Fire: the problem and the solution

[Music] For a wildland firefighter, the flaming front is the most dangerous place to be. In fact, it can be deadly. An area that has already burned is known as the black. It is the safety zone, a place where you can escape to. When you are on the fire line, you want to keep one foot in the black. Fire is our enemy when it is burning down our community or taking the lives of innocent people in its path. Yet fire can be our friend when it is carrying out its natural role in keeping ecosystems healthy. By keeping one foot in the black, we understand that we can fear fire, but we can also use it, learn from it, and embrace a relationship with it. Evidence tells us that we don't need less fire. We actually need more. By building a relationship with fire and creating a fire culture, some say we can protect both ecosystems and community resilience. As a society, we need to learn to keep one foot in the black. This is one foot in the black, a podcast examining wildfire in the west, and how these stories, stories of history, of culture, of landscape, and of climate change serve as a warning for our communities. Fire is natural and essential to many ecosystems all over the globe, but climate change is rewriting the rules. In an era of increasing drought, record breaking temperatures, and more frequent larger wildfires, our communities are having to learn to live with fire. On the morning of September 8, 2020, a small fire started in a grassy field in a rural Oregon town. 24 hours later, lives and communities were shattered. What became known is that Almeida fire spread from parts grass and an urban park to bow and dry brush. Within minutes, gill force winds of over 40 miles per hour pushed the fire right into people's front yards and onto porches and wooden decks. Fences became flame fronts, landscaping became fire brands, and eventually roofs, siding and houses and entire neighborhoods were all aflame. The Almeida fire left a nine mile long path of destruction, burning 2,800 structures, and killing at least three people in just a few hours. When I saw the forecast for the day of the Almeida fire, I knew that it was one of those days. I got up in the morning, but I just put my fire pants on for that day, and most firefighters go to work in no-max. When the fire bell rings, you got to put on another protective layer, and that was just the kind of day when you just get dressed in everything you're ready to respond to a fire at a moment's notice. I'm Chris Chambers, a wildfire division chief for Ashland Fire and Rescue. And I just went driving around Ashland on patrol, just looking for any activity that could lead to a fire ignition because the conditions were projected to be that bad, and they were. Red-blade warning continues. Most of this will be for tonight through tomorrow, but even Wednesday, especially for some of the higher terrain areas, we will have critical fire danger of that combination of gusty winds and very low humidity. We'll lead to any fires spreading very quickly in these weather conditions. If you can control the incident and minimize the threat to life, then that should be a priority, but this was the kind of fire where we weren't going to put that fire out anytime soon. And homes and people were being directly impacted. At one point, I pulled up next to a house across the freeway, and I made sure people were evacuated, and I saw a fire start next to me, and I got out my fire extinguisher and a shovel, and I thought, if I can control just this fire, maybe it'll help. And then that fire spread so fast around me, and then I looked up and realized, no, fires everywhere out here. There's no controlling it. We just need to get people out of the way. As dozens of houses became engulfed in the Elmita Fire, first responders were overwhelmed, and thousands of residents were evacuated. Chaos ensued, and notifications were scanned. Cell lines were jammed, and the internet went down. Evacuations were done door to door right in front of the fire spread. The, for the most impactful part for me was one evacuating people, but then two, just being in a neighborhood where there was complete and, well, nearly complete and total devastation. Just to see it on that scale happening in front of your eyes is, I've seen a lot of single houses burn. I've seen 11 houses burn, but to watch hundreds of houses burn. At one point to turn around and see the retardant jet flying down the middle of talent avenue and dropping retardant in the middle of downtown talent, I was just flabbergasted. The Elmita Fire was part of the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon, where 900,000 acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, were all on fire within a 48 hour time frame. I'm Pam Marsh. I'm currently service the House Representative for Oregon's District 5, which is Southern Jackson County. When the weekend of the Labor Day fires, the state fire marshal clearly communicated to our region that if we had a problem, they were going to be no help, because they could see that there were vulnerable areas all over the state, and that their troops were going to be their extra fire people were going to be called to many different spots. And as a result, until the middle of the night, our local firefighters were really on their arm. And they did a valiant job saving people. And they, in many cases, had to simply walk away from the actual fighting of fire because we didn't have enough people and we didn't have enough water and we didn't have any backups. The beachy creek fire, 75 miles east of Salem, Oregon, was burning at a rate of almost three football fields every second. An event at the scale of Labor Day fires had not been seen in Oregon for at least 100 years, possibly as far back as the 1800s. The storm, dry and easterly winds, showed up at the worst possible time. Early September, we were eight before the fall rings arrived. When the communities of Ashland, Tallinn and Phoenix, Oregon woke up that next morning, 2,800 homes had burned to the ground, and countless businesses were gone. The level of destruction was incomprehensible, lives were shattered. Due to the heroism of first responders and kind neighbors, only a few people lost their lives. Probably three days afterwards, and with the metfor fire and some of our local officials. And of course it was heartbreaking and astounding just to see acres and acres of destruction. And I thought at the time there must be hundreds of bodies in here because we looked at like these devastated mobile home parks where I know that very vulnerable people who don't speak English, people who are aging in place lived. And I could not imagine that they had gotten out. And of course in the days that followed what we found out is that four people died in the fire to me, that is, and that's horrible for those people and their families. It's no question of tragedy. Given what I saw and what we experienced, it is a miracle that all those people got out that they did. And I think there are untold numbers of heroic actions, stories that we will never hear of people knocking on, dragging people out, stuffing them in cars, rescuing pets, doing everything that they could to get neighbors and friends and strangers out of harm's way. We'll be right back. Hey there, this is Jessica Klingke, one of the people bringing you one foot in the black. This podcast is one of the many ways the Climate Sysky Wildland Center engages in the issues around fire and climate. As a nonprofit advocacy organization protecting the wild places of southern Oregon and northern California, KS Wild is dedicated to bringing you science-based information on issues impacting our forests, waters, wildlife, and climate. And we depend on the generous support of people like you to accomplish this meaningful work. If you'd like to learn more about our programs or how you can become a sustaining member, visit kswild.org. Thanks, now back to one foot in the black. When we assess the damage from the Elmita fire, we have to ask why this happened and how we can prevent the next disaster. But this fire, in other recent suburban and wildland fires, raised so many other critical questions. Questions about our past relationship with fire and its important ecological role. Questions about climate change and where we should be building our communities. Questions about what the science is saying and how policymakers are responding. And of course, the question nearly everyone is asking. Are these fires part of the new normal brought on by climate change? I'm Alexi Lavequiel. And I'm Joseph Fale. Through our investigation and interviews with leading experts in fire policy and science, this podcast, One Foot in the Black, explores the solutions to living with wildfire in the era of climate change. Discovering that our best medicine to address this dire situation might just be fire itself. KS Wild is an organization based in Southern Oregon, a region that has been impacted by many fires over the years. Here in Ashland, Oregon, on the unceded territory of the Tacoma people, allies, friends, neighbors, and colleagues are being directly impacted by the aftermath of the Amitabhire. Fire season is nothing new to us, but this hit differently. And as an organization, we're at the forefront of tackling the issues of fire and climate change. We think, strategize, organize, and inform about fire and climate. And here we are, survivors of a climate fire. But the Alunah fires not an outlier. We've watched for years as fires burn through towns, destroying homes and lives, all throughout the West, all throughout the world. With this introduction to One Foot in the Black, we offer a preview of the key topics we'll be covering over the next five episodes. Topics that we think are at the heart of the issues surrounding wildfire and climate change. So, first, we want to establish how we got into this current mass with fires burning downtowns. If you ask firefighters, scientists, or expert land managers who study wildfire the question, why are we having so many fires? You will get one of a few different answers. Sometimes it will even get political. We ask them what we should expect in the future, and listeners might not like the answers that we heard. The answers we found in talking with experts are organized into four root causes of increased impacts from wildfire. The first one is that we've been too good at putting out fires for too long, that now it's harder to fight fires once they do start. We spoke with Tim Ingallsby, a wildland firefighter and executive director of firefighters united for safety, ethics, and ecology, or fuses about the policies of the Forest Service that have brought us to this place. For most of the first half of the 1900s, the Forest Service positive was called systematic fire suppression. And the notion was, wherever you see fire, you jump on it, stop on it, put it out quick, keep small. They adopted this policy called the 10 AM policy, which was like any and every fire possible when we put out by 10 in the morning the day following this detection. That was about what they needed. And if you fail, we'll just add more crews and more machines and keep doing the same. So it's finally dead out. The only good fire was a dead out fire in the foresters. And it started out that fire was the industrial foresters' enemy and the Forest Service attempted to exclude it entirely from the landscape and suppress it wherever it could access it. By thinking that the best approach to stopping wildfires was to put them out, it may have given the illusion of keeping people safe and protecting the forest. But unprecedented heat is drying up the landscape and stronger winds are pushing fires into uncontrolled events. Sometimes, right into urban areas. So what's interesting and one thing that we found out is that the fires that often are the easiest ones to put out are the ones that would do the most good. So those are often fires early in the fire season before things have gotten really hot and dry. Those are low severity fires that would burn in the forest understory. They would burn around the big trees, leaving them intact, but reducing all that flammable brush and fuel. And those are the fires that we need more of on the landscape. Now when we put those fires out, what do we get? The result is fuels continue to build up. And then when the area does burn, it's often under the most extreme conditions. And those fires often get out of control. And they're likely to burn very hot, very fast, and very severe. In addition to an increasingly expensive and aggressive firefighting response over the past 100 years or more, and if we go back even further to the onset of colonialism in North America, we find that the removal of indigenous people and their practices for traditional cultural burning has contributed to the narrative that fire is to be feared in thought. My name is Belinda Brown. I'm a coastal looked up and member of the Jumawi Otsige Nation. Otherwise known as the Pit River Tribe in Northern California, where we have 11 autonomous bands and we cover a four county region, Moda, Shasta, Lassen, and Siskyu counties. We have the upper Pit River watershed. Jum is the name for the river. And we have the sturdying responsibility for time and memorial to watch over these land bases. But we've had many impacts since late 1800s for European invasion. And one of the most, I say, detrimental impacts is removing the Aboriginal people off the land. We are, we still are here. We are a keystone species to taking care of the land. And the fire is a big part of that. We were friends with fire. Fire was our friend. Fire is medicine for the land. And when the people were removed and the farming with fire, for the many roots and berries and trees and grasses and everything that our people depended on. Or a subsistence lifestyle was interrupted is when we see the not so good management of our land. And it's for all kinds of reasons that we are facing, the issues that we're facing. However, I believe the Aboriginal people and their Aboriginal fire is very necessary for good land management and for being able to bring back that concept and that practice to what we're facing today. The second root cause of increased wildfire impacts is what we've done to the landscape by reshaping our forests and vegetation. In some places that looks like a lot of invasive species that have moved in and they carry fire differently than native plants. Here in the Pacific Northwest, that often looks like the fact that we've cut down our biggest trees and replaced them with small trees and brush. Now those big trees, many of them, had survived wildfire in the past. Those century old trees, you can see they have fire scars on them from past wildfire. So we can tell that they were good wildfire survivors. Now the young trees are a lot closer to the ground and they don't have that thick bark. So they're often going to burn pretty high severity when they do go up in wildfire. So we reshaped our forests, we reshaped the landscape and we've made it more fire-prone. The next root cause that we've identified is a perspective that we don't have a fire problem at all. The problem is people in the way of wildfire. By developing and building more homes in wildfire country, we are more impacted by fire because our houses are burning down. Janet Lancaster lives in such a place and the threat of a devastating wildfire ripping through her community, interpanic around that reality led her to create the community group Firesmart Marlin. So what makes a community at risk to wildfire in my mind has to do with the fuels and to some degree the climate. And specifically there's an actual term, a wildland urban interface or the woe that describes the type of area most at risk of wildfire. By definition, an interface is where two things meet, two items meet. In the woe or in the wildland urban interface, that interface is between residential areas and wildland and as I said fuel. So over time, more development has taken place further into wildland or wooded areas. It does have to do with where people live, do you live in an area where there's a lot of fuel, i.e. woods and you live in a hot, dry area. So those and if you're living there, you're living in a community that's at risk of wildfire. Between the years of 1990 and 2015, one study found 32 million new homes were built in the wildland urban interface. And according to a wildfire risk analysis tool, in 2019, 4.5 million US homes were identified as high or extreme risk to wildfire, with more than 2 million in California alone. The point that everyone makes is that our homes and communities are just not prepared for wildfire. We need to harden our homes and make them ready for wildfires by clearing brush away and making homes easier to defend in the event of a wildfire. So what I tell people is when we talk about defensible spaces, how do you eat an elephant? When bite at a time? Global space, it is the buffer that people create between their home or other outbuildings on their properties and the grass trees, shrubs and any wildland that's around it. And we're thinking about those grass that trees the shrub as fuel. This space around the home is what's needed to slow or stop the spread of wildfire and we want to protect the home from igniting or catching fire. The defensible space is also important in terms of protecting our fire fighters, right? It's not just about us, but it's about our firefighters that may need to come and defend your home. We'll hear more from Janet Lancaster and living with fire in the Wildland Urban Interface in episode 3. Now the next root cause of increased wildfire impacts is the elephant in the room and that is climate change. Scientists will tell you to just get used to fires. There's no fire-free future and that climate change is the reason that fires are so severe. It's heating up and drying out the landscape and it's only going to get worse. Climate change is making conditions for extreme fires more common. Jessica Halofsky is the director of the Northwest Climate Hub and is a leading expert in climate change. She says that we should expect more of this. Climate change affects fire in a couple of ways. The first is that it affects fuels, so it mainly affects how dry fuels are and how available they are to burn. And then it also affects fire weather. So when we have more, we have warmer conditions, very low relative humidity and dry fuels, those conditions are more conducive to fire. So we have more extreme fire weather and conditions that lead to more fire and larger fires or extreme fires. We've got a lot of opinions about the root causes of fires and what we can do about them. Do you know who I think is right? Everyone is right. We've created a perfect storm for fire conditions and this is not an either or problem. The solutions to our fire problem are as complex as the problem itself. We'll be right back. Do you want to learn more about ways to protect you, your family and your community during fire season? Check out Chaos Wilds Forest and Fire Toolkit. This one-stop shop of resources has most of what you need to know about living rarely and in the forests of the SISCU region. Check it out and download a free copy at kswild.org. So how do we manage to live with fire? And how can we build a relationship with fire in this time of climate change? A time with more drought, more record breaking heat, and more frequent devastating fires affecting our communities. We've identified these root causes of increased wildfire. We removed fire from the landscapes, including indigenous fire use. We've cut large resilient trees and replaced them with small, highly flammable trees. We developed our communities out into fire-prone landscapes at an alarming rate, and we've heated the entire system up through climate change. In the next episode of One Foot in the Black, we'll look at the history of fire and how our landscapes are born through fire, and how fire has shaped us as a species. Wildfire is as important as rain to many ecosystems throughout the world. In North America, as in many places around the world, indigenous people embraced fire and used it as a management tool. Today, we are regaining that knowledge and beginning to year more effectively. We are realizing that there is no fire-free future and that we need to embrace fire before it overwhelms us. This episode of One Foot in the Black was written by Joseph Fale, Alexei Lavekio, and Jessica Klingey, editing and sound design by Jessica Klingey. Sound engineering by James Tadakis, music provided by Blue Dot Sessions. People thanks to our guests, chief Chris Chambers, representative Pam Marsh, Tim Englesby from Fusey, Belinda Brown from Loma Kotsie, Janet Lancaster from Fire Smart Merlin, and Jessica Halofsky from the Northwest Climate Hub. More information about the topics covered in this episode, as well as KS Wild programs in forest offence, stewardship, clean water, and fire and climate policy, visit www.kSWild.org For more information on how to support those displaced by the El Mita Fire, please visit almeidafiredonations.com. One foot in the black wouldn't be possible without the support of the Myron Memorial Trust, Wilver Force, and from the donations of generous supporters like you. Please take a minute to like, subscribe, and review One Foot in the Black. It helps other people find our podcast and makes us feel good about doing it. One foot in the black is a production of the Climate Sysky Wildland Center, all rights reserved.