Welcome to the second episode in our series about community-level wildfire resilience, supported by Fire Aside! We spoke with Fire Aside CEO and co-founder Jason Brooks about how Fire Aside—a home assessment platform that allows agencies to have direct 1:1 engagement with residents on resilience actions they can take—fits into bigger picture policy, data and decision making around community wildfire resilience in California and beyond.

Fire Aside was developed in Marin County, CA alongside the county fire department there, a partnership that was spurred by Jason's own interest in improving the wildfire resilience of his own property and not knowing exactly where to start. That was in 2020—now, Fire Aside is being used by over 100 departments in nine states to increase the efficiency of their home assessment processes and improve engagement with residents who want to improve their defensible space and home hardening.

It's become clear that increasing resilience actions at the neighborhood level, rather than just the homeowner level, is the best way to meaningfully reduce risk in the WUI, where fires often spread home to home rather than via vegetation; this scale piece is a huge part of what Fire Aside does, and is what makes it such a compelling technology in an era of urban conflagrations like those in LA this winter (or Boulder, Lahaina, Paradise etc before). Jason and I spoke about the impetus for developing the platform, as well as how it can potentially be utilized to help inform decision making and even funding needs at the city or county level. Down the road, the data procured from Fire Aside may even be useful in informing state policy or other big picture decision making. (Disclaimer: Fire Aside does not own any of the data that is compiled through the app/platform. Residents and departments using the platform own this data.)

We appreciate Fire Aside's work and their support of this series on community resilience—if you or your organization are responsible for wildfire risk assessments, we really can't recommend this technology enough.

A few action items!

Consider following Fire Aside on Linkedin.

Check out some Fire Aside testimonials on Youtube.

Slightly unrelated but please consider supporting justice and exoneration for firefighter Brian "Hakiym" Simpson. You can read about the case here. You can sign the petition here, or donate to a local mutual aid organization supporting Hakiym here.

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

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

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

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

1. Bring fire back to fire-adapted ecosystems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

00:00 - Episode Start

00:38 - Amanda Monthei Intro

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

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

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

12:41 - Good examples of post-fire response

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

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

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

18:39 - The importance of community recovery collaboratives

21:00 - Developing a CWPP

24:35 - Overthinking CWPP documents

26:35 - Common post-Fire challenges

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

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

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

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

36:43 - Disconnect between FEMA & local organizations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

00:00 - Episode Start

01:31 - Pepe's Background

07:56 - 1996 Fires

11:04 - The Early Days Of Managed Fire

14:01 - Thinning Versus Fire, Thinning PLUS Fire

16:00 - Prescribed Fire Scales As A Tool

17:40 - Pepe's View On Managed Fire

19:48 - Lessons Learned with Managed Fire

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

25:24 - Experimental Forests

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

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

32:56 - Social Implications Of Managed Fires

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

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

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

41:37 - The Work of the Southwest Fire Consortium

49:50 - Episode End

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

00:00 - Episode Introduction

05:07 - Matt's Introduction And Background

06:51 - Helicopter Coordinator Position Details

08:38 - Matt's Initial Interest In Aviation

10:22 - Changes In Air Attack

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

14:45 - Misconceptions About Aircraft Firefighting

17:36 - Benefits Of Helicopter Coordination

18:53 - Fire Retardant Use—Benefits and Limitations

20:14 - How Aircraft Supports Firefighters On The Ground

23:32 - Other Limitations To Fighting Fire With Aircraft

25:06 - What Factors Inform Availability of Aerial Support

28:02 - Lack Of Resources Problem

30:03 - Outro

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

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

Timestamps:

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

10:10 - The Beginnings Of Watch Duty

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

13:21 - Watch Duty's Functionality

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

18:06 - Concerns and Questions from PIOs/PAOs

21:07 - Gaining Trust And Users

22:25 - The Future of The App

25:01 - Upcoming Watch Duty Features

26:48 - Public Education Features

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

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

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

47:16 - How People Use Watch Duty

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

50:49 - Outro