Are We Burning Enough 'Good Fires'?

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra:  I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to The Bay; local news to keep you rooted. This is still kind of funny to say, but some fires are actually good. Prescribed burning, to be exact, is great. That’s when we burn off overgrown forests that end up feeding those bad mega-fires that threaten homes and communities. The kind of fires that we don’t want. Thanks to decades of fire suppression, we’ve got a lot of prescribed burning to do.

Dana Cronin: Ecologists and indigenous tribes have said for a long time that we’re not doing enough. And certainly they say right now there’s not enough prescribed burning happening.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, what it takes to burn a good fire in California.

Dana Cronin: It’s important for us Californians to remember that our state, California, needs to burn.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Dana Cronin is an editor and reporter for KQED.

Dana Cronin: Fire is part of our ecosystem here. It has been part of our ecosystem here for centuries. Our forests really need it to avoid getting too dense. This is something that indigenous tribes have known forever.

Elizabeth Azzuz: Prescribed fire really is beneficial.

Dana Cronin: I talked to Elizabeth Azzuz. She is the director of Indigenous and Family Burning for the Cultural Fire Management Council and she’s a York tribal member up in far north California.

Elizabeth Azzuz: It’s basically like the floors are littered with trees and brush and invasive species that have taken over. And when that happens, it kills all the native and and indigenous plants in the understory.

Dana Cronin: She told me that right now we have about 200 years worth of dead fuels. That’s things like dead leaves and sticks covering our forest floors. And that’s really bad for our ecosystem.

Elizabeth Azzuz: When you don’t have prescribed fire and you have all that fuel loading, that’s when you get the really ugly, unhealthy air quality. You know, the the levels that are so bad that they’re toxic to humans. That’s basically because no one is caring for the land. No one is restoring those environments. My father had a goal to be able to walk out in the forest and look as far as he could see in any direction. And we are actually making progress on that level currently. We’ve been able to see the elk and the deer return to the areas that we burned. So the prescribed fire really, honestly, is a prescription for the land.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what goes into a prescribed fire, Dana? Like, who even does this work?

Dana Cronin: It’s somewhat of a piecemeal system because it is up to landowners and to managers to burn on their land. So our state fire agency, Cal Fire, does a lot of burning. The U.S. Forest Service, indigenous tribes. Even private landowners can get burn permits. The way they do this, it’s very complicated. It takes a lot of planning, but, you know, essentially they light certain sections of forests on fire. You know, they, of course, have it very meticulously planned out. They bulldoze containment lines to make sure that the fire stays within a certain perimeter. They’ve, you know, ensured that conditions are perfect for burning. So, yeah, it takes a lot of of work on the front end and end, you know, as the fire is happening as well.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What are the conditions that have to exist in order to burn a good fire?

Dana Cronin: The conditions are very specific. As you can imagine, you don’t want to set a fire on a day that’s too dry or too windy, because then you run the risk of it burning out of control. But it also can’t be too cool or too rainy because then it won’t burn enough. The fuel moisture also has to be just right, meaning trees and sticks and, you know, things on the ground can’t be too moist or else they won’t ignite. So it’s basically like this Goldilocks perfect set of conditions that are ideal for setting safe fires. Typically, though, that Goldilocks set of conditions happen in most of the spring and sometimes in the fall months.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, then how does this year fit into that? Because I know we have had a pretty cold and wet year. Has California been burning good fires like it’s supposed to, given that?

Dana Cronin:  This year in general, there have been fewer prescribed fires than normal in California? That’s according to Cal Fire and some researchers have pointed that out, have noticed that and are wondering why in a seemingly, like you said, quote unquote, good fire year, fire agencies didn’t take advantage of that.

Daniel Swain: It was pretty clear this is going to be not a bad fire year wildfire wise and potentially a very favorable year for for doing prescribed burning.

Dana Cronin: I talked to Daniel Swain. He is a climate researcher at UCLA, and he looked at his climate models that showed him the number of days this year that were favorable for prescribed burning and found that on those days, not much fire activity happened.

Daniel Swain: We implemented the methods in our study. We looked at the data from this year after the fact. And lo and behold, you know, there’s this broad swath of areas in California that would have seen far above the usual number of days favorable for prescribed fire this year.

Dana Cronin: Daniel is a climate scientist, not a fire scientist. I will just lead with that. But, you know, he’s especially concerned about that because he put out some research recently showing that climate change is actually narrowing the window for prescribed burn days across the West. Basically, climate change is making it harder to reach those Goldilocks conditions that we need to conduct safe burns. In fact, his research showed that the Bay Area is a hot spot for losing those safe burn days. Because it’s getting hotter here, it’s getting drier here. We could lose as many as 30 of them by the year 2060.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Climate isn’t the only factor dictating when we do prescribed burns. It’s also a question of resources. Daniel Swain, the researcher, mentioned that federal fire crews are mostly seasonal, which means there are more of them working in the summertime, but not so much in the cooler months when prescribed burns could theoretically happen. On the other hand, there are so many stakeholders responsible for prescribed burns in California, and one of the biggest ones said burning this year wasn’t so easy.

Dana Cronin: I did talk to someone from Cal Fire. I brought these concerns to them. Gregg Bratcher is his name. He helps oversee the prescribed burning program in Sacramento. He did confirm that Cal Fire did not conduct as much prescribed burning this year as they normally do. But he said that, you know, while Daniel’s climate models might have shown these favorable conditions for safe burning, the conditions on the ground did not support that.

Gregg Bratcher: That we’ve lost a lot of burn days because it was just straight too wet.

Dana Cronin: He said that in the spring months, when most prescribed burning happens, the ground was still just too wet to light, you know, meaningful fires and to keep them burning.

Gregg Bratcher: So we’ve seen some prescribed fire projects occur over the last couple of weeks. The lower elevations are yielding itself a little better for prescribed fire, but at the higher elevations, still fuel moisture or to wet even the dead fuel moisture components are still on the wetter side.

Dana Cronin: He says, you know, a Cal fire, they’re pretty used to having to balance their resources, especially, you know, depending on the year. This year, there were fewer fires. Presumably they had more staff available to to do things like conduct safe prescribed burns. What was a bigger hurdle in his mind is getting the public on board with prescribed burning.

Gregg Bratcher: We’re not a landowner. Cal. Fire is not. We’re a little bit tired, you know, just because we want to or highly suggest to a landowner that this is what should occur, they still have the opportunity to say no.

Dana Cronin: You might remember that a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago here in the Bay Area, we had really bad air quality for a few days. That was from smoke from wildfires burning in the northern part of the state. Those fires started naturally. They were ignited by lightning strikes. But agencies and tribes up there who manage that land decided to let them burn because they were located in such remote areas and conditions were good for burning fires safely. It’s another form of, quote unquote, good fire. Obviously, that bad air was a nuisance. I was annoyed. Same. But, you know, fire managers say that better a few days than, you know, many weeks on end like we’ve experienced in the past.

Gregg Bratcher: You know, a live fire scares some people. They’re not, you know, excited to see that and have smoke in their their homes. So we have to balance everything we use our environmental scientists or fire personnel, resource management folks, all that be looking at all the different angles, air quality, fuel, moisture as smoke management to make sure that we’ve got the right windows to do that.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It does seem like everyone agrees more prescribed reading needs to happen and that climate change is really impacting our state’s ability to do that.

Dana Cronin: Prescribed burning is hands down the best way to manage our forests and prevent those big mega-fires. You know, that’s according to like decades of research. And also, you know, indigenous tribes have been doing this for centuries. It is the best tool in our toolbox, but obviously they are getting harder to do safely. So there are other tools that we can use.

Gregg Bratcher: It’s not the only tool that we use.

Dana Cronin: Gregg Bratcher with Cal Fire told me that they are starting to do more mechanical maintenance, which is basically like taking chainsaws and wood chippers and cleaning up the forest that way, like by hand, which is obviously very time consuming and again requires a lot of manpower. But he said that we need as many tools in our toolbox as we can get going forward.

Gregg Bratcher: We’re going to continue with our with our prescribed fire program. We will certainly we know the constraints that we have and we’ll keep moving forward with them. But like I said, the other the other tool is is cutting, masticating, piling on site for four burn piles or 100% removal of material offsite.

Dana Cronin: I think there’s sort of a glass half full and a glass half empty view. The glass half empty would be. And Daniel said, like, if we’re not doing enough and climate change is going to make it harder to do, then you know, what hope do we have going forward? But, you know, on the flipside, there’s so much opportunity here. We aren’t doing enough. We could be doing so much more. We have you know, according to Cal Fire, we have resources. Yes, the window is narrowing, but we’re not even meeting a certain threshold right now. There’s, you know, so much opportunity for us to really ramp up our prescribed burning.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Dana, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. I really appreciate it. Thank you. That was Dana Cronin, an editor and reporter for KQED. This 15 minute conversation with Dana was cut and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. It was produced and scored by me. Music courtesy of the audio network. The Bay is a production of member supported KQED. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.