Life with Fire

Welcome to the first episode in a three-part series about community wildfire resilience, sponsored by Fire Aside. 

This episode explores a number of big, meaty topics you've likely been hearing about in the wildfire space, from wildfire insurance to categorical exclusions to NEPA to wildfire resilience policy in the era of urban conflagrations like those in LA this winter. Our fearless leader on this journey is former CAL FIRE Chief Deputy Director Chris Anthony, who has worked with some major players in the wildfire space since retiring in 2023. His consultation clients have included entities in the nonprofit, academic, philanthropic, agency and private industry (including Fire Aside) spaces, while also serving as a board member for the Earth Fire Alliance and California Fire Safe Council.

Chris has a deep understanding of wildfire resilience at both the landscape scale (think fuels management and big-picture restoration projects) as well as at the community scale (think home hardening, defensible space and how counties and cities engage with homeowners). This breadth of experience has made him instrumental in informing and advancing critical wildfire policy at the state level in California, while also getting involved in projects that leverage technology to help us better understand and mitigate risk to wildfire. 

After 30 years in CAL FIRE, his goals upon leaving the agency were simple: 

1. Bring fire back to fire-adapted ecosystems.

2. Build more understanding around what strategies and mitigative actions can meaningful reduce risk in communities.

3. Develop and support policies that help us meet these two goals.

4. Find innovators and technologies that can help scale up some of the critical actions we need to take to move the needle on fire resilience. 

We would like to extend a huge thank you to Fire Aside for sponsoring this series. Fire Aside is a home assessment platform that helps fire departments, conservation districts and other entities perform more thorough wildfire risk assessments, while also providing a platform for directly engaging homeowners in taking meaningful action to improve their resilience. Learn more at FireAside.com.

Today's episode is all about post-fire—how to plan and prepare for post-fire challenges like debris flows and landslides, how to recover at a community and landscape scale, how to maintain a love of place after it's impacted by fire, and how we can reduce suffering in this often dynamic phase of wildfire response and recovery.

Our guest on this topic is Collin Haffey, the Post Fire Recovery Program Manager for the Washington DNR, who prior to working with the DNR worked as the Forest and Watershed Health Coordinator for the New Mexico Forestry Division during the catastrophic 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. This fire burned over 340,000 acres in largely rural areas that were also, subsequently, impacted by intense debris flows and mudslides, spurred by monsoonal rain events only weeks after the fire burned through the area. These debris flows were in many cases more devastating to residents in these areas than the fires themselves—they destroyed wells and water systems, devastated roads and other infrastructure and destroyed hundreds of homes, including century-old adobe homes that had housed multiple generations of native New Mexicans. If you're interested in learning more about the HP-CC Fire, I highly recommend the in-depth reporting of Patrick Lohmann at Source NM. I also wrote about the post-fire impacts of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon, as well as potential policy solutions, for Land Lines Magazine back in 2023. 

For some background: post-fire concerns range from erosion and flooding events that can have major impacts on infrastructure and watersheds (and systems), but also includes the process of reforestation, erosion reduction and reducing the incursion and spread of invasive species in delicate post-fire landscapes. 

How communities prepare and plan for these challenges can make an immense difference in how quickly they recover, and Collin's work focuses heavily on encouraging communities to better prepare not just for wildfire, but for what comes after it. 

One of Collin's biggest projects at present is the After the Fire Washington website, where you can find tried-and-true recovery practices, resources for landowners, community members and community leaders, case studies and other information. 

Finally, if you'd like to read a bit more about Collin's experiences and insights gained from seeing the HP-CC Fire impacts first hand, check out this great blog post he wrote for the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network: Stuck in the Mud: Gaps in Post-Fire Recovery Programs - Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Episode Start 

00:38 - Amanda Monthei Intro 

06:54 - Start of conversation—Collin's background 

08:17 - Gaps In post-fire conversation, preparedness and planning 

09:57 - Lessons From Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire

12:41 - Good examples of post-fire response 

14:25 - Need someone to direct post-fire tasks

16:14 - Is the only way to learn about recovery through experience? 

16:52 - Suppression vs. recovery teams—a need for both

18:39 - The importance of community recovery collaboratives 

21:00 - Developing a CWPP 

24:35 - Overthinking CWPP documents

26:35 - Common post-Fire challenges 

29:02 - Managing mental & emotional trauma (both community and practitioner) during the post-fire period

33:12 - How community and resident relationships to the land change after wildfires

32:33 - Fostering a love of place after (and despite) wildfire

35:03 - Getting community involved in post-fire preparedness

36:43 - Disconnect between FEMA & local organizations 

38:36 - What does a community that is well-prepared for post fire challenges look like?

There's been a lot of postulating about whether the firing of some 4400 (and counting) Forest Service and National Park employees on Friday will have an impact on fire operations this summer. We spoke with Riva Duncan, who has decades of experience in fire operations for the US Forest Service (before retiring with the agency), and her answer couldn't be more clear: yes, these losses in capacity are already having an impact on our ability to suppress wildfires this summer. 

Riva is vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, which advocates and provides a voice for the wildfire workforce. Consider donating to support their work!

In our sixth and final episode of the Fire in the Southwest Series—sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative—we explore the complex, multicultural fire histories and management dynamics in New Mexico, with Deputy State Forester and Tribal Liaison Lindsey Quam.

New Mexico's recent relationship with fire has been fraught with distrust in the aftermath of the 2022 Calf Canyon Hermits Peak Fire, which started from an escaped prescribed fire and an escaped pile burn. Lindsey's career has been bookended by such events, having started his career in Los Alamos, NM in the aftermath of the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, which also started as an escaped prescribed fire. This has allowed him to witness first hand how public trust has ebbed and flowed around the use of prescribed fire. It's also presented opportunities for him to help shape and better understand the many mixed emotions New Mexicans have around this topic.

Lindsey spoke to how the intersecting cultures and management values across New Mexico—including Indigenous peoples, the Hispanic population and, well, white people—presents challenges but also opportunities in trying to extoll the merits of prescribed fire.

"There’s no dispute amongst native New Mexicans who live off the land—there is a recognition that fire is important and necessary, but there's also a fear," Lindsey, who is himself a member of the Zuni Pueblo, said.

Lindsey also shared how his agency is scaling up forest treatments through collaboration, and establishing priority landscapes to implement landscape-scale resilience projects.

If you'd like to learn more about acequias, which are mentioned in this episode, I can't recommend Patrick Lohmann's reporting enough. He is a journalist with Source NM and did some stellar reporting on the impacts of the Calf Canyon Hermits Peak Fire on acequias and traditional (and often rural) communities in northern New Mexico. 

For our fifth episode of the the Fire in the Southwest Series, we're talking managed wildfires, which has a number of alter egos depending on who you talk to in the wildfire world, some of which include "wildland fire use" or "managing wildfires for resource benefit".

Dr. Jose "Pepe" Iniguez, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, is our fearless leader on this journey through the fraught, occasionally contentious world of managed fire. Pepe has had a long career studying wildfire impacts in forested landscapes while building a better understanding of how our public lands have been shaped by disturbances like wildfire. His takeaway? We can't effectively manage forests at the landscape scale without the help of wildfires, and managed fire is the most feasible answer to the question of how we reach "scale" in our ability to build landscape resilience.

In short, managed fires are often lightning-caused wildfires that are determined to be burning in an area that is not likely to impact nearby communities, infrastructure, watersheds etc. As such, they are not managed with "full suppression" as the main priority. They are heavily monitored by ground resources (if the fire is accessible) and aircraft, though on occasion these fires become "wildfires for resource benefit" merely because there aren't enough resources to attend to them. See: the 2021 fire season in California. In many cases, these types of fires burn in wilderness areas where fire suppression can be extremely difficult because of a lack of access, and which is made all the more difficult by designations that disallow the use of things like chainsaws and helicopters. 

Want more information about managed fire? Check out this fact sheet from our sponsor for this episode, the Southwest Fire Science Consortium. 

This recent blog post from the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network is also very much worth the read if you're hungry for more context around managed fire. This blog was  written by a recent guest of the podcast, Zander Evans from the Forest Stewards Guild. 

A huge thank you to both the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative for supporting this episode and all of the other episodes from our Fire in the Southwest Series. 

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Episode Start 

01:31 - Pepe's Background 

07:56 - 1996 Fires

11:04 - The Early Days Of Managed Fire 

14:01 - Thinning Versus Fire, Thinning PLUS Fire

16:00 - Prescribed Fire Scales As A Tool 

17:40 - Pepe's View On Managed Fire 

19:48 - Lessons Learned with Managed Fire

22:24 - The Benefit of Starting Small in Building A Managed Fire Program 

25:24 - Experimental Forests 

28:27 - Hotshot Crews Work On the Long Valley Experimental Forest 

30:47 - Smaller, More Local Incident Management Teams Often Work Better 

32:56 - Social Implications Of Managed Fires 

35:29 - Thoughts on Improving Public Perception of Managed Fires  

38:30 - Prescribed Fire and Managed Fire Have Different Liabilities

40:06 - Do We Need A Fire Influencer? Pepe suggests Britney Spears. 

41:37 - The Work of the Southwest Fire Consortium 

49:50 - Episode End

If you've found yourself wondering "where the heck is the aircraft?" while watching a fire burn near you, this is the episode for you.

Guest Matt Lynde—a helicopter operations specialist for the Forest Service's Regional Office in California—gave us a run-down on why some fires have huge airshows and others have almost none, and even tackled a few common misconceptions about the use of aircraft in fighting wildfires. Among these misconceptions is the idea that aircraft put fires out and that if you don't see aircraft on a fire, that means it's not a high priority for fire managers. As Matt explains in this episode, there's a ton that goes into the decisions on where aircraft goes and when, and noted how challenging it is to prioritize certain fires over others during big fire seasons when resources are limited.

Matt also spoke about his career as a helicopter coordinator, and how he climbed the ranks from being on engines and helitack for the Forest Service early in his career to finding an interest in aerial supervision and coordination later in his career. If you have an interest in working on the aerial side of things within the Forest Service, this is a good episode for you.

This episode of Life with Fire was created in conjunction with Region Five of the Forest Service, for a project that explores some of the common public misconceptions about aerial firefighting. The full Storymap can be found here. 

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Episode Introduction

05:07 - Matt's Introduction And Background 

06:51 - Helicopter Coordinator Position Details

08:38 - Matt's Initial Interest In Aviation 

10:22 - Changes In Air Attack 

12:19 -  Safety Procedures And Risk Factors of Aerial Firefighting

14:45 - Misconceptions About Aircraft Firefighting

17:36 - Benefits Of Helicopter Coordination

18:53 - Fire Retardant Use—Benefits and Limitations

20:14 - How Aircraft Supports Firefighters On The Ground 

23:32 - Other Limitations To Fighting Fire With Aircraft 

25:06 - What Factors Inform Availability of Aerial Support 

28:02 - Lack Of Resources Problem 

30:03 - Outro 

With fire season escalating across the West this week, many people are downloading Watch Duty App for the first time. But what is Watch Duty all about? Why was it created? Where does their information come from? What do agency employees think about it?

We spoke to Watch Duty CEO John Mills about the Watch Duty app as well as fire technology more broadly, and gave him a chance to respond to some listener questions from PIOs, wildland firefighters, community resilience experts and others in the Life with Fire community. His responses are about as no-BS as they come, and he provided an honest assessment of where the app is currently and where he'd like it to be in the near and far-off future. A few things they're adding in the near future include a version of the app just for first responders, which John speaks to in the episode, while in the longer term he's looking forward to exploring how Watch Duty can provide more opportunities for community education about wildfire and wildfire resilience. 

Timestamps: 

07:33 - Interview starts, John explains his background in Silicon Valley

10:10 - The Beginnings Of Watch Duty 

12:12 - John's experiences of the Walbridge Fire 

13:21 - Watch Duty's Functionality 

16:20 - How they find reporters/contributors for Watch Duty 

18:06 - Concerns and Questions from PIOs/PAOs 

21:07 - Gaining Trust And Users 

22:25 - The Future of The App

25:01 - Upcoming Watch Duty Features   

26:48 - Public Education Features 

29:40 - Watch Duty's Role In The Fire Tech Space 

34:48 - John's Thoughts On the Fire Tech Industry 

42:39 - Watch Duty's Main Benefit Is Efficiency 

47:16 - How People Use Watch Duty 

49:50 - The Reason They Don't Allow Comments on Watch Duty

50:49 - Outro 

Welcome to episode four of our Fire in the Southwest Series, supported by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium as well as the Arizona Wildfire Initiative! Today's guest, Zander Evans, is the executive director of the Forest Stewards Guild, which has a mission of promoting ecologically-, economically-, and socially-responsible forestry as a means of sustaining the integrity of forest ecosystems and the human communities dependent upon them. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Guild's team—including Zander, who has worked there for over 17 years—has seen the first-hand impacts of some of the most destructive wildfires of the last two decades, including the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire.

Zander and Amanda spoke about the role of the Forest Stewards Guild in helping provide more capacity for often resource-strapped agencies, as well as how their roles are shifting with the legacy and rise in megafires like the CC/HP Fire. We discussed the Guild's objective to connect work on the ground to policy, while creating a network of land stewards that can learn from each other and share resources, lessons learned and other critical information that can help others dealing with similar issues across the country. 

We covered a lot in this episode, and in classic form, Amanda asked many difficult-to-answer questions that Zander did a great job of tackling—including questions about trauma-informed community engagement, how to continue to get good work done within a legacy of escaped prescribed fires and how communities can more effectively prepare for the "post-fire" piece of the resilience equation. 

Things mentioned in the episode:

Santa Fe Fireshed

GoFundMe for Smokey Bear Hotshots. Many of the crew's members tragically lost their homes in the fires near Ruidoso, NM last week. They were responding to the fire when this happened. Please support if you're able!

Timestamps: 

07:56 - The Guild's Intersection With Wildfire Management

13:38 - Engagement Practices Since Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak

15:38 - Keeping Agency Folks In Same Roles/Locations Would Help Collaborative Efforts

16:44 - Guild Partnership With The Forest Service

19:27 - Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire Aftermath And Community Perception of Prescribed Fire

23:57 - Zander's Recommendations For Other Fire Prone Communities

26:12 - Santa Clara Pueblo Takeaways

28:00 - Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) Should Include Post Fire Element

30:20 - Preplanning For Post Fire Impacts and Things To Consider In Pre Planning

37:14 - Encouraging People To Go Back Outside After Experiencing Fire Trauma

39:05 - The Santa Fe Fireshed and Using Watershed Concerns to Frame Management Practices

44:24 - Implementation Takes Community Engagement!

Welcome to our third episode of our Fire in the Southwest series! In this episode, we spoke with Jon Martin, who is the Director of Native American Forest and Rangeland Management Programming at the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University. Jon spent three decades working in forestry before retiring, and now uses his extensive interagency background to find pathways that can help tribes achieve their management goals within a Western fire management framework.

This topic is especially prescient right now, as the Wildfire Commission Report was explicit in its recommendations to incorporate more Indigenous knowledge into land management (see: recommendations 12, 15, 16). However, while this directive is a step in the right direction, actually accomplishing it will require overcoming significant workforce and budget constraints at the ground level, especially within tribal communities.

Jon and Amanda spoke about what this integration of different management practices can look like, how to overcome those barriers, the differences between cultural and agency fire, as well as the fundamental question of whether or not the differences between cultural and agency fire can be meaningfully reconciled. Jon also provided a great example of this integration working (the San Carlos Apache Tribe's use of Crisis Strategy/Infrastructure Bill funding). Finally, we wrapped the episode up with a discussion about the nature of federal land agency employment, which all but requires employees to move locations every 3-5 years to move up in their careers. Jon spoke about how the collaborative/shared stewardship pathway that is needed to meaningfully integrate Indigenous management into Western management requires a wholesale commitment to developing interagency relationships, and how this should be a major priority moving forward. 

"It’s not about going out and managing forests, silvicultural prescription or even forest management," Jon said in our conversation. "It’s become all about people management, almost a social science. I think people are starting to realize that. It’s a softer approach but it’s very real.”

This conversation and the rest of our Fire in the Southwest series is supported by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, as well as the Arizona Wildfire Initiative. We're so grateful for their support!

Time stamps: 

06:23 - Jon's Background and Navajo Upbringing 

09:42 - Northern Arizona University And Its Programs 

11:51 - Native American Forest And Rangeland Management Program 

13:00 - San Carlos Apache Tribe

14:12 - Western Land Management Agencies Working With Tribes 

15:38 - Opportunities And Funding Becoming Available To Bolster Tribal Management

18:45 - Fire History and Research in the Piñon Juniper Ecosystems of the Southwest

20:38 - Indigenous Fire History In Piñon Juniper Ecosystems 

22:41 - Culturally Informed Management In Higher Elevation Forests 

25:56 - Increasing Acknowledgement Of Cultural Burning 

26:33 - Wildland Fire Management And Mitigation Report Directives for Indigenous Burning

28:10 - San Carlos Apache Tribe—Wildfire Crisis Strategy Funding Leading to Tribal Management Success Story

29:34 - Collaborative Efforts Require Long-Term Commitments and Relationship Building

33:50 - Tribal Management Is Inherently Collaborative 

34:20 - Jon's Career Wins 

37:32 - End 

What is it like to watch vegetation type-conversion in real time? How are invasive grasses changing the ecology of the desert and broader Southwest? What's being done to protect and restore Southwest ponderosa pine forests? 

This episode with Tonto National Forest fire ecologist Mary Lata dives into the fire regimes of the Southwest, how they're changing by the year, how invasive grasses are influencing those changes, and particularly how she's beginning to see more fire in the Sonoran Desert, where fire was not historically common. We also spoke about her work within the Four Forest Restoration Project, which aims to restore and protect the significant ponderosa pine forests within the Apache-Sitgreaves, Coconino, Kaibab and Tonto national forests. 

Mary was preparing for a public meeting the day of our conversation and had a few great slides that she showed me during our conversation, so I've uploaded the full video of our conversation to Youtube for folks who would like some more context for the topics we discussed in the podcast. 

This episode and our entire series on Fire in the Southwest was made possible with support from The Southwest Fire Science Consortium  and the Arizona Wildfire Initiative.

Timstamps: 

01:11 - Introduction

05:42 - Mary's Background and Career

10:04 - Four Forest Restoration Initiative

13:05 - Growing up Near Badlands National Park

15:33 - Different Ecosystems and Fire Regimes of the Southwest

17:19 - The Sonoran Desert

19:39 - Witnessing Desert Conversion Over Time

20:14 - Should Human-Caused Ignitions Be Part Of A Fire Regime?

22:05 - Lightning Caused Fires Versus Human Caused Fire

23:52 - Mary's Love of Nebraska

27:01 - Grasslands In The Great Plains

30:36 - Current Restoration Work and Climate Change Impacts on Southwest Fire Regimes

34:11 - What is Assisted Migration and Can It Help The Southwest?

38:04 - The Changing Role Of Disturbance In Grassland Systems

39:24 - Grassification of the Sonoran Desert. 

45:13 - Outro