The Caribou-Targhee Camp Crew Unloads Equipment coming back to ICP..
Well, fall is in the air. In our neck of the woods, the aspen leaves are turning and the morning air is cool.
We’ve gotten through another wildfire season. But basically most of the coverage we have seen in the media during this year has stressed potential future problems, or blamed problems on the current Administration. From a piece by James Peron in Medium:
It’s not the journalists fault; they are selling the public what the public wants. And when they have a terrifying story, or can take a gruesome one and make it sound worse, they sell more papers and that means higher profits. Whatever their politics they are profit-seekers at heart.
I know plenty of journalists would be horrified at this — certainly many who attended the same journalism classes I did —and simply wouldn’t acknowledge it. I actually suspect they don’t see it this way. They are merely reporting the “most important” stories and that means the most horrific news they can find.
They wouldn’t even notice they look for the bad news. It’s just good journalism but it leads to faulty perceptions resulting in bad policies because unscrupulous politicians use fear to buy votes.
Of course there have been problems, including the high rate of burnovers. I don’t know the reasons and it’s possible that a variety of causes contributed to each one. I am against generating overall conclusions until the reports are out. To whom is it important to hurry to diagnose before the facts are in? And why?
But while news folks tend to focus on the latest bad, or predicted future bads, maybe there should be just one story on how well things generally worked in what we were warned would be a devastating fire year. Remember this Outside piece from May of this year?
Why 2026 Could Be One of the Worst Wildfire Seasons in Recent U.S. History
Extreme drought, overstretched crews, and a sweeping Forest Service restructuring are converging into what experts fear could be the most volatile fire year in U.S. history.
Doesn’t it seem odd that this article focuses on the Forest Service instead of the real wildfire reorganization at Interior? I wonder why that is?
Some experts like Duncan disagree, saying that although these cuts and changes aren’t directly targeting firefighters on the ground, they erode the foundation that keeps those crews operating safely.
“Morale is terrible right now,” Duncan said. “We lost a lot of folks through DOGE cuts, and more through delayed resignations and early retirements. There’s a huge network of support behind the scenes to help the firefighters doing the actual work, and a lot of those folks have left. With the proposed reorganization, getting rid of offices and research stations, we’re losing even more of that support network.”
Of course, moving peoples’ offices doesn’t make them unavailable for fire assignments. But it meets the “sounds vaguely plausible” and “fits the narrative” criteria.
But the good news story is that everyone pulled together- the folks in the brand-new USWFS, the Forest Service, States, counties, and crews of all kinds- even folks from other countries, and we got through a really bad fire year.
This is due to the effort of people, some working without proper housing, without communications capabilities that most of us take for granted in this day and age, and all the other difficulties that are could easily be enumerated. Of course, some of us need to focus on what is not working and fix it.
My concern is that we don’t give appropriate attention, value, and gratitude to the people who are making this work- firefighters, support folks, those doing the Wrok while people are gone on fires, and the families of firefighters. All are part of the whole who have made this season, scary going into it, work.
Some miscellaneous tidbits, following up on other stories…
1. What is the linkage between bureaus and the USWFS and how is it supposed to work?
The Office of Communication at DOI got right back to me when I asked the question about how things are supposed to work between the land management agencies and the USWFS, so shout-out to them.
The transition guidance issued in April is current.
The increasingly complex wildland fire environment now requires a professional workforce that is positioned to meet wildfire response and mitigation needs year-round. The U.S. Wildland Fire Service works in close collaboration with the Interior Department’s land management agencies to ensure fuels treatments, wildfire prevention strategies, and post-fire recovery efforts are fully aligned with public land management goals. This integrated strategy is intended to meet wildfire response needs while also building long-term landscape resilience.
2. Do Piles of Logs Left Over From Wildfire Suppression Actions Go Toward FS Timber Targets? Thanks to Andy Geissler of AFRC for this one!
Most of the time the Forest Service will sell log decks associated with fire suppression in a competitive manner in the same way they sell green timber sales. You can take a look at the Willamette National Forest’s current timber sale page and find four deck sales over the past year: Willamette National Forest | Timber Sales | Forest Service.
The volume sold is part of the agency’s accomplishments. The Forest Service has a unique “salvage sale fund” that often pays for these sales. If those funds are unavailable, they will typically use “timber” dollars (i.e. National Forest Timber Management dollars (NFTM)). However, both the salvage funds and NFTM fall under the blanket “timber program funding” according the agency’s accounting. Bottom line, these deck sales are funded by timber dollars.
It’s also worth noting that, in most cases that I’m aware of, the fisheries program gets “access” to the logs in these decks for in-stream wood placement. In some cases I’ve seen the Forest Service haul logs to a location and then fly them into rivers and creeks via helicopter. That work can be funded with timber receipts too.
Conversations in Comments to Bring Forward to More People
3. Litigation is Used to Affect Policy. It’s really OK. People who have different views use legal means to achieve their ends. These organizations tend to also work in politics via their c4 wings, and policy. That’s fine. Jon said, and not to pick on him, but I’ve heard this before,
Litigation is not an adversarial process for “determining policy.” It determines what the law requires.
In reality, there are entities that use legal means to pursue their ends. Folks like Earthjustice are pretty direct that that’s what they’re doing. I also get it that folks who use this method would want to create executive branch actions that have legal hooks that they can use. And they will resist changes that seem like common sense to many of us, that they argue could interfere with their access to the levers of decision-making.
For example, this letter about FOFA (my understanding is that the current Senate version is 150 days).
Section 121 also dramatically limits the time to seek judicial review to 120 days after the date of publication of a notice in the Federal Register of agency intent to carry out the fireshed management project. This abbreviated timeframe places an undue burden on interested parties and communities with limited resources and would likely have the unintended consequence of leading to more litigation, not less, as interested parties may be forced to file suit to protect their legal rights. This is especially true if a claim requires a pre-suit notice period, such as the 60-day notice period required by the ESA. Finally, Section 121 creates a new, restrictive standard for standing to sue by requiring a litigant to have participated in the rulemaking in a very specific way that goes beyond the standard required by federal courts for Article III standing. We therefore oppose this provision of the bill.
Like I said, it’s really OK for them to have their views and pursue them in whatever ways the US governments systems allow. And it’s equally OK for others to push back in courts. Personally, in my lived experience, courtrooms are not the best place to settle federal lands disputes, and we should be more transparent and design policies that favor other means of dispute-settling, but that’s the way it is.
4. More on How the USWFS and Bureau Interface Will Work
As an FS retiree, I’m having trouble understanding Jesse’s comments, I think at least in part, because I don’t understand how the DOI operates without what we would call “charge as worked.” From my FS experience, it seems like budgets are limiting… if you have the budget and don’t have the people, you can contract or grant the work. If you don’t have the budget, you will just do less. Anyway, maybe someone with both FS and BLM experience can translate.
If it were the FS, for example, (and say the wildfire folk were stovepiped in a similar way) all the “Wildfire Folks Approved” projects would have employees doing monitoring, NEPA, etc. would charge to the Wildfire account. If the FS wanted to do prescribed fire for other reasons than fuels, they would have to fund it through the benefitting function. Of course there is a tendency, when many functions benefit, to assign the charges to the function with the most available bucks. So there will be fuels people deciding if fuels bucks should be used. Wouldn’t we expect wildlife people to decide if wildlife bucks should be used on projects intended to help wildlife?
So when I look at the transition function list, I see the issue as “who is paying for it” and not so much “what is done.” Maybe the way people are paid in Interior makes the whole thing more difficult than it needs to be? And would that be a good argument for keeping the FS out of Interior (if they don’t use “charged as worked.”)?
I don’t usually post on Sundays, but was off Friday enjoying the National Forest fall aspen. Also I finished a helpful and hopeful recent book by Spencer Cox called Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt. It’s helpful for the work we do here, and reminds us of the importance of listening. Cox is a big fan of listening and the back and forth of the legislative process for resolving disputes and moving policy forward.
What strikes me about the ongoing discussion of wildfire strategies is that it doesn’t seem like anyone has convened a group to hash it out. We have people who say, “let’s not do it”, some that say “hey there have been problems, let’s fix them”, and those that say “everything was fine until the current Secs pulled out a full suppression strategy.” I wonder if they are ever in the same room, engaging. Convening this group- or identifying problems and fixes- might be a good task for a foundation somewhere.. Has someone already done it?
So let’s listen to one person’s experience.
I Still Cry for the Mountains Dave Daley
My family are cattle ranchers in the northern Sacramento valley. We have called Butte and Plumas County home since my ancestors came in the 1850’s searching for gold. We have a deep, almost reverent, connection to the land. We live and work in two different ecosystems — the oak woodlands of the foothills where our cattle graze from October to May, and the mountains of the northern Sierra Nevada where the cattle spend the summer on private and federal land.
Five years ago this week we received news that the Bear/North Complex fire had jumped the Middle Fork of the Feather River into our grazing permit and in twelve hours burnt almost 194,000 acres. It eventually burnt close to 350,000 acres, killed 16 people, and became the 8th largest fire in California history. The initial maelstrom was fueled by winds over 50 miles per hour in steep, rugged and heavily timbered country. Words cannot describe the scope and intensity of that blaze.
This was a “let burn” fire that had started in mid-August and had been burning for almost three weeks in rough terrain. The United States Forest Service (USFS) made a conscious decision not to extinguish the fire because of difficult access and risk to firefighter safety. And the pervasive assumption that “good fire” will reduce fuel loads. This wasn’t a “good fire!”
I understand the decision to prioritize firefighter safety, but aerial suppression might have protected personnel, and ultimately saved two towns, an entire ecosystem, the wildlife and my cattle. Instead, the USFS decided to expand the “let burn” area and drones were used to light more fire. The previously predicted deadly winds came soon after. I often wonder what would have happened if they had not purposely expanded the fire’s footprint. The outcome might have been the same, or perhaps some areas would have been spared leaving behind a patchwork of burned and unburned tracts, where wildlife, seedbanks, springs and the beauty of the mountains still existed. Instead, we only had complete death. As we searched for survivors while the fire was still burning, I watched as the few remaining green spaces were intentionally burnt. What wildlife lived, did so no longer.
When the smoke finally cleared in early December, sixteen lives, the towns of Berry Creek and Feather Falls, and hundreds of homes were lost. And an incredibly beautiful ecosystem destroyed. Almost 400 cows and their calves were burnt to death, along with all the wildlife. We lost beautiful landscapes that we had loved for generations. The federal government never accepted responsibility nor paid for damages to private property or restored public lands. You can’t pay enough to replace life or replace an ecosystem that was literally cooked. The fire burned so hot that in places the soil was sterilized.
After five years, I have realized that we always view fire from the ecosystem we know best. If we have witnessed fire in a mountain, sagebrush, desert, juniper or grassland ecosystem, then we assume that is how the fire will respond, and the land will recover exactly as it is imprinted in our memory. And, if you are from an urban setting, you may have no vision of the nature of forest fires. So many of my ranching friends from other biomes have said to me, “I bet the country has recovered and your cattle must be doing great.” They don’t understand the impact of catastrophic fire in the big timber country of the Sierra Nevada. It hasn’t recovered and it may not in my lifetime. What we are doing to manage fire isn’t working in all ecosystems.
Creating effective approaches to fire requires us to tailor our response to the ecosystem; mountain, foothill, desert, valley; wet or dry; hot or cold. And then there are so many variables when the fire is active– topography, wind, humidity, vegetation type, fuel load, moisture, temperature, season. The diversity of landscapes requires flexibility and an awareness of and responsiveness to local conditions. The current model seems to be a one size fits all where the USFS approach is to create a perimeter, often miles from the fire, and intentionally burn to the line. How many acres are needlessly burnt? Or the fire grows and escapes, as was the case with the Bear/North Complex.
To be clear, this is not criticism of firefighting personnel, as they work in dangerous conditions that most of us cannot imagine. I applaud their work. This is simply a critique of the federal approach to managing forest fires.
Roughly half of California is federal land that is not controlled by Sacramento, but managed by Washington D.C. Both parties have failed the environment and the people. We never seem to focus resources on pre-fire fuels reduction, nor post fire restoration. We spend billions on suppression in a failed model that the government has created.
Policies developed from afar and without any understanding of what happens on the ground rarely work. Who makes federal decisions regarding fire suppression? Is it someone with local expertise who understands both the human and ecological implications of their decisions? No.
After the fire was finally put out three months later, I have yet to see a plan for post fire recovery and restoration. I have watched the burn scar turn into a brush field. There are no conifer seedlings, almost no wildlife and five years have passed. Catastrophic burns in big timber will convert to a brushscape in two or three years. The absence of policy, resources, and political will, just lead to more fuel for the next fire. We are left with standing dead trees surrounded by dense brush four feet deep.
The federal government has abdicated responsibility for post fire management. In our grazing permit, there has been a token attempt at dead tree removal on a few acres along one road. There appears to be little action taken to address the effects of forest fires, which may be due to resource limitations or policy constraints. If they don’t move quickly (which the USFS is incapable of), it is too late to salvage the timber, repair the roads, and open the campgrounds. A myriad of hurdles cause delay until nothing is done.
There is another model. Our grazing allotment is mixed public and private land. The private timber company immediately began harvesting as quickly as they could, and shortly thereafter began replanting. There aren’t any new conifers growing on the federal land five years later—the seedbank for trees was destroyed. Completely. Contrast that with the private timber company land, where dead tree removal began immediately and nine million conifer seedlings were planted in three years! Sure, there may be an economic incentive to do so, but that effort is still essential for the health of the land.
There are alternatives to the current federal approach. The cost of megafires to taxpayers is astronomical. The Dixie fire in five northern California counties in 2021, a massive fire of 963,000 acres, also fueled by backfires, cost $637 million to suppress. What if those federal funds were directed to fuels reduction? Forest management could include fire prevention strategies such as thinning, timber harvest, grazing and the use of prescribed fire, designed for the specific ecosystem. I envision a time when fuel loads have been reduced to the point that a lightning strike would not be a major concern because our National Forests are healthy and natural fire has returned to the landscape. I know. I’m a dreamer.
Some would suggest that climate change has resulted in the increasing severity of catastrophic wildfires. If that is the case, then fuel load reduction becomes even more essential. We can’t simply keep adding “fuel to the fire”, as we have for so many decades.
Post-fire management is just as critical to the health of our federal lands. Removing dead timber, replanting, stabilizing the soil, protecting waterways, repairing roads are all essential and should be prioritized in federal lands management. If we don’t do some of these basic steps, we will simply spend more money on the next fire and destroy the forest again.
Fire destruction and recovery is not just a California issue, nor a red state/blue state problem. This is federally owned land and has been managed the same under both Democratic and Republican administrations. I truly believe that the remote forest is “out of sight, out of mind”, and there are not enough of us in rural areas who witness the destruction to even have a voice.
When there aren’t enough votes to get you elected, what politician really cares? And, if the public doesn’t understand how this devastation affects all citizens, there is even less political will for change. The effect on air quality, water quality, soil stability, wildlife habitat and so many other long term ecological impacts are quickly forgotten if you don’t see the destruction. I see it every day and can’t easily forget.
Are there simple answers. No. But we need all available options to reduce catastrophic fire. It seems we are developing small contingents that only advocate for their solution…. “Grazing sheep and goats is good, cattle are bad”, “thinning is good, logging is bad”, “prescribed fire is the only practical solution, everything else is not natural”, “leave it all alone, humans should never intervene.” Isn’t it possible that we need all tools available for forest health, and what works in one biome may not work in another? And the best way to deploy those tools is to listen to the people who live there. Listen to the land itself. Please.
The recovery is painfully slow in the Bear/North Complex fire. I realize the intensity of that fire is more severe than many others. It may require different solutions. My hope is that we can work as hard at reducing fuel loads pre-fire and at post fire restoration, as we do at suppression. Suppression requires crisis management when all hell breaks loose. Planned, thoughtful fuels reduction using all available strategies would benefit the land and the communities. And we cannot forget the critical importance of restoration. It would be far more cost effective for taxpayers, better for the economy and so much better for the landscape and forest health. I can only hope.
BLM staff member assesses vegetation debris in a forested area of King Mountain from horseback. A BLM Colorado staff member assesses the amount of fallen tree limbs and vegetation debris in a forested area of King Mountain from horseback. Dead and overgrown vegetation can increase the risk of wildfire spread and damage. BLM fire managers and range specialists routinely scout areas to consider for future fuels management or reduction projects. Implementing these projects offers many benefits to include improving firefighter and public safety and reducing wildfire risk to infrastructure and public and private lands. (BLM photo by Kristy Wallner)
Some folks have a talking point with regard to the fire folks in USDA moving to Interior (I don’t want them to move either but..) “you can’t separate wildfire from land management”. This even is used as a reason for line officers to give up power to fire managers within the FS. Still, Interior is apparently trying this. As usual, the devil is in the details. I’ve sent questions to several BLM communication folks, and I don’t get any answers. Maybe they haven’t figured it out yet. still, I did run across this.. So what happens in a few years when Interior figures it out.. will these folks need to change those talking points? Why not pick more resilient talking points now?
I also wonder whether this project would be litigated if it happened in Montana.. do the legal hooks of certain T&E species provide a critical habitat for litigators?
SILT, Colo. – The Bureau of Land Management’s Colorado River Valley Field Office is moving forward with a plan to reduce wildfire risk, improve forest health, and offer suitable timber for sale. The work will cover nearly 5,500 acres near King Mountain and may begin in summer or fall 2026.
“As we get ready to put this project into action, we’re looking forward to creating conditions to help slow future wildfires,” said U.S. Wildland Fire Service Fuels Specialist Chad Sewell. “The work we’re doing out here will make a noticeable difference on the ground and help keep this ecosystem strong for years to come.”
Expected Benefits:
Improved safety for firefighters and the public
Reduced wildfire risk to recreation areas, infrastructure, and nearby communities
Healthier habitat for wildlife and better recreation experiences
Safer and easier-to-use foot and horse trails after clearing away fallen branches and dead trees
Better livestock distribution, easing pressure on nearby Greater Sage‑Grouse habitat
The BLM will partner with the Colorado State Forest Service under the Good Neighbor Authority to sell appropriate timber as commercial products. This collaboration will help BLM reduce wildfire risk while supporting local industries and strengthening local economies. The authority, approved by Congress, allows BLM to enter an agreement with the state to perform forest, rangeland and watershed restoration work. The state will retain any funds from timber sales under the agreement for use on additional GNA projects.
“We’re excited to team up with our partners on a project that benefits the community and the landscape,” said CRVFO Field Manager Lisa Dawson. “Selling the timber we remove reduces waste and helps support local mills and the people who work there.”
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So the fuels specialist (seems to be) still there (in the same office), and works for USWFS, and seems to still be involved in project design and communication. Is that how it’s going to work in the future? Is the USWFS just a question of readjusting so that wildfire folks have more control over wildfire-related (and funded) local projects, and continue to be available for national suppression efforts?
Look, no one expects USWFS to have it all figured out, as if it will be forever. Fire folks are famous for doing lessons learned and improving the way they work. But still, what they are currently thinking, and the expected trajectory of where they’re going would be nice to know. But perhaps I should be asking the USWFS and not BLM.
You’ve got to give Megafire Action much credit for thinking up creative interventions. Home hardening through making it so homeowners can more readily access funding and contractors for doing the work is one challenge. As for me, I’d be happier with many state programs testing different approaches than one federal program to address these problems.
From an email message from one of their policy folks on their testimony on a bill..
One of the issues is that there is not a universally accepted “standard” or “certification” for home hardening. We have IBHS base and plus but the state doesn’t recognize those, the Safer From Wildfire Regs are basically an ala carte approach, and so it’s challenging for homeowners to understand what exactly they must do.
We support the development of a certification program that makes clear what scopes of work project managers or contractors need to achieve, clear what kind of insurance discounts can be expected, etc.
Easy to navigate also may include technology pathways that connect homeowners and contractors that are qualified to do this work to the selected standard, so that folks fon’t have to “open the phone book” so to speak for 5+ contractors.
Here’s a memo from them with more detail. There are so many bills, I get distracted by the numbers, and this memo goes to the ideas.
The problem
CAL FIRE estimates that 2.12 million homes sit within the highest fire hazard areas, the vast majority of which were built before modern wildfire construction standards.
1 Home hardening can more than double the odds of a home surviving a wildfire and can disrupt urban conflagrations.
2 However, adoption remains dangerously low, with 50% of homeowners in high-risk areas citing cost as the biggest barrier to home hardening.
The current grant-based approach—serving just 155 homes in five years 3—cannot scale to meet the state’s wildfire risk. A new approach is urgently needed to expand state capacity. The opportunity
California can adopt a homeowner assistance model capable of reaching tens of thousands of homes (see Table 1 below) within the next few years through three key elements:
1) Reposition ember resistance (IBHS Essential) as the target standard (~$15k retrofit)
2) Leverage proven loan financing models that stretch state dollars (SB 894)
3) Recalibrate CWMP to complement loans with smaller, targeted grants
Many of you know that I am skeptical of financing creativity, with concerns that it lines the pockets of middlepeople at the expense of those it’s intended to help. However, I’m also pragmatic, and if this has proven itself with the GoGreen financing platform.
Leverage proven loan financing models that stretch state dollars (SB 894) California needs a financing model that can stretch limited public dollars to reach tens of thousands—not hundreds—of homeowners. SB 894 would establish the California Wildfire Resilience Loan Program, administered by the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority (CAEATFA) and modeled after the State Treasurer’s successful GoGreen financing platform. The bill creates a loan loss reserve that leverages public (or private) dollars at roughly 12-to-1 to unlock private capital, dramatically lower interest rates for homeowners, and finance home hardening and defensible space improvements across residential and small business properties. A revolving loan structure recycles repayments to support new lending, allowing modest public investment to unlock substantial private financing and scale mitigation to hundreds of thousands of homes statewide. Additionally, CAEATFA has the administrative expertise to stand up such a program with low overhead, and private creditors can process demand without state resources (Department of Finance estimated $3.9 million in the first year for operational costs to establish the Wildfire Mitigation Loan Program to serve 1,000 homes; crucially,
additional funds would be needed to capitalize the loan loss reserve fund).
Under SB 894’s roughly 12:1 leverage structure, about $1,250 in public credit support could help finance a 5-year, low interest $15,000 IBHS Essential retrofit loan. Because more than 98% of loans are expected to be repaid (current GoGreen rate), the same public dollars can finance thousands more homes over time, dramatically expanding statewide reach.
And here’s a screenshot of the GoGreen site:
Circling back to my first post today, it’s hard for me to see how more climate-WUI modeling would have helped these policy makers.
Phil’s comment on the last post reminded me that I had wanted to post about these California State efforts, especially the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Adoption of Zone 0. Our friends at Megafire Action track this, so I don’t know the exact current status.
Zone 0
What exactly it means to homeowners is made clear in this What Homeowners Need to Know” by the Sonoma Valley Fire District. They say the rules are not yet finalized, so again, I don’t know.
1. They don’t apply everywhere.
The proposed Zone 0 regulations apply to properties located in:
State Responsibility Areas (SRA); and
Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones (VHFHSZ) within Local Responsibility Areas (LRA).
Not sure about your property? Use the State Fire Hazard Severity Zone lookup tool – CLICK HERE
2. The requirements are easy to understand and fairly granular, e.g.
Except for the limited vegetation specifically permitted by the regulations, combustible materials would not be allowed within Zone 0.
Examples include:
Bark, wood chips, and other combustible mulch
Fallen leaves, needles, and combustible debris
Firewood
Combustible items stored beneath decks, balconies, stairs, or pergolas
Dead or dying vegetation
New combustible fences or gates within five feet of the structure
Combustible outbuildings within Zone 0
Roofs and rain gutters must also be kept clear of leaves, needles, and other combustible debris.
The vegetation section is about as granular as it gets..
Limited vegetation would be permitted in portions of Zone 0 that are outside the required vegetation-free areas.
Allowed vegetation must be well maintained, non-woody, and free of dead or dying material.
Examples include:
Lawns and low ground covers under 3 inches tall
Non-woody plants between 3 and 18 inches tall, when planted in areas no larger than 1 square foot and properly spaced
Potted plants up to 18 inches tall in unaffixed, noncombustible containers no larger than 5 gallons and properly spaced
Plant spacing is based on the height of the tallest plant, with required separation equal to at least 1.5 times the plant’s height.
Those in favor of more protective standards are now focused on assisting homeowners who are willing to voluntarily meet stricter insurance-backed guidance. Some may do the work for insurance discounts; others may do it for a chance to get insurance in the first place.
Both sides find hope in a provision that allows local governments to adopt alternative versions of Zone Zero, which San Diego and Berkeley have already done and Los Angeles is in the process of doing.
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What I’d like to highlight here is the complexity of the process. Yes it was long, yes it was messy, but they followed through and accomplished something that responds to both concerns of homeowners and those of fire departments and safety concerns. According to Google AI:
California developed its Zone 0 (ember-resistant zone) regulations through a multi-year legislative, executive, and public rulemaking process starting in 2020. [1, 2, 3]
Senate Bill 504 (2024): Further reinforced and refined the statutory framework for developing the Zone 0 standards. [1, 2]
Executive Order N-18-25 (2025): Issued by Governor Gavin Newsom to accelerate the rulemaking process, mandating a target completion date. [1, 2, 3]
Zone Zero Regulatory Advisory Committee (2025): Established as a special advisory committee under the Board of Forestry to draft the specific technical requirements. [1]
Public Refinement and Final Approval
Workshops and Public Input: Throughout late 2025 and mid-2026, the Board held extensive public workshops, gathered stakeholder feedback, and revised draft language to balance strict safety with practical compliance for homeowners. [1, 2, 3]
Board Approval (August 2026): The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection officially approved the final Zone 0 regulations on August 19, 2026. [1, 2]
Administrative Review: The approved package moved to the Office of Administrative Law for final administrative review before filing with the Secretary of State. [1, 2]
Maybe other states could start with the agreement here as a template?
Sorry about this post.. I got a bit carried away on some side trails.
Thanks to Nick Smith again, there’s a link to Yale Environment 360, who reposted a story from Grist as part of the “climate desk”. The reporter is a Grist reporter who covers climate news.
We’ve heard that “people moving into the wildlands is bad for wildfire” for many years. I think the concept of “suburban sprawl” is too generalized to make those claims. It’s as if folks should just densit-ize existing footprints of cities, towns and existing suburbs. But that is difficult to do, and there are already many, many people out there in the woods and fields and grasslands, and the current reality, even if new housing was completely halted, is already problematic. Where limits are imposed, demand tends to increase prices, and so there are affordability concerns.
Of course, people living in these places are dealing with it, some more successfully than others.
“What’s happened over the last decades is we’ve had explosive population growth in naturally fire-prone areas,” said Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. “People are moving in to where fire happens.”
The wildland-urban interface, which researchers often call the WUI, is the phrase given to places where housing is sandwiched between paved city centers and forests or grasslands. Researchers have been raising the alarm about the fire risk posed to homes in these areas since the 1980s. As humans burn more fossil fuels and warm the planet, longer and more severe droughts will likely make that risk worse.
And it could be argued that improved fire tech will give us more control, and if it gets dry enough, less vegetation (fuel) will grow back. I don’t see this in too many stories, though. And despite researchers warning us, people are successfully living in those places, and enjoying it greatly.
Reno is the fastest warming city in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Climate Central.
These half-wild, half-suburban neighborhoods remain one of the most rapidly growing types of land in the country, although development has slowed compared to the surge between the 1990s and 2010s. In some places, housing scarcity in cities has pushed home buyers to the outskirts of towns, where building is generally cheaper and faces fewer permitting or zoning requirements.
People are also attracted to living with more space, near outdoor recreation areas with beautiful scenery. More than a third of all homes in the continental U.S. are now considered to be in the wildland-urban interface.
Some people are also concerned about crime in some metro areas. As I’ve said before, I’m not sure that the definition considers the rural-urban interface. Like if there are grazing animals on grasslands nearby, we are still fire-prone but not close to “wildlands”.
Percentage of Housing: Depending on the specific study parameters, between 25% and 46% of all homes or residents in New Jersey are located in the WUI. This ranks New Jersey in the top 5 states nationally for the percentage of homes built in these zones. [1, 2, 3]
Certainly New Jersey has fire-prone vegetation, particularly in the Pine Barrens, and maybe that’s the issue not “wildlands” or “farmlands” or “rangelands” per se. As we say in the Marshall Fire, houses close to one another also increase fire spread.
The story used this study to make some conclusions about the WUI..
Notably, we introduced a novel index, the “Integrated Human-centric Wildfire Risk Index (IHWRI),” which takes into account the compounding effects of critical fire-weather days and WUI expansion, which accounts for the expansion of geographical and temporal opportunities for the ignition and growth of extreme-impact fires and housing growth in harm’s way. IHWRI indicated a 4.1-fold increase in compound fire risk in California from 1990 to 2022. While climate-driven trends alone increased critical fire-weather days by 2.5-fold, the compounding impacts of WUI expansion and climate trends amplified conditions conducive to extreme-impact fires by 4.1-fold. The Sacramento Drainage climate division in Northern California emerged as the region with the highest increase in IHWRI, mainly due to its increasing critical fire-weather days.
The study has a nice section on limitations and future work:
While our study provides valuable insights into the compounding effects of climate change and WUI expansion on fire risk, we acknowledge some limitations that present opportunities for future work. Our analysis relies on data from 36 weather stations across California, which could be expanded to create a spatially continuous field of risk change, better capturing spatial heterogeneity. Incorporating additional variables related to fuel characteristics and landscape conditions would also provide a more comprehensive assessment of fire risk. Our fire proximity analysis uses a single WUI edge map from 2020 for the 2012–2020 period, which is a limitation, although changes in WUI from 2010 to 2020 were only −0.7%19. Future work could explicitly investigate how the increasing frequency of very large and mega fires affect the likelihood of their encroachment upon or occurrence near WUI zones, as our current analysis only implicitly captures this relationship. Furthermore, exploring data with higher temporal resolution could reveal seasonal or daily variations in fire risk factors, enhancing the precision of our findings. Additionally, the IHWRI index could be further refined to include vulnerability factors, potentially improving predictions of structural losses and fatalities. Finally, expanding the analysis to include various climate change scenarios would offer valuable insights into future fire risks and inform long-term mitigation strategies. Addressing these limitations in future research will enhance the understanding of compound fire risk and support the development of more effective management and policy strategies.
The study was apparently funded by NIFA, DOE and Joint Fire Sciences. What did they find out?
Our findings underscore the urgent need for a multifaceted approach to fire risk mitigation, addressing both climate change adaptation and fire-aware developments and planning. Failure to address these compounding factors can lead to increasingly catastrophic fire events, posing grave threats to human lives, property, and ecosystems. By understanding the critical role of human activities and WUI developments in exacerbating the compound fire risk, this research informs policy interventions aimed at reducing human-ignited fires and regulating development in fire-prone area
This is a fairly common finding in what I call the “modeling over understanding” literature- that there are things that other people could do to make things better and if they used our info it would be helpful. In my opinion, we already know stuff about human-ignited fires and we already have had various issues at regulating development in fire-prone areas. The key literature would be “what works, what doesn’t and why” in terms of interventions. It mystifies me why someone like JFSP doesn’t run some kind of interaction with communities to find out what their questions are, find out what info already exists in the literature, and design research to fill in those identified gaps. In my experience, people claiming their research will be helpful is not exactly the same as it being helpful. My own experience with research panels is that they don’t tend to ask these kinds of questions.
If you did this research, would you find anything we don’t already know?
You say it will be helpful to policy makers.. which ones. How would they use it? Have you asked them if this would be helpful to them? Who did you ask and what was their answer?
In my brief experience on a Dave Cleaves-led national wildfire research review, I received the info from a researcher “yes the national forest folks want this.” Then I asked the national forest person and he said “yeah, whatever they want to do, it’s their money and we want to have a good relationship.” And that’s within one of the only agencies that does useful things and still has its own research arm.
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Anyway, back to the story..
Evacuating from neighborhoods in these fire-prone areas can be especially fraught. Roads are often narrow and connected by a single road with only one way out. During the recent wildfires in Spokane, the rush of fleeing traffic caused hourslong jams, leaving families sitting in their cars as the flames closed in. Similar scenes of gridlock unfolded during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, and drives that normally took 25 minutes took hours.
I have buddies working on evacuation routes in the Denver Mountains. Part of the problem is that it doesn’t seem like in Colorado, it’s anyone’s job in government specifically to make evacuation plans. Still, this is a known problem that local people work on, and WUI and wildfire researchers, including social scientists, have been studying for, well, here’s Sue LeVan et al. from .. 1990!.
The hazard to structures in the wildland-urban interface or intermix (WUI) has been increasing as people move from the cities into rural areas. This movement has increased the likelihood of wildland fires occasionally threatening these structures. Forest fire fighters must defend these structures from wildfires.
Apples and oranges again..
In January 2025, the Eaton and Palisades fires broke out in the shrubby sprawl surrounding Los Angeles, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and burning down thousands of structures.
Those two neighborhoods were around when I was a tyke, and a quick Google search found that the communities were established in 1921 and 1887 respectively. Paradise in 1979.
Thanks to Nick Smith for his newsletter, today I found two and maybe three and will try to put them “in conversation”. I wonder whether partisan forces are intentionally fanning the flames of “bad Trump Admin wildfire policies” and it’s really a tempest in a teapot, or a fire in a firepit, or whatever the wildfire equivalent is. If you just take a gander at Inciweb, you see all kinds of tactics being used. Many acres of fuels are being burned for wildland fighter safety reasons. What is different is that there is no intentional WFU at this point (supposedly, we shall see when the annual report comes out).
It seems like maybe people are mixing “full suppression strategies” with “not using indirect tactics”, which as we’ve discussed before, the latter is not happening. And as a resident to the north of the Aspen Acres fire, the talking point “trying to put out all wildfires is a bad thing” doesn’t really resonate with me.
Also, if the problem with not using WFU in a bad fire year is that not enough fuel will be reduced, won’t plenty of fuel be reduced just from regular wildfires with regular tactics? It looks like it’s possible, based on the acres in Inciweb.
First, a shout-out Ms. Leuschen-Lonergan and reporter Mosabber Hossain for this story in Inside Climate News about what’s happening on two Montana wildfires.
Mariah Leuschen-Lonergan, fire communications lead for the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Rockies Fire & Aviation Management program, said some sections of the Sand Creek and Bobcat Lakes fires are burning in steep, densely timbered terrain that is difficult for firefighters to safely enter and leave.
Intentionally burning vegetation between the fires “removes the fuel before the main fire gets there, so when the fire edge reaches the burned-out area, there’s nothing left to carry it forward,” Leuschen-Lonergan said in an email response to Inside Climate News.
She said the approach gives crews a safer place to work and can help protect private property in the path of the fire.
Firefighters consider safety and threatened property or infrastructure when deciding whether to use a firing operation, Leuschen-Lonergan said.
Terrain, vegetation, current fire behavior and weather also influence where and when the operations are conducted.
“Firing is one tool among several for building and securing control lines,” she said.
Fire officials have not specified how much of the reported 45,561 acres burned by both fires resulted from strategic firing operations.
Fire officials said they are working on a very rough estimate and will share it as soon as possible.They confirmed that acres burned during firing operations are included in the reported total acreage of each fire.
On the Sand Creek Fire, crews have been using a combination of direct and indirect control lines. Along the western side, firefighters were preparing the Steel-Fox Road as a control line and using hand firing operations to burn pockets of heavy fuels and bring that fire toward established control lines, according to the latest incident update.
Large amounts of dead and downed timber in the southwest portion of the blaze has challenged firefighters. Fire officials said the probability of holding a control line there was very low, prompting crews to scout locations to dig control lines away from the active fire edge, where firefighters could work more safely.
Leuschen-Lonergan said fire managers, in deciding when to intentionally burn downed limbs and vegetation, examine temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction and the moisture level of available fuels, including grass, needles, twigs, branches and brush, as well as heavier logs on the ground.
An incident meteorologist assigned to the fire provides forecasts for the specific location. Fire behavior analysts, operations personnel and the meteorologist evaluate the conditions before a firing operation is approved and carried out.
Smoke rises from the Sand Creek Fire as crews work to establish control lines on Sept. 1. Credit: Northern Rockies Complex Incident Management Team
“No two fires, or even two spots on the same fire, are identical,” Leuschen-Lonergan said.
Crews conduct firing operations when conditions allow vegetation to burn at an intensity they can manage. Wind direction and speed are monitored during the operation to reduce the possibility that the fire will move toward homes or increase in intensity.
If conditions are not suitable, the operation does not proceed.
Rain can also affect the operations. If fuels become too wet to burn effectively, crews may postpone the work until conditions change.
Leuschen-Lonergan said the challenges are not limited to firing operations.
“It’s not firing operations specifically that are getting harder, it’s fire operations in general, and there are many elements involved in those challenges,” she said.
“Fire seasons seem to be running longer. Fuel loads and standing dead trees are heavier in many areas, which makes direct attack, usually our safest option, harder to use.”
She said those conditions can result in greater reliance on suppression methods that keep firefighters farther away from the wildfire.
“We lean on indirect tactics like firing operations more often,” she said.
Development in wooded areas is another factor, Leuschen-Lonergan said, reducing the number of locations where firefighters can safely engage a fire.
Phil Hardy sent the below in as a comment, so I thought I’d post. From my observation, (some) people mischaracterize the motives and views of others. That can happen from both sides.. the change agents can characterize the skeptics as “turf defenders”, while the people who don’t want (this set of) change say that the changers “want to suppress everything” and “are in it to make money from FS contracts” or whatever. Whatever energy we spend decrying others’ motives (other than politicians for whom that is BAU) is energy we could have spent trying to understand their concerns and address them.
Maybe we all don’t disagree about all this as much as we are told by others (whose business model derives from outrage) we do? Maybe we should just talk to each other directly, and especially, listen. Maybe, as Tim said on The Hotshot Wakeup podcast Friday, we could all work together on improving conditions for wildland firefighters.
In that spirit, here’s what Phil has to say:
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I guess I need to clarify myself for everyone here. I’ve waited long enough. And I apologize for the wait.
I am absolutely for managed fire and recognize the value of prescribed fire. However, I think it’s lunacy to conduct those sorts of things between May and October. And we can argue over the exact timing because the weather is different every year.
I don’t think enough people even want to have a discussion of the fact that what we really are talking about is fire in the WUI. That needs full suppression. Federal fires that bleed into private property and state timberlands need full suppression.
Let’s use the Angeles NF as an example. I would describe this essentially as an urban forest. There are probably 10 million people who live around it within 10 or 15 miles maybe 20. I scarcely think there is a purpose or place for managed fire or prescribed fire here. Something’s gonna get on fire there anyhow anyway.
I’m also flabbergasted by continued references to two things: First, “let’s do things how the natives used to do it.” In 1900 90 million people lived in the United States. Now there are 340 million people living in the United States. There’s no possible way we can do things the way the Indians used to do it unless we are talking about doing it in Alaska or in a large enough designated wilderness areas. And let’s forget about all of the health issues that go along with letting something that big burn. Let those burn, fine.
The second thing is people are still constantly bringing up is the 10 AM rule. I don’t know a single policy person who isn’t some kind of crockpot who keeps using this term and believes it. It’s a ridiculous comment and a ridiculous idea that people propagate to raise money for their NGO’s.
I can’t believe it still gets used! I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and I’ve never had a conversation with anyone about the 10 AM rule other than to say, “that’s ridiculous. No one talks about that anymore.”
Oh! I have a third, “clear cuts”. I haven’t bothered to do enough research here, but I seem to believe that the last clear cut on Federal land occurred in 1971 but I’m sure there’s somebody on here who can enlighten me about that. But online people still talk about it all the time on federal lands. Where are they getting these talking points?
If I wasn’t clear enough, and Steve Ellis did mention this (Parenthetical remark, Steve was my BLM state director in Idaho in 2010) and I like Steve. However, I think too much has changed since he retired.
I have spoken in the last week to 10 current and past federal fire chiefs on all different national forests. All of them say, it has changed completely. They all spoke of former line managers who had almost coequal fire knowledge as the fire chiefs. Experienced fire knowledge, and they were great forest sups or District Rangers. Not anymore, by and large.
My main thesis is, whatever we’re doing is not working well because we just burned down half of Spokane. We’ve lost large parts of two cities in two years. So everything is fine?
I get it, change is hard and scary. But all I think about are my children (and hopefully grandchildren) living in Boise who are breathing absolutely toxic air every summer and have been all their lives. And those toxins are even worse now because of all kinds of things like electric car batteries.
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A few of my own thoughts:
As to Phil’s “clearcut” comment, I attempted to get a definition going in this post in 2025 “Clearcuts, Openings, Definitions and Some Reasons For” and “Let’s Define Clearcut and Reduce Unnecessary Disagreement.” The latter starts with “What if.. we agreed on a definition of clearcutting?” Still, as Matthew Koehler pointed out in his comment, the FS does do some clearcutting still. I don’t know how prevalent it is.. nor the fuels/silvicultural rationale. Perhaps the totals are in some FS database somewhere? This might be a good question for readers to address from their local unit perspective.
And as to the prescribed fire close to town idea, I’ve seen it work in Northern Arizona and Colorado, but the vegetation, fuel characteristics, weather patterns and all that are different. Part of that is probably the NEPA process and public involvement in the decision. Plus prescribed fire tends to be used by local experts which increases trust over time, while WFU based on a team of out-of-towners.. maybe not so much.
Firefighters monitor a 2018 prescribed burn on the Gus Pearson Natural Area north of Flagstaff.
Quote from Andrew Sánchez Meador:
If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave.
Yes, this fits into the “I think we already knew that” category, but it’s great to hear someone officially in the research community say it. Here’s a link to more information on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest. From Arizona Public Radio:
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A new study from Northern Arizona University shows thinning and regular prescribed burns can help ponderosa pine forests survive both drought and wildfire. The work took place at a thirty-year-old research site on the Fort Valley Experimental Forest north of Flagstaff. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with ecologist Andrew Sánchez Meador about the findings.
Okay, so this experimental area has places that have been thinned, places that have been thinned and routinely burned, and then some places that have been left alone.
Yeah. And in this study, the initial thinning was followed by repeated burning every four years. In fact, we’re going to burn it this fall. That repeated burning, that frequent fire interval, is key to the function of this ecosystem.
What did you find out?
We actually found that both young and old trees responded to the thinning and grew really fast. That’s not a surprise with young trees. When you open up and make resources available, young trees can tend to thrive and jump on that. But what we found was trees 500 years old had dramatic increases in growth rates, suggesting that if we treat, both young and old trees can increase their vigor, they can be more resilient to drought, insect and disease, and what we also found was that if we introduce fire into this system, we don’t increase the mortality in that.
So the trees in the treated area are more likely to be resilient to the drought?
Yes. And to increased fire or being exposed to fire. Which is an equally important thing. Because you see a lot of messaging now advocating for putting fire back into these systems. People are scared of fire, rightfully so. But what we do know is, putting fire back into the system, seems to have only positive benefits in a frequent fire, naturally functioning system.
How do you hope the information from this study will help inform forest management in this region?
First and foremost, as we work to translate this science, I hope it makes the public feel better about seeing reduction in forest density. These forests we all live in here in Arizona, they are the only forests we’ve ever seen, so when we come here and someone tells us that these forests are unhealthy and too dense, that’s hard for us to understand. But these type of studies repeatedly show these forests are degraded and if we open them up we can increase vigor and resilience and make them healthy…And I think the other piece of this is that we know a lot about this. I often get the question about: we’re experiencing increasing severity of fire, and frequency of fire. The burn year is getting longer and longer and longer. What we can do to counteract it? Well, we know that thinning followed by the reintroduction of prescribed burning, that can counteract it. It took us 150 years to get into this mess, it’s going to take us a long time to get out of it, but we know that thinning and burning is a way out of it, we just need to be able to do it at a landscape scale in order to get ahead of these wildfires that we’re experiencing.
We’re on two decades of drought and we know that our ponderosa pines are struggling. After doing this research are you feeling more optimistic about the future of ponderosas, or are you still worried?
That’s a great question. Because I often say that if I look forward to the future climate… We know that we’re getting warmer, and the availability of precipitation is becoming less for plants and trees. If you were to manufacture or engineer a species of tree that is well suited for that, ponderosa pine would probably be at the top of the list of the thing that you created. It’s well suited for the future climate. What it is not well suited for is the current density and the way wildfires behave, and insects and disease behave. I’m very optimistic that if we can do more restoration at the landscape scale, if we can create more continuous parts of the landscape that are restored, we’re setting our ponderosa pines forest up to have the best chance they can have.
