- Good evening.

I'm Jonica Bushman, President of San Joaquin Valley Town Hall, welcoming you to our program on the Era of Mega Fires.

Town Hall is a non profit, all volunteer organization that has brought nationally and internationally known speakers to the Valley for 84 years.

The pandemic precluded our hearing Dr. Hessburgh at the Sirhan So we're happy to partner with Valley Public Television to bring his message to the entire community.

Our program is made possible by the generosity of our sponsors, Gill and Coleen Wood, Shirley Bruegeman, Physician's Hearing Services and Valley PBS.

Thank you, and enjoy the show.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, my name is Brandon Collins.

I'm a Fire Scientist with both the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station and UC Berkeley.

Welcome to tonight's conversation on mega fires.

I'd Like to thank the San Joaquin Valley town hall for bringing this topic to the table for discussion as well as Valley PBS for their support.

And we are teaming up with the Town Hall and providing this content to you today.

This time I'd like to welcome our panel that'll be engaging in tonight's discussion.

First, we have a Retired Chief from Cal Fire, Ken Pimlott.

Second, we have Jim McDougal, He's an Assistant Chief for Cal Fires, Fresno Kings Unit, Assistant Fire Chief, that is.

Then we have Tom Jordan, he's a Senior Policy Advisor with the Valley Air District, and then lastly, our keynote speaker this evening is Dr. Paul Hessburgh, he's a Research Ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Wenatchee, Washington, that's with the US Forest Service.

Then he's also a Professor at the University of Washington.

So I'd like to dive right into my first question and this stems right from some of the content in the film.

And that is with regard to the feasibility of using fire both in the case of prescribed fire and in managed wildfire, to treat enough acres at a scale that will meaningfully impact large wildfire occurrence.

So my first question is directed towards Ken and it's really from a policy standpoint, do we have the will from the side of our lawmakers to actually uphold a policy that would significantly expand fire on the ground?

- Thanks, Brendan, it's a very good question.

And the reality of it, I think based on what we're seeing in fire activity, it's becoming more and more of an issue and people are recognizing it more.

I think the greatest single challenge from a policy perspective is socialization of it, with the general public.

People are afraid of smoke, they're concerned about smoke, they're afraid of fire.

We obviously had a very strong initial attack suppression strategy to protect the public.

And so now we've got to find ways to work through that, to help folks understand that there is good fire.

And so it's gonna take a significant amount of work, both from communicating with our public, our population, as well as working with our policymakers to provide the support and also mitigate some of the litigation that potentially comes with using both natural and prescribed fire.

- Thanks Ken, Jim, would you mind commenting on that?

I mean, as it sort of boots on the ground type of person, I mean do you feel that, that you have the support from the policy side of above and also, do you have what you need at the unit level to actually do some of the work we're asking?

- Yeah, I do from agency we're very well supported with that over the last five years, we've really increased the tools we have to do more prescribed fire.

That being the fuels crew and equipment that has come to the units.

It's been very, very helpful.

And in Fresno we have been getting more prescribed fire on the ground.

It seems like fire season gets in our way occasionally, we had a really good plan to do about 800 acres of prescribed fire in the Shaver Lake area this fall.

But then we had the Creek fire, so that got pushed back but it is our goal to continue to do prescribed fire in the Shaver Lake area and the Timber.

We have a great partnership with Southern California Edison on their forest.

And so we continue to plan that and we're in the in the planning phases this year for those, and here locally, we have very much support from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District.

We've worked with them over the years and finding those burn windows to conduct prescribed fire.

So it's very beneficial here, and there's a lot of support here to get that done.

- That's good to hear now, Tom, in the film itself, error is sort of listed as one of the main things inhibiting more prescribed fire, but I've heard from my own conversations, folks are very progressive in some of the Air Districts.

And I'd just be curious to hear some of what you've seen at least change maybe in the last few years with regard to the tolerance of prescribed fire smoke or even managed wild fire.

- Yeah, so the San Joaquin Valley is about a 26,000 square mile bowl and smoke tends to congregate here.

So right now you're breathing air that's cleaner than any time during your lifetime because of huge investments from industry and others to clean up processes here in the Valley, but that can all be overwhelmed by one wildfire.

And so we've really looked at the situation and we would much prefer a controlled burn that puts out some smoke with the right weather conditions than to be overwhelmed by what we've seen over the past few years with huge wildfires, and weeks upon weeks of air quality that's worse than we've seen in generations.

So we work with the land managers, We look for those burn windows to make sure they can accomplish their goals without having a big impact on the population of the Valley.

- Very good, thanks for that.

Paul, I had a question for you now, just kind of, I guess it's sort of in that feasibility mindset but it's also really about capacity of our workforce and also the leadership that we have, and maybe I'm thinking more particularly with Forest Service, is there that leadership and capacity to do the work that we know needs to happen.

- Over the last several decades of my career with the Forest Service, I've watched the numbers of professionals go from 40,000 to around 27, 28,000.

And so I think we have fewer boots on the ground and we really need quite a few more.

And in terms of the financial capacity, as you well know over the last 25, 26 years, the fraction of the federal budget that went to preparedness and suppression has gone from about 17% to 55 or 60%, and so while budgets have remained flat or slightly increasing so much more is going to the suppression side of the problem, and I think the tea leaves are telling us that very significant investments on the proaction side are needed at this time.

So I think that there's leadership to go forward and do the work, but there's also very significant investment required and minds are not all in agreement about what the level of that investment might be and where it ought to go.

- Yeah that's very true.

So Paul, I have you on, and what about this idea, the Creek fires obviously been spotlighted, we've already talked about it just briefly, and the Creek fire is just a culmination of what we've been seeing elsewhere in many of the forest throughout California, and on this issue of capacity, we find that these forests that have experienced big fires ended up going into a cycle of what we call chasing the black.

Essentially all they're doing with their limited resources is going and trying to rehab and restore areas that have been affected by fires or even tree mortality.

And as a result are not getting ahead and getting into the quote unquote, green ahead at the next fire.

How do you think, how do we break that cycle?

- I think it's really important to get out ahead rather than chase the black.

And I think that's a big part of your question, provides the answer.

And that requires very significant allocation of first and power and resources to be able to go into areas and treat them to avoid the kinds of wildfire influences that we're having.

If you stop and think about it, about two or 3% of the fires that escape initial attack are managing our landscape and geographically that means that the proactive is being outstripped from three times to almost 10 times.

So wildfires are managing the Western landscape and that's one of the reasons why folks are looking at the black as where to do work.

But the fact of the matter is there are tens of millions of acres that need work and we have the opportunity and the tools.

We have time tested tools to do that work.

And that should clearly be the focus.

We've recently completed a grant, a new fire grant with a number of partner laboratories.

And what we found out, we're basically saying what was the good work of wildfire as a consequence of studying past wildfires?

And what we found out across the fires we studied is that wildfire is a really blunt tool.

Wildfires are not returning the landscape to conditions that we would favor.

And so we have an opportunity to actually do that, to create transitions, adapt conditions so that when the wildfires do come, we get better work from them.

- Okay and if I may, can I pivot that question as well, to Jim and to Ken?

Have you guys seen that in your experience, may be Ken, under your leadership, you've seen a number of large fire incidents.

Have you seen some of your managers caught in sort of that cycle of chasing black, as opposed to getting ahead of the next wildfire?

- Yeah, absolutely Brandon as these fires continue to increase in scale you know, we continued, no matter how much we're investing and Cal Fire has really turned towards an organization to try to invest more on the front side in fire prevention and fuels management.

But just last year alone, we broke records 4 million acres burned in the state.

So no matter how much we're trying to invest up front in the resources, they're all being committed to the firefight as whole communities are being impacted.

So the challenge is no matter how much we're putting out there to try to invest, it's really truly being sucked up into this wicked fire problem as we've talked about.

And so that continues to be the challenge as to how do we identify resources that are committed to this effort so that we truly can get ahead if it.

- When I'm mentioning the black, for viewers it's really just, we're talking about chasing of wildfire that's already happened or in the case of the Southern Sierra, we could be chasing the quote unquote brown, right for all the dead trees.

And again, not getting ahead of the next wildfire, but Jim what has your experience been in that regard?

Are you seeing sort of a competition of your own resources to go into one versus the other?

- Yeah, here in Fresno, about five years ago there's no question we chased the brown, we chased the red and we chased into the gray, but what we're really doing is building a network of fuel breaks around communities.

We're taking that network of fuel breaks and then applying prescribed fire against that on larger landscapes.

For example, at California Edison, we built fuel breaks around the community of Shaver, we're at the same time doing prescribed fire on the Edison land, expanding the treatment of those fuel breaks.

So the goal is to build these fuel breaks around communities and then push that out across the larger landscape using prescribed fire because now you have your communities hardened, and that's the focus we really had.

And so, yeah, we had the resources to do that through a lot of efforts using local cooperators and getting those key landowners to participate and educate those folks on not only the good that is gonna come of this on their land, but the good of the community, right?

'Cause people are letting you work on their land, and so you wanna make sure they're getting their benefit and what they expect.

And the other important part of that though, is how it affects the community of the whole.

So it does take an entire community whether it's them giving you the permission to work on the land or working with your fire safe councils to get that work done, 'cause it takes an army.

- Just so I'm clear, the viewers are clear when you're talking about chasing the red and the brown and the gray.

Those are the phases we often use to describe tree mortality at large scales, the red phase being when the needles just turn reddish brown trees just been killed, brown being some time thereafter for a couple of years and the gray being, when all you have are just the standing dead trees with a few branches.

- That's very true, that's exactly right, yep.

- Okay I wanna go into a slightly longer winded question but please bear with me, it will be directed to all of you, but immediately I'd like to go direct this towards Tom.

So, in the film, Dave Peterson spoke about this issue of a fire debt and there was also a seminal research paper by Jennifer Marlon and colleagues in 2012 that talked about a similar thing called The Fire Deficit.

And essentially what they were arguing in that paper was that for thousands of years fire had sort of tracked climate, right?

In drier periods you had more fire and wetter periods you had less.

But for the last hundred years or about 125 years, we've deported where temperature's gone up and fire has gone drastically down.

And so they described that as this deficit,, right?

We're in a massive deficit, we should be burning a heck of a lot more considering how the previous few thousand years we'd been tracking climate and we now we're not tracking.

So, going back to 2020, that was the first year that California had burned at a level of consistent with sort of pre Euro-American estimates.

There was a paper by Scott Stevenson and folks where they estimated prehistoric burning, they called it, And we finally got to that level, right?

But that was, if you think about it in that way we know 2020 was a very exceptional year for at least what we're based on.

But if you consider that the historical context of how much fire was on the landscape here, it seems to fit right in there.

So my question to you, Tom and sorry this is a super long way to it.

Is can we tolerate the additional fire, the elective fire being prescribed fire, maybe manage wildfire, given the background of this really elevated fire that we had in 2020 if that is the new normal?

- I think we can, I think the prescribed fires are done typically when meteorological conditions are appropriate and you aren't getting as much drainage into communities.

We work very closely, as I mentioned with the land managers, to make sure that we're giving them appropriate windows, when they can burn and that smoke's going to dissipate or maybe if they aren't near community in the more remote areas where we might be able to open up even more windows when it's further away from people.

And I think the unfortunate thing about the last, well the fortunate thing about the unfortunate events of the last few years, is this used to be thought of as a rural issue, what's happened the last few years is urban California has experienced this, and the way they experienced wildfires is this impact weeks upon weeks of smoke in their neighborhood, canceled events.

And so I think the public has come to realize we need to do something different.

And I think with continued education, they'll realize that maybe some minor smoke impacts from time to time is a much better situation than what we've dealt with in the last few years in particular.

- Is that a message that you can convey to people that hey that level seemed out of control last year but actually that might be quite normal.

And kind of maybe, is that a message that people are receiving?

Are they just thinking that it was some anomaly?

- Yeah I think some of it's an anomaly, I'll keep going back to the community at Shaver, Edison Company in California been doing prescribed fire they're in the U S Forest Service in that general area.

And those folks are very attuned to smoke, but after the Creek fire, they were done with smoke.

So I think we do have a long ways to go with education.

That was a tremendous amount of smoke to set out in the Valley throughout this summer.

And it's way different than we've seen in the past.

You know, we've had some pretty smoky times but this was longer and probably heavier smoke than they've had.

So it's gonna take a lot of education from all agencies and groups working together, to get that message out there, what that might look like.

- Given that there isn't some level of smoke at which we're not probably gonna just keep pushing on the Valley.

What other opportunities are there for fuels management and in your neck of the woods, Jim?

- Sure, so there's still a fairly strong logging industry here in the Central Sierras.

There is only two or three saw mills, two saw mills that really do take the material, but the loggers are here.

And the salvage from the Creek fire has been ongoing even while the incident was still getting mopped up.

And those folks are already logging again this year.

So we do need to increase the capacity of our saw mills locally or just the utilization of the material, whatever that is.

There's a lot of new technologies out there but the utilization of what I call the renewable forest, we need to find what those are.

'Cause it's gonna take both mechanical treatments and prescribed fire treatment.

Some of the forest is so dense, especially with the mortality that we need to do some type of mechanical thinning, before a prescribed fire.

And again, if we get some of that fuel off the landscape as a resource, then that does decrease the amount of smoke you put in the air while you're doing the prescribed fire too.

So there's some benefit to both sides but we definitely need mechanical treatments to work right along with the prescribed fire.

- But what are some of the policy, what policies are being considered to increase capacity for mechanical removals of even small damaged trees or non-commercial material at all?

- A number of areas that are being looked at, and that's certainly looking particularly around communities, can we increase our ability to utilize exemptions from the existing timber harvest plan?

Not in a way that degrades environmental quality but recognizes that there's a critical need for getting that material out from these communities, much of what Jim's talking about around Shaver, if there's a merchantable use for that material whether it be biomass, maybe in distributed biomass facilities or install logs or other materials chip material to put back on the ground, to have the infrastructure in place and to provide some environmental streamlining without degrading the process to get that done.

And so there's a number of legislation, pieces of legislation being looked at to work on that.

And it's really trying to find ways, and I believe it's in the governor's package, that's there right now with the legislature to fund is finding ways to help with the workforce and find opportunities to get people retrained in woodworking.

There is such a need to have a workforce that's qualified not just in burning, but to be able to go out and operate chainsaws and to understand what's needed to put these fuel breaks and to put fire back into a community and actually back into our more our forest areas that are again, as Jim talked about overstocked, and don't just necessarily need fire put in first, they need to have some other work done.

So there needs to be really a qualified robust workforce to help get that done - All along those lines, if we were to significantly advance the number of acres that we treat mechanically, do we see any sort of inherent conflict if this sort of fuels based approach versus the malware of ecological approach which some might argue it would require fire essentially, to do all the work.

The way I think about it in the Northwest here, for example, we see that no fire and no smoke options aren't on the table.

And so the question, as we say in the documentary is we get to choose how we get our fire and our smoke.

One of the things that we're doing across really large landscapes is basically preparing for the inevitable fires because we know, there are our acres burned, are going to continue to climb in the 21st.

And so how those landscapes will receive those fires is pretty important.

We also know that when we thin and burn the slash and burn the concentrations that the smoke traders are significantly different.

We can reduce it by half to 90% of the PM 2.5 emissions and the duration of those emissions.

So the sense that we have here is that we can treat large landscapes and get the work done and create a significant difference.

- How about the impacts to maybe some of our charismatic megafauna, right, in the Sierra, we tend to focus on the Pacific Fisher and the Southern tier and the California spotted owl throughout the Sierra.

As we constantly come up against those issues, when it comes to mechanical treatment do you think there's a conflict there?

- There's a conflict right now because the references that we use don't make any sense.

We share those conflicts further North as well, where we have late successional and old forest associated species, we consider the last hundred years of logging and what remains.

But the references we need to think about are under the active native fire regime.

Where did these complex forests exist on the landscape?

Where were the fire refuse yet?

Where were the old forest?

And when you roll the film and you allow forest to grow up for 125 years, you see an awful lot of the landscape that used to be open, become closed complex forest.

I think that we can remove the conflict by allowing those areas that naturally ought to be open canopy, fire, tolerant conditions, to reside juxtaposed to the late successional forest where they actually ought to reside, on the landscape.

And that means using sort of a topographic template approach to tailor treatments, to typography and to where you'd see the expected fire regime.

I think it's work we can really do.

- So it's not either, or right Paul, what you're saying, it'd be basically to achieve both objectives and you don't have to go to your camp is to argue, you know how we should go for it.

- Absolutely options abound for creating a good mix on the landscape and the reference matters.

- Good point, okay, I'd like to change gears just a moment and talk about something that's pretty darn important.

That's also been brought up in the film and this is the wild and urban interface.

And one of the things that can come up with with sort of loss of structures in the wild and urban interface, and I've seen it sometimes, honestly in some articles is the idea of blaming the victims.

Almost the fact that you are saying why did you build there?

You should have known, and hence, you know, perhaps it's your fault that you lost your structure.

I don't subscribe to that notion, of course, and I think, you know, homeowners do, they absolutely have a role in managing their fuels locally.

But what I would like to hear, and perhaps this is from Ken maybe first is what role does Call Fire have in helping the landowners or even homeowners manage their fuels, even locally.

For example they're not gonna do their own prescribed fire, They don't have the training.

They might not even have the permit to be allowed to do it.

Is there some kind of partnership that's going to bring some of those resources onto to private homeowner's lands to deal with that problem?

- There's 31 million acres of state responsibility area throughout California.

That's right where the urban interface and much of it resides.

And Daniel communities do have a responsibility, every homeowner has a responsibility to take care of his or her defensible space.

And all those things that are required in the public resources code, all geared toward combined will help protect whole communities.

But the problem is much bigger than these individual property owners.

And how we got here is how we got here.

It's not time to point back and blame but it's time to look forward and figure out how do we as a team, both Cal Fire all of the stakeholders, local government, our federal partners come together and find ways to empower landowners to get the work done, investing, using cap and trade funds and other funding sources to invest in projects with our local Fire Safe Councils where fuel breaks can be put in to protect, whole of community, helping with education, So that residents understand how to evacuate.

They understand what the fire risks are.

And then engaging in longterm maintenance.

It's one thing to talk about this once and go do work but we have to invest in this long-term for every acre we treat that's an acre now, that we have to maintain down the road.

And so it's really empowering our communities to understand this is what it means to live in California.

In the urban interface, we all have a responsibility to roll up our sleeves and invest and get it done.

- Good point, Jim, so came in a really good point in that the problem is much bigger than sort of what some people have called, the home ignition zone.

You know, just the 30 feet or a hundred feet around the home, which of course is important.

How do you sort of prioritize at the unit level?

The work that's either, might reduce exposure, although it's not maybe right directly in the wild and urban interface, how do you prioritize working right around someone's home versus further outward where the threat might come from?

- It's pretty dynamic the way we first evaluated it.

So we looked at things like fire history, where fire's been what's their return interval on the landscape.

And then where have fires not been?

We all know that eventually all these acres are gonna have some form fire in them.

So as we looked at communities and we looked at fire history and fire ignitions how often are we having fires in these areas and then looked at landscapes and the landscapes here are unique because our landscapes here are intermixed with private and federal lands.

And so how do we work with our cooperators the US Forest Service to strategically as a group look at where we put fuel breaks.

And we did that.

We put those fuel breaks on ridges or directly adjacent to communities.

And sometimes the size of the fuel break mattered depending on where we put those, depending on what the threat was.

And so we looked at expand and do as much as we could do with the dollars we had here in Fresno County we have a lot of partnerships with the Good Neighbor Authority with the US Forest Service.

And we have the plan that's strategic a plan that's amongst all the agencies.

And we work across those landscape based on priorities not based on whose land it is.

Because we're looking to protect the larger communities rather just maybe than a single watershed or a single resource.

So we looked at it very holistically very landscape-scale fuel reduction type work.

- Interesting, very good.

Okay I'd like to kind of wrap this up with a wishlist if you will.

And if I may, I would like to start with Tom could you give us one policy change that you'd like to see inactive that could actually start pushing us towards the goal of treating a heck of a lot more acres than we are right now?

- I think the positive thing I've seen is I think there's more agreement than I've seen in a long time over what needs to happen.

I think that the policies are starting to be put in place.

I think we need to get more towards the how do we actually accomplish that, as has been mentioned, there's a number of tools in the toolbox, were they are appropriate, how do we make sure they're adequately funded?

So I think we've made a lot of progress on the policy and on the funding side both at the state and federal level but we need to move on to how do we make it actually happen?

- Paul, could I direct it to you?

What's the one policy change that could really make a difference or is there one?

- There's a handful but just restricted to one, I'd love to see an equal to or greater investment on the proactive work side.

As the investment we put in on the suppression side.

- Good point, Ken.

- Putting our money where our mouth is, and make that investment upfront.

We say, we're going to, and then obviously priorities change.

We're making great strides in changing some of the laws and policy relative to use of fire.

We need to finish that out and then implement it on the ground and empower our leadership at the field level, the Jims and the forest managers, to be able to get that work done and then support them in that effort.

Even when it always work out the way we want it to.

- Excellent and Jim, give me a nugget here, we need something strong to go.

- There's something strong here, they're all right so as we continue out there doing work we gotta have the support.

A lot of these projects we put together with our federal counterparts are continually sued.

So the legality of them trying to get things done can stop a whole project across multiple landscapes, right?

So the policy changes that were talked about, we do need to invest more into the pre-fire work, the education to the public, being prepared and treating the forest, so when we have these mega fires, we don't lose a forest.

I think that's one thing we talk about.

And again, we need to do more, because we can treat some of that landscape.

It's not gonna be as devastating and we're gonna have more forest for the future.

So, I agree with all.

- Okay, well, thank you all for those responses.

Hopefully that's something we can work on with our legislators and our officials.

Now we'll wrap this discussion up on mega fires.

Thank you all of our panelists.

And I'd like to turn to Paul Hessburgh for any closing remarks.

- Thanks, Brandon, I wanna thank Ken and Jim and Tom for joining me in this discussion.

Brandon, thanks for leading us through some questions that tested our metal a little bit.

This mega fires issue is a big deal West wide.

And I think considering some of the ideas not only from the film, but also from this panel will allow us to be able to move forward.

I think one of the key results is that we need to have a fairly big footprint and we need it fairly fast.

And I'm optimistic that we can get there.

Thank you all for participating in this panel.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Come grow with us.