Listening to radio parallax this program was produced by Edward McMillan I'm Douglas Abbott will see you next week. The day from someone always fight. For you I'm fine but because if you you. You better leave it alone. Take. Drugs and women. Away and if you want to stay away. Because the. Soup. To another great radio. Special broadcast of California burning produced by. 15. Series taking a deep look into the potential solutions for the catastrophic wildfires that have been plaguing the way. On this episode we hear from a variety of people who. Experience . For the 1st time. Series looking into the issues. That we've been experiencing in California and the West in general. Vailable as a podcast where ever you get your. First episodes in the series. Then during the period of Western expansion 1st. The use of fire was eliminated. In its place. The new. Trees with the. Brush and force litter like dead branches and pine needles which burn and spread fire easily. But the purpose of this episode is to find out what are the best practices for managing our forces now given their current conditions and our societal needs. The very topic of maintaining our forests is a difficult one it seems to put the environment in which we live against the economy which keeps our society functioning Unfortunately with the conversation framed this way no one concedes anything and therefore nothing changes so this conversation doesn't even happen much anymore but it's a conversation that needs to happen because catastrophic wildfires are destroying our forests and threatening our communities around the state. With the camp fire that burned 90 percent of the town of Paradise destroying over 19000 homes in killing at least 86 people the campfires this defining moment in all of our careers in that it seems like everything changes now. Lots of things that we didn't expect to have been happened this is equal under geographer. Wildland fire issues in Northern California and mapping and the other tools of the geographer to . Help people understand the different ways that fire operates on our landscapes Zeke's going to teach us about how fire operates on a landscape level later in the episode and we're going to talk to a variety of people who are managing forests in California from Forest Rangers and firefighters to private landowners and timber companies and that's the point of this episode to get a better understanding of fire and how human management of these forests affects the way fire behaves and we don't understand this basic knowledge will never solve our wildfire problems in this state and this episode we are going to be focusing a lot around Northern California but the lessons around fire and fire behavior are universal. Welcome to California burning managing our forests for fire. So yeah managing forests in a state with 40000000 people will be tricky We have lots of stakeholders here both public and private who may have completely different goals for their land but before we talk to those with the most at stake I think we need to understand some basics of wildfire behavior let's go to Humboldt State University in Arcadia California which has a highly regarded forestry school. It's nestled in the redwood forests of Humboldt County they have a one of a kind wild land fire lab with a mission to conduct fire research to better understand and manage fire adapted landscapes we're dealing with a few legacies one is the legacy of fire suppression and the legacy of logging right we've altered a lot of these forests this is Dr Jeff Kane He's the director of the fire lab and associate professor of fire ecology and fuels management at Humboldt State University you know older forest tend to be more resistant to even wild fire today but they can also be susceptible but we have a lot of young forest we have a lot of dense forest and that's largely reflective of our land management choices begin to state those choices bluntly they were 1st cut all the big valuable trees and get out of there and then leave it alone and let the forest get overgrown now we have these overgrown forests and we need to really learn how to predict fire in them so that the primary factors that influence the fire behavior how hot it is how fast it moves how tall the flames are. How much surface fuel you have so in the absence of fire those surface fuels build up and so you have more surface fuels over time and that contributes to greater flame lengths and greater fire behavior the other part is how densely packed the fuels are and so we from the science of it we talk about 2 things One is the crown bolt tensity the younger the trees the denser the crowns are they're closer together there's more fuel per unit volume area and so that can allow for the spread of crown fire by having young dense forests and then the other part with young forests is that they have their crowns are typically lower to the ground so that distance between the surface fuels and where the crown fuels are available that can transition from a. Surface fire to ground fire and then spread so what we see here in the Northern California is that oftentimes are you have these young plantations or maybe they're even denser than they would have generated naturally that you could carry a fire very easily and those areas tend to be you know the more severe fires where you have lots of tree mortality compare this to a more biodiverse older forest for older forest they tend to have more varied structure they have Barger trees that are often much higher off the forest floor trees lowest branches we often call them ladder fuel because a ground fire can use them to try into the tree canopy which then spreads fire fast but old growth trees lowest branches don't start until 102030 feet off the ground way too high for flames to reach in most ground fires plus huge trees have bark that are inches thick and don't burn easily studies of tree rings have shown that 100 plus year old trees have survived many fires throughout their lives all of this I should do is couched by what the conditions are during the fire whether the camp fire the car fire Santa Rosa fires these were pretty extreme weather events high wind speeds really dry conditions and it's just a recipe for severe fire and of course the species that make up these forests also make a difference in how frequently these forests want to burn in this is where a lot of Jeff's research goes he burns a different tree later dried pine needles twigs and branches of different species and he's found that species that tended to exist in more fire prone forests have litter that burns easier classic Ponderosa pine or Jeffrey Pyne they have these really long needles builds a nice fluffy feel bad they you know the idea is that you know it facilitates the spread of fire so yeah you get higher flame Lang. But it's more rapid combustion so it ideas that yes it's going to get hot if you're a tree but it's not going to be hot for very long and these species often tend to have really thick bark and so they can withstand other species like an example would be like lodgepole pine which tends to have shorter needles more compacted field beds doesn't burn very well as a surface fire and they tend historically had lower frequency less common fire maybe every 3200 years and they have very early thin bark and so it's showing us the ecology of California and more broadly the Western u.s. Conifer forests and it seems to correlate with what we know about the fire history for these species fire history varies considerably from place to place with some forested areas regularly burning every 5 to 10 years while other areas traditionally maybe only saw fire once or twice a century we leave Jeff's office and head over to the fire Lab This is the wild land fire lab basically we have a large fume hood so I don't know it's about what is that. Yeah something like. 12 and then we have a stainless steel table where we can put fuels on and then the fume has a draw so we can burn things and have a smoke the you know we moved. So material in there yeah don't do it want to see it yeah yeah. Yeah so these are drying oven so often you know we want to you know remove some of the moisture before burning so that dries fuels and also can tell us how much fuel is out in the woods so typically collected on the field bring it back try it and then weigh it and then that's the amount of pills you have in a given area something we call. Supply and needles. Basically is the really long needles allow the needles to kind of get hung up and then each other and then that promotes greater airflow through the fuel and so that's what's going to contribute to a pretty high flame lengths the other part of that is a lot of conifer species and species have. These are chemical compounds that are highly volatile adding to the flammability of these fields. And then. We'll be taking different measurements So here I've just put a really large meter stick that's on the stand and that allow us to get how high the flames tell us how tall the flames get what's the flame will also look at things like flaming time how long does that take the flames to combust the material how long will it smolder for so flaming are the visible flames moldering is the glowing combustion those embers that you see following a fire. Spots are going to happen. I mean generally what we see is that when we understand the flammability of all these different species they kind of bear out into different maybe strategies or consistent groups where you have these species that are really really flammable but not for a long duration then you have other species that are very flammable they put a lot of energy but they are slower to combust and then there are some species that just don't burn very well at all not so many of those in California but there are some all right so. This. Just one little spot here will see. 6. And so once again it's into the heart of that will see much taller flames. Another thing will measure after the combustion is gone through is how much mass is left. For the day when you face. With beauty and function. And I'm not talking about dense towns with subdivisions like that. The camp fire sparsely populated communities with houses nestled into the mountains in canyons surrounded by wilderness the. Community just a dozen miles up you creek canyon. With the unfortunate name of. Thousands of people living in shanties. But now the community has no more than 90 people living in it down the road just a couple miles. Which is little more than an old historic schoolhouse museum which contains its pioneer history. Which is. Half way down. When the started on November 8th in the entire area was evacuated including many of the people Dharma knew who lived at the Canyon gathered at his house in Chico. And they're getting rumors about what might be happening up the canyon so his brother in law Jason and a good friend. Drive up the other side of the canyon from where the fires burning down. The city streets. Are chaotic. We're going to. The Highway 32. Down. It's something that I'll never forget. The canyon. You're looking across the top of the canyon and we're looking down the canyon and across the wall you know the. To see red shooting down. Further down canyons. Towards us as we look down we see. There's someone down there. And then. That's. Good rather be called Sam for the story. Fighter who also grew up in the canyon with Dharma and Jason grew up in the canyon with them so kind of looked up to an unknown and for as long as I can remember Sam returned to his home in the early afternoon right after he heard the fire was spreading so he could check on his home and maybe protect it when I came into view creek canyon it was like a ghost town in there and once I got home and I got out of my car parked I could hear Pope pain tanks in the. Area just exploding and it just sounded I wouldn't vision I've never been in a war but what I would have vision it would sound like it was just. A few minutes later a few minutes later boom and you could hear that coming over the ridge line into view creek canyon that was the echoing and I went up to my house and made sure that we had everything you know things off of the porch then at that point was when I kind of started looking around I made a decision obviously I was going to do everything I could for my loved ones and and the people that I grew up with it was a bit later that evening when he gets a phone call from his buddy Jason who says he's up center and can see I'm at the bottom of the canyon and he said Yes your headlights Jason asked me should we come down and I was like yeah if you want to I could use some help. But I remember looking up and I was like caps on fire I don't think you can it. Is like it's on the side of a cliff visually. Down the canyon wall. You could be done jump in the truck. And this point is on fire roll the windows up. And Sam was relieved that they not only made it down. But that they were there to help and yeah I mean. You know know the area I mean it made me feel you know just made me feel we're in this together we're going to do what we can. Give them some basic fire safety instructions and the immediately started working on saving a home that was in the fire's path. Like I'm going to go to my house my brother in law who lives there. Back with some shovels and. An excavator has that big mechanical that can take ditches and knock things over and it can travel on all sorts of terrain on it's heavy duty tracks. Meanwhile Sam are knocking down fences trying to save his neighbors' homes point we save those 3 homes. In the fence down we drive across the steel bridge in the fires blazing on the other side here comes my brother in law with the escalator and across the bridge is another home at this point they have Jason's A.T.V.'s well in their community for. A couple groups and we had this line we all rode up to the cemetery and we figure we can hold and keep an eye on about 2 miles. Yes they felt safe doing this not just because of the knowledge from Sam but they grew up there they knew this place if anything ever happened to us we're going to run down going to meet at the steel bridge and jump in the water if we have to Meanwhile the fire was coming down the canyon walls from the south from Paradise closing in on the center Bill historic school house and Museum. Flying down you could just hear cracking and burning coming down the center both school and my brother in law Jason goes watch my back I'm like What do you do when he drove. Any went around the school house and the museum started taking the escalator and digging a trench. Path as the flames are coming down the hill like you know maybe for a few wide is taking the escalator and he's kind. And just knocking things out of to way and I'm yelling at him you gotta get out there you're done and he turns around and right as he turns around he blows a track on the last man. To track on the better the fire hits the track. This little bit out of there. Then the sheen was shipwrecked at the Center for about a month and a half after this fire but the fire line worked the trench or the swath that he was enough to divert it around both sides of the school so a burnt around the museum all the way to the road and they came around the other side and burnt and save the school and then he blew a track and that. Was done for them. To keep putting out spot fires digging up vegetation and creating fuel breaks throughout most of the night taking refuge in one of their homes for a quick rest and were relieved when firefighters finally made it up to them the next morning but the work they did save the homes and held town including the historic museum and schoolhouse Dharma jab Jason and Sam are now known as the hell town hotshot. It's in the honorary title given to them by the community that they helped save. Maybe it was reckless to do with these guys to go back into the fire but the more I learned about how fire works in considering Sam was a trained firefighter It didn't seem as crazy because fire is physics and it can often be predicted if you consider all the factors involved but most of us don't really understand those factors this is why I met up with Hugh Scanlon who recently retired as a battalion chief for Cal Fire California's wild land fire department he drove me through a dense redwood forest on the northern coast of California and suddenly the forest clears and there's a large opening so this area is very Creek State Park and we've just entered boys' prairie and this is an area that was prescribed burned just this last year and will get out in take a look. When I walk to boys Prairie which is regularly maintained when this area gets burned about every 33 to 4 years that's one of the main ways that this prairie gets maintained highway cuts through the prairie a campground on the far side of it backs right up to the edge of the redwood forest that surrounds us but burning this prairie if done correctly doesn't threaten these things that we want to survive the burn Greg Wood is extremely resilient in resistive to fire it survives fire quite well. Douglas fir older Douglas fir survives fire quite well there are some species that do not do very well and fire white for We've got western hemlock a number of species which are very susceptible to fire especially in their in their younger age classes those species are now doing pretty well and what we've got is we. Got forests that are just thick with young material that's basically ready to burn in the process because. We walk through a wide variety of flowers and grasses little streams are hidden by an abundance of freshly growing plant life but without regular fire this prairie wouldn't exist at all so prescribed burning an area like this is about $100.00 acres in this block in order to burn this site basically they have to put together their burn plan figure out all of the resources they're going to need to be able to burn it what kind of conditions they want to have to burn it so that they get the right effects in this area we actually have a number of threaten endangered species that they're concerned about here this is very close to an area that has marveled nearly at nesting sites so when you can do the burn is constrained at some level to make sure that when you're burning you're not going to adversely affect any nesting marble in Maryland's marble Miro it's are done nesting generally by September 15th so that becomes like the magic day starting September 15th you can actually go out and do a burn in this area so when you finally have all these things lined up and the weather cooperates you can schedule your burn day what will happen is they will bring everybody together on site and they'll do a briefing and they will assess the plan with all the control lines and figure out which way the wind is coming from so in this case of we have a north wind something is coming from the north and blowing to the south. If you were to light this at the north end. The fire would catch the wind and then start burning across this very quickly and then you would go oh my gosh what am I going to do to stop this fire from crossing my control line down here. And going and running off into the woods so what you do is you say well maybe we don't want to light it at that and maybe we want to wait at the south end with a north wind and have the fire slowly work its way back off of that control line to build a burn area and that burned area will get larger and larger as the fire backs off of that line what will be in happen is you've created a much bigger area of burn material and cleared material that won't burn any more which brings us to one of the 1st guidelines you'll learn in firefighting $101.00 whether it's a controlled burn or a wildfire that you're fighting when you're working in a in a in a fire area if the flames are less than 4 feet in height we usually consider that to be Ok to be able to be there say with a hand crew and tools and be able to work on that you know so that said you're Ok so you know you can if you're digging up fuel at that point if you will and you can work pretty close to where the fire is it's really important a lot of times be able to be actually as close to that fire as you can because one of the advantages we get with a lot of these fires and you can see it here with his prescribe burn example if we go over here on the ground if I'm working here. And say the fire jumps across this line and starts burning over here and starts burning real hot and flares up all you have to do is step over here and I'm in something that has already been burned you're safe so I'm safe firefighters referred to this is keeping one foot in the block if you keep a foot in the black It gives you the ability to move into an area that's already burned and therefore you increase your margin of safety. So what would you be doing to this that's fuel and potentially is catching and you have one foot in the black What do you do what we would do in this kind of situation as you would start digging scraping the fire back into the burn area so we're going to try to separate the fire and the vegetation that is burning from vegetation that's not so we keep basically scraping the burning vegetation back into the black and trying to make sure you don't have any burning vegetation. And you can either do. Or you can do that using fire hoses basically going in cooling and removing the heat from the. Results. Like what happens. To what happened in much of. The camp the. Canyon is right next to Paradise which sits on a ridge on a ridge subjected to strong winds. Because of the canyon. Back in the winter. Just a month or so after the Camp Fire. Took a drive up the canyon. Patterns in that area what's interesting to me about the patterns we see in these burns is you see these patches of black. Patch size. Of burning effects because we get. Lots of edge. On these patches and edges are interesting places because that's you know if there's a lot of habitat in the edges which places the birds can perch and see wide open areas and hunt lots of edges in the sprawling Canyon one place we'd stand looked hardly burnt at all then just 40 or 50 feet around the corner everything was completely black and right and when the reasons that this is black and see is our position in the winds howling on a string now I don't want to be here to fire right and so. When positions on the landscape tend to be places that we have hot fire behavior and in the shelter positions less. The kind of arrangement a landscape the proportion of a landscape that's exposed to winds. That drives our severity and drives what trees are going to do well here so all these things about the landscape really. You know the pyro diversity creates biodiversity this is an extremely important lesson here pyro diversity creates biodiversity what that means is that the edges between different burn types creates opportunities that attract different kinds of wildlife and encourages growth of different kinds of vegetation which is biodiversity and biodiversity makes the land more fire resilient so Zeke and I are standing in the footprint of the camp fire and surrounded by tragically burned homes but ecologically for the land it was kind of a good burn down here leaving fire resilient trees alive well clearing smaller and weaker trees and excess brush right here burned all the grass off but it didn't get up in the canopy at all just concrete through here you can tell it's a got up you know 1020 feet high at one point at some point. And I think what people forget is that fires like the camp fire burn 24 hours a day and throughout the entire 24 hour period there's this really wide range of environment. Conditions if you think of you know. You're going to get. This late in the year it was really cold and. We get the humidity. For weeks. So let's think about how the Camp Fire progressed from where it started in the tiny community of pulled. The. Previous. Blue the. Tree to tree. To the edge of. The winds from the east. But it's not just wind exposure that. Exposure to the makes a difference because of the. Changes in vegetation. So the trees. The trees. Crown Fire because canopies Roy tall and shady underneath and it's cooler and moister fire severity is also affected by the time of the year that the fire happens fires traditionally started from lightning strikes in the summer not late fall like the campfire did our typical summer weather is that we'll have a low pressure weather system move through and then it will be hot and dry for weeks 2 or 3 weeks maybe there's no weather at all you know that's when it gets to be you know 110 degrees and just this kind of continental skill high pressure parks over California and everything stays really stable so what happens when we have a lightning storm that comes through and starts a bunch of fires is stable air causes smoke inversions especially in our canyons so big lightning storms come through will start thousands of fires. Within a couple days the whole valley smoked in the canyons are smoked in and then this high pressure to sparks and these fires to smolder under that heavy smoke and because smoke gets thicker and thicker. Daytime average temperatures can come down you know 10 degrees just all the smoke blocking the sun so when we look at the big picture of how fires have behaved in California in the past we've had a lot of this low intensity fire that's largely in part because our lightning fires happen lends itself to smoke inversions and that's another reason that these fires that happen in the fall under these extreme conditions are so destructive. As we drive down the canyon towards Chico I think about. The forests in these communities may never fully recover from this fire this is a 3rd major fire in 3 decades through those fires all of which were severe few trees survived in the soil was so roasted that nothing much more than grasses are coming back which spread fire extremely fast compared to a diverse forest I asked Zeke why this actually hasn't happened to more towns in the foothills of California. The towns are still there because maybe we've got like one day per decade where you've got the weather conditions that could support later in later in the year closer to those windiest times of the year in the late fall early winter this increases the likelihood of a fire being severe before next break I want to bring in science educator and communicator Dave he's also the host of N.P.R.'s Science Program Blue Dog I asked him on the program so he could explain why our fire season seems to be getting along without going into the all the nuances of climate change you can find that info anywhere but I do want to talk about the direct impact that climate change is having on these catastrophic wildfires. Thanks for coming on to the show Cermak now great to join you so how does climate change affect these catastrophic wildfires that were been seen so often now well it's basically some some very simple things because the climate is warming you are getting a much longer fire season in other words it's getting warmer and drier earlier in the spring and later in the fall so that so that fire season is lengthening the real key thing to look at to me is the overnight low temperatures which most people don't focus on they look at they look at the high temperatures but if you look at the overnight lows you can see that there has been a steady trend of those going up and that's really the signature of climate change in California and coupled with that of course the high temperatures during the day those dry out vegetation stressed the plants and then of coupled with the drought we had there for several years you know created the catastrophic situation we've had since you know basically from 2012 to 2018. So Dave is there a relationship between climate change and the bark beetle that's been causing so much tree mortality lately Yeah there certainly is and you know you can definitely see it if you fly over the forests in like you know from say Denver to California you can see the devastation of the brown trees killed by the bark beetles and what's happening is because the temperatures in winter are warming those overnight lows are not cold enough to cause the you know long periods of freezing that would kill off a lot of these beetle larvae in the wintertime they're able to survive and then you know breed and infest more and more forests so it's the overnight lows in the wintertime especially That's not controlling the bark beetle like it used to you know they're a natural part of the ecosystem or they used to be but now that ecosystem is changing because of the warming temperatures in the bark beetles are starting to kill more and more trees. Thank you Dave Shlomo of blue dye. You're listening to California Bernie co-production of North State Public Radio with support from Sierra Nevada brewery I met that and we're going to take a short break and when we come back we're going to join a group of forest rangers for a tour of a fire recover project in the $2200000.00 acre Shasta Trinity National Forest when you see the clear cut patches that you're looking at the private Timberland their goal is to maximize profits by growing trees as a crop that's not the goal of the Forest Service will be right back. Local programming is available 24 hours a day $365.00 days a week on. Joining us for the holiday party Friday December 20th 630 show at 730 performances by the Mondo greens the Copas brothers and a potluck see their. Welcome back to California burning supported by generous funding from Sierra Nevada Brewing Company I met. Talked a lot about how fires burning across landscapes how we can predict in why some fires burn so severe. After a catastrophic wildfire How do you even begin to repair a forest especially on a large scale to help prevent future severe fires Fortunately I found a group of folks doing this kind of work that were more than happy to talk to me. Up in Hayfork California I met with a group of forest rangers who wanted to show me a wildfire recovery project that they're working on so I jumped into a car with national forest ranger Randy and I'm. Sure on the chain National Forest the Shasta Trinity National Forest is California's largest forest and acts as a barrier between the Central Valley and the coast. As we continued to drive up towards the project say the overly dense forest we were surrounded by suddenly opens up with black in the ground and tree trunk surrounding us so now we're really entering. Into the forest. Like yeah so this is the fire it burned in 2012. So it started over the Reds and. In just a couple of hours it jumped Creek burned up the slope and then over the top. And the fact is it was a really quick fire it wasn't one of the fires that went on and on and on but the fire was severe in the ridge it burned over separates forested timber lands from the town of Hayfork where people work in live so where this fire went over could now actually be restored to act as a strategic fire line to protect Hayfork against future fires. Out on the ridge and meet up with the other rangers who agreed to show me around. Specialist for prescribed fire and fuels for the National Forest. On the public affairs officer for the Shasta Trinity National Forest. Fire ecologist for the Shasta Trinity national forest all 5 of us are standing on this strategic ridge which because the brush was triggered by the previous fire is now acting as a natural fire break but this break needs to be maintained so brush and Bush's don't return which can then spread the fire fast again they eventually want healthy fire resistant trees on this ridge but what the Forest Service needs to do next is control soil erosion making sure the road ridge top is stable and that the ground will support growing trees can be mulch could be would strong directional fouling of trees. Act as the tree itself serves as a water bar it intercepts and disperses water along the length of both its filled direction across the slope hydro seeding with our copters where you put down mulch material to increase the growth and so I'll cover with grasses and the mulch itself and then we also use and use strong walls where you put the netting wraps straw bales along with stakes to hold it up after erosion has dealt with they plant new trees from seeds collected from a similar area establishing a healthy new stand of trees where there is no canopy anymore has a few phases you know initially are trying to get trees above the. Grass and brush grow faster and taller than baby trees do and can take up all the water and block sunlight from reaching those baby trees effectively killing them if you don't manage the competing vegetation and then you kind of get into a stage where you're really more worried about what's the overall fuel condition across that young stand because small trees can catch fire easily in the dryer months and if all the trees are the same size no older bigger trees in between them if one catches fire they will likely catch fire and then you get to the point where maybe the trees are competing with each other you can see across the the road how these small trees are very closely spaced and they don't really have room to grow so then we'll go in thin out the trees. Basically when replanting a tree stand the Forest Service goal is to get to the point where they don't have to use their own resources to maintain it because their resources are limited so they partner with a timber company who can then thin some smaller trees and harvest some larger ones and sell the wood to subsidize their work which is a totally different strategy than how a private timber company might manage their lands on private timberlands some of which you can actually see from the Ridge were standing you can't help but notice the 15 to 20 acre clear cut scars scattered about so when I see the clear cut patches that you look in on the private timber land their goal is to maximize profits and the way they maximize profits is by growing trees as a crop. That's not the goal of the forest service most of our landscape so we do have goals to produce timber products because we are the land of many uses right we have lots of goals producing timber for the American people is one of them but preserving habitats is another one providing clean drinking water is another one providing recreation opportunities is another one so that wide range of goals kind of pushes us out of the clear cut business and into other methods of harvesting and thinning that achieve multiple objectives the problem that I saw with this idea is that both the forest and the timber company wants to keep the big healthy trees they're more valuable to the timber company and more fire resistant to the forest so the Forest Service is using the timber company to clear the forest What do you do if those trees aren't marketable because that's a major issue with these overgrown forests the trees are numerous but small it can be challenging to develop a thinning project that's also economically by a ball and balancing all the competing interests we have other contracts called stewardship contract. Where in addition to the value of the timber and paying the operator to do additional work Kevin says all the interests and goals of the Forest Service are weighed with a multitude of specialists wildlife biologists fish biologists watershed hydrologist soil scientist geologist so-called trust foreign fuel specialist archaeologists have I don't want to forget anybody so this is this is massive range of specialties that go into it have say and have importance when we plan our projects. You know we're not the only land managers out here we're not the only stewards of the land you know there's private companies there's private lands so working with our partners working across our boundaries finding ways to work together and maximise our opportunities because our findings limited their funding much in the minute but together to do a project together. Thank you Carol Underhill Dan Osterman Kevin I was born and ready Paris for the day they spent with me driving me to different sites and answering all my questions and a big thanks to Joe Rose for coordinating everything in making this whole tour possible. The next stop is to the east to Timberland's owned by Michigan California timber company a tract of land on a small mountain called Black Butte just north of reading Chris chase manages these lands for both lumber production but also fire resilience he can't stop every fire he can't prevent every fire but but we can certainly take steps to help mitigate the the impact of those fires. Your. He takes me to a say where they are mechanically thinning small in unhealthy trees in the stand to provide more room for others to grow bigger and healthier you can see how that's just that but it's not Elpida you see a lot of these tips are dead they can see. That was just kind of a different look to it. The branches are a little scraggly. That this isn't a particular tree pagers going to. Stare almost. As this tractor with a huge mechanical arm and. Grabs a tree cuts through it in one stroke. Then the tree gets placed in a neat little pile to minimize ground history. We have pictures and a video of this California burning. Eventually material like this will be put into a shredder and sold to a co-generation place where it creates a renewable form of low emission energy the shredder is buzzing loudly in the back room it's really low value residual material small diameter broken shots mostly limbs needles that kind of thing so you know we do have the option of just burning this on side but you know that's that's an open controlled. Environment there's you know some risk associated with you know spoke up in the atmosphere. It's right here is a very. Spend the better part of the day walking around and c.t.c. Timberlands talking about the severity of these problems and I keep bringing up perscribe fires but he doesn't think the forests are ready for fire in the areas that need maintenance the most the fuel load is just too great he says so they won't be low level fires 1st they need thinning then possibly fire can be used afterwards to help maintain and we've got to acknowledge that we've got to remove some of these medium and large trees that have value to cover the costs of the operation and make it self-sustaining and that may require some government investment as sort of seed money to get this going but that's where we need to go if we're ever going to get ahead. Just afraid if we. Were. Losing. 20 years. Condition. In the absence of. Let's do what we need to do. For the future. Thank you Chris chase. Companies. The director of. The Trinity national. Into the next episode of. Urban interface where the. Cities and how we can live better in those places and. Communities. The same experience we have. And was made. Music. Thanks to. You're listening to. A little bit of news and information you can use fiddler it's the last week of even though it already feels like winter here in the north it hasn't been rainy it's been super cold of course causes lots of issues for those living near or in the camp fire burns especially in places like. Where places to get supplies are far and few between Also the land and some of the. Stable in many of these places don't have gas electricity available so if you feel like doing something nice for the community still in recovery don't forget those in Concow. Making it more difficult the Trump administration has proposed nap sometimes known as food stamps which help provide assistance to families in need the new rules would stop states from providing work requirement waivers. Areas like county to county county Plumas County and other northern California areas this rule will basic food assistance for the poorest 700000 Americans the other proposed rule change would end food assistance for another estimated 3000000 Americans by disqualifying folks who are enrolled in other government programs Unfortunately our representative congressman. Has not stepped in to protect his constituents from these rules if you think he should give him a call or write him a letter with pen and paper this is the most effective way to create local change with your congressperson Just remember to be nice. Because you do catch more flies with honey if you're rude to your letter phone call will probably just be ignored and you have some positive food news as we enter the winter holiday season a tradition I haven't partaking in many years is a Christmas dungeon. Just open up. You may have been listening to some of the reporting that I've been doing over the last year so. He's a big proponent. Is the perfect time to do this kind of work. If you. Reach out to your local. Org. Tickets at the usual outlets including plays in Jay's case. And Chico paper company our New Year's Eve party is going to be awesome too It's Tuesday December 31st it's at the women's club with 3 great local bands swamps and Smokey the groove and lo and behold you can get tickets in advance at the usual case outlets it's also a show tickets $10.00 in advance coming up in January 2020 we start a series shows for k.c. a Far that are going to be awesome Fred Eaglesmith show starring tiff Guinn will be at the Women's Club on Sunday January 26th the Sam chase in the untraditional be at the women's club that Friday that's January 31st with a Lockwood Porter from Chico open in a show. From the Mother Hips will be at the Women's Club on Valentine's Day Feb 14th it's a Friday night this year Robbie folks Grammy nominated artists Robbie folks and American artists is going to be. On Thursday February 22nd we've got a night of the blues on February 27th with Rick Astor in and the night cats and former 3rd base coach for the Giants and his band are going to be at the Women's Club on Friday March 6th That's Tim Flannery and of the lunatic fringe then coming back to Chico in March Thursday night it's Tim Blum and his band Tim Blum from the Mother Hips tickets at the usual k.c. Of our outlets that means Chico paper company plays in Jason online and. Thanks for listening to the station that believes in peace through music your community radio station 90 point one ks Chico California. 90 point one. Org.
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