Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire

(wind howling) - [Joe] The situation is a blinking code red for our nation.

- [Donald] Hopefully this is going to be the last of these because this was a really, really bad one.

(melancholy music) - [Barack] Obviously as you saw in some of these subdivisions, the devastation is enormous.

(fire crackling) - [Reporter] The flames of the Dixie Fire gutted the entire town of Greenville, California.

- [Reporter 2] The Caldor Fire has burned 75,000 acres with zero containment.

- [Reporter 3] A record-shattering 93% of the West covered in drought conditions, fire season is underway with no end in sight.

- [Reporter 4] Here's another interesting fact.

Six of the seven largest wildfires in state history have happened in the span of just a year.

- [Reporter 5] Residents are now left wondering if anything can be done to keep their community safe from future fires.

(pensive music) - There are reasons how it is that something ignites and how it doesn't.

If it meets the requirements for combustion, then it ignites and burns.

And if it doesn't it's because it didn't meet those requirements for combustion.

And that makes it a physics problem.

- I have a high level of confidence that we can prevent community fire destruction during extreme wildfires, because the research that has gone on for the last 30 plus years, shows us that we have opportunities to prevent the big community fire disasters.

But if we continue our current emergency response approach wildland urban fire disasters will be inevitable.

(pensive music continues) It's very frustrating for me to realize that Paradise didn't have to happen, and then listen to an interview of a fire professional saying there is nothing that we could have done.

Because there is!

(pensive music continues) (wind blowing) (dramatic orchestral music) (dramatic orchestral music continues) - [Speaker] We have our eyes on the vegetation fire.

It's gonna be very difficult to access.

Camp Creek Road is nearly inaccessible.

This has got potential for a major incident.

- I got to our local coffee shop and we started seeing ash the size of baseball, softball size, coming down from the sky.

So, obviously, that's not normal.

- I have been on some pretty significant wildland fires, but there was just something odd and different about how this was acting.

(engine rumbling) - When we received notice that there was a fire we were in the process of meeting our patients in the morning, shift had just started.

At that point I asked the manager how far away is the fire, he said, "Seven miles."

And 15 minutes later the fire was on the hospital grounds and we were burning.

We knew the only way to get patients out of here was to load them up in our personal cars and that's what we did.

- I talked to Daniel, and he said get the kids from school because it's not right, so we might need to get out.

So the only thing I ended up grabbing even though the back of the SUV was empty, was my daughter's stuffed animal, my son's baby blanket and our wedding rings.

- People are just running up to you going, "I don't have a vehicle.

What do I do?"

"My house is on fire.

What do I do?"

- [Darrel] So it's 11:38 in the morning in Paradise and this is what it looks like.

- It was as black at noon as it would be at midnight with no stars.

- [Reporter] Ordering an evacuation order now for areas of Pentz Road in Paradise.

- I had two critical patients in the back seat, one individual had battery-operated equipment to help keep them alive, and oxygen.

The batteries ran out after about an hour.

And I thought an hour was plenty of time.

I didn't have any idea that we were going to be trapped for so long.

- And the last thing I remember hearing Daniel say was, "Don't worry.

I'm gonna find you."

And then the phone disconnected and that was it.

- Fearing the worst 'cause all I heard was my family screaming and then the phone disconnecting.

When I was first getting into Paradise, it looks like you're driving into hell.

So I already told myself, you know, if you don't get out of here, this is what you have to do, you're gonna have to get in there and find your family.

- You're just flooding those major roads with that many people and it just takes one traffic accident, one vehicle to break down, stall, to stop everything.

- The road is rough here because all the cars were on fire right here.

We're in a really bad spot.

- So from that point it was total panic, everybody panicking, trying to go off the road, essentially four-wheeling to get out of our side of town because it was on fire.

I remember grabbing my daughter's hand and she was just praying.

We knew Daniel was somewhere, somewhere.

- Time kind of just went out the window at that point, don't remember what time it was, don't remember how long it took me to get there, just get there.

Then I realized that my truck was out of gas.

I kind of just threw everything aside, got out and started running.

- Hydrants were out, so you're running out of water and oh gosh, we're gonna have four, five, six engines run out of fuel here fighting the fire.

And then what do we do?

There was really no playbook for something like this.

(tense music) - [Darrel] We were stuck, right here.

The heat was so intense, my car started melting.

The window is so hot.

I can't even touch the window right now.

- I was basically trying to touch my kids because I thought this was gonna be the last time I got to touch them.

- I picked up the phone and started calling family members of the patients that were in the car and one by one I put the calls on the speaker overhead, and I let the family members say goodbye to their people.

- All of a sudden I see a figure running through smoke.

And, I don't know how I knew, but I knew it was him.

I knew it was Daniel.

- Oh, my God.

- We are stuck in it.

It's hot right now.

There are explosions everywhere.

Oh my God, people's tires are popping.

(tense music) - You would be next to a firefighter and you'd be like, "Hey, how you doing?"

And they look at you and go, "Yeah, my house is gone."

And you start asking like, "Where's your family?"

"I don't know."

That's when it started to, the gravity of everything really started to hit me.

(tense music) - We're in a bad spot.

- Oh, yeah.

- [Michelle] Oh my God!

Aaah, it's okay, you guys, it's okay, just keep going.

Keep going, baby.

Keep going.

- Okay, were good.

- Okay, oh my God.

Oh my God, it was so scary.

- [Daniel] As soon as we broke through that wall of smoke, it was daylight, it was almost blinding, but we knew that we had escaped.

- Myself and my three patients all made it through the fire, we all survived.

(melancholy music) - When I think about the numbers, I'm still, I feel like my jaw still drops to the ground.

Almost 19,000 structures.

So many lives lost.

It's you know, it's astounding.

- [Narrator] When the 2018 fire season ended, it was the deadliest and most destructive in California history.

The Camp Fire burned the town of Paradise, killed 86 people and was the most expensive natural disaster on Earth that year.

At the time 2018 was the fourth warmest year in recorded history and a warming climate pointed to even more fire in the future.

But how could this disaster happen in California, a state that is home to the largest and most advanced firefighting organization in the world?

(helicopter whirring) (pensive music) (pensive music continues) - Over a 10-year period, I was a wildland firefighter for both the US Forest Service, the National Park Service, with many varied experiences doing just about everything in fire, except jumping out of airplanes.

The primary tactic is to corral fires by creating an un-burnable line around them.

You encircle the whole fire perimeter with a trail built to mineral soil, nothing burnable there, then you start burning inside that line to kind of rob the wildfire of any fuel to burn.

You use hand tools, shovels, Pulaskis and rakes.

You can use heavy equipment like bulldozers or plows.

Then you add in the air show with helicopters and planes dropping water and retardant.

And when you get those different crews and parts working together, that's when it's very effective.

But you don't really put out the fire, you put a fire line around the fire and over time the fire will just kind of burn out of any burnable fuel.

What the Camp Fire disaster did, was it caused a lot of people to see the limits of firefighting.

So the question has become how do we protect homes and communities in a changing climate that is becoming hotter, drier, stormier, with more people living in fire prone places.

- [Narrator] Firefighters work to protect communities is nothing short of heroic and it can be incredibly effective.

Most wildfires are put out safely and quickly.

The LA County fire department is the pinnacle of firefighting skill, technology and grit.

It is amongst the most elite fire suppression organizations in the world.

- So the threat in Los Angeles County, you know, I say that it is probably one of the most dangerous places around because we get the kind of weather that very few places on the Earth get, coupled with the vegetation and the topography, the number of people that we have living here and it makes for a very threatening environment.

- Our air operation here is extremely demanding.

We have a complex aircraft, we fly it single pilot.

We fly it day, night under night vision goggle.

A very diverse & demanding environment that we operate in doing a very complex mission.

Because of the way we are here in Southern California and the way the houses are built into canyons and built into the terrain, the fire danger is quite high.

So when you see a fire that is moving towards homes, it definitely puts an added sense of urgency with what you're doing.

(pensive music) - There's you know over 100 cameras in the LA Orange County areas in those wildfire prone locations and they've got a camera 365 days, 24 hours a day on these areas.

They'll be able to pick up a little bit of smoke in a location and then get a response out really quick.

The conditions we fly in and how much water we can drop is unparalleled to any other era of firefighting.

But we still on the ground, we basically do the same thing.

We're taking hose lines and spraying water on the fire's edge.

We're clearing the vegetation from the fire's edge.

- The best tactic that we like to use is a combination of the aircraft along with ground crews that are actually on the ground cutting line.

And then we support that movement.

- [Narrator] Since 1983 an average of 72,000 fires burn each year in the US, nearly 98% of them are controlled by firefighters before becoming large and destructive to human communities.

(pensive music) (wind blowing) - When winds hit the canyons they bounce, move and shift.

If you haven't been in a wind driven fire, day turns into night.

There's so much particle in the air that you have no idea that it's daytime.

And you've got flame lengths, 30, 40, 50 feet high and you've got so many embers being tossed at 50 miles an hour spotting about a mile in front of you and to think that you're gonna stop it by putting a hand line or putting a dozer quickly around it, it's not going to happen.

(pensive music continues) - It's so windy that the water literally isn't even really hitting the ground, then what are you doing other than accepting a large level of risk?

- [Narrator] To understand how fires move, think of the Camp Fire.

On a dry and windy day a power line falls and ignites nearby vegetation.

Extreme wind fans flames and sends hundreds of embers far ahead of the initial fire to start new spot fires, which start hundreds more fires just minutes after the initial ignition.

Spotting enabled the Camp Fire to travel six miles in just two hours.

- We don't want anything to burn as firefighters, but you would have to have four to five engine companies there, and a truck company there, and a paramedic squad on every single structure to adequately protect it.

That's impossible when you've got thousands of homes in the fire's path.

- [Narrator] While the number of fires per year stays surprisingly similar, the destruction they cause is increasing at an alarming rate and that destruction is caused by a very small number of fires.

(pensive music continues) - The 2% of the wildfires that occur end up being extreme, the wildfires that we can't control at initial attack.

They're inevitable.

Our disasters, our wildland urban fire disasters, are occurring during that 2% of those wildfires.

There is no management trend that indicates that we're going to be able to control all wildfires.

- There is a perception that firefighters choose not to put out some fires or with more resources, more air tankers, bigger air tankers, they could just put all fires out.

And that's a dangerous misunderstanding of the situation.

(pensive music) - [Narrator] This misunderstanding was laid bare in 2020.

After a hot dry summer fires burned up and down the West Coast.

On Labor Day a 50-year wind event turned valleys into wind tunnels after a record-breaking heat wave.

In Oregon live power lines ignited new fires and existing fires were fanned by winds of up to 100 miles per hour, forcing people in towns across Oregon to immediately evacuate in a replay of the Paradise disaster.

- [Speaker] This is unprecedented, this has never happened in Oregon.

We have not experienced the tremendous loss and destructive fire nature that we've seen over the last 72 hours in our history.

(pensive music) (fire crackling) - [Chris] This massive fire event extends from the Canadian border all the way to the Mexican border, and the damage was significant.

- [Speaker] Wow, look at above me.

Jesus, there is embers floating all over around me.

This thing is gonna light everything on fire, look.

They're landing on the ground, right there.

- You got fire over here, it's all back there, there was another fire up here, there was fire on the other side of the river, the helicopter pad was burning, so basically everything's on fire.

- [Kate] Our air quality ranks the worst in the world, due to these fires.

More than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated.

- I had to walk away from everything that we have ever known, and lived for.

(pensive music) - This is our property.

(car door opening & closing) Man.

Oh my God.

(pensive music continues) That hill up there was on fire, the entire hill.

And then it just got worse and worse here, clearly, so I'm glad we got out with our lives, that's the most important thing.

Just crazy, man, this place is just reduced to rubble, nothing left.

(objects clattering) - [Narrator] As residents returned to find their homes burned, a narrative began to spread that more forest management could have stopped the fires and the firefighters could have put out remote fires early in the summer before extreme winds fanned them into destructive infernos.

Digging deeper reveals dozens of power line ignitions across the state of Oregon.

- [Speaker] There's a branch hanging from power lines that's smoldering and burning.

- [Speaker] We got a fire!

- [Operator] Okay, give me just a moment.

- [Speaker] God honey, look at that, look at that!

- [Speaker] It's sparking!

Oh God, that was too close.

- I see something, you know, boom!

My son, he went by and he's telling me he's actually seen some sparks flying off of the telephone wires down the road here.

- Between those two sections, that is where I've seen it spark, the whole way down.

I didn't think it's gonna start this whole hillside on fire.

- The winds were pushing 65 miles an hour or better, and they were coming this way.

- [Narrator] Those power line ignitions suddenly threatened thousands of homes simultaneously and immediately overwhelmed firefighting capacity.

People fled with no advance warning.

- Our fire department is not designed to fight a fire with a 95 mile an hour wind, we don't have those resources, it does not exist.

(pensive music) - [Narrator] 2020 became Oregon's most destructive fire year in history.

And globally it tied previous records for the hottest year ever recorded.

California's single largest fire went from 280,000 acres in 2017 to over one million acres in 2020.

(pensive music) But in the past firefighting worked, so what changed?

One change is people's relationship with fire, The Yurok who had lived in the same fire-prone landscape since before the arrival of European settlers respected and worked with this powerful element.

(gentle orchestral music) - I do not fight fire, I light fire.

(gentle orchestral music) (singer vocalizing) I think Grandma was born in like 1910, and fire was a major tool for managing this landscape.

She remembers people burning, Great Grandma told her, it's a fire adapted landscape and we are fire adapted people and the application of fire kept us in balance and gave us enough open territory for our animals and our food sources and everything that we needed to survive and thrive.

(gentle orchestral music continues) I was probably 10, 11.

The brush was growing right up next to our house, obviously it's a fire danger.

So Grandma and Grandpa knew this and so they had us cut the brush, move it away, pile it and burn it, then we started burning it a little more, and then a little more.

And then, you know, it made sense, if there's no fuel to burn, then you're safe.

(gentle reflective music) - [Narrator] Fire wasn't only a question of safety.

The Yurok people used it increase food production and improve the creation of raw materials from native plants like willow and hazel.

- A long time ago, each family had their own place that they would take care of often using fire.

They would have their hazel gathering place, their acorn gathering place, their place to gather berries.

(gentle reflective music) If it hasn't been burned, then you don't have the single straight shoots.

It has many limbs on it and after fire it becomes stronger and more pliable, more flexible.

- The land was clear when I was a young man.

When I was just a kid, it was a lot of prairies.

Elk used to be abundant here like the herds of the buffalo back in the plains.

- [Narrator] In the absence of fire, meadows shrink and disappear, decreasing biodiversity and habitat for game.

It's a process that began as settlers colonized the West and fundamentally changed our relationship with fire.

- They started prosecuting us and putting us in jail for lighting fires, and then they called us arsonists and renegades.

There was a mass public hanging of 17 native individuals and they were hung in public for lighting fires.

(gentle reflective music) - Colonization is, you know, it's the whole reason why fire was taken away from the average person, because the colonizers were afraid of fire.

They just suppressed them, and so it went from something that was used in a good way to something to be really done away with, to exclude it completely.

(gentle reflective music) - In the last 100, 120 years, there is tens to hundreds of thousands of cultural burns that haven't occurred here.

(gentle reflective music) (gentle reflective music) (tree thudding) - [Narrator] At the same time as the new inhabitants of North America were preventing Native Americans from tending the land near their communities with fire, they were busy suppressing wildfire through a new organization called the Forest Service.

In the 1920s its mandate was to extinguish all blazes as quickly as possible, and it's easy to understand why.

The early 20th century was a hot dry period.

We know of the 1930s as the Dust Bowl and it wasn't just crops that suffered.

There was lots of fire which prompted a ramp up in fire suppression.

By the 1940s, surplus military equipment from World War II mechanized and professionalized the effort, but large fires still burned homes and forests.

Then something happened that confused our understanding of fire for generations.

Ocean currents shifted and brought cooler, wetter conditions to the Western US, making fires far easier to fight.

- We had these incremental wet periods during the summer.

Incremental rains every week or two is just enough to tamp down fire behavior and support the fire managers to get out there and suppress those fires.

- [Narrator] At the same time cattle grazed heavily in the Southwest, consuming fuels, that might have historically burned.

Fire suppression was very successful.

Acres burned per year on Western federal land plummeted from seven million to around a million by the 1960s.

- That's where we started in the Western United States really interacting with the landscape and developing our expectations on what the landscape could provide for us.

And that's the period of that great expansion, we see communities expanding, we see the land utilization expanding, we've expanded our recreation resources, we've expanded our water infrastructure, we've expanded our power infrastructure and we've expanded our timber bases under the expectation that it is sustainable into the future.

- [Narrator] In the minds of people who grew up during the 1950s and '60s, fire was unlike hurricanes, tornadoes or floods.

It was a force they could expect to control.

Since then the situation has changed, but for many people expectations have not.

By the 1980s the Western United States left that cool wet period and entered a prolonged drought.

And the number of acres burned per year began to rise.

Now increased drought and heat makes long wet periods a distant memory, and there are more people in nearly every fire prone landscape, creating more potential for ignitions.

- Yeah, I mean how has fire changed in my career and people ask me all the time, has it gotten worse?

And I tell them, look at the list.

If you look at the list of most destructive fires in California, largest fires in California, deadliest fires in California, most of the fires on the list have occurred in the last five to 10 years.

I think that tells a story right there.

(gentle reflective music) - We have a real problem.

Whole neighborhoods, small towns being incinerated by wildfires that we cannot stop, cannot put out.

The strategy in recent decades "Okay, we'll prevent these wildfires by removing the fuel first".

And that is what people are talking about when they say "forest management".

On public lands it is mostly thinning, where trees are selectively removed, and on private land they're talking mostly about clear cutting.

So we're really counting on this fuel reduction to work, to start reducing fire damage, because almost all the money spent each year on preparing for wildfire is spent on it.

(tree thudding) - [Narrator] After decades of clear cutting older forests on public land, the Forest Service transitioned to thinning forests with the goal of reducing fire risk.

(gentle reflective music) - So the focus is on prevention, going in there and thinning out those millions and millions of acres of overstocked stands.

- Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other.

It is either carried out or it burns out, but it comes out.

- [Narrator] This logging and thinning, dubbed fuel treatments, became the principal tactic to reduce the growing risk fire poses to homes and communities.

(gentle reflective music) (gentle reflective music continues) - So here's an area that's been thinned.

The purpose of a thinning typically is to remove the smaller trees in a stand, so there's a larger distance between the trees.

If a fire came through here pre-thinning and it was very dense, some of those smaller trees serve then as what we call ladder fuel, so it would carry the fire up that smaller tree and up into the tree tops and then it could run along in a canopy fire where most of the trees would die.

So the hope is that if a fire would come through here, it would lay on the ground, if firefighters could get in here that it would be a more defendable place and that hopefully the fire wouldn't get in to the community.

- [Narrator] Now more than 30 years into this experiment, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year reducing fuels in forests, but the number of families who lose their homes to fire remains devastatingly high and firefighting costs continue to skyrocket.

So Dr. Tania Schoennagel decided to examine why.

- So many things have to happen kind of perfectly to make that fuel reduction treatment work.

(rhythmic pensive music) Firefighters have to be there, it doesn't just go out on its own in a fuel treatment.

You have to have people on the ground or aerial attack.

And then it has to actually modify the behavior and a lot of these treatments remain untested and we don't know how well they will do under these extreme conditions that are so destructive.

- [Narrator] But these are difficult questions to answer without being on the ground in a thinned patch of forest during a fire.

To answer them one would have to know where fire would burn before the forest grows back.

- We said, well, what's the high order question that is, "Do they even encounter wildfires?"

"How often do they have an opportunity to do their job which is to reduce fire severity?"

If they don't encounter a wildfire, they don't have even the opportunity.

And so what our group did is looked at all the recent treatments conducted in Western forests, and an independent group just about at the same time did a study that looked at all ecosystems across the West.

And we came to the exact same conclusion, the results showed that over the last, say, decade and a half, less than 1% of the area treated even encountered a wildfire.

(rhythmic pensive music) - [Narrator] For example, the forest around Fort Collins, Colorado was cut for over a decade to reduce fire risk, then in 2012 the High Park fire burned 87,000 acres, but encountered almost none of the thinned areas on its way into town, where it destroyed 259 homes and killed one person.

Zoom out to the entire country and we find a pattern that helps explain the increase in homes destroyed.

We can't know where wildfires will burn.

But some fires are so large, they burn through many fuel reduction projects.

The town of Greenville is nestled in the forests of Northern California.

Over the past decades tens of thousands of acres have been cut and extensive fuel breaks have been created on the promise that these actions will protect nearby communities, lessen smoke and reduce the costs of firefighting.

But driven by winds and extremely dry conditions, the Dixie Fire quickly swept through treated areas and jumped over fuel breaks to burn nearly one million acres and destroy over 1000 homes, leveling most of Greenville.

While fuel reduction and timber harvest may have changed fire behavior for better or worse inside the burn, the tens of millions of dollars spent on cutting the surrounding forests did not help local residents, nor did it reduce the firefighting burden and the 6,000 firefighters assigned could not stop the blaze from becoming the state's second largest.

- So here we have one of many vistas where you see just a vast ocean of forests and the idea that we can fireproof this huge landscape of flammable material is simply an impossible task.

It's like trying to scoop out water out of the ocean to make it less wet.

These areas are just so vast in the West that there's no way that we can remove enough trees to make them non-flammable.

So what that means is that the vast majority of the treatments are just sitting out, laying wait, and waiting, and waiting, and probably expiring in terms of their period of effectiveness, because, of course, trees grow back and fuels grow back.

So what that told me is that even if we double or triple the number of effort in terms of area treated, it is not going to have a significant impact on wildfire.

(rhythmic pensive music) (rhythmic pensive music continues) - The big shift in forest management and fire management came right at the early 1990s and at that time two things happened, one, scientists started measuring, hey, climate is affecting wildfire behavior.

But secondly, they were clear cutting old growth to the point of driving species extinct, and so there were some court ordered legal restrictions on clear-cut logging, and just like that, you know, the focus of the agencies kind of morphed.

They charted out prescriptions that basically any tree made of wood was subject to being salvage logged or thinned as hazardous fuel.

(percussive music) Now this is all very different from prescribed burns.

The real hazardous fuel load is the layer of small diameter fuels, like dead needles and limbs, shrubs and saplings, that accumulate on the ground surface every year.

This material is left behind after logging and thinning operations.

- [Narrator] Forest protections do limit logging in some areas of public land, especially when compared to private land, so fires in the West have been blamed on laws that protect natural, older forests from being cut down.

Testing this belief is tricky, because fire conditions vary wildly from forest to forest, slope to slope, day to day, even minute to minute.

Finding two fires that burned in identical conditions in different forests, under different land management, is challenging.

But Oregon State University scientists were given the opportunity, when a fire burned into an unusual area of land management in Southern Oregon.

- This historical land allocation and management regime where every other square mile alternate between, you know, private industrial land management strategies and public lands.

It is very strange, because, you know, nature doesn't operate on square lines, where you have right next to each other conservation type management versus timber production type management.

In 2013, a fire burned through this checkerboard landscape and that afforded us this opportunity to really ask this question.

"How does different forest management regimes influence the outcome of these fires?"

(pensive music) So what we found through this research was really surprising.

In the Douglas complex intensive forest management increased fire severity relative to the less intensive public lands management.

(pensive music) (indistinct radio chattering) And you can see, looking from above, that real impact of fire and land management.

(pensive music) Well, we're heading down to the Holiday Farm Fire that burned along the McKenzie River.

What's burned in that is, I think, 70% private, 65% of that being private industrial forest.

- [Narrator] Dr. Chris Dunn's work tested the long-held belief that forest management made communities safer.

If true, the towns engulfed by the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire, burning east of Eugene, Oregon, should have fared better than those surrounded by natural forests.

- You can really see the fire behavior from one ridge to the next with each of these crown fires.

(pensive music) Vida should just be up ahead on the left.

Oh my gosh!

So this is really apparently where the fire front was pushing through.

All these clearcuts and older plantations and it really, really cooked 'em off.

(pensive music) Down to the left, thats Blue River.

Burnt!

I see a lot of management and a lot of mortality and a community lost.

Smaller trees have thinner bark, which increases their susceptibility to any kind of fire.

You have this perfect fuel bed of very uniform crowns, crowns touching, it's more easy to ignite those crowns and carry through the crowns than on the public lands, that have more diverse crown structure.

Now looking at these Labor Day fires from the air and looking broadly across this landscape, you can see that this private industrial forest management regime, like we studied in the Douglas Complex, did not afford protection to these communities.

Instead what we saw was complete devastation of communities.

(percussive music) The idea that you can push out a solution to do more forest harvesting to prevent that, it's fairly naive.

(rhythmic pensive music) (rhythmic pensive music continues) - [Narrator] Two-thirds of all forests in the United States are available for timber production and extraction.

The removal of older trees across so many acres often leaves rural communities nestled between clear cuts and young tree plantations.

As the climate warmed in the late 1990s, Dr. Beverly Law began to ask what it might mean in terms of total carbon stored to shift the makeup of so many forests to younger trees.

(reflective music) - We're going to visit our Mature Pine AmeriFlux site.

It's about a 90 year old forest, and there's a climbing tower that takes us to the instruments at the top.

And it measures the carbon dioxide exchange between the forest and the atmosphere.

(reflective music) Well, the theory has always been that old forests are net carbon sources to the atmosphere or they are net-zero.

It's a theory that's driven a lot of decision making on old forests.

(reflective music) We set out to say well, what does it take up?

It started off with about 10 of us in the US and 20 globally, and when we all got together, we said gee, we need to get our act together, and so we have comparative measurements and if we do it all the same way, then we can see how these different systems react to climate.

And so, now we have about 1000 worldwide and we have instruments on the towers.

The towers are used to get them way above the tree canopy and the aim is to get this net of carbon dioxide, being taken up by the forest and given off, taken up and given off.

And what's the net of that over different time frames?

(reflective music) Well, we found that these forests are much more important than people imagined, mature and old forests are the workhorses.

They take up more carbon annually, and they have a lot more stored in the wood.

(reflective music) - [Narrator] First she and her team proved that assumptions about older trees losing carbon were flawed and the exact opposite was true.

Older forests continue to uptake carbon in huge quantities proportional to their size.

(reflective music) - This site is known as the Young Pine Site, it is pretty well-known internationally.

Trees here are about 28 years old and we have a young site and a mature site, and they're in about the same climate.

And so we're comparing the carbon dioxide exchange with the atmosphere between these sites.

Well, we found that the young forest is a net source to the atmosphere for those first 20 years, every year there's more respiration from the soil surface, than there is photosynthesis and uptake of carbon by the trees.

So 20 years they are going net-zero.

- [Narrator] Her team's findings have sweeping implications for forest management.

Young forests are actually contributing to climate change, while old forests fight it.

(ethereal music) So how do her team's findings apply to a fire-burned forest?

Is it still storing carbon?

(ethereal music continues) - When we look at fire emissions they are a lot less than people think.

So what you see here, it's the trees, that they're still standing and about half of what is here is carbon, and it can stay here for decades to centuries, but these big trees, those will be centuries.

And that's carbon that's not in the atmosphere.

It's here in the forest.

It's not in the atmosphere.

The stuff that goes in the atmosphere is the small stuff, small trees, the duff, shrubs, that kind of thing.

These trees are still here, they may fall, but they'll still be here long after we're gone.

And then new forests grow up where the seeds came down after the fire.

(ethereal music) And we found, when we were doing our work on emissions, that the emissions from harvest were five to 10 times as much as they were from fire emissions.

When a forest is harvested, there is carbon that is lost on every stage, from leaving debris on the ground to wood that's lost to the landfill.

So you're putting carbon to the atmosphere much quicker than you might have from the forest.

(wind whistling) - [Narrator] During the 2020 fire season, the forest where Dr. Law's team made some of its most important discoveries, burned.

The forest was the longest running carbon research site in the global network.

- I've been working at that site since about 2000, so 20 years of continuous measurements at the site and little fires had occurred in the area, because that's just normal frequency, but it burned in 2020 and the fire ran right through our research site.

So we're going to see what it looks like.

What the fire did isn't so bad, it's what happened afterwards.

Oh my gosh, there's the tower.

Oh my God.

It's been heavily logged.

(door clicking) (footsteps thudding) (melancholy music) (birds chirping) This is just wide open, huge area, huge area, thats been logged.

(melancholy music) Carbon is carbon in the atmosphere whether you burned it for heat or put it in the atmosphere some other way, adding more is not a good thing, and we need to go carbon free with our energy.

Three decades, that's all the time we have, before we reach a tipping point.

I feel sick about it because the science was never considered.

As a scientist, like, I didn't spend my whole career, learning about all of this, decades, to not have people use the science.

(melancholy music) Oh, what can you do?

(wind blowing) - [Narrator] And Dr. Law's site is not alone.

But her research shows that logging or even thinning forests releases more carbon than fire itself.

This carbon is added to an already warming atmosphere as fire seasons grow longer, homes burn down and lives are lost.

(wind howling) (birds chirping) (gentle orchestral music) (singers vocalizing) - Fire occurrence has been part of the natural history of North America since the retreat of ice sheets during the Pleistocene.

Humans were here when that was occurring, humans were lighting fires, lightning is the other principal igniter of fires.

So, fire occurrence is clearly not a disaster.

(gentle orchestral music continues) (footsteps thudding) - I am a poet and also wildlife biologist.

I was sent out to the burned forest to work with a group of scientists and follow them around and quickly realized that these forests were so rich and biodiverse that if I didn't capture this in photos, film, words, no one was gonna believe it because how on Earth is a burned forest so beautiful and rich.

This is really an alien landscape to most people, once fire goes through, people just assume nothing is there, that it is destroyed but it's not true at all.

This is a place that's still intact with biodiversity and animals returning to the area.

(footsteps thudding) Right after fire, there's a flush of new vegetation that happens, all kinds of berry-producing plants are stimulated by fire.

You see all the wildflowers coming in.

I've seen carpets of morel mushrooms coming in right after fire.

(birds chirping) Smoke detecting beetles come in right after the fire and they zoom in to the charred trees, lay their eggs there and wood boring beetle larvae grow inside the wood.

Now this draws a whole another layer of life in which is the black back woodpeckers.

And they are specialists, they love these intensely burned forests and they know exactly where to go to find wood boring beetle larvae.

And not only do they have their food source in these trees, they build their homes in the trees as well.

(birds chirping) (gentle orchestral music continues) Fire in the American West is like this grand reset button, everything starts from that point onward.

It's just an amazing, thriving intensity of life coming up from the ground, responding to the light that's available, theres resources available, and animals coming in to feast on all this.

(gentle orchestral music) - [Narrator] Small mammals find abundant food in the new roots and leaves emerging after a fire, and their numbers often rise.

But small mammals are also food.

A secretive family of goshawks have found a tree to nest in surrounded by high intensity burns where hunting is easier.

And bears, bears love burned landscapes for the diversity of food.

On this cold spring day roots and berries are late to grow, but this bear finds plenty of grub worms in trees downed by fire.

(gentle orchestral music) (gentle orchestral music continues) - So it's like waves upon waves of new life coming in.

I probably have about 12 cameras all in all, all over the Sierra Nevada, I've been focusing on mammals for the remote cameras.

I have seen foxes, bear, deer, mountain lions, bobcat, amazing shots of bobcat, and very recently in two locations, the Dixie Fire being one of them, Pacific fishers, right in the heart of a post-fire forest, right in the heart of the high intensity areas.

When you see so much life in unexpected places, it makes you be so respectful of something so much larger than you, that's happening and has happened for millions of years.

And it's got a machinery that is mysterious and beautiful.

It may not look that way to most eyes initially but it's just is this mysterious unfolding of life.

And that to me is the most amazing part of being here.

(gentle orchestral music continues) (gentle orchestral music continues) - You know, wildfires do a lot of good work for free.

They are part of an ecological stimulus, that rejuvenates the landscape.

But we have a real problem, we're failing to achieve our objectives of keeping people safe.

What is needed, is not just more of the same, but a completely different approach.

I call it a shift in our paradigm and our whole approach to how we relate to fire on the land and what we do to live with fire in the land.

(pensive music) - [Narrator] Enter Jack Cohen, a research scientist for the largest firefighting organization in the world.

- From my standpoint, one of the major contributions of the research that I've done, is to redefine this problem.

But the main point here is that it's a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem.

The big problem with us defining wildland urban fire disasters as a wildfire problem is that we focus on and put all of our energy into attempting to eliminate the wildfire to begin with.

We're 98% successful in our initial attacks.

(brooding music) So we're putting our energy into the very difficult margins of control during the severe conditions.

And we're not gaining!

In boldface, it basically tells us that we're going in the wrong direction.

We want to do fuel treatment and particularly since 2018, we have emphasized the idea of doing fuel treatment, maintaining the wildfire definition of the problem, instead of taking the opportunity to be more practically effective with regard to changing the ignitability of the thing that gets destroyed which are the structures.

(brooding music) - [Narrator] But is it possible to separate home ignition from a wildfire?

To find out, Jack would need large blocks of forests, something to represent homes, and a flamethrower.

- [Researcher] This is plot number five right here, panning into it.

This camera will be in this box.

This is the one that we're hoping to burn about five o'clock.

(brooding music) - So I'm asking the question, how big an area do we have to do vegetation control, vegetation treatment, in order to eliminate the ignition, producing exposure from a wildfire?

How far away do I have to do this, in order to keep those big flames from igniting my house?

So I got involved in doing four years' worth of crown fire experiments, where I built wall sections and exposed them to the big flames of crown fires at 33, 66 and 98 feet from this big wall of flame.

- [Researcher] And Jack Cohen has his "shelter" in there, his wall section.

It's over here, I will zoom in on that.

(brooding music) - So here's what it looks like.

We have these square blocks carved out of the Boreal forest in the Northwest Territories.

And we ignite that with essentially a mobile flamethrower, 75 gallons of jelly gasoline in about 45 seconds along the ignition line.

(engine rumbling) And we were able to produce crown fires.

- [Speaker] And there we go.

Oh yeah!

(brooding music) (wind blowing) - And now what I want to know is what is the effect of this crown fire?

- [Researcher] Jack's in there somewhere, (brooding music) (helicopter whirring) There goes Jack, (brooding music) - [Speaker] Get some good video?

- [Researcher] I got Jack running into the smoke.

(brooding music) - [Jack] At 33 feet, we got four out of seven of the wall sections to ignite, At 66 feet, the big crown fire flames didn't even char the wood.

So now I've essentially scaled my zone of treatment to keep the house from burning down to within 100 feet of the house.

And that's become essentially the home ignition zone size.

- [Narrator] Jack calculated that thinning vegetation in a gradient starting 100 feet from the house and clearing more and more as you move closer to the home is all that is needed to eliminate ignitions from flame exposure.

But there was another type of ignition that persisted.

- I had this mental model of what to expect with regard to the wildfire burning through the vegetation, getting to the community and burning up the houses on the edge of the community.

I was seeing things during fires that I just sort of filed away in the back of my head, things that that didn't quite match what my expectations were.

I started really paying attention to not only the things that were destroyed during a wildland urban interface fire event, but also maybe especially those things that survive.

One of the interesting things about this photo is that we have largely forest, both conifer as well as deciduous surrounding, total destruction.

And yet when we look, if we back out and we look at where the fire came from, we see that all the trees, the tree canopies are unconsumed before it gets to the total destruction of the mobile home park.

(brooding music) More than half the time the big crown fires are not igniting these structures.

It's something else.

- [Narrator] Understanding that something was crucial for Jack's theory to work.

(brooding music) - Well, as it turns out we're talking about a burning ember, landing on the structure, and the debris that maybe is in the rain gutters and igniting that debris that then puts flame on the eaves that then spreads into the attic of the house and totally consumes the house.

- [Narrator] And with that, Jack created the modern understanding of how fire moves through a community.

He found the mechanism that burns houses and why wind creates so many ignitions.

- 90% of those are from embers.

- Embers are flying ahead of the fire-front.

- So many embers, spotting, you know, in advance of the fire.

(brooding music) - [Jack] So we had to do experiments where we could generate a blizzard of burning embers on a full-scale house.

And then begin to experiment with where the ignitions occur and see if a specific design was vulnerable to ignition from burning embers.

(brooding music) - We have a major test chamber, size of a airplane hangar.

Whether it's against hurricane, hail or wildfire, we crash test structures here.

We're convinced that there's a point where you can prevent a loss.

- [Jack] There is nothing else that I know of on this planet, where we can actually go in and do full scale experiments with burning embers.

- We have a wall of fans.

It's 105 fans and we're able to create realistic wind speeds and wind gusts.

So all that wind comes at us here.

And then we also have these ember generators, these are ducts coming out of the ground, but what is happening underneath the ground is we have a burn chamber, where we're feeding in wood chips and dowels.

And when that starts to burn, up out of the duct comes as glowing smoldering embers, and that's what we see in a real wildfire, the wildfire exposure, that impacts buildings and homes.

What we have here is a mock test building.

Half of it is wildfire-resistant and the other half of it is more traditional building structure.

And here in the wind chamber, we're going to shoot embers at it.

And when they come and impact the building, we're going to see the difference in wildfire-resistant building and non-wildfire-resistant building, and how they perform to that ember exposure.

I get really excited about burning houses down.

Final safety check.

We have water curtain on, attack line and backup line are safe, fans are on, we are about to start generator, start-up procedure.

- Controller ready.

- Copy.

- [Speaker] All right, generators are ready.

On your mark, Dan.

- Copy.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Generators on, - Alright, all on.

(brooding music) (wind howling) (brooding music continues) (brooding music continues) (brooding music continues) - What this all means, is that we have huge opportunities to change the requirements for combustion such that it doesn't happen.

We don't have to control the extreme wildfire, in order to keep the house from igniting and burning.

And we don't have to live in a concrete ammo bunker, to prevent the next Paradise.

(ethereal music) - [Narrator] There are currently no laws in the United States requiring houses to include all of the recommendations from the researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety.

But California began to require houses in fire prone areas to incorporate some of the recommendations in 2008.

Dr. Alexandra Syphard looked at 4,000 homes that either survived or burned in California fires.

(ethereal music continues) - There are a range of strategies that can be taken to increase the chance that homes could survive a fire.

Those strategies that are closest to the house are more effective.

By far the most important factors were the structural characteristics that you would associate with preventing ember penetration into a structure.

Vent screens, enclosing eaves, multi-pane or double-pane windows and defensible space done from the structure out to five feet, and then going out to about 40 to 60 feet.

You got some significant benefit of defensible space and anything beyond maybe 60 to 70 feet was not significantly beneficial when it comes to structure loss.

Vegetation management can control behavior.

It can make fire slower.

And in strategic places, even in wind driven weather, it could buy a little bit of time for defense.

But serving those functions is only relevant if it's adjacent to an asset that you're trying to protect.

If it's not, even if it does slow the fire, it doesn't matter.

- [Narrator] Even in the face of compelling research we continue to spend billions on thinning forests and suppressing fires and very little on preparing homes to resist ignition.

So what does the industry whose bottom line depends on an accurate assessment of risk, care about?

Decades of research that tells us on how to keep homes safe.

Based on this, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety has honed a new certification program that focuses on the home itself and the five feet immediately around it.

But the small amount of money spent to support homeowners goes primarily to clearing vegetation up to 100 feet from structures rather than focusing on the most effective actions.

(ethereal music) So what drives the destructive fires that burn homes and kill people?

Wind and drought.

In favorable conditions firefighters are often able to slow flames and prevent community-wide destruction.

But not all fires burn in favorable conditions.

A warming climate is increasing the frequency of extreme fire weather.

Yet for the vast majority of Western forests high-severity fires in dry windy conditions are nothing new.

For evidence that these forests evolved with intense fires, just look up.

(reflective music) In the Rim Fire that burned near Yosemite in California spotted owls occupied nests inside the burned forest at similar numbers to before the fire.

Recent studies show that owls raise their young in forests burned at low intensity and choose to hunt in nearby high intensity burns.

The new green growth attracts small mammals and provides abundant food, even for a wobbly owlet, hoping to fly for the first time.

(reflective music) (reflective music continues) (wind howling) - There's nothing that influences fire like fire.

In last year's firestorms in California, during the peak of their runs, the only thing having any effect on their fire spread or the fire behavior was bumping into recent fires.

That's what stopped the progression of the wildfires.

So that's what the fire community believes, you got to get as much fire on the ground as possible now.

You know, to hedge against the wildfires of the future.

So, what does living and thriving with fire look like?

Preparing our homes and communities, so we can live with more wildfire in the landscape, combined with the careful use of controlled burning by indigenous fire practitioners and prescribed fire professionals.

(gentle reflective music) - We are in the fifth day of our 2019 Fall TREX.

We're on the Yurok reservation on the Klamath River.

And what we're doing is a training exchange and we welcome all these people to come in.

Folks from Spain, from Mexico, Canada.

- We want to burn it all the way into these bushes here.

So if you're on holding, you got to move into the bushes.

It's gonna come around those trees and we wanna get fire in in this big group right here.

That's invasive right here.

That's 40 years growth right here.

We're going to see if we can kill some of this.

- The community here from Wautek to Weitchpec decided that the number one issue facing our community of most importance was to bring fire back to the land.

Our ancestors had a fire regime that included regular cycles of burning and so the fir trees did not encroach on the prairies There was not all of these invasive non-native species.

Fire is definitely a part of restoring the ecosystem to balance.

And so it's like it's a sacred obligation and responsibility and a privilege to be in this time, in this place and to bring fire back to the land and to the people.

(gentle reflective music) It's awesome.

I can like just totally see the vision when this is pure prairie again.

You can tell it's coming.

I can almost see the elk here.

It's good stuff.

- Well, we have 100 years of fire suppression.

As you can see around us, there's blackberries, a lot of brush, brambles.

So the high mountain elk and the coastal elk haven't been able to get to each other for quite a while and this is one of their historic corridors.

So it's going to take a lot of young people like this out here to continually come back year after year and help us burn in the spring and in the fall to restore this land to what it was before.

(gentle reflective music) - Please grandfather, grandmother, accept this blessing today, and give us the blessing of fire We will care for it, as you had cared for it in the past, in the present and the seven generations to come.

Wok-hlew, wok-hlew.

- [Both] Wok-hlew.

- Give us guidance, clarity of mind, purity to carry this out with the best intentions.

(gentle reflective music) (fire crackling) - Oh, I love that sound.

(laughs) (gentle reflective music) (fire crackling) - [Speaker] It's good for our ecosystems, it's good for our water, our hydrology, our prairies.

There's just so much that I'm learning about that.

It's amazing, just the sheer necessity of fire on the land.

(gentle reflective music) We have 300,000 acres to do, and we're doing 15 of it today.

(laughs) But it's 15 that we didn't have done yesterday.

So every time we put fire on the ground, it's a step in healing all of us.

- That is freaking amazing.

(laughs) So happy.

(gentle reflective music) (gentle reflective music continues) (no audio) - [Narrator] But there are challenges.

The majority of homes that are lost in wildfires in the United States are not in forests.

In California 80% of wildfire burned homes are lost in grasslands or Chaparral.

And if we compare our situation today to cultures that have lived harmoniously with fire since time immemorial, we see a very different landscape.

Forests are now crisscrossed with roads and power lines.

Older forests have been logged and converted to young tree plantations.

Many forests are lined with suburban development.

While prescribed and cultural fire restores and revitalizes the land, we struggle to bring it back in this challenging environment.

Still, communities in any fire-prone landscape can find hope in those that survived.

On Labor Day in 2020 fires devastated communities across the state of Oregon, including the community of Elkhorn.

- Everything burned, all of the trees, most of the homes.

It just was unbelievable.

When we saw how devastating the fire had been and how much loss there had been, we really didn't know whether our house had survived.

We knew that most of the neighborhood was destroyed, totally gone.

(gentle hopeful music) Nobody here thought we would ever have a forest fire.

But we did the research and planned for the event, because when you live in the forest that's always an eventuality.

- [Narrator] While many residents had cleared vegetation around their homes, few knew of the far higher odds of survival that hardening a home provides.

But Mary Bradshaw did.

- We built the house with a metal roof.

We put no gutters up because gutters collect pine needles.

We have no vegetation against the house.

Our patio and our porch are concrete.

We have cement fiberboard siding, we have closed soffits.

So that nothing can get up underneath and catch fire.

- [Narrator] When the fire blew through the forest and into the community, Mary's home survived.

(gentle hopeful music) - The house was basically unscathed, we were shocked.

(gentle hopeful music continues) We wanted to live in the forest.

We didn't expect the forest to adapt to us.

So we built with the forest in mind and I think it saved us.

(gentle hopeful music continues) - What we can do right now is prepare homes and communities.

That's something we can do.

We have all the tools and technology and ability to do that right now in a few short years.

We could maybe eliminate that problem, of homes and communities being destroyed by wildfire.

(gentle hopeful music) And when we get there, that expands all of our options and opportunities of how to work with fire on the land, how to put more fire on the ground safely and sustainably.

(gentle hopeful music continues) (gentle hopeful music continues) (gentle hopeful music)