having a conversation today about fires here in New Mexico where two days in August as we sit here in a very Punky Fire season so far Punky meaning the word fire has has a bit of a different connotation this uh season so far we're here with Patrick Lowman he is a reporter First Source New Mexico and propublica and his Publications have done a bit of reporting on the situation we wanted to catch up with you uh Patrick about the fire service and they confirmed that last month that the April 22 Sarah palato fire which we're all talking about now was initially a prescribed burn of course as we all know that but the confirm confirmation means that Three Fires in New Mexico when you step back from it were caused by prescribed Burns gone awry where are we now in the perception let's start with perception about these prescribed Burns and and the results and how we're how we're dealing with them at this point yeah well I'll tell you that I've been spending all year focused on the aftermath of the Hermits Peak CAF Canyon fire which was a collision of two prescribed Burns um one of them was a pile burn like the Sarah palato fire and nothing was a broadcast burn basically meaning um the a crew of Hot Shots go out and like light areas around where they want to treat the forest um and you know since then um people have been very wary every time they hear that a prescribed burn is going on um even though you know the forest service uh stresses that a very small number of them ever escape and become declared wildfires uh you know I can you can understand why a lot of people have a form of PTSD about you know the the forest service driving up the back County Road to light a fire or to light a pile on fire so um you know we know that um the state has tried its best to uh prevent prescribed Burns in um in New Mexico at least During certain times of the of the year uh despite that the forest service says it's not really held to state law on that front so they've continued prescribed burning um throughout throughout the state this summer interesting point there we'll touch on that in a second about what they are obligated or not to do um we don't want to get ahead of folks certainly um could you just very quickly describe what is a prescribed burn but even more importantly than that Patrick what are these Mounds that seem to just burn away for like a year before they decide to become a big problem what is all that for folks that don't know what these things are yeah um well generally the way that this begins is that uh an area a large area is uh approved through an environmental analysis for a number of treatments uh that can include spinning um uh certain mitigation measures and also burning as a tool to try to create healthy forests and return fire to the landscape you know a lot of forests across the West including in New Mexico are very dense and overgrown um where uh you know uh the natural um the natural Forest would have you know a certain 25 eat trees per acre or something like that now it's 100 um or more uh they're trying to you know thin these forests to make fire a more healthy part of the landscape and not allow for really high intensity burns with crowning that you know destroy and are completely unpredictable so that's sort of the the goal of them they have a couple of ways to do that one is a broadcast burn which is um when it's a crew of firefighters and they have an established area where they would like to burn um and they use drones or um or uh you know kind of flame like putting dropping flame is what they call it like little um flamethrowers um and uh and then there's a pile burn uh which has resulted in two escaped wildfires in New Mexico that we know of this year uh basically the forest service will use a variety of thinning measures to take down ladder fuels or other material and they mask them into these piles and then they burn those piles um unfortunately what has happened in two instances is that uh Embers will embed deep within these piles and then despite you know snowfall or months of time passing they will stay smoldering until um in like this year for example on April 22nd it was a very uh intense wind event that just caused a lot of chaos for uh about 20 fires burning in the state at a single time in uh in this last year um and that included uh a single Ember you know smoldering in a pile uh that had that had been amassed and burned on uh in January of last year so it had smoldered for four months this is the CAF Canyon fire um one thing that I've heard in talking to some experts on Wildland firefighting lately is that um normal practice for these pile Burns would be they would be amassed by hand so you would clear all this material and then you would you know have the crews like with their own hands piling them up into small piles and lighting them um and that had a couple of benefits one it took more work more resources more people uh which is a challenge facing the forest service at the moment but uh smaller piles uh there's tends to be less risk of this happening than what's happening now which are these mechanized power Burns where they're using bulldozers or other heavy equipment to pile them all into one big pile the piles are bigger and there's also dirt in the pile which allows the Embers to kind of embed more deeply and be harder to to monitor um uh so that's sort of what I have read in the Sarah palato fire um had occurred um and that's something that I think is an interesting new phenomenon that might be explaining why some of these um pile burns are are left to smolder that's fascinating I actually had not heard that level of detail when it concerns dirt in the second you mentioned that it was like of course holy smokes this is interesting which begs another question of course and I'm sure you've heard about this a lot Patrick is folks have a lot of confusion about why can't you just wet these things down just soak the mess out of them and just be done with it why is the forest service even a lot are there any new protocols that have come to the surface uh from them that you've been able to report on on how to deal with these piles so they don't flare up again yeah I think that that is a very key point about the ongoing conversation that's happening especially in light of the Hermits P cath Canyon fire about prescribed Burns so as we know the pile burn the cat Canyon fire and the broadcaster and the Hermits Peak fire merged became the biggest fire in State history there is now you know a this caused a cascading number of events that has decimated um uh the forest and devastated lives in Northern New Mexico after this fire occurred the forest service did a 90-day review and paused all prescribed Burns across the country to figure out what went wrong the vast majority of that review focused on the broadcast burn the Hermits Peak fire you know so we know a huge amount of detail about where the crew was briefed the day of the hermit's Peak fire when they walked up hermit's Peak from the El por veneer campground to light this fire and and exactly what happened in a moment by moment you know kind of like timeline of events and a lot of the recommendations came out about how to prevent these types of broadcast burns from escaping there was very little time and effort spent on the pile burn which was the cast Canyon burned um and so I think that there there needs to be a renewed level of scrutiny um from the forest service um and Society generally on how many of these power burns are sitting out potentially smoldering right now um and what's going to be done to make sure that they are monitored more consistently and may be done in a way that mitigates the risk against these types of things flaring up in months or years later after their ignite I have an ignorant question I apologize for this but does the public have access to any GPS coordinates or any other coordinates about where these piles are or is it just that forest service that knows where they are physically yeah there is some review there's some pre-notice on nmfire.com nmfighterinfo.com where they'll tell you that we're about to do broadcast burn in this general area if you have a bit of sophistication with um infrared data there's a few uh sites where you can look to see where there's like um detected hot you know like hot spots um you might be able to find it there um when it came to the calf cannon fire when we were reporting on this um back in April of last year uh we were able to find uh dispatch records that showed um someone called the Santa Fe interagency Dispatch Center uh after the fire and wondered if this if the fire um that he saw was actually the pile burn from January you know so we can see some of the the communications like you know some of the dispatch records some of this data coming forward um but generally speaking you know the the forest service is not very transparent it doesn't have much in the way of public review or public input before they like these fires uh they're kind of going off of a broad um uh environmental assessment that can be uh completed or or prescribed burn plan that can be completed four or five years in advance of actually lighting the fire so um I think that it's kind of a trade-off that the forest service will tell you you know if we allow these things to go to public comment or to have this a full airing of this that inhibits our ability in a short window during the year for us to light this fire and so we're going to be doing less of what we believe and most people believe is a vital fire forest health tool um but at the meantime you know a lot of people do feel like this is all just going on without any of their input and there's not much information available also the very key um part of this which we know which was absolutely true during Sarah palato fire is it takes a very long time for the the forest service to release information about the causes of fires there's a number of fires across New Mexico and across the West that you know are still under investigation technically um and um you know this was true for the the CAF Canyon fire um you know the forest Service uh took weeks to to own up to the fact that they had started the fire in the meantime there were a lot of like rumors circulating conspiracies about uh what could have happened what what couldn't have happened and as we know what the serial pilotifier it took uh more than a year for the for the forest service finally to admit the fact that they started it um there are some there are some um impacts that I can talk about sure that's that's amazing let's talk about one of them um interesting in Source New Mexico you guys reported how FEMA has paid less than one percent of the three billion Congress allocated which had a lot of push of course from our local delegation as you well know that was for victims of the hermit's peak half Canyon fire what's the deal on FEMA funds how are they allocated how why is it always there's a guaranteed follow-up headline just like this once they're allotted then six months later there's the guaranteed headline well the money's not really going out we're not really quite sure away why what's the hang up here when it comes to getting people whole after a fire like this right well it's a very unique situation uh that we're in with the Hermits peak of Canyon fire and that FEMA has only twice in its history made an effort to actually fully compensate victims of a wildfire the reason that they're doing that of course is because the federal government started it they're liable so now they're in this position of administering a four billion dollar fund trying to actually pay people the replacement value of their home and pay local governments for all of the revenues that they lost and like help people like really rebuild to their pre-fighter uh lifestyle and and return to the land that they've cultivated for hundreds of years in some instances um that's a big thing to do and FEMA's not very used to doing it um they uh are they had to kind of assemble an office in 45 days they have to issue rules and guidelines they have to staff up I mean these are all the defenses that the FEMA is offering as to why it's taking so long um but you know for a lot of people uh in the burn scar um they uh it's been 14 months since this fire started and they've yet to receive a dime in some cases um or they've gone through a million layers of bureaucracy trying to get this and that done or they've been denied for some unclear reason and then have to appeal um and you know that's just creating a lot of challenges for people and it's taking a really long time uh by any income that's a fascinating point because money needs to be part of this another question here um you know I I just there's something about what we've got going on here just again it just still boggles the mind when you think about it from a regular Citizen's point of view like like I just why whose feet does this solely lay on is it the forest service does the state have some culpability there's a lot of struggle out there trying to tie this all together in one's mind as a citizen what's your sense of that yeah I mean these are these are absolutely um Federal wildfires ignited by them um so so I think you can't look too much far beyond uh the forest service and some of these agencies that are doing this often without much communication with State local officials or even right members around them um I I think I you know the the forest service has a statistic uh that 99.89 of prescribed burns are are extinguished and do what they need to do and I think that's worth keeping in mind but that's hard to tell members of The Hermit speak of cannon fire that it's a rare occurrence um and I think that you know what's occurring now with these uh you've got the Zero pilotifier The Hermit speak fire the calf cannon fire and of course all the way back to 2001 The Sarah Grande fire was a very devastating events that have occurred because of these and you can't um and you know the forest service needs to uh reassure the public that it won't happen again the the other fact that's kind of lurking Above This is as we know that our forests are at higher risk due to climate change the demonstration is intending to greatly increase across the West the number of fire uh forests that are treated with some of these methods including prescribed Burns potentially even increasing the number of Acres treated with prescribed Burns four times um over the next 10 years so um it's it's very possible given how volatile and chaotic and how the models that the forest service uses to determine the safety of a prescribed burn are sort of being outpaced by the rate of climate change that this can happen again and it probably will happen again just given on the numbers so the way that the forest service tries to prepare to prevent these fires from escaping and the way the Federal Emergency Management agency or any other Federal agency charged with Disaster Response can handle trying to compensate people in the event you know these are all things that that that the forest service and federal government more broadly need to pay a lot of attention to specifically in New Mexico to see if we can make sure that this goes more smoothly the next time it happens because it will likely happen again you know let me go back to something real quick here Patrick we get a lot of feedback about the idea of ground cover you mentioned it earlier it's a problem we've got generations of it on the our forest floor overgrowth we haven't had the natural cycle of burns every 25 years or so and I get a lot of feedback saying look roughly goes like this why can't the state just pay people to do ground cover pick up and I'm always like do you realize how big our state is first of all second of all it's a great idea but do you have a thought on that that does come up in conversation we talk about ground cover but there's really not much to be able to be done with it outside of burning if I'm following that you're the train of thought correctly am I right on that you know I have to admit I don't have a ton of expertise on like these other alternative methods for fuels treatment um uh I think um certainly you know um all options should be on the table as far as the forest service is concerned especially the safer options especially in areas like New Mexico during the winter season you know it just seems um like the conditions on the ground should determine the option um and the models that the forest service is using to try to determine the risk and the likelihood of an escape should all factor that in um much more than they are doing so far Patrick I want to thank you very much it's been actually very enlightening it's Patrick Lowman of course from Source New Mexico and pro publica uh we haven't had quite The Ripping Fire season like we've had in a couple years before but it's on certainly and Patrick your information is a big help and Mike we're calling you at some point in the future if this thing this thing being forest fires decides to have another late summer spark as they say we'd love to hear from you as well yeah thanks for having me absolutely folks we'll see you on the Regular Show Friday and of course seven o'clock Channel 5.1 and Sunday mornings as well as 7am on channel 5.1 as well until then see you next time