Managing Forests: The Success of SERAL, Reforestation, and how Tuolumne County is tackling megafire
Hey Everyone, Jaron here. This is my inaugural blog post for the website and today we’re diving into a top local priority — forest management, the rise of megafires, and highlighting the work being done to give our community the best chance at staying affordable, healthy, and safe. Hope you enjoy, and if you want the “what’s happening” tl;dr version, just skip to the end!
Sections:
Fire, megafire, and fire-fighting (extremely abridged)
Paradies, local planning and the WUI
Projects protecting the community
Part 1: Fire on the Mountain, Run Boy Run.
John Muir, 1897
“God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, and avalanches; but he cannot save them from fools, — only Uncle Sam can do that.” [Link]
Megafire as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon — in 1910 the “Great Fire” (also known as the Big Burn and Big Blowup) was the first taste an American public got to fire on the frontiers, standing as the nation’s largest and most deadly fire for a century. An area the size of Connecticut (3 million acres) burned and generated a mythology of its own; Nobly the infamous U.S. Forest Service Ranger Ed Pulaski who held his firefighting crew in a cave at gunpoint because the blistering air outside meant certain death. And, less nobly, the American mythology that fire was inherently evil, to be hunted down and extinguished in the name of conservation.
Source: HistoryNet
Forest Service personnel review the aftermath of the Big Burn, which scorched more than 3 million acres of woodlands across the northern Rocky Mountains. (U.S. Forest Service)
Despite not happening California, and Pulaski’s noble legend, the 87 deaths rang out as a cry that something had to be done. Citizens demanded action be taken not only to protect people but the valuable timber needed to build our nation. President Teddy Roosevelt, a famous conservationist, nationalized many public lands into the federal forest system we have today — 57% of all California forests and 76% of Tuolumne’s land area. Native Americans who had stewarded the lands with fire for thousands of years were enslaved, stripped of their cultural practices, moved to reservations and denied the ability to use traditional fire, their wisdom ignored. California meanwhile pulled a scrappy fire response system into a well-organized “state responsibility area” paramilitary force named the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (now CALFIRE). Towers were put up; Equipment and bases were set up around the state; it was the early 20th century, we were at war with fire, and we were great at it.
Careful with Fire
Yeah, no kidding.
Part 2: Unlearning Fire.
It initiated a long and unfortunate public relationship with wildfire that viewed it as a disaster and not a natural mechanism for ecological balance. Yet, the legacy of the Great Burn (and megafire) soon faded from memory as it was systematically removed from the ecosystem only to come roaring back recently.
We can think of fire as a predator with vegetation being the prey. Remove the predators from an ecosystem and the herbivores flourish — that is, until they overpopulate, become diseased, and destroy the underlying resources creating catastrophic dieoffs. (Only the local turkey population seems to have escaped this and will soon have enough votes to take over. Of course, some would argue we’ve always had turkeys in office.)
Today’s forests — “protected” from fire but diseased with beetles, bearing 10 times the historic fuel density, struggling to compete for light and water — were primed for correction in the form of catastrophic blazes. The tools we built were rapidly made useless in many conditions when fire became simply unfightable.
Overgrown
It’s often said that in 1849, a prospector could have ridden a horse through the forest, arms outstretched, and not hit a tree. Now, tightly packed and in competition, trees are vulnerable to a new predator — beetles.
“Why not simply put wildfire back in the ecosystem?” you might ask. Well, it’s become so out of whack that any spark can create a megafire, and megafires (unlike nice, low-level burns) kill nearly everything. Let me borrow a visualization on “ecological resilience” that made a lot of sense to me. You put a ball in a cup, shaking it back and forth with the shaking being local conditions. Wind, water, density, etc. Up to a point, you can shake the cup and it always rolls back to the bottom where it started. It’s in equilibrium, that is until the shaking is so violent that it flies out. There’s no getting the ball back in without manually picking it up.
Theoretical Ball-And-Cup Diagram
Forests have the capacity to handle year-to-year variations, but even with millions of years of evolution, there is a point that changes are too severe, too destructive for their adaptations. Fuel, burning hot and dense, overcomes bark armor, glasses soil silicates, cooks the annelids and bacteria, and bakes even resistant seeds. A once-green forest becomes a black moonscape. This is where we get type-shift — a high-severity wildfire burns everything alive and the former forest is reduced the following year to chaparral brush lands, growing fast, reigniting and still burning hot, outcompeting slower grower trees, and preventing the re-establishment of forests.
Part 3: Megafire at Home.
To see type-shift, look no further than the scar of the 2013 Rim Fire, a blaze that can be said to have ignited the modern era of catastrophic megafires, especially in the Sierra Nevadas. It was the second-largest blaze then. In recognizing the 10-year anniversary, we also lamented that it has been usurped 9 times since.
Many more acres burned in 1849 compared to today (though the gap is closing), but what was generally “good fire” has become increasingly type-shift high-severity fire (formerly about 10%) which has quintupled to 43% of all acres burned today. Without reforestation (and before that, clearing dead timber), high-severity areas would remain brushlands for centuries, millennia, maybe much longer. The Rim Fire, as devastating as it was, however, only modestly destroyed property, and no lives were lost thanks in part to a miracle but mostly to truly heroic efforts by first responders.
As high-severity fire applies to built communities like ours, the City of Paradise is a story we are all familiar with. In 2018, the Camp Fire wiped out a town of some 25,000 people. There are many important details but the lesson learned was that forest fires don’t just stay in the forest and what we thought they could do was vastly underestimated. Local planning is critical — evacuation infrastructure, up-to-date emergency plans, modern fire apparatus, reverse 9-1-1 systems, clear chains of command, fire hardening, and a hundred more things are all steps that need to be taken. We learned that Tuolumne County was not where it needed to be.
A Highly Recommended Read
If you’d like to understand a personal and detailed perspective from the survivors, first responders, and agencies at Paradise, Lizze Johnson paints a heart-wrenching but incredibly informative picture. Click for link.
City of Paradise
Inadequate evacuation routes combined with intense flames trapped many cars, even melting the aluminum components. It travelled three times faster than previously thought possible.
It should be recognized that our built communities pre-date California (we were once the state of Alta, Mexico) and were not always planned or constructed in ways that anticipated intelligent future growth, infrastructure, and dangers. It met the needs of the day, and often without much in the way of oversight. There’s a narrative in the State that irresponsible local planning is to blame for these catastrophes — I flatly reject that line. It’s a scapegoat for state and federal decisions that created the conditions of this issue, be it federal forest mismanagement, the missteps of public utility monopolies, a century of zealous fire suppression, or disruption of the ecological balance. But, looking at our path forward to becoming resilient to these events, we must admit there’s an element of responsibility for historic planning that must now be rectified, and the second best day to address it is today.
Part 4: Yeah, But What Are You Doing About It?
All this brings us to today, and some of the great work that I’m proud to highlight on behalf of our Board and staff. The priorities of my first campaign focused on Housing, Jobs, and Transparency, issues I would argue of equal significance to the longevity of our community. One problem local government doesn’t have is a lack of worthwhile, existential challenges. We’re downright lousy with them. But while the pillars did not have “Treat the Forests” “Pace and Scale” "Invest in Emergency Management” in it, it was somewhat an “it goes without saying” priority.
The details are where it gets hard. You don’t swear an oath and suddenly become the expert in every nuance of every issue. Instead, it’s a long process of learning and listening — two of the most valuable traits in public service. And when you research, listen to smart people, build on past successes, and are open to doing things differently, great things can happen.
First, an acknowledgment.
We have made amazing progress in two years but only a fool would say these following efforts are just a product of his or her singular leadership. This is undoubtedly a generational work from the Board of Supervisors, with the participation and leadership of many groups from the state and feds, to community organizations, industry, county staff, and many more. Making my own contribution to it is being passed a baton, running like hell, and like the old camping adage, leaving it better than we found it.
Meeting of YSS
On the cutting edge of partnerships where one entity owns the land, another lives by it, another advocates for it, and another makes a living off it. Instead of competing, they work together to protect it.
First, Tuolumne County has been blessed with a “model collaborative” in the form of Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions (YSS). What’s a collaborative? They generally start from a place that lacks collaboration; a place where folks who would normally be in the ring duking it out but are able to rise above to identify shared interests, negotiate, and work together. At that table, we have the timber industry, government, and environmentalists (beforehand three strange bedfellows) working hand-in-hand on projects, bringing millions of dollars into our community. I’m a proud evangelist of this group and continue to support their work with increased staffing for Master Stewardship Agreement (MSA) funded projects.
1. Working with partners, Fuel Reduction, Reforestation
Have you heard about the SERAL Project before? Because it’s big news. Tuolumne County is 1.3 million acres. 76% is federal land for about 1 million acres. This massive fuel treatment is 116,692 acres of thinning across a variety of local environments, most of which is on U.S. Forest Service lands including north of Columbia, to build a "horseshoe" around our communities that reduces fire severity and provide for a more defensible area. This is in addition to other large projects like MySierraWoods fuel reduction on A-10 properties, the 108 FireSafe Council’s defensible space for seniors grant and Community Wildfire Protection Program, investing in roadside mastication with public works, supportnig new Firewise Communities, and more.
Pre-Treatment
The purple outline is the SERAL project footprint. Note the generally consistent speckly rainbow powerbait look across the region. Lots of red indicating estimated 8 foot flames
Post-Treatment
Green is good. After treatment, the SERAL area is substantially lower in flame length meaning less intense (and more fightable) fires, and substantially reduced annual burn probability south of the work.
SERAL is not just for protecting the community — this is the exact data our staff and Board are bringing to insurance companies, the Department of Insurance, and our state elected leaders to show that catastrophic fire is not inevitable, that fire insurance is being modeled with out-of-date data, and what we do now makes a difference.
Beyond SERAL, the county has taken steps to continue reforestation and restoration work in the Rim Fire scar — nearly a third more of the outstanding work was recently awarded in a grant to support clearing, replanting, and maintaining the area.
2. Advocating to higher levels
This brings us to our second point — advocacy.
In addition to making fire insurance a top legislative priority (which warrants an entire post on its own), we’ve also been proud to fight against issues like newly revised “fire hazard severity zoning” which seeks to not take into account these efforts and threatens even higher risk premiums. We’ve fought with other rural counties against overreach by the Board of Forestry and advocated to all entities the importance of not just forest projects, but the secondary markets of lumber, value-added wood products, and biomass energy that support them.
We’ve had success in some areas, stopping the worst of some harmful policies and gathering the data needed to back up our partners. In others, we’ve continued to push and engage our state and federal leaders to take action. While not always successful, we have faithfully represented Tuolumne County to ensure we are at the table and being heard.
Fire Insurance
Fed up citizens in 2019 speak up to Insurance Commissioner Lara. While still a tough hand, YSS research has given renewed hope in fighting for our top legislative priority. (Credit: MML)
This includes too some non-traditional outreach. Over the past two years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with audiences at housing conferences, UC research symposiums, biomass industry interests, and several state legislators about these local conditions, the support we need, and how we all must work together to solve it — building connections across issues to show how interconnected the challenge is.
Stronger Together
Speaking on a panel with UC President Michael Drake, UC Vice-President Glenda Humiston, Secretary of Agriculture Karen Ross, and others about the importance of appyling UC Ag and Natural Resource research to real-world, rural challenges into 2040 such as forest management, bio-energy, and wood product innovation.
3. Investing in Emergency Planning
Tuolumne County has always had a part-time emergency services coordinator. It was a bit of a running joke two years ago that nearly everyone on the fourth floor (administration) had at one point or another been the OES Director. It was an important position that hadn’t been invested in, charged with mitigation efforts, disaster recovery, FEMA paperwork, resiliency planning, community education, and much more.
We did not want to become another Paradise. Recognizing the importance of this work, we invested in a full-time position and an extremely talented individual, Dore Bietz, who was tasked with bringing in capacity-building funds. This office, now up to four people and largely grant-funded, is bringing in unprecedented amounts of money for fire home hardening (Ponderosa Hills), fuel reduction, identifying and planning for secondary egress in identified vulnerable communities, and more.
OES Director Dore Bietz
It’s hard to overestimate the value of a great employee like Dore or compatriot in administration and current YSS Chair, Liz Peterson.
This has been paired with an expansion of MSA-funded positions able to work through the administrative, financial, and legal hurdles of complex forest health projects under the leadership of Liz Peterson. Between these two, we’ve directed a massive rework of outdated emergency plans, building up the Stryker Court emergency operations center (EOC), establishing a clear chain of commands for emergencies, and brought us if not where we want to be, at least much much closer. It’s in no small part that these efforts to coordinate services and our fearless first responders that we were able to seamlessly handle the Washington and Woods Fires (flames of which we saw crest the hill from county offices in downtown Sonora) that could easily have been the big one.
4. A county fire Service 50 years in the making
In 1974, a countywide fire system was implemented by the Board of Supervisors. Before it was operationalized, the financing mechanism (property tax based) was ripped out by Prop 13. Until 2021, just Jamestown, Mono Village, and a handful of largely vacant volunteer stations composed Tuolumne County fire. In just two short years, we’ve been able to not only add additional stations in Groveland and Mono Vista, but also Columbia where our fire district reached the point of no longer being able to sustain itself as a full-time response engine. I’ll delving more into this in a future post.
Beyond just staffed stations, the County has been a partner in investing in the next generation of firefighters. Columbia College fire students now see $500 per month in compensation and I’m a proud supporter of Columbia College’s initiatives for wildlands fire partnerships with SoCal as well as a pioneering 4-year Cooperative Land Stewardship degree. I’m also proudly a steadfast supporter of the ongoing efforts by Chicken Ranch Rancheria to establish an all-risk professional station near Jamestown.
Fire Investments
With resorts going into Groveland, GCSD engines had to leave up to 45 minutes for responses making the area susceptible during that time. A new station now protects that area and Columbia, soon following suit, will have a rennovated fire station near the airport. (Credit: UD)
Lastly, we’ve sought every opportunity to begin replacing a fleet of fire apparatus that was in some cases decades old. In one instance, an engine well past it’s useful life broke down only to have the backup engine also breakdown. That couldn’t continue. Through several key purchases, we were able to get "gently used” engines at bargain rates saving taxpayers millions, and use one-time fund balance to purchase new vehicles such as a new Type-1 Engine and water tender. Each year, we’ve invested in this equipment and a goal into the future will be providing not only for sustainable fire funding but also an equipment replacement fund that ensures we are putting aside funds to maintain and replace the fleet.
