Wildfires in context: scientific insights and reporting advice from the field

[00:00:25]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Hello, everyone, and welcome to SciLine’s media briefing on wildfire behavior response and risk reduction. Wildfire seasons are becoming longer and more complex with many parts of the United States experiencing above average or record breaking acres burned, active fires, evacuations and related issues. Today, we’ll examine the science behind what drives wildfire behavior, the decisions that shape wildfire response and risk reduction, and practical approaches for covering these stories with greater accuracy and context. My name is Christian Monterrosa. I’m SciLine’s engagement manager, and I’m particularly excited to be motoring today’s discussion with Wildfires being one of my main focuses in my career as a photojournalist and having covered some of California’s worst fires over the last ten years.

To give you a bit of context about SciLine, we’re an editorially independent non profit based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and funded by philanthropies. So all our services for journalists are free. Our mission is to make scientific evidence and expertise accessible for journalists in the course of your reporting on all sorts of topics like today’s. More of our resources are available on SciLine.org, and you can also click from the blue, I need an expert button, anytime you need to speak with a scientific expert for your story. We’ll look for a source with the right background to answer your questions before your deadline.

A couple of notes before we begin, I’m joined here by two researchers and a journalist who have extensive expertise in wildfire science, management, and reporting. I’ll let each of them introduce themselves. Dr. Andi Thode, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:02:01]

DR. ANDI THODE: Yeah, hi. My name is Andi Thode. I’m a professor of fire ecology and management at Northern Arizona University. I also serve as the lead for the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, which is one of 15 fire science exchanges across the U.S. and those exchanges have a tremendous amount of information for all of you. And my research really surrounds fire effects, changing fire regimes, and currently, I’m really looking heavily into invasive species and issues those are causing in desert ecosystems.

[00:02:37]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. Doctor Heidi Huber-Stearns.

[00:02:41]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: Thanks. Hi, everyone. I’m Heidi Huber-Stearns. I’m an associate research professor at the University of Oregon. I co direct the Institute for Resilient Communities Organizations and the Environment, and we have two program areas within there, the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice and the Ecosystem Workforce Program. We focus on a wide range of applied social and ecological issues primarily in the West. A lot of my work. I’m a social scientist. A lot of my work is really focused on prescribed fire, the intersection of smoke and public health, land management, and forest management.

[00:03:15]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. And, Murphy Woodhouse, would you introduce yourself?

[00:03:17]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Yeah, Murphy Woodhouse. I’m the Mountain West News Bureau reporter at Boise State Public Radio. Been here for about 3.5 years, and wildfire has become my principal area of focus, and I have a professional background in wildfire as well.

[00:03:32]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Awesome. Thank you all. Before we begin taking audience questions, I’ll ask each of our panelists a few questions myself. Journalists, you can submit your questions at any time during the briefing. Just click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen and please let us know if you’d like your question directed to a specific panelist. We’ll be posting a recording of this briefing on our website later today and a transcript will be added in the next couple of days. With that, let’s begin. I’ll start with you, Andi. What does the term fire regime mean? And how can differences in fire regimes impact how fires burn and affect ecosystems over time?

[00:04:10]

DR. ANDI THODE: Great. Yeah. So a fire regime is a term that we use basically to describe the general way that fire works in an ecosystem, and those ecosystems vary from mountain, forested ecosystems of different types down to the deserts. So we really think of this as seven sort of different terms that make up a fire regime. That have to do with how frequently the fire burns in an ecosystem. Is it every year? Is it every 50 years? Is it every 100 years plus? What time of year? So the seasonality of fire, the size of the fires and the pattern of those fires, how they’re burning on the landscape, severity wise, which I’ll talk about in a minute.

And then also the intensity of the fire, which we describe as the heat released by the fire. And when you see really long flame links versus very short flame links, that’s directly relating to that intensity of the fire, how much heat is coming off the fire. And then severity is a broad term that we look at for fire regimes, which is talking about the effects of the fire on vegetation and wildlife, are probably the two most direct ways that those are used, soils as well. And severity on soils versus wildlife can be different and vegetation can be different. And then the last is back to that pattern of fire, which is the pattern of that severity. So do you have really big, high severity patches, typically, or is it a very patterned fire where it’s a mix of different kinds of fire on the landscape?

So those fire regimes are really important for how they used to work and then how they’re currently working because with past management, from logging to grazing to fire suppression, and then changes in our climate that are leading to the large droughts, like we’re seeing affecting the Western U.S. much this year, those can really change the way that fire regimes are working and how frequently or how severely fire comes through a system. I also kind of want to bring up relative to that, that not all wildfires are bad. We really have a range of what the word bad means. If you talk about bad or good ecologically with wildfire.

That really depends on that fire regime and how fire is supposed to work in that system. So if you think of, like, a Ponderosa pine, lower elevation forested system, fire is actually really, really critical for that system to function and have the proper kind of fire, which originally was short flame lengths, low intensities, low severities and very frequent every ten to twentyish years kind of thing. You could compare that to ecologically a fire system like Southern California chaparral, which we hear a lot about in the more fall time frames, those systems are supposed to burn at high severity with long flame lengths, but they’re not supposed to burn as frequently as they are because of invasive species and human ignitions.

So that’s why understanding these fire regimes is really critical to understanding really how good or bad ecologically the effects are. Now if we’re talking about social effects. Even though Southern California chaparral fire is ecologically supposed to burn at high severities and intensities, socially, that’s not great when you have homes right in the middle of that. So those are kind of different ways that we have to think about how fire works in these systems. And when talking about wildfires being good or bad, there’s multiple perspectives to that.

[00:08:02]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Great. Thank you. I’d love to take a step back even before a fire, what conditions have to come together for a wildfire to become particularly difficult to control?

[00:08:13]

DR. ANDI THODE: So, the world of fire loves triangles, and we have a couple of different triangles. The one that relates directly to fire behavior or how quickly fires moving, how intense it is. Excuse me, we call the fire behavior triangle, very hard concept to get. And so that includes fuel, weather, and topography. Weather is the most unpredictable piece of that triangle. And so weather really is a big driver of when we get these large fire events that builds on other things going on, but big wind events, lack of precipitation, really dry weather and low relative humidities. So a lot less moisture in the system in general. Things that add to this fire behavior triangle, though, is the longer term climate.

So drought, if we’re coming in on a high wind event with low relative humidities on top of a long term drought or even just a couple of years of drought, that allows our larger fuels to become more available, and that allows our ignitions or something that people call PIG, our probability of ignitions to go up so that basically, whenever an ember lands, there’s more of a chance that it actually will ignite the fuels around it.

So all of those pieces coming together will cause it to be particularly difficult to control. The other piece that I want to bring into this, though, is the wildland urban interface or basically where homes and communities meet our wildlands and areas that burn. And if those wildland urban interfaces are not prepared themselves and don’t have the right kinds of roads that fire trucks can turn around in and all of these other social infrastructure things, that also can make it very difficult to control wildfires because our firefighters are then focused on trying to save houses instead of trying to put out a fire.

And I’d like to also just put quotes sort of around the word control because we really, in many cases, don’t control wildfire. We herd it around. We do things to try and take the heat out of it, to remove oxygen and remove fuel from the system. But I think this idea of control, you know, this is a natural event, and we don’t really control completely nature. And so I think to think that to put the onus on wild and firefighting community as a whole to control these events is not exactly acceptable, especially when we haven’t done our part socially on communities and our homes.

[00:11:23]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Yeah, thank you. And you talked a little bit about looking ahead into the fall, specifically in California, but I’m curious what seasonal outlooks tell us and what they can’t tell us about upcoming fire activity.

[00:11:38]

DR. ANDI THODE: So seasonal outlooks are really good at looking that longer term drought perspective. And so we can see where we’re sitting from a perspective of drought. We can also see where we’re sitting from a fuels perspective from previous years. So in some systems, fine fuels are absolutely critical to driving wildfire behavior. And we know what the buildup of those fine fuels were from previous years. And what I mean by fine fuels are things like grasses. Needle litter can also fall into that sometimes. Just how many small little things out there that burn quickly is what we call fine fuels. Excuse me. What the seasonal outlooks don’t tell us is when that fuel, weather, and topography are going to align.

And then when we’re going to get those lightning ignitions exactly or when we’re going to get those human ignitions and when that really dry period is going to come. The seasonal outlooks are kind of a broader perspective, bigger picture, longer term, based on the past for sort of predictions, but not actuality.

[00:12:52]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Awesome. Thank you so much. Heidi, I want to turn to you for a few questions. Wildfires often involve multiple agencies. So how can reporters understand who’s making which decisions?

[00:13:05]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: Yes, there’s a lot of different elements to this. I’ll give a bit of a high level couple points about it and then have some links for folks to follow up as well. Broadly, incident command is the standardized system that manages all wildfire responses across all agencies in the United States. The incident command system for wildfire is managed by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group and NWCG Incident Command System framework. In practice, what happens is that when a local entity reports a fire, the local agency, fire department, local national forest unit, state, private company, essentially, local resources respond first. So that’s for initial attack. That’s the first initial response.

If it grows beyond that local capacity, then one of the 11 regions of different geographic areas that we have in the U.S., the GACCs, the geographic area coordination centers will respond and support with additional resources. So the resource requests go from there. And then at a certain point it goes to the National Interagency Coordination Center, the NICC, at the National Interagency Fire Center, the NIFC in Boise, Idaho.

Those are all the acronyms. But essentially, what that means is there are different points of mobilization and where those resources are coming from. A couple of things about this is these resources are not distributed evenly across the country, particularly when we think about they are positioned in different ways, from a federal resources perspective, but at the state level, local and then also private businesses that provide contracting for a lot of this work as well and provide a lot of the surge capacity across the system. Those resources, some of them are preposition, and many of them are actually really heavily based in the Pacific Northwest. Not that that’s where they end up getting deployed, but it does mean that they have to travel to get to incident. So just some perspective on a little bit around that. Who’s making the decisions. Many different levels. The decisions are being made. The system, we have the system in place.

It’s worth flagging that we are at different preparedness levels across the nation, PL levels, preparedness level, and some of that impacts where some of these resources go. From a very pragmatic standpoint, if you’re looking for information about an incident InciWeb is the official incident information location. You can search the fire name, you can look up incident updates. You can see who the incident commander is, who the management team is, and the agency administrators. That’s going to be the best place to go to understand who’s in charge of a fire. That can change over time as the fire grows in complexity or as on the back end as things calm down. And so it’s worth checking there. You can also look up the PIO, the public information officer for the fire. You can look at daily incident reports, and that’s going to tell you more about what’s going on. For larger fires, they have ICS 209s, which also give you detailed information.

So those are all good places to look that give you a bunch of that base information without having to try to contact someone who’s actively on the fire, for example, and not being able to be responsive. Another local example in case it’s helpful, at least here in Oregon, we have regular smoke and heat or smoke and fire calls where there are calls during smoky times like we’ve been having, that happen fairly regularly and those are open to a lot of different folks. That’s another great place to find out what resources exist. Like Andi said, the consortia can also be a helpful resource for finding some of this information as well.

[00:16:43]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. What does the public often misunderstand about prescribed fire? I know they used to be called controlled burns. What role do prescribed fires play within the broader management of a wildfire?

[00:16:59]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: So this would have been great at on to the end of one of Andi’s responses. So as Andi said, there are a lot of forest systems that need fire with different severity, different flame links, but understanding those fire regimes, as Andi said, helps us understand the need for prescribed fire. So there are a lot of systems that do require prescribed burning or that benefit from it ecologically. And so I think, there’s a lot of different elements to this. One of the things that we look at in our work is understanding how people are thinking about and experiencing smoke from prescribed fires.

So thinking carefully about when prescribed fires, if they’re coming on the heels of a really smoky wildfire season, there are some considerations around public essentially, you know, are people of smoked out and so thinking carefully about when and how and understanding what we do know and continue to learn about wind patterns and dispersion and what that means for what types of burns can take place. There are a lot of ways in which prescribed burning can be done and usually isn’t going to smoke out in an area and is going to have ecological benefits for the forest system and ideally gives it some of the fire it needs before a large wildfire comes through. So from a misunderstanding perspective, there are a lot of concerns about the risks of prescribed burning that come up in some communities. You know, some communities have experienced. It is rare, but it happens that a prescribed burn escapes and does damage and is not able to be managed in the way that it was intended. And so there are some risk concerns that communities have around that.

There’s also thousands of prescribed burns each year that go on successfully as well, you don’t usually hear about those. So, there are some concerns around that. I think like I said, smoke is one of the considerations we hear a good amount about, as well as concern of burns escaping. I will just flag. The other thing here is that prescribed burning is different than managed wildfire, which I believe was part of the original question. Managed wildfire, there are different names for it, but essentially unplanned ignitions that were either human or lightning caused or otherwise unplanned ignitions that are allowed to burn for ecological benefits if they’re burning at an appropriate severity and flame length that is acceptable for that forest system.

That is an approach that’s been used to achieve some of the objectives that you might see, for example, with prescribed burning to get fire in those landscapes. That approach has a whole set of considerations that come with it. Currently, this year, as far as I understand it for the 2026 fire year, where we are right now in the season, the USDA has issued a full suppression strategy for all unplanned wildfires, so that is not a management tool that is being used right now. What that means is every unplanned ignition will be managed under a full suppression strategy on national forest lands going forward, but that is another one of the tools that can be used in different landscapes.

[00:20:02]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Got it. Thank you. And on the topic of smoke that you briefly mentioned, how can reporters help audiences understand that wildfire impacts continue long after the flames are extinguished because of smoke exposure and other factors?

[00:20:17]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: Great. Yes. Sorry, I’m going to go back, Christian. I apologize. I want to say one other thing about prescribed fire if that’s okay. One other misconception about this that I do think is worth bringing up is that most of what’s burning in a forest fire is not live trees, it’s dead material on the forest floor. And so that’s what we’re removing. I think that understanding that allows us to choose the time and place for fire and understanding that it’s not about burning a lot of trees. It’s really about burning that material on the forest floor.

OK. Transitioning to smoke, how can reporters help audiences understand those impacts after flames are extinguished.

So yes, there’s several things. I would say one of the things that we encourage that seems very small and can be challenging in a media context is what images people choose to use in their reporting, their academic reporting, their media coverage matter greatly, whether it’s fire or smoke. There are people that have trauma responses and are triggered by smoke events being featured in news articles or by seeing people without any personal protective equipment on in a smoking environment. And so I would flag that that’s one of the things that’s kind of cutting across the long after flames are extinguished.

One of the other big considerations that we hear a lot from our public health colleagues is the long term impacts of smoke exposure. We’re just starting to hear more research about this and we don’t fully know what the impacts are. We’re seeing more and more of them, but what that means is something that seems like just a few smoky days here or there actually can have quite an impact on people. One of the other things that we talk about a lot in Oregon with our Smoke Center, but also more broadly is if you actually look who is in the unhealthy for sensitive groups on your AQI, your air quality index rating, who is actually in a sensitive group that would be more susceptible to impacts from smoke. It’s actually a large portion of the population. So it’s all children, not just some, anyone with developing lungs, it’s anyone with preexisting cardiovascular or respiratory issues.

It’s all elderly folks. The number of people that actually are in that sensitive group is much larger than many people think. We see parents that are like, ‘Well, my kids are fine. They don’t have asthma.’ Their lungs are still developing. You know, athletes and others that are breathing in more air during that time. They also are at higher risk of having some of those impacts. And I think those are some of the longer term things that we talk about. There’s also a lot of considerations around what happens when you have smoke exposure year after year. We have people leaving communities that have been just inundated with smoke because their families aren’t able to go outside or their children are stuck in clean air spaces and not able to do what they need to do.

And those are some of the kind of longer term impacts that we’re seeing.

[00:23:11]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Awesome. Thank you so much. Murphy, I’d like to turn to you and ask a bit when it comes to reporting on wildfires. How do you build trust with firefighters, emergency managers, and affected residents during these fast moving situations?

[00:23:26]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Yeah, no, that’s an important question. So I will say, my professional background in fire, I did four previous seasons. That has opened a lot of doors for me, but I do want to get across. That’s obviously not going to be many people’s experience here, and it’s certainly not the only way to go about that. I’d say in my reporting, that has been an obvious advantage, but far from sufficient to be able to do this work well and build the sort of trust that you just talked about. So, like I think a lot of that just comes from the reporting itself, wild and firefighters care about this stuff a lot. They are reading this reporting, they’re listening to it. And so I think, like, showing the community that you can report on these complex and very high stakes issues accurately and fairly is a really great way to build that sort of trust. And I really do think that this is a year round effort. Like, if you’re just calling a random number on an incident or you’re just one of a dozen reporters that are bothering them that day. It’s going to be hard to stand out.

But if you’re someone who has an established relationship, I mean, to be clear, the fire world is fairly small. Like, you can actually build relationships with key players kind of all over. And so I think, yeah, doing it the day of the incident is not going to be a good day for that. And so the way I approach that is, kind of for my own accountability and just making sure that I’m, you know, not kind of losing the plot. Like, I’ve kind of built an informal network of firefighters and scientists and other people close to these issues that kind of I share my reporting and ask for especially critical feedback. I just pretty generally checking in with them so that I’m someone that they know and have a sense of as opposed to, again, imagine Spokane, how many reporters were trying to get ahold of a fairly limited number of people.

If you’re a number they have in their cell phone and you guys have an established relationship of trust and they have a sense of where you’re coming from, you’re probably going to get a call back more likely than the other folks. I do want to say that and I think that this is an interesting area for conversation. I’ve actually done very little individual incident coverage and I actually think that there’s a good conversation to be had about how important it is or perhaps the outsized way in which individual incidents, have come to mean, I mean, just being most fire coverage. But yeah, let’s see what else did I have to. Oh, here’s something that I really do want to get across to folks is, like, I would say that a fair bit of the trust that I have built in this community stems from the fact that a major focus of my reporting has not been on wild fires as disasters, which is something we need to talk about.

I cover wildfire as work very seriously, and I cover the very intense workplace issues and wildfire very closely and critically. And that is definitely something that has been well received by many corners of the fire world, and many people have started coming to me because of that reporting. So I report on long term risks. Obviously, the immediate fire line risks that we’re learning about repeatedly this season, but then pay issues, I mean, one of my lines about wildfire is wildfire is not a war. Wildfire is a workplace, and I think that our business has done a particularly good job of covering wildfire as work when it’s been basically an all but open workplace safety scandal for decades. So I think those are ways that I’ve gone about building trust in this community.

[00:27:03]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Yeah, thank you for that. I wanted to jump back a little bit and just dive a little bit deeper. You mentioned your professional background in fire. Were you on a crew? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:27:13]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Yes, I did a short engine season when I was getting my undergraduate degree and then did three full Type I hand crew seasons 2008-2010 on the type one crew out of my hometown Pocatelo.

[00:27:26]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Awesome. Thank you. As you know, there’s fast moving situations during a wildfire breaking news events. So how can journalists balance some of those dramatic images with accurate scientific and operational context when reporting?

[00:27:41]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Yeah, I really do think that this is one of the defining challenges of covering wildfires responsibly. And so I want to just share two quotes from Doctor Don Falk, who is one of the authors on what to me has been one of the most important papers. To me, as I’ve been trying to understand this crisis. It has a long scientific name. It’s in the list of papers that I shared with the SciLine folks. It discusses the scale of what’s called the wildfire deficit on the landscape. And what they have found very basically is that as exceptional as the current period seems, in terms of extent, we are burning less than a quarter of the annual acreage on average prior to colonization. So, I’ll just read the quotes from Dr. Don Falk that I think are explicit media criticism. So he what he said. What we found is that there is much less fire in North America than there was in historical times, and this is maybe the most counterintuitive result from the whole study.

The way we see fire in the media and hear about it, it seems like the whole world is exploding with fire, but that’s actually not true. There’s less fire now than there was historically. And then another quote from him that I think is relevant for this conversation. This is a problem in the media report, sorry, I didn’t write it very well. We’re drawn to the catastrophic events. Most of the time, both prescribed and even wild fires are burning at low and moderate severity. There’s a lot of that fire still happening, and it’s just that we don’t hear about it. So our view and our understanding of fires being shaped by the focus on these more catastrophic events. So that’s what Dr. Don Falk has to say about that and those were quotes that I took very personally and they very much informed the way I go about this work. So another one of my lines about all this is that wildfire is not a disaster.

The disaster is the terrible way that we have chosen to live with this essential and inevitable force. And I would say that and Dr. Thode, sorry if I mispronounced that was making a similar line there. Like, I would say that much of the coverage puts the onus on the destructiveness on the fire itself, not on the legacy of decades of suppression policies that have, in large measure, put us in this situation that we’re in right now, not on the climate change that is supercharging all of these events. And then also, I think, probably one of the most important and certainly a complex conversation in the West, but one that we’re going to have to have or we’re going to just keep watching Spokans happening is the fact that we have development policies that have allowed for neighborhoods to spring up on lands that thirst for flame, that will burn literally, I mean, Colorado is an exception to a degree.

California has had statewide building codes on the books for some time now. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The vast majority of land in the West does not require any wildfire mitigation building practices as a matter of law. And so, this is very much a problem on multiple fronts and on multiple timelines that we have created for ourselves. And but then to get back to the media thing, the intelligent use of large scale fire on the landscape is going to be one of the most important tools that we have for emerging from this crisis.

But I think that the media has in significant measure, been a part of constructing fire as an unwelcome threat that must be suppressed by any means necessary. Wildfire is not a war, but I do think that much of the coverage has a martial framing and words of war, you know, hot shots as special forces, acres destroyed, battling blazes, this sort of thing. I would just really encourage reporters to be much more judicious in the language and framing that we use when reporting on fire. And I would just really encourage reporters to seek out stories that paint the more complex picture of this essential phenomenon. Because, I mean, fire is the way out of this crisis, and right now, it’s very difficult to do the scale prescribed fire, cultural burning, wildfire use, similar practices, precisely because of how we in the media have constructed fire.

[00:31:38]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. I appreciate that perspective. My final question is from a practical standpoint, what resources, tools, or habits have been most valuable in your wildfire reporting?

[00:31:49]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: Yeah. Great question. And I’m happy to be a resource for folks after the fact. But yeah, wildfires an extremely science heavy beat. So I’m glad that there are two scientists here, and I’m the non scientist. So, I believe it’s already been mentioned, and I believe Dr. Thode you’re a part of it, but the Fire Science Exchange Network is an extraordinary, extraordinary resource. And if you feel like after speaking a little bit more about it, they put out a number of regional newsletters. So I subscribe to the Great Basin, Northwest, Northern Rockies, and maybe a couple others, but they have regionally specific newsletters that every single month, literally, it is just a dozen, two dozen recent papers asking essential questions. And so, like I read those. I go through, I open up the ones that seem relevant.

Anyway, can’t, cannot. That’s one of the links that I shared, I cannot talk that up enough. I read those newsletters every single month. Google Scholar alerts work you really great. I’m not being paid to say this, SciLine has proved to be a quite at times borderline miraculous resource for getting folks on the phone fast. Because it’s so science heavy, I read the whole paper. I use my spots and other short coverage as an excuse to really build my expertise and knowledge and but then also to build my rolodex, right? Build relationships with experts so they get a sense of who I am, and then they’ll come to me, right? When they got a paper that’s forthcoming or they’re seeing something interesting in the scholarship, they’ll come to me.

But yeah, being a fire reporter is to be a science reporter to a significant degree. NIFC, again, these are all links that I’ve shared with the SciLine folks. NIFC has quite a catalog of resources for current statistics, fire perimeters, lots and lots of stuff about that. And then I would just also say that this is not a beat that you should do alone. There’s a pretty cool cohort of youngish wildfire reporters in the West. You know, there are group chats, there are Slack channels, stuff like that, but this is not something to take on alone. It is utterly- it is daunting. It is overwhelming. It is complex. But there’s a lot of really excellent wildfire reporting happening right now.
So I would just encourage you to build relationships with fellow reporters trying to tackle this, yeah, I mean, extremely high stakes beat.

[00:34:13]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Sure. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for those great questions. I want to open this up now to those in the audience and our panel here. I want to remind reporters on the line that you can submit your questions using the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Our first question comes from a Colorado based reporter at the Daily Yonder. Can you talk about any projects or solutions addressing post-wildfire risks like flooding and mudslides? And that’s open to anybody.

[00:34:48]

DR. ANDI THODE: I can take a first stab at that if that’s helpful. Post fire, flooding and debris flows are a big issue in some areas of the country, even more than others because like here in Arizona and in the Southwest, we have the rains, our monsoons, which is why I blinked out because lightning hit outside. It comes right after our major fire season. And so if we have severely burned landscapes and then a ton of water falling on them, that becomes a big issue. Southern California is another place where that’s an issue. Some of our desert ecosystems also work with that.

These post fire flooding events, are there is something called the Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation program, the BAER program, if you ever heard of that. That’s what that is. And the idea behind that is in the first three years following wildfires, they do a lot of work to try and help prevent some of the negative effects of flooding debris flows on communities. I will be honest that some of the methods are relatively controversial, like post fire seeding in its effectiveness, but there are some things that are done like mulching, putting mulch across the landscape is known to be quite effective, often mulching trees, if you’re in forced systems on site to help give some ground cover.

Those things are actually known to be pretty effective. We have, through the Southwest Fire Science consortium, created a guide called after the wildfires. And these after the wildfire guides exist in I think most of the Western U.S. states, they’re generally state by state because they lead to different resources and information from where you can get, is it safe to eat the vegetables in my yard if we had flooding afterwards? To where do I get information on how to get funding from FEMA or how do I organize my community? So those guides can be really, really helpful. And I’m not sure if I answered all the question. I should have wrote it down.

[00:37:03]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: That was great. Thank you. Our next question is from a freelancer based in Oregon. Can you discuss what’s involved in doing our part around home and community? For example, I live in Talen Oregon in a heavily landscaped community. It’s open to anyone.

[00:37:21]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: I can maybe just start by saying, I think the number one resource that I would recommend as far as a place to start would be the Oregon State University Extension Fire Program, happy to share these links afterward. I’m keeping a running list of them, but they have links to a lot of resources on home hardening, community hardening, but also a really great guide that we’ve seen in Tallent and Ashland, we’ve done work down there that people are very excited about. That’s a native. It’s plants to plant around your home. That are more appropriate for fire resistant native planting. So that’s another great guide that they have. So I know those are all Oregon specific. A lot of those relate to other states as well and other extension systems have that, too. But I’d say that’s a good local example for someone that’s based in Oregon and being in talent, it means you have a front row seat to what it means to be recovering from these wildfires and thinking carefully about that.

[00:38:25]

DR. ANDI THODE: I can add to that a little bit, too. Insurance is very heavily tied to this these days. There is a lot of concern about whether people will be covered with insurance. Different states are handling that differently. This is becoming a big, big issue, and people are losing their insurance due to wildfires and not being prepared in some cases. And so there’s a group called, and I always have to look at it when I say it, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. So it’s the IBHS system. And they have a new wildfire prepared home thing. So if you Google IBHS wildfire prepared, you will come to their checklist. And these are starting to be, its insurance company helped build these backed with fire professionals.

And this is starting to be accepted most in a lot of the Western U.S. and actually across the country, states are adopting this as sort of the baseline that you’ll have to hit with home preparedness. So this is a really great resource for folks to look at.

[00:39:38]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: I’d love to jump in a little bit as well. This is one of the most important things to be talking and reporting on right now. As I said before, the vast majority of jurisdictions in the West have literally no legal requirements of any kind for building in threatened areas, but this is an area where there’s interesting coverage to be done. Colorado has a new statewide plan that’s being stood up as we’re speaking. Utah, a conservative state has a somewhat similar program California has for a while.

So I would just encourage folks to be looking at state and local level efforts along this front. And then one thing I really like highlighting in this conversation is, I think because of I think it’s, you know, to some degree, like an American identity thing, but as with so many problems, we’re very bad at talking about problems socially, as shared problems, as things that we need to face in concert in unison in solidarity. And so there’s been a great focus on the home hardening front to talk about the responsibilities of individual homeowners. And I also just want to point out homeowners, what about us renters, right? What do renters do?

But then also the notion that these, so what we just saw in Spokane is a textbook example of many people refer to as an urban conflagration as opposed to the separate disaster of wildfire. What happens in urban conflagrations is the fuel is the homes. And, I mean, the flame links and intensity that can come off of a burning home, it doesn’t really matter what you have done, even if you’ve done everything right, if the homes around you are fully engulfed in putting off 50, 100 foot extremely intense flame links. So we need to talk about neighborhood and community hardening at least as much as individual home hardening, because again, this is a weakest link kind of situation. It has to be every home or the vast majority of homes. And currently, I would say that the vast majority of focus is just on enabling individual homeowners. And I think that’s a very limited approach to this. Thank you.

[00:41:46]

DR. ANDI THODE: Can I add one more thing to that? It is really important to, and the reason not only the flame lengths of your neighbors, but the embers and embers are what get communities. And so, even if a wildfire is multiple miles away, the embers from that wildfire can actually be carried into communities. And if you have very receptive fuel beds of houses or vegetation around houses or fences, things like that, that is what typically gets neighborhoods. And when you look at a lot of the pictures of burnt down wildfire neighborhoods, the trees are still standing and they’re still green. And that’s because those embers are moving house to house, and then fences are carrying fire house to house.

[00:42:33]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. Thanks for pointing that out. Another question from MLive in Michigan. How do you suggest selling the public on prescribed fire as a helpful tool in reducing wildfire risks rather than just another risk?

[00:42:49]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: I’m going to jump in real quick, and then I’ll let the scientists speak up. I mean, the numbers are overwhelming. The vast, vast, vast majority of prescribed fires do not escape control. There was a GAO report on this from several years ago. It’s literally something like 99.6% escape. But when they do, as with the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico, which went on to become the most disastrous wildfire in that state’s history. That obviously can set the clock back on these efforts substantially. And so I think that part of it is balancing the legitimate concerns and preoccupations of the public with the overwhelming science on this.

So there is and I would invite the scientists to step in with the details, but, I mean, there is just a voluminous scholarship to show that prescribed fire very effectively reduces severity and threats to the built environment. And they may be aware, but the question on the relationship between smoke exposure, ultimately, is a very, very live one in the scholarship, and so I would encourage caution right now about over promising the ability of prescribed fire to cut down on smoke exposure over time. But when it comes to reduced severity, it is an overwhelming-

[00:44:22]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: I agree. I would just add one of the things in the years that we’ve been looking at prescribed fire barriers, what the actual barriers are to getting more prescribed fire on the ground in the West and then more recently a closer look in California in particular. But what we see time and time again is that the biggest barriers are not actually about public perception or public tolerance. It’s actually about a lot of other challenges, particularly around having the resources, the people and the equipment in the place to do the burning when the burn windows are there. So it’s a workforce capacity issue. It’s a resource capacity issue. It’s a risk aversion by managers who are concerned about making the decision to burn issue.

And so we’ve looked at a couple of different ways that say, OK, so what are the barriers and what order? There’s a lot of conversation and rightfully so there’s a lot of reason why what the public thinks matters for this. I would also say when we look at what the barriers are, that’s a narrative that a lot of land managers hold that public doesn’t want us to burn, but the barriers they’re actually hitting are around capacity constraints, leadership constraints or other things.

The GAO report that Murphy mentioned is a great place to look at some of the reforms that they’re thinking about. But I would say that those elements are actually becoming barriers well before it gets to these other stages.

[00:45:48]

DR. ANDI THODE: Yeah, and I’ll just add my favorite little saying is, It’s not if you get wildfire, it’s when and how. And prescribed fire is one of those tools in the toolbox that allows us to decide the how.

[00:46:05]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: And I’m going to be annoying and jump in just one last little bit. And so, several people have mentioned wildfire use or managed wildfire. There are a number of different terms, and one of the issues is that there hasn’t been a common term to talk about this, but the basic idea is the intelligent and strategic use of wildfires that are started either naturally or by humans. As I think it was Heidi mentioned, those are currently by current agency direction, not allowed, but what the science shows us is that the vast majority of low and moderate severity fire on the landscape right now, which is, I don’t want to say that that’s the only form of beneficial fire because there are instances in which high severity, high intensity fires are actually exactly what ecosystems need.

Right now, wildfire itself is doing most of that work, but right now there are regulatory and agency hurdles to being able to really lean into the intelligent use of wildfires. Again, it’s specifically prohibited this fire season, but it’s kind of just sitting there, staring us in the face as the most important and powerful tool to put good acres on the ground. We have a radical fire deficit, and one way or another, we need to find a way to put more fire on the ground, not less.

[00:47:19]

DR. ANDI THODE: And I’ll just add to that in that, when we do, so I’ve done a lot of work with burn severity mapping using satellite imagery to map fire effects at a large scale across large landscapes. And if you look at most wildland fires and forested systems, it’s rare that you have more than 60% or even 40% high severity fire. So a lot of the work that those wildfires are doing can be positive benefit for these ecosystems. It is just a very hard thing, and the agencies do not try and broach the fact that a human ignition and fires that are burning down homes in one area could actually be having some ecological benefit in another that could prevent those houses from burning in the future.

[00:48:08]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: And I’m going to be really annoying. That reminds me of one of my hobby horses, which is that talking about fires, using acreage as the principal metric by which we talk about seasons, destructiveness, et cetera, is deeply, deeply, deeply problematic, and we really need to move beyond acreage as the metric for how we talk about seasons. Probably most importantly for what Andi just said, which is the fact that many of those acres are good. We need them. They’re doing positive resilience work on the landscape. And so when we just say 20,000 acres destroyed, one, that’s just wrong, right? They were not destroyed. An essential ecological force has simply returned to them. But then, two, they are one of our biggest tools, and we spend all of our time just talking about how much destruction they’re doing.

[00:48:56]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. Yeah, we’re coming up on time, so I want to make sure we get to a few more questions here. So very briefly, our next question is for Heidi specifically from a freelancer based in New York. It sounds like they’re essentially going back to the 10:00 a.m. rule. Is that your read? And did that play a major role in why we have larger slash more intense fires now? A quick note from us. If you’re unfamiliar, the 10:00 a.m. rule was established by the Forest Service in the 1930s and mandated that every new wildfire be contained by 10:00 a.m. the morning after it was first detected. Heidi, what can you tell us about that?

[00:49:36]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: Well, I can tell you that Murphy, Andi and I could probably have an entire other hour dedicated to this topic. It’s a great question. I think it follows up nicely what we just talked about. My very short answer is just, and again, happy to follow up on this. Many researchers view that that long era of fire exclusion when we had the 10:00 a.m. policy in place is one of the factors that contributed to the fuel accumulation in the situation that we currently have in many of our forests. Andi, of course, has a lot more expertise in that space than I do. This current emphasis on on full suppression, is understandable in many ways, given kind of the risks that people are facing and the preparedness level that we are at and the conditions we’re under. I would say it’s maybe concerning about what this means moving forward, right? Like, it’s likely not a sustainable approach to do that.

I think we’ve learned that from past decades. So maybe I’ll stop there.

[00:50:36]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Thank you. Our next question is from the Oregon Capital Chronicle. What infrastructure or public health stories about wildfire aren’t being told? What are we as journalists missing? Now we’ve alluded to some of these missed opportunities if we have anything else to add.

[00:50:55]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: I’d love to name three really quickly. Again, happy to follow up. I would say heat and smoke. When people are facing both heat and smoke at the same time, the synergistic effects are actually much worse for their health and we don’t talk about that a lot and that tends to be in places where they’re also experiencing wildfire, not always, but many times, same season. That’s something that we’re learning about and research that’s coming out, but really aren’t talking about. So people are not taking the protective actions they need to protect themselves and their family members because they’re not aware. The other is mental health impacts from both smoke and fire.

That’s pretty and particularly not just for the communities facing this but also the frontline responders to these incidents. And then the last component, I would say is the faces of the people doing the fire and forestry work, not just while the flames are out there, but also the very hard work in the forest to try to improve conditions in the forest and improve forest health. The people actually doing a lot of this work on which we depend that we don’t see or hear about is the other element.

[00:52:02]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: I would like to highlight, there’s a cultural burning renaissance happening kind of centered in Northern California, but certainly not just there. The Karuk the Yurok and many other indigenous peoples have a millennia long tradition of living well with fire and at a time when we’re living just horrifically with fire, I think we need to turn to those examples of different relationships. And not just them. There’s a lot, like prescribed burn associations. I mean, there’s just lots of interesting work happening to the fire on the landscape that we need and like this period of living terribly with fire is a fraction of a second of our species, like literally thousands and thousands and thousands of years long history of living well with fire. So we have a lot to learn from people like the Kuru.

[00:52:57]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: Awesome. Thank you. I just have one more question for you all. I wanted to flag for reporters on the call that you’ll receive a quick email survey when you sign off from this briefing. If you could take even 30 seconds to give us any feedback that you have, it would be really helpful for us to plan our services. So they’re useful to you in the future. With that, our last question is, what is one take home message you would want reporters to leave with?

[00:53:25]

DR. ANDI THODE: I can start. I think bringing the bigger picture to wildfire and bringing it year round, like Murphy brought forth before is really important from a media perspective. Not just these big events with the big flames. To just have very limited ability to tell a story that really brings forth the idea of fire regimes, the systems that these are in, and the real complications that are behind trying to work with the problem of wildfire. So I think that’s really it. And then I think the idea of community preparedness as a community, as as a whole is really critical and only going to become more and more critical through time as we continue to dry out this planet.

[00:54:20]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: I would just like to again highlight we had three firefighters killed at the end of June. A fourth died of his injuries from that same incident last month. A helicopter just went down in Utah killing both on board. A dozer operator was just killed in Southern Oregon. I believe we have at least six, seven direct fire fatalities this year, on average, 15.5 wild and firefighters are killed every single year at work, and I would ask every single person on this call if that is a level of death and injury that you would accept at your workplace, and if not, I would ask you to cover the extraordinary level of death and injury in wild and fire the way you would in any other workplace. It is an outrageous scandal.

[00:55:06]

DR. ANDI THODE: I’ll also just add to the top of that then something Heidi brought up. But firefighter long term health, cancer rates, other things related to that, I can’t tell you how many colleagues I’m watching go down with cancer.

[00:55:23]

DR. HEIDI HUBER-STEARNS: I would just add to a second all of what you both said and also say, one of the things that I think is an incredible opportunity in media is to help make sure that people can access the resources that they can. We know there are a lot of places where people don’t have the resources to do some of this, but just increasing smoke and fire literacy, for example, I’ll share some of these links, but incredible resources for how to even improve air quality in your home during a smoke event. It’s not enough to just shut the windows and doors. You can actually make yourself a toxic box inside that’s worse than outside.

So, there’s some pretty simple things that can be done for people to understand that that they are making decisions that are that are benefiting their family. I think it gets pretty scary for people to try to think about what they do when all these events are going on. And so I just really love when I see articles that take an opportunity to provide those resources or give a little bit of education and information so that people have something to walk away with that they can do themselves in their home. You know, like Andi said, the long term effects from so much of this, you know, we’re just starting to see that. And so if we can protect ourselves and our people, that would be wonderful. So that would be the thing I would add with.

[00:56:41]

MURPHY WOODHOUSE: And then I’ll shut up after this, wildfire is not a war, and we need to stop covering it like it is.

[00:56:49]

CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA: I want to thank you all to our great panelists for sharing your expertise and perspectives today and thank you to all the reporters who joined us. A list of resources mentioned here today as well as a recording of this briefing will be available on sent.org shortly, and a transcript will follow in the next couple of days. We hope to see you at our next briefing and thank you for joining us today.