first came to California, they outlawed burning.

And then during the Mexican period, they outlawed burning, and of course now during the California American period, they outlawed burning.

And so because they stopped the burning, all those shrubs and trees encroached on the lands.

(gentle music) - The Amah Mutsun Land Trust and their stewardship Corps, they're doing something that's really powerful for themselves, for the landscape, and for the greater good of the State.

- [Narrator] Quiroste State Valley, sits just up the coast from San Vicente Redwoods.

- We've been working at Quiroste Valley for several years now, and what we're doing there is we're trying to restore the landscape that was there pre-contact.

Because it's significant, we work with State Parks to get it designated as a cultural preserve and as a cultural preserve, it allows our tribe to have much more voice in how that Valley isn't taken care of.

Prescribed fires are basically to reduce the fuels, to reduce the fire threats.

(gentle music) Stewards are certified firefighters, our stewards are all certified chainsaw operators.

While in the stewardship core, those are young adult members of our tribe.

- [Man] Our creator, thank you for another day of life, thank you for this opportunity with State Parks to burn again.

(gentle music) (fire crackling) (chainsaw motor whirring) - So we're trying to restore the Valley there to open it up.

You know, a lot of that work has been completed.

So whenever the CZE fires started, our people were actually working there in that Valley and they evacuated and the fire was right there.

The fire had a ring around Quiroste Valley, but it did not enter the valley because of the work of our stewards, it did not catch on fire.

And State Park see, you know, looks at that and say, "That's just evidence."

The work we're doing there is showing the path for how to reduce the fire threats in the future.

- It is so very important that we recognize fire is sacred.

Today, we've been brainwashed by Smokey the Bear, "Only you can prevent forest fires," and you have to be scared of fire.

No, you have to respect the relationship with fire.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Smokey's original message, known to generations of Americans by heart, "Only you can prevent forest fires," has been replaced with the more accurate, "Only you can prevent wildfires," to reflect the growing acceptance of helpful fire in forest management.

- [Man] I should light it now?

- I think it's yeah.

- Yeah?

- Yeah.

- [Narrator] Oh dear, someone is about to burn a pile of debris that's too tall, it can start a wildfire.

Wait, could it be?

Blimey it is.

- Oh, wait, it's Smokey.

- [Narrator] It's Smokey Bear.

What a legend.

- [Narrator] Though his message has evolved, Smokey Bear remains a staunch advocate for fire safety.

- [Narrator] And how we removed some of the debris, to create as smaller, safer, burning pile.

- No need to make it big.

I appreciate it.

- [Narrator] And he's still keeping an eye on you.

- (laughs) He watchin' you.

- [Narrator] Smokey's done it again.

- Bye Smokey.

- [Smokey] Only you can prevent wildfires.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Of particular concern to Bay Area hikers and campers during the fire, was the status of Big Basin State Park, a treasured getaway for many.

- Sempervirens Fund is California's oldest land trust and we also are credited with founding Big Basin Redwood State Park.

It contains the largest contiguous grove of old growth redwoods left in the entire world.

And it is a legacy of the first Redwood conservation movement in California.

And it gets about a million visitors per year.

(gentle music) I was incredibly anxious to get out to see Big Basin.

After the fire, it looked so different from anything I remember.

There was so much light coming in because there was an absence of canopy.

Burned really hot in here, a lot of light coming through.

The fire had gotten so hot in certain places that you just had sun streaming down to the forest floor.

It was a really shocking experience, but in a way, it put me at ease because I was able to see the trees up close especially the old growth redwoods and know that they were going to survive and not succumb to this fire.

(leaves rustling) - The entire park has been shut down, but it will reopen again and it will be rebuilt.

(gentle music) - It's hard not to feel a sense of loss after a megafire like this.

The coast redwood has some pretty incredible adaptations that make it very fire resistant and resilient in the face of wildfire.

It has incredibly thick bark, it also does not contain any pitch, or resin, which is a highly flammable substance in other tree species.

In addition, it has the ability to resprout and regenerate, so not only can it sprout from the base, which is called basal sprouting, but it can grow a whole new canopy structure, and that's called epicormic sprouting, which is a very unique quality among conifers.

And it's still got green growth on the top and new growth coming out.

So it's gonna do okay.

(gentle music) Their trunks show evidence of having burned multiple times over in the past.

So, they've been through this before, they can get through this event.

(leaves rustling) The general consensus among researchers and redwood ecologists is that about 85 to 90% of redwoods even in a catastrophic fire, will survive that fire and continue to grow and thrive.

And I fully expect a majority of the redwoods in Big Basin and to recover.

While redwood is incredibly resilient to fire, a lot of species that co-occur with it in the Santa Cruz Mountains aren't as fire resilient.

This is tanoak, madrone, Douglas fir, they do not do well in fire and they cannot regenerate their canopies in the way that redwoods can.

(gentle music) Redwoods have been around for millions of years, so they've seen a lot of change and they've adopted too huge climactic changes.

What we're finding so far with redwoods and climate change today, they're faring well.

Overall, the species, it will persist.

(tense music) This megafire is very much related to climate change and I think what's worrying, is not knowing how frequent these kinds of fires are going to be in the future.

- We're seeing a change in our environment here locally, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where our fuels are much drier.

Fuel moistures are hitting critical much sooner.

We're hitting those in July and August now, so several months in advance of when we consider our peak burn season here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It's a true testament that there is something changing in our environment.

Our fire season could be very extreme again because these fuels just are not getting the supplemental water that they need to become more fire resistant.

(leaves rustling) (gentle music) - This event did open a lot of resident's eyes.

Just a small silver lining, if you will, is that people are starting to take their fuel reduction a little bit more seriously.

And that's one thing that everybody needs to take part in.

They need to do their part to make sure that their home has defensible space.

It's nice to see that resiliency and folks helping each other out and rebuilding and moving forward.

(gentle music) - Busy, has been an understatement in our world lately, post-fire.

A lot of tank replacement, a lot of well fixing.

You know, we basically fought for about six days.

(leaves rustling) It only brought our community tighter.

It's fun to be part of, especially considering it's a community that I was born and raised in.

You know, you kind of take that to a little bit of pride and really kind of repeat it.

(saw motor whining) There's a lot of people, they just wanna be home.

Trying to facilitate that as best we can.

(gentle music) - I'm really excited for the next 100 years on this property.

(metal thumping) Because I think it's in good hands and it has a good vision.

(gentle music) I couldn't think of a better thing to be doing.

(gentle music) (guitar strings strumming) (gentle music)