Just one thing:
This week we’ve got a Butte County special edition, with some of the news updates you have come to expect sprinkled in for good measure. There were enough podcast links this month that I created a Spotify playlist that includes episodes of shows featuring Butte County characters from the tour I went on with the Butte County Fire Safe Council (BCFSC). Find the whole playlist here and watch the video of my tour above.
This week’s news:
Notes from the Fire Tower | Butte County, California
🔥 Fire, Generally | Prescribed burns, State Farm, building back better in Colorado, dementia and community-preparedness
🌎 Climate | Boreal forest floor and carbon, burning faster than we can regrow, fine-tuning infrared emissions readings and the end of FEMA(?)
🚒 Firefighting | One wildfire service, the four lies of firefighting and good, controlled fires, tragedy in Idaho, a fireworks warehouse explodes, a child causes a grass fire with fireworks and salmon habitat threatened by retardant
🚁 Firetech | Appearances on The Hill, FireSat first flight, Pano AI raises $44 million, Lockheed is bullish on wildfire technology, Tahoe is getting wildfire ready
What’s Burning? | Canada, Europe, Turkey, Syria, Alaska, California and Oregon
Notes from the Fire Tower Field: Butte County, California
Butte County is a fiery place—four of the most destructive wildfires in California history were either started or burned into this land. This short list of historic and devastating fires here have all occurred just in the last seven years. Half of their land has burned in the last decade. Butte County is a place my sister served as a wildland firefighter, so I have both a special place in my heart for the community and the terrain, and I’ve also paid a little more attention to their fire landscape over the years.
Recently, I was invited out into the field with the Butte County Fire Safe Council to put eyes on the land that I’ve read so much about. Encouragingly, the work of the council has had measurable results on wildfire outcomes. During last year’s Park Fire a little island of green remained amidst a sea of burnt forest, protecting over 700 acres and saving much of the town of Cohasset. The successes of the agencies working on wildfir resilience in Butte County are measured in lives, homes, buildings and ecosystems that remained intact, and it is in stark contrast to the realities in the same county after the 2018 Camp Fire, which remains the deadliest fire in our state’s history, taking 85 lives and destroying 18,804 structures—effectively leveling the entire town.
Just as fires start with a single spark, the work of the council occurs at a deliberate and steady pace as they connect one at a time with landowners to perform the mitigation work that will allow coexistence of humans in a fire-adapted environment. Their work is funded by grants as well as private donations, and their approach is strategic, as they consider where their investment of time, muscle and experience will best pay dividends when fire approaches.
The Council attends to their mission with huge heart, goodwill and urgency. These are great people and I was lucky to spend the time with them. Seeing more than their fair share of wildfire has given them expertise in everything from effective wildfire mitigation to recovery—and they share their hard-earned knowledge with generosity. “We can live with fire,” they each tell me in their own way. “We just need to take it one step at a time.”
💚This video perfectly highlights the effectiveness of the work the council does—you can clearly see the “Green Island” around the town of Cohasset after the Park Fire burned through last year. This accompanying article goes into great detail about mitigation efforts and their results.
🌲Dr. Don Hankins, who we visited on our Butte County Tour appeared on Radio Pacific (minute 7) “Fire does have a place within the landscape, and exclusion is really the problem.”
🤓Remember when we spent all that time nerding out with Zeke Lunder from The Lookout on fire behaviour, history and methodology? Zeke documented one of the same sites I toured during a broadcast burn in the center of Magalia.
🔥I’ve long meant to deep dive into the Life with Fire podcast by Amanda Monthei—and this episode features Taylor Nilsson, the Executive Director of BCFSC, one of the tour guides on my trip to Butte County.
🐐For the goat lovers out there (hi!!!) a lesser-known fire last year showed the very clear benefit grazing provides to safeguard land during fire events. If you watched my video above this is another chance to catch BCFSC’s Sarah Jo doing her thing.
The BCFSC also has this detailed info-rich storymap—I especially recommend the section on wildfire history, where you can see the progression of fires burning through the county since 1994. If you are in a recovery stage you may also appreciate the tab labeled After A Wildfire.
Fire, Generally
Prescribed burns, State Farm, building back better in Colorado, dementia and community-preparedness
The age-old prescribed burn story in the LA Times, with great photos. “If you’re wondering where fire will go and how fast it will move, think of water,” [Len Nielson, chief of prescribed burns for the CAL FIRE] said. Water barely moves on flat ground, but it picks up speed when it goes downhill. If it gets into a steep section, where the walls close in like a funnel, it becomes a waterfall. “Fire does the same thing, but it’s a gas, so it goes the opposite direction.”
State Farm is facing criticism for its handling of claims after the LA fires. “‘Throughout this entire process State Farm has been like a black hole where hope and fairness go to die,’ one testimonial said.”
A home hardening story from Colorado, with this nice quote from researcher Jennifer Balch, who led the fast fires study. “There’s no future I see that doesn’t have fire in it,” Balch said. “ What we really need to be thinking about is how we build our homes and how we build our communities to make sure that they're resistant to fire.”
Need a reminder to wear a mask when it’s smoky? This article will help—wildfire-related air pollution exposure = heightened dementia risk.
Cal Matters covered long-delayed discussions about community preparedness in the state of California, with harsh consequences for the most vulnerable.
“Fires are going to continue to blaze, and we need to be making sure that we’re not letting people die when we could have protected them through public policy and through processes,” [State Assemblymember Tom Lackey] told CalMatters. “We need to make sure that we’re having these discussions so that we can continue to protect our people.”
Climate
Boreal forest floor, burning faster than we can regrow, fine-tuning infrared emissions readings and the end of FEMA(?)
Canada’s forests may be burning faster than they can regrow, but that may be historically appropriate for some areas that were formerly more grassland before they became overgrown due to lack of regular fire intervals.
Researchers are trying to figure out what is in the smoke from WUI fires using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy… in other words, they are setting out to learn what’s in the emissions of fires by how they appear on the infrared spectrum—something that would enable us to detect these complex emissions from afar (like, say, from a satellite…)
President Trump reportedly plans to wind FEMA down ‘after hurricane season’.
Anyone else following the boreal forest carbon emissions dilemma with me? It’s not the forest itself that poses the highest risk of releasing astronomical amounts of carbon—it’s the soil. The emissions belowground are severely underestimated in climate models, but!!! “actively combatting boreal fires could cost as little as 13 dollars per ton of CO2 emissions avoided—a cost on par with other carbon mitigation solutions like onshore wind or utility-scale solar.”
Firefighting
One wildfire service, the four lies of firefighting and good, controlled fires, tragedy in Idaho, a fireworks warehouse explodes, a child causes a grass fire with fireworks and salmon habitat threatened by retardant
Chief Dan Munsey appeared on The Hotshot Wakeup fresh from testifying in front of Congress in support of the bipartison Fix Our Forests Act. A great listen, and not only because he mentions Rain but also for his list of four lies we tell about wildfires. For his take on good fire vs suppression tune in around minute 32. “Good fires should be controlled. They should be planned.”
Tragedy in Idaho. Two firefighters were killed by a sniper when they responded to a grass fire. The assailant later appeared to have taken his own life, as well.
A sad tale of a fireworks warehouse on the first of July in a small town in Yolo County, California.
In Southern California a thirteen-year-old was arrested for setting off fireworks that started a fire that caused evacuations.
The new national mandate to suppress all wildfires impacted this salmon habitat in Northern California, according to Zeke at The Lookout.
One of the biggest and most uncertain things about wildfire at the moment is exactly who is going to be handling it. The Trump administration has signed a bill to consolidate federal fire departments—then gave a quite short timeline to make it happen, and zero budget. Not much out there on this. The Hotshot Wake Up has this. Megafire Action’s Eric Horne (their national policy strategist) had this and this to say ahead of the official signing of the bill, including what seems to be a pretty nice summary of just about everyone’s main takeaway for now: “structural reform on this scale comes with real risks and significant opportunities.” Anthony Schultz, the Director of Wildland Fire Solutions at ESRI (mapping company), also had a summarized take that I’ve been using as my barometer as we wait for more to shake out as a result of this big shift.
The cuts to the federal agencies that handle firefighting is examined a bit in this NYT story about what kind of fire season we can expect in California.
“Tim Chavez, an assistant chief with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, said that even before this year’s sweeping changes, part of President Trump’s efforts to remake the government work force, some federal agencies were ‘struggling to keep their engines staffed.’ If the staffing shortage worsens, he said, Cal Fire expects it will have to take up the slack on fires burning on federal land that are usually managed by the Forest Service.
Firetech
Appearances on The Hill, FireSat first flight, Pano AI raises $44 million, Lockheed is bullish on wildfire technology, Tahoe is getting wildfire ready
The Association of Firetech Innovation appeared at a Congressional hearing on wildfire tech with relation to the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act, alongside Chief Dan Munsey—who we worked with during our April demonstration. Their compilation video on LinkedIn is a great short summary of the testimony. Chief Munsey’s remarks are available here.
Images are beaming down from the first of the FireSat constellation.
Pano Ai raised $44 million for their Series B and Bloomberg points out that while AI generates a sobering quantity of carbon emissions, tech like Pano is aiming to cut them, too.
Pano AI also got some nice coverage from Fox News on their work in Aspen, Colorado.
The Tahoe Ready project—implementing technology to reduce risk at the neighborhood level—got some nice local press.
Lockheed Martin’s CEO Jim Taiclet is on record stating his belief that industry has a place in the wildfire space.
“I think if industry, government and the technology sector can collaborate on the wildfire problem, there is a path to actually eliminating megafires in the United States,” Taiclet said during the Edison Electric Institute’s annual conference in New Orleans on Wednesday. “And that is the goal I think the government should get behind.” —Jim Taiclet
What’s burning?
Given the level of wildfire activity—much of Europe has fire, Canada is experiencing its second worst fire year ever, Alaska is at Preparedness Level 5, Oregon saw 72 new fires after a single night of lightning—it’s a bit surprising how little news there is, considering. But here we are. There’s a lot going on these days.
In the United States: California, Alaska, Oregon.
Elsewhere: The NYT has a summary of how Europe is faring wildfire-wise after a strong heat wave (fires in France, Spain, Greece, Portugal). Turkey, Greece (evacuations), Canada’s fires on ‘on track to become the 2nd-worst on record’, Syria, which is experiencing extreme drought.
Thank you for reading along, and thanks for surfacing great content Genny Biggs, Christopher Anthony, Anthony Schultz and Bryan Hatton. And thank you (again) for inviting me out to the field Taylor Nilsson, Connor Gilmartin and Jim Houtman. I really enjoyed meeting you and your whole team at BCFSC (Hi Sarah Jo! Hi Kiara! Hallo Lauren!)
Andrea
