California Towns Scramble to Prevent Next Wildfire Catastrophe

This story originally appeared in Capital and Main and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

In December 2018, one month after the Camp Fire killed 85 residents and nearly leveled Paradise, residents of Nevada County, in the deeply forested Sierras, packed a town hall. Worried that the county would be the epicenter of the next California fire catastrophe, the residents raised life or death questions. They wanted to know what happens when phone lines and cell towers are toppled during a fire, where do they turn off the gas, how can they get evacuation training, and how to reach people with disabilities or no transportation.

In the last four years, California has poured vastly more money into fire prevention and education. But now that 60% of the state is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought, after the driest winter in recorded history, it’s a race against time to help communities that are not only vulnerable to wildfires, but also least able to pay for efforts to mitigate the fire risk.

Climate change is making fires burn hotter and spread faster and has extended wildfire season across the entire calendar year. Twelve of the largest fires in California history have happened in the past seven years, introducing harrowing phrases like “fire tornadoes” into the lexicon. About a quarter of the state’s population lives in areas known as the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI — including Paradise, Greenville and Nevada City, where city budgets are strained and state fire prevention dollars are only starting to trickle down. At least one in 12 California homes is at high risk of destruction from wildfires, according to a recent study. An analysis of roadways and fire risk concluded that one out of every 100 California zip codes had a population-to-evacuation-route ratio that is as bad or worse than Paradise, where the death toll fell heavily on the elderly and disabled.

Nevada County spreads from Sacramento northeast across grasslands and forests of the high Sierras, skirting Lake Tahoe and touching the Nevada state line. It’s home to the gold rush town of Nevada City and steep slopes of pungent Ponderosa pines, many of them dead. Killed by an ongoing, climate-supercharged bark beetle infestation, dried out trees are fire accelerators, and some remain standing for years, like matchsticks, on homeowners’ properties. Despite the fire prevention money raining down from state and federal coffers, the burden of removing these trees still falls on the residents, according to Pascale Fusshoeller, editor and co-founder of the local news site YubaNet since 1999.

“One tree costs several thousand dollars to cut down, and 500 to haul away,” she said. “If you have 10 trees destroyed by beetles, you can’t afford that.”

Nevada County, with a 12% poverty rate, is not the poorest in the state — that would be Tulare County with 27% — but it does have a significant elderly population, the most likely to die from fires. And it is becoming an increasingly popular destination for retirees. Nearly a third of the population is at least 65 years old according to Census data. Between 2007 and 2016, Nevada County experienced its greatest proportional population increases in those aged 65 to 74 years old (80%) and those aged 85 and older (57%), according to county documents.

The elderly, poor and disabled face the greatest risk from fires, and the more people living below the poverty line, the greater impact on a community when a disaster comes. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that environmental catastrophes like fires make those experiencing poverty even poorer if they stay behind.

The 2022-2023 California budget passed by the Legislature last week includes $21 billion for a climate package that includes wildfire efforts, but the exact allocation is among the components being negotiated with Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The governor has committed to doing 500,000 acres of fire prevention work by 2025, and has backed a new state workforce to handle fire mitigation. On the federal level, the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Biden last year allocates $131 million to reduce wildfire risks across eight Western states, including California. But given the vast area and the great need, many rural communities fear that no matter how funds are distributed, they won’t be enough to keep them from becoming the next Paradise.

A new state program offering up to $20,000 for home-hardening and $6,000 for “defensible space implementation,” which would include tree removal, is being rolled out in three of the most vulnerable communities in San Diego County, with the rest of the program to follow next year.

The funds, Fusshoeller said, are helpful but not enough. A $6,000 grant for defensible space would pay to fell one to three trees, depending on the location and size of the tree(s), she said, but wouldn’t necessarily pay for the removal of the lumber from the property, which is a must with bark beetle trees.

State officials say that, while the state has significantly increased the amount of money for fire prevention in the last three years, it’s up to the communities most at risk of fire devastation to apply for funds and to implement them. Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, says it’s up to the entire community to work together.

“If you do the work to harden your home, but your neighbor doesn’t, and their home is a torch, the community efforts won’t work,” Ferguson said.

Part of the effort to protect communities is communicating why everyone needs to pull their weight, from raking leaves to controlled community burns to home hardening, and why it’s all important. LISTOS, a state initiative, devotes $25 million to educate communities about fire dangers and individual and collective actions they can take.

“This includes basic steps, like how to pack your go bag or sign up for alerts,” Ferguson said. Instead of a top-down approach, the messages are filtered through trusted messengers in the community, which could be the local Fire Safe Council or a church.

“All disasters are local, and the community aspect is important,” Ferguson said. “We get resources out as broadly as possible, but peer-to-peer education is the best way. Your neighbors may be elderly, and it might be up to you to help them prepare.”

LISTOS (Spanish for “ready”) is focusing on the people who are most at risk and who are often the hardest to reach, Ferguson added, including “seniors, people with English as a second language, people with disabilities, those without broadband and those whose immigration status makes them distrustful of government.”

In Nevada City and County, some community efforts include citizen-led controlled burns, neighborhood efforts to help homeowners clear brush, and even renting goats to help eat the fire fuel. But there are still large-scale prevention efforts, like forest clearing, that haven’t gotten off the ground and haven’t seen funding, Fusshoeller said.

“Cal Fire inmate crews do a great job on public lands for slave wages,” Fusshoeller said. “But there’s not enough firefighters to do prescribed burns. And there’s a 100 years’ backlog of vegetation, so it is hard to keep up. Crews will go to work on active fires first. Also, there is no mill in California that can take additional trees. They’re still disposing of trees from the last fires.”

Nevada City and County have several urgent needs that require major investments: improved rural roads for faster evacuation, extensive broadband coverage and cell towers in rural areas, plus a reverse 911 system, so people can get fire alerts.

Nevada City, with just over 3,000 residents, has only two routes out of town, Highway 20 and Highway 49, and crews were working through the spring to remove trees felled by winter storms that blocked these routes. Its annual budget is $5 million, and it has 1,600 miles of private roads in various states of disrepair.

Nevada City’s city planner, Amy Wolfson, said it’s an ongoing effort to obtain funding for fire prevention, and it’s always on a project-by-project basis.

“The City is sometimes successful in obtaining grant funding for tree removal work in our public spaces, but not always,” Wolfson said in an email. “Funding and staffing resources are both ongoing speedbumps to effectively mitigating this ongoing threat.”

Some good news: Nevada County and the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County were both recently awarded funds for a drive-by wood chipping service and green waste drop events, part of 144 local wildfire prevention projects across California.

Some of those federal grants for wildfire mitigation should be restructured so rural communities can compete in the fight for funds, according to Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit community development and land management research group. Its analysis of FEMA’s Building Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program found it was a well-intentioned federal effort distributed inequitably, with little money going to the most endangered rural communities. The research found that 94% of funding went to coastal states, which had higher capacity, had engineers on staff, full time grant writers and accounting teams that could track a budget. Headwaters Economics also determined that poorer regions and communities of the U.S. have a disproportionate risk of catastrophic loss from wildfires.

Whether or not individuals or communities in the greatest risk of fire are doing enough to prevent catastrophe, one thing is clear: Almost all of them see the risk they face. “The Camp Fire was the big wake-up call for people in [fire zones],” Ferguson said. And there’s a growing awareness that there’s no “fire season” anymore. In May, Fusshoeller had to cut an interview short because a fire had broken out nearby.