By Molly Peterson (The California Newsroom), Dillon Bergin (MuckRock), with graphics by Andrew Witherspoon (Guardian)

During wildfire season in the western US, soot-clogged skies have long triggered public alerts with advice like: Shut the windows and stay indoors. For those who can afford it: Use an air filter. As Canadian wildfire smoke curled down to Kentucky this year, officials began to do the same thing.

On alert days, “smoke’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s there when you’re going to bed at night,” said Michelle King, the assistant director of the Louisville metro air pollution control district.

She and other regulators say they’re working on how to communicate about smoke – something she anticipates doing more often.

“We collectively are seeing, more and more, the very real impacts of climate change, and no reason to think that is slowing down or going away,” King said. “I think that this is a new normal.”

From the midwest to the mid-Atlantic, more US states are laboring to understand how and when smoke will make meeting federal health standards harder.

“The best advice a Boy Scout will give you is, ‘Don’t stand downwind of the campfire,’” said Frank Steitz, an assistant director at the New Jersey department of environmental protection.

“But what if you can’t? What if you can’t avoid it?”

But these exceptional events are no longer exceptional, and the requests to obscure them from air-quality records are more common, according to an investigation from the Guardian, The California Newsroom and MuckRock. Without reform, the exceptional events rule is likely to become a regularly used tool, one that experts warn may divert resources or distract from addressing the growing problem of wildfire smoke.

Finding common ground to change US clean air law is rare. But on wildfire smoke, academics, environmental advocates and some regulators agree: it’s time to reconsider our approach.

Dave Jefferis hands a flag he rescued from burning to his neighbor, Jim Marchio. Both stayed behind to defend their homes from the River Fire Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

“We’re going to have to think bigger when it comes to solutions. We’re just getting there,” said Jodi Bechtel, the assistant director for the department of environment and sustainability in Clark county, Nevada. “I cringe at the idea of amending the Clean Air Act because that is such a heavy lift. But I think we’re at the point where the way it’s written and the expectations in it almost aren’t working anymore.”

This year, said Michael Benjamin, the air quality and planning chief at the California air resources board (Carb), he and his western colleagues “felt really bad” for eastern cities affected by Canadian fires. “But part of us, especially when it was impacting Washington DC, we said, well, good,” he remembered. “Now the policymakers really understand what it means to be exposed to wildfire smoke. And maybe they’ll start to think seriously about how to mitigate it.”

A growing problem

Smoke from wildland fires is reversing a continent-wide, decades-long trend toward bluer skies, according to recent Stanford University studies.

A warming climate has helped to set the stage for wildfires to burn hotter and bigger. “Stopping them or making them less severe is going to be very hard and going to involve intervention on a scale that we’re just currently not prepared or able to do,” said the environmental scientist Marshall Burke, one of the leaders of Stanford’s work.

At the same time the likelihood of wildfires grows, the US is considering making stricter goals for ground-level ozone and fine particulate, pointing to an avalanche of studies documenting health impacts. The Biden administration has delayed plans to take action on ozone until after next year’s election. On fine particulates, a contentious public rule-making is expected to yield a more strict standard any day now.

Yet in the face of growing risk, and in anticipation of tighter limits on these types of pollution, state and local governments have been clear: they will turn to exceptional events for relief more often, even if the process is arduous.

“Lowering the annual standard will require more exceptional event demonstrations, resulting in a significant increase in workload for the state of Arizona and Maricopa county, with no benefit to air quality or public health,” wrote that county’s department of air quality, commenting on the EPA’s proposed soot standard.

A home in the community of Chicago Park near Colfax is engulfed in flames on Mount Olive Road during the River Fire on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

“There’s going to be much more pressure on regulatory agencies to take advantage of exceptional events,” added Carb’s Benjamin. “Sometimes people don’t understand what attainment means, and under the Clean Air Act, it’s not necessarily that you’re breathing clean air, it’s that you’re meeting these requirements that are defined by the federal government.”

Meanwhile, public agencies and other air policy observers argue that the exceptional events rule effectively undermines one of the few tools states have to combat wildfires: beneficial or “prescribed” burns.

Originated by Native Americans, controlled application of fire to wildlands reduces the risk of catastrophic infernos by clearing underbrush, pine needle beds and other fuels that make forests prone to burning. Federal and state agencies say that increasing this “good fire” is a priority. The EPA modified exceptional events guidelines in 2016, in part to do just that. But not a single prescribed fire has been forgiven under the exceptional events rule since then.

A group of 86 western scientists, researchers and advocates say that local regulators are not permitting prescribed fires because they fear they could create too much smoke – the kind that warrants exceptional events. “The current statutory scheme is selecting for the very worst type of fire when it comes to public health,” they told the EPA.

Near the California-Oregon border, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council advocates for a healthy ecosystem, which the director, Will Harling, said includes the return of beneficial fire. Obstacles to such planned burns, coupled with forgiveness offered wildfires, he said, are why his children “have smoked the equivalent of about 20,000 packs of cigarettes while they’re in their teens”.

“Just because they scrub that out of the record doesn’t mean that smoke isn’t in their lungs,” he said.

EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann, responding to our questions in writing, confirmed that exceptional events “could result in the removal of event-influenced data from the data set used to make certain regulatory decisions”.

Brann wrote that local air regulators must meet requirements in the exceptional events process, such as taking “appropriate and reasonable actions to protect public health”.

Pathways to reform

Across the political spectrum, experts, advocates and states say it’s time to change the exceptional events rule. They offer vastly different ideas about what that change should look like.

States and their advocates generally seek liberation from regulatory paperwork. Republican senators, led by Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, recently introduced legislation aimed in part at making filing for exceptional events easier.

Similarly, the Western Governors’ Association has argued for greater state flexibility, complaining both that “the rule is resource intensive, costly, and place[s] a significant burden on strained state resources”, and that regulators are slow to act on it. The nonpartisan association suggested to lawmakers that rules should permit more complicated multistate exceptions.

We can’t fix it, goes the reasoning, so why should we be punished for it?

The EPA, for its part, maintains it is following the law. “The Clean Air Act requires the agency to address emissions from natural events such as wildfires differently than emissions from industrial or mobile sources that EPA and Tribal, state and local air agency regulations can control,” Brann wrote.

Independent clean-air watchdogs emphasize instead that the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect public health.

The Salt Fire burns in Shasta County, as seen from I-5 June 30, 2021.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

That could mean stepping up enforcement, said Eric Schaeffer, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit that advocates for transparency. Plenty of controls already on the books could work better, he said, including more frequent inspections and better monitoring systems for known polluters. “There’s always more that can be done,” he said.

Michigan attorney Nick Leonard, who represents fence-line communities where Canadian smoke has mingled with routine local pollution, called the exceptional events rule a “misapplication” of the Clean Air Act, and pointed out that local air regulators could simply stop using it. “It’s sort of creating this alternative reality,” he said.

Though the EPA strips exceptional events-related data from regulatory use, epidemiologists and health experts continue to analyze air quality using unmodified data, which remains available. In its annual State of the Air report, the American Lung Association has always included pollution exceedances that exceptional events would leave out, said Will Barrett, a clean-air expert for the group.

“Those are unhealthy air days,” Barrett said. “Ultimately, your lungs don’t care if the pollution is classified as an exceptional event under an obscure federal law.”

‘A warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act’

For the summer of 2023, more than 20 states so far, from Wyoming to Wisconsin to North Carolina , have flagged air-quality readings that were far higher than normal. Most of these days came in June, as skies in the midwest and eastern US were blanketed with Canadian wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke knows no borders. Unlike refineries, wildfires have no scrubbers. You can’t shut them down. But the Clean Air Act, whose pollution controls have saved millions of lives, affords the agency responsible for healthy air no direct authority to manage lands that burn.

Instead, the EPA’s response to this fast-growing source of soot, ash and toxic chemicals has been “ad hoc” and muddled by a lack of coordination with other agencies, according to a Congressional watchdog’s report earlier this year.

EPA spokesperson Brann wrote that the agency “supports efforts by agencies across the federal government – including the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior, as well as interagency forums such as the Wildland Fire Leadership Council – to implement and further develop strategies to reduce wildfire risk, and to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.”

The growing use of the exceptional events rule reveals “a poorer and poorer fit between the policy we have and the problems it’s trying to solve”, said Stanford University’s Michael Wara.

He called the rule “a warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act”.

To heed it, say experts, it’s essential to adapt the law to the conditions under which we already breathe.

“If fires are going to become more widespread and more predictable, then that changes the calculus for air-quality determinations,” said Schaeffer of the Environmental Integrity Project. “You have to assume that’s part of your baseline now.”

The landmark law protecting air quality wasn’t created to deal with global heating. But the policies of the past are colliding with the problems of the future.

“The Clean Air Act should really include climate,” said Benjamin of Carb.

“States who have tried to keep these things separate – to keep climate change and exposure to local air pollution as two distinct things – I don’t think they’re going to be able to maintain that indefinitely,” he said.

A key assumption of air pollution policy, said Wara, has been that we are in control: “Climate change is kind of making a mockery of that.”

The obligation to protect people from polluted air remains, he added: “That’s really what the Clean Air Act is supposed to do, is keep people safe.”

While he was in college, Moiz Mir lived under an orange sky in Sacramento, California, for weeks because of the Camp fire; some of that pollution was forgiven in nearby Nevada county as an exceptional event. His neighbors didn’t understand the risks of smoke then, or know where to get masks. He began to warn them, to educate himself, and to learn from other fire-prone communities how to cope.

Smoke, he said, “made a permanent and lasting impact” on his psyche and life path. Now 26 years old and a grassroots climate activist, he points out that “in crisis, people look to authority for answers”.

They’re still looking, as the smoke thickens.

“We were thinking like the impacts of climate change were distant,” Mir said. “But now, it’s quite literally the air that I breathe.”

Manola Secaira contributed to this report

Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret is a collaboration of The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian. Molly Peterson is a reporter for The California Newsroom. Dillon Bergin is a data reporter for MuckRock. Andrew Witherspoon is a data reporter for the Guardian.

By Scott Rodd (CapRadio), George LeVines (The California Newsroom), Emily Zentner (CapRadio)

Before the Caldor Fire sparked one year ago this week — before its 150-foot flames devoured century-old ponderosa pines in California’s Sierra Nevada, and before it destroyed more than 400 of the 600 homes in Grizzly Flats — Mark Almer had a plan. 

The 60-year-old retired fire inspector had spent over a decade fireproofing his Grizzly Flats home, trading wood deck boards for composite material and replacing traditional siding with a protective cement shell. 

“Hardening the home is huge,” he said. “But it’s just one piece of the puzzle.”

Almer had an even bigger plan to protect his community. 

Mark Almer poses outside his Grizzly Flats home, one of the few structures to survive, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

For more than a decade, he’s led the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council, a group of two-dozen volunteers that raised money for wildfire mitigation projects, educated the town’s roughly 1,400 residents about defensible space and regularly gathered local, state and federal fire officials to help improve their fire response plan.

The Caldor Fire would be the council’s ultimate test.

On August 16, 2021, two days after the fire ignited, gusty winds pushed the flames out like billowing sails, spreading across thousands of acres overloaded with shrubs and trees in the neighboring Eldorado National Forest.

Almer and his wife didn’t grab much on their way out the door. Their six cats, corralled into six crates, took up most of the car space.

He was more concerned about making sure everyone else in the community got out safely. Before the official evacuation order came, Almer called his next door neighbor, Victor Diaz.

“I thought we still had time,” Diaz said in a recent interview.

But Almer’s voice indicated otherwise. An even-keeled speaker with a clean vocabulary, Almer barked his warning with a rare four-letter word that Diaz declined to repeat.

“You need to get the beep out,” Diaz recalled.

The Caldor Fire burns south of Grizzly Flats on August 15, 2021.Courtesy of Eric Henton

Diaz, his wife, their six kids and the family dog raced down Grizzly Flat Road in a two-car caravan, leaving behind the fire’s red glow and the home they’d never see again. 

Many residents knew this day might come. At a community meeting in the early 2000s, the U.S. Forest Service, with chilling foresight, had warned that a wildfire mirroring the Caldor Fire’s burn progression could easily wipe Grizzly Flats off the map. 

In the years that followed, the Forest Service took steps to prevent such a catastrophe. But a nine-month investigation by CapRadio and The California Newsroom, a public media collaboration, found that the Forest Service’s plan to protect Grizzly Flats fell far short:

• After the community meeting, the Forest Service took a decade to announce a comprehensive 15,000-acre forest management and fire mitigation plan, called the Trestle Forest Health Project. It aimed to “reduce the threat of large high intensity wildfire and threats to Grizzly Flat[s]” and other nearby landowners by removing excess brush and vegetation that fuel increasingly devastating wildfires, according to project documents.
• The Forest Service originally committed to finishing the Trestle Project by 2020 — a year before the Caldor Fire would later ignite. Due to a complex web of regulatory delays, logistical challenges and resource shortages, the agency pushed back the completion date to as late as 2032 — three decades after its initial warning to Grizzly Flats.
• The Forest Service’s data overstated Trestle Project accomplishments, claiming the agency completed work on at least 24% of the project before the Caldor Fire. Original analysis of corrected Forest Service data provided by the agency shows only 14% completion. The agency confirmed the inaccurate information had been online for more than a month; it updated its database less than a week before publication of this story.
• The corrected data also suggests that in the decade-and-a-half leading up to the Caldor Fire, the Forest Service completed 15,000 acres of fuel reduction work within a five-mile buffer around Grizzly Flats — coincidentally, the same number of planned acres in the Trestle Project. However, the actual coverage of that work was limited to 5,800 acres because of the agency’s decades-long and highly criticized practice of counting repeat treatments on the same parcel. Furthermore, the majority of that work occurred several miles from the town’s border.
• The Forest Service failed to complete sections of the Trestle Project along the southern border of Grizzly Flats, identified as “first priority” due to the area’s susceptibility to wildfire. Instead, the agency prioritized removing trees — often far from the town’s borders and not a part of the “first priority” area — that generate revenue.
• Despite more than five requests, the Forest Service failed to provide complete data on its national wildland fire management budget, citing a recent data transfer in which it lost some information from the past two decades. The agency also could not provide similar budget information at the regional and forest level, saying numerous changes to the budget structure and process over the last 20 years made retrieving the data especially difficult and would render any analysis “incomparable.”

Agency leaders say a slew of hurdles stood in the way of the project’s completion:  limited funding, pushback from environmentalists and fewer opportunities to complete essential prescribed burns due to staff shortages and climate change.

“I am committed to doing everything I possibly can to mitigate [wildfire risks] on our landscapes,” said Forest Service Chief Randy Moore in an interview. 

United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore on August 25, 2021.Tom Witham/USDA

When asked if his agency bears any responsibility for the devastation in Grizzly Flats as a result of the stalled Trestle Project, he cited financial constraints.

“I mean, do[es] anybody bear any responsibility for not having the budget to do the work that we need to do?”

The Eldorado National Forest falls under the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region, which Moore led from 2007 to July 2021, when he was appointed chief by President Joe Biden’s administration. He assumed office just a few weeks before the Caldor Fire ignited. Moore declined multiple opportunities to say whether completing the Trestle Project would have resulted in a different outcome in Grizzly Flats. 

“I’m not really sure why we keep talking about that question,” he said.

After reviewing this investigation’s findings, a dozen sources — including wildfire experts, career firefighters, former Forest Service officials and residents — said they believe Grizzly Flats would have stood a better chance of surviving the Caldor Fire if the Trestle Project had been completed.

Among the sources was one of the project’s key architects, former Eldorado National Forest District Ranger Duane Nelson.

“There would have been a very high probability that Grizzly Flats would not have burned in the Caldor Fire” if the Forest Service completed the Trestle Project, Nelson, 67, said in an interview. “It could’ve meant survival.”

An Early Warning

On a chilly day this past March, Almer sat in his idling white Toyota Tundra pickup next to where the Grizzly Flats Community Church once stood. The small yellow chapel bordered by white picket fencing had vanished, along with most of the community, in the Caldor Fire’s wake. From the driver’s seat, Almer observed rows of charred metal chairs facing an absent pulpit.

“It’s kind of eerie,” he remarked, “as if they were still ready to accept parishioners.”

The remains of the Grizzly Flats Community Church after the Caldor Fire, September 2021.Courtesy of Bill Brown

The church is where local Forest Service officials, in the early 2000s, held their town meeting to warn residents about wildfires. Grizzly Flats is surrounded on three sides by the Eldorado National Forest; the agency acknowledged that a devastating fire would likely rip across federal land before reaching town. Using a PowerPoint to show fire modeling scenarios, they gamed out all the ways Grizzly Flats could go up in smoke. 

“It was important for us to start talking to people and make sure that they had the information that we had about what our models were showing,” said Kathy Hardy, a former district ranger who attended the meeting.

One scenario showed what would happen if the fire started a few miles south of town in the Eldorado National Forest, close to where the Caldor Fire would ignite years later.

“The modeling said that it would take out Grizzly Flats within about 24 hours,” Almer recently recalled. “Well, 20 years later, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”

The Forest Service has not provided records related to the meeting in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in December 2021.

As Forest Service officials flipped through presentation slides, residents shifted uncomfortably in their metal chairs. This was a town that had just installed its first all-way stop sign. The Grizzly Pines School had recently earned a Distinguished School Award from the California Department of Education despite having only 36 students. The place, in many ways, was idyllic — so remotely located and so small that it had no grocery store, no gas station, no diner, not even a local bar. Now, the Forest Service was telling them, with data to back it up, that their town and their lives sat in Mother Nature’s crosshairs. 

A gas leak burns the day after the Caldor Fire hit Walter Tyler Elementary School in Grizzly Flats, California, Tuesday, August 17, 2021.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Two Fire Plans, Two Timelines                    

Grizzly Flats wasn’t the only town in peril. For years, the federal government had been wringing its hands over the nation’s growing wildfire crisis. In 2000, wildfires burned over 7 million acres across the country — a stunning total at the time, and a harbinger for even worse years to come.

In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of the Interior — the agencies that managed much of the land that had been scorched — developed a National Fire Plan. It emphasized forest management and fuel reduction as key preventive measures. Methods traditionally used by the federal government include commercial thinning (cutting some trees to be sold as timber or wood pellets), removing  brush with heavy machinery (a process known as mastication), and prescribed burning (intentionally setting lower-intensity fires that benefit the landscape). 

To figure out where to put its resources, the Forest Service — which operates under the USDA — helped compile a list of communities nationwide at “high risk from wildfire.”  It included thousands of communities, identified primarily for being in the “wildland-urban interface” or WUI, a term used to describe the intersection of developed land and the natural environment.

Buried on the list was “Grizzly Flat.”

(The town, throughout history, has been referred to as “Grizzly Flat” and “Grizzly Flats.” The latter is more common.) 

Shortly after the Forest Service’s cautionary meeting at the local church, Almer and two-dozen other residents formed the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council. They set up an informational phone line, installed a nine-foot community bulletin board at the post office and started an adopt-a-hydrant program, which got residents to shovel out hydrants after snowstorms. 

The council served as an essential community thread in the simple quilt of Grizzly Flats.

“There was no government, there was no mayor,” said Kathy Melvin, 78, who joined the council in 2007. “There was just the fire safe council, the church and the school. Everything kind of revolved around those entities because we didn’t have anything else.”

Within a couple years of its founding, the council commissioned its own community wildfire protection plan. The 74-page document laid out plans to clear evacuation routes and assist residents with defensible space around homes. 

It also proposed a series of fuel-reduction projects, including an ambitious “shaded fuel break” in the shape of a horseshoe around Grizzly Flats. Shaded fuel breaks remove ground vegetation to reduce wildfire intensity and provide a staging area for firefighters. The horseshoe covered the east, north and west sides of town; the community was banking on the Forest Service to tackle fuel reduction work along the southern border to complete the protective buffer.

The plan would cost millions of dollars, and the council raised money however it could. An area couple hosted 150 people at their home for a wine tasting under paper lanterns and summer stars. The council held annual barbecues. What money it couldn’t raise, it made up for with grants.

The efforts paid off. Over the next 15 years, the fire safe council cleared more than 1,500 acres of fire-prone vegetation around town, completing almost all of the horseshoe fuel break at a cost of nearly $2 million. The council even earned national recognition for its productivity and wildfire mitigation work.

The Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council holds its 14th annual barbecue, July 21, 2018.Courtesy of the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council

Meanwhile, most of the Forest Service land to the south of Grizzly Flats remained dense and overgrown — a reminder to residents that their community was dangerously exposed.

‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal’

 As a district ranger in the Eldorado National Forest, Duane Nelson started each day with a clean, pressed uniform and aimed to clock out with dirty shirtsleeves and muddy boots. 

“I wasn’t going to just be a ranger sitting in the office behind a computer all the time,” he said. “I made a promise to myself that I would be out looking at projects, checking up on crews or going by fire stations.”

His 38-year career in the Forest Service can be traced to a childhood vacation to the Rocky Mountains. Sitting in the back of his family’s faux wood-paneled Ford Country Squire, he watched hours of hypnotic prairielands roll by. All of a sudden, purple mountaintops pierced the horizon, surrounded by timber canyons. 

“It’s an image that’s been in my head ever since,” he said.

Nelson earned a degree in forestry and left his Midwest roots behind, preferring the mountains and conifer forests of Northern California. 

When he took over as the Eldorado National Forest’s Placerville District Ranger in 2007, he didn’t like what he saw. The majority of his district was dense, dry and prone to catastrophic wildfires — especially around Grizzly Flats.

A few years before Nelson arrived, the district had thinned and burned 1,000 acres to the south of Grizzly Flats, including areas along the town’s southern border. But other fuel reduction efforts were scattered and piecemeal, often deep in woods and miles from town. 

So Nelson devised what he called a “big, hairy, audacious goal.” He wanted to reduce forest congestion across his entire district. 

To do that, he said, “We needed to reverse this massive fuels accumulation that had developed over 100 years of overly aggressive fire suppression.”

Duane Nelson as Placerville District Ranger during an annual live fire training in the late aughts near Grizzly Flats.Courtesy of Duane Nelson

Before the advent of modern firefighting, naturally occurring fires served the important role of balancing ecosystems and preventing the accumulation of fuels. For millennia, indigenous communities set fire to forests and wildlands for a variety of reasons, including hunting and cultural practices, which also kept the land in check. But according to fire ecologists and historians, the federal government’s century-long practice of snuffing out every wildfire, instead of letting them perform their natural role on the landscape, has left forests overloaded. Combined with hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change, the heavy fuel loads are spurring bigger, more destructive blazes.

Nelson helped devise the Trestle Project as a big step toward his goal. It would create a miles-wide fuel reduction buffer east and south of Grizzly Flats.

When the Forest Service finally announced the project in 2013, the agency sent a letter to residents describing 16,000 acres of planned work. (A miscalculation led to the document overstating the work by nearly 1,000 acres. The actual number was just over 15,000.) It laid out an expeditious — and optimistic — timeline. The analysis was supposed to take about a year, with the forest management work scheduled to wrap up by 2020.

Almost immediately the project encountered an onslaught of hurdles and delays.

“It’s sad to think about what could have been,” said Michael Wara, a climate policy expert at Stanford University who recently toured Grizzly Flats. “[If] all this work was done by 2020, Grizzly Flats might still be there.”

‘We Don’t Have That Kind Of Time Any Longer’

One of the most aggressive objections to the Trestle Project came from Chad Hanson, co-founder of the John Muir Project, a nonprofit that aims to protect biodiversity in national forests and fiercely opposes tree removal. One of Hanson’s primary concerns was the California spotted owl, which is designated as a “sensitive species” by the Forest Service.

In a written objection to the Forest Service in 2015, Hanson argued the Trestle Project would “pose a serious and unacceptable threat to owl populations on the Eldorado National Forest.”

Elsewhere, Hanson has argued that commercial tree removal could exacerbate wildfire intensity. Leading fire scientists have publicly pushed back against a number of Hanson’s claims; one expert even called his positions “self-serving garbage.” 

The project’s 296-page environmental impact statement devoted dozens of pages to analyzing potential impacts on the spotted owl. The report also invited public comment that demanded thoroughly researched responses from the Forest Service. The agency developed alternative maps, taking into account spotted owls and sensitive species of frog and trout. 

The Forest Service also put out other reports, including one that identified a likely ignition point very close to where the Caldor Fire would later start. 

As the Forest Service spun out reams of paperwork, Almer reminded the agency that Grizzly Flats remained woefully exposed to wildfires that were growing more severe every year.

“The most aggressive treatment of the [Trestle Project’s] fire fuels is critical to preventing the ‘loss of our community,’” wrote Almer in a 2015 public comment about the project on behalf of the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council. “Everything that can be done, must be done.”

He followed up this plea with a 2017 letter addressed to Randy Moore, who at the time led the agency’s Pacific Southwest Region. 

“Maximum treatment must be given to the defense and threat zones abutting Grizzly Flats … to prevent spot fires from a wildland fire igniting homes within the community,” Almer wrote in his letter.

In an interview, Moore said he did not recall the letter from Almer. The threat Grizzly Flats faced “is not unique,” he said. “I can tell you that that’s going to be common for a number of communities all across the West.” 

The Forest Service acknowledges that its regulatory approval process for desperately needed forest management projects can be a slog. But trying to streamline it is a delicate balance. 

As Scot Rogers, the current Placerville district ranger, said in an interview, it’s essential that “the American public has an opportunity to engage in the management of their lands.” But, he added, “That doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to get lost in a sea of analysis and unable to actually execute these projects — because we don’t have that kind of time any longer.”

The Trestle Project wasn’t approved until late 2017, more than four years after its announcement and more than a decade after the agency called the initial meeting at the church.

But by that time Duane Nelson, one of the project’s main architects, was gone. Burnout had set in, exacerbated by persistent staffing shortages. Sleepless nights left his nerves shot.

“If it’s hot, dry and windy, rangers don’t sleep,” he said.

Nelson retired in early 2017, a year before he’d originally planned. Before submitting his notice, he took a drive through his district, following the backroads that bisected dense tree stands. He wanted to see the condition of the forest before making his official decision. Driving through the Trestle Project area, he envisioned the southern border of Grizzly Flats cleared of brush and returned to something like its natural condition after prescribed burning.

“We had done a lot of good things,” he said, reflecting on his retirement. “But there was still a lot of work that needed to be done.”

Stalled Out

Over the next four years, the Forest Service completed only a fraction of the Trestle Project.

It called for fuel reduction across more than 15,000 acres of land around Grizzly Flats, but completed work on just over 2,000 of those acres. 

A cell phone tower disguised as a tree holds some of the only green “foliage” near the center of Grizzly Flats, California, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Prescribed fire, considered crucial by fire scientists, was nowhere to be found. The project called for more than 10,000 acres of intentional low-intensity fire, but the agency only completed 136 acres of “pile burns,” the process of collecting and burning logs and vegetation that is widely considered much less impactful.

The agency instead prioritized commercial tree thinning, which generates revenue that offsets costs.

Generally, commercial thinning and other treatments designed to reduce fuel loads are a necessary precursor to prescribed fires, according to Rogers. 

“Largely, we’re not going to be able to put fire on the ground before that work is completed,” he said.

But Trestle Project reports and Forest Service data show the vast majority of the planned prescribed fire was intended as the first treatment.

Wildfire researchers and former Forest Service officials say it’s disappointing the agency would focus on commercial thinning over other forms of treatment.

“The evidence that commercial thinning really reduces risk is not that good,” said Wara, the Stanford climate policy expert. “If you thin and then burn in an area, then you get dramatic risk reduction.”

Meanwhile, areas adjacent to the community that the Forest Service identified as “first priority” were left untouched and overgrown. One stands out: The highly overgrown — and highly combustible — southern border, which would have dovetailed with the buffer zone that Mark Almer and the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council worked on for over a decade.

“The part that didn’t get treated was the part we should have been most worried about,” said Hugh Safford, who spent two decades as the Forest Service’s senior ecologist in California before retiring in late 2021.

The steep, dense and dry south-facing terrain made it one of the more complicated parts of the project, but also the most essential, Safford noted. 

The Caldor Fire burns south of Grizzly Flats on August 15, 2021.Courtesy of Eric Henton

Melvin, the longtime fire safe council member, lived on the south end of Grizzly Flats and shared a property line with the Forest Service for nearly four decades. Her house was among the first in town to face the Caldor Fire’s wrath.

She took defensible space seriously, clearing shrubs “down to the dirt” before every fire season. By contrast, she said, the nearby Forest Service land remained overgrown with trees, brush and highly flammable mountain misery shrubs.

Melvin kept her expectations about the Trestle Project in check.

“The history of the Forest Service, in the time that we lived there, was that everything took forever,” she said. “I wish they had done more.”

No Money, No Mitigation

In a series of interviews, Forest Service officials offered an array of reasons why efforts like the Trestle Project face delays and are sometimes not completed.  

At the top of the list: Money.

“Let’s not make any bones about this,” said Chief Moore in an interview. “We do not have the funding to do the level of work that needs to be done out there.” 

Compared to the soaring costs of preparing for and fighting wildfire, spending on hazardous fuels reduction has barely increased over the last 15 years when adjusted for inflation, according to incomplete data provided by the agency.

That doesn’t mean all projects struggle to secure funding. From 2008 to 2019, a partnership of private organizations and government agencies, including the Forest Service, pulled together $150 million and tackled 57,000 acres of fuel reduction around Lake Tahoe, not far from Grizzly Flats. 

Chief Moore lauded those efforts around Tahoe during testimony before Congress in March.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore testifies about reducing wildfire risk before the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Environment, March 16, 2022.

“Last year, the Caldor Fire in California blew right through scattered small treatments on the Eldorado National Forest,” he testified, “then hit an area of treatment at-scale on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit.”

The work, he said, allowed firefighters to engage with the Caldor Fire and keep it “from burning into South Lake Tahoe.”

The Forest Service repeatedly declined to — or could not — provide basic budget information for the agency’s nationwide wildfire management work, the Pacific Southwest Region and the Eldorado National Forest. The agency also could not provide funding information related to the Trestle Project.

In December, CapRadio and the California Newsroom filed a FOIA request for detailed budget information from the Eldorado National Forest, which remains pending.

Forest Service officials described the process of securing funding for specific projects as fluid and sometimes unpredictable. 

“[The] budget is not a one-and-done thing,” said Erin Uloth, Acting Deputy Director of Strategic Planning, Budget, and Accountability for the agency. “It’s a very ongoing, constantly shifting, evolving thing.” 

And since Congress routinely delays funding to the agency — doling out money on an interim basis as politicians in Washington clash over the federal budget — it’s not always clear how much will be available for individual national forests.

The Forest Service conceded as much in Trestle Project documents: “With several other large-scale projects occurring on the [Eldorado National] Forest, it is unlikely that funding for this project will be prioritized over funding for other projects.” 

The Forest Service estimated timber sales would have covered about 80% of the $1.3 million cost for commercial tree thinning.

The real challenge is funding prescribed fires. Setting controlled burns under the Trestle Project would have cost about $3 million, according to project documents. 

The bipartisan infrastructure law signed last year sets aside roughly $3 billion over five years for restoring ecosystems and fuels reduction. Chief Moore called it “a shot in the arm” for future forest management projects, but said more money is required to tackle the work needed across the Western U.S. The Inflation Reduction Act plans to provide $1.8 billion to the Forest Service for hazardous fuels reduction projects.

The money can’t come soon enough.

As former district ranger Nelson put it, the agency’s inability to get work done isn’t isolated to the Trestle Project and Grizzly Flats. Across the increasingly dry and fire-prone West, he said, the Forest Service has “over-promised and under-delivered on fire mitigation — work that could have changed fire behavior on these landscapes.”

Climate and Crews

Forest Service employees call them “Goldilocks days” — the brief window when weather, moisture levels, personnel demands and air quality all line up so prescribed burns can be done safely. Those days are becoming increasingly rare as hotter temperatures, severe drought and erratic weather patterns become facts of everyday life.  

Rogers, the current Placerville district ranger, said his unit had a prescribed burn planned for spring of 2021, months before the Caldor Fire ignited.

“We had to cancel because conditions just weren’t quite right,” he said. “The historic drought conditions really cannot be overstated.”

Even Goldilocks days come with an asterisk. Concerns over escaped prescribed fires have also stymied plans. Less than 1% of prescribed burns get out of control, according to the Forest Service. But the ones that do can be devastating, creating PR nightmares and souring public support for this increasingly essential method of fuel reduction. Most recently, the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, which destroyed hundreds of homes, started after two Forest Service prescribed fires escaped.

Prescribed burns run amok can cause risk-aversion within the agency — from district rangers all the way to the top. Forest Service Chief Moore announced separate agency-wide prescribed burn suspensions this year and last year. Before Moore stepped in as chief, the Trump administration had suspended the practice in California in 2020. 

Moore said this year’s pause only impacted “about 10%” of the agency’s planned prescribed burns, since most are done in the fall and early spring. But many prescribed-fire experts say the move is a dangerous step backward. 

Then there’s the staffing problem. Setting and managing a prescribed fire requires a lot of personnel. Longer and more extreme fire seasons mean crews ping-pong from district to district and fire to fire, often remaining on the frontlines for weeks at a time with no break. That prevents them from managing prescribed burns and tackling other vegetation reduction projects in their home districts.

The Forest Service struggles to retain staff due to the untenable stress of working extreme fires and stagnant pay. President Biden vowed to improve firefighter wages, but getting money to people on the frontlines has been a slow process. After a time-consuming analysis of which regions struggled most with high vacancy rates, the federal government concluded “it is difficult to recruit or retain wildland firefighters in every geographic area.” 

Lawmakers and labor unions are pushing the Forest Service to get the money out the door quickly. 

“Employees are living in their trucks, vans, hammocks, or are ‘couch-surfing’ while working for the Forest Service,” wrote Randy Erwin, National President of the National Federation of Federal Employees, in a recent letter to the heads of the USDA and the Forest Service. “This is most often not by choice but out of necessity.”

‘We Did Our Job’

The day after Grizzly Flats burned, in August of 2021, former district ranger Duane Nelson had a call to make.

He had moved to southwestern Colorado after retiring from the Forest Service. He watched from afar as the Caldor Fire barreled through the Trestle Project area, leveled Grizzly Flats and then took off across the Eldorado National Forest.

“It was hugely frustrating,” he said. “My entire ranger district basically burned up.” 

Frustration quickly gave way to anguish. Standing in a grocery store parking lot as shopping carts rattled by, Nelson dialed a close friend he hadn’t seen in years — Mark Almer. 

“All I could say to him before I started crying was, ‘Mark, I’m so sorry,’” Nelson said. “Because I felt like we had not done all that we had hoped.”

The two men had worked for years toward the same goal — protecting Grizzly Flats — on opposite sides of the Forest Service boundary.  

Nearly a year after the Caldor Fire, the Grizzly Flats Post Office remains a rubble pile, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Nelson said he’s still processing the tragedy of the Caldor Fire.

“I’m not going to say I felt guilt,” he said. “We had done a lot of work trying to make that area as resilient to fire as possible. But what I did feel was remorse.”

Almer placed no blame on Nelson or the Forest Service for the devastation of the Caldor Fire. He gave them credit for at least drawing up a plan to protect the community, even if the Trestle Project fell years behind schedule.

“We’re neighbors, and neighbors take care of each other,” he said. “But sometimes, the best intentions don’t happen quickly.” 

While the fire safe council’s efforts didn’t prevent the Caldor Fire from destroying most of Grizzly Flats, Almer views their work as a success.

“If everybody got out of here alive, then we did our job,” said Almer, noting that residents safely evacuated along routes cleared by the council. “People can rebuild — people can replace their stuff. But you can’t replace somebody’s life.”

Wara, the Stanford climate policy expert, marveled at the council’s dedication and handiwork after a recent trip to Grizzly Flats.

“I was driving those roads and said, how did no one get killed in this fire?” he recalled. “How is it that everyone got out? And the answer is, the community invested.”

A note Mark Almer left taped to the front door of his home on August 16, 2021.Courtesy of Mark Almer

Almer’s home survived a flurry of embers, some the size of baseballs. He spent 12 weeks in a Sacramento hotel with his wife and six cats, waiting to return to a barely recognizable neighborhood. 

Others in the community, including residents who lost everything in the fire, are more critical of the Forest Service. In interviews, some laid blame at the agency’s feet. 

“They did predict it, and they knew it was going to happen,” said Grant Ingram, a retired firefighter who now owns a fire-mapping business. The local fire district commissioned him to examine what happened before, during and after the Caldor Fire.  

“If it’s predictable,” he added, “it’s preventable.”

Uncertain Future

Today, Grizzly Flats is stuck in a negotiation between devastation and recovery. One of the only green trees left in town isn’t a tree at all. It’s a rehabbed cell tower, covered with fake green boughs, across the street from where the Community Church once stood. The tower’s vibrant color contrasts with the remaining real trees, all of them burned like a forest of spent match sticks. 

Up the road, a confused twister of scorched mail carts and collapsed P.O. boxes is all that’s left of the post office. An American flag flies above the rubble. In the parking lot, a couple of charred four-by-fours support a blackened crossbeam — the only remnants of the community bulletin board built by the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council over a decade ago.

While a few wood frames have gone up where homes once stood, it’s unclear how many Caldor Fire survivors will return to Grizzly Flats. Many are looking at homes elsewhere, ready for a new beginning. 

Kathy Melvin, the longtime fire safe council member, lost her home. She recently purchased a new one in the suburbs of Sacramento. She’s holding onto her land in Grizzly Flats, maybe for her children to rebuild one day. 

Victor Diaz, who escaped with his wife and six kids after Almer called and told him to evacuate, also lost his house. The entire family has been living in an RV since winter, next to where their new home is being built. 

Victor Diaz, who lost his home in the Caldor Fire, sits on the foundation of the new house he is building, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Victor Diaz and his wife, Safiro, pose with their six children outside the RV they all share as a home. Clockwise from top, Sofia, 2, Adaia, 13, Daila, 11, Esteban, 8, Gabriel, 6, and Anna, 5, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

On a warm afternoon in late July, Almer stood on his fire-resilient deck and talked about a bright future for his town — even if it’s a distant one. He’s continuing to lead the fire safe council. And he’s optimistic that Grizzly Flats will eventually get a new community center; the nonprofit El Dorado Community Foundation has already raised at least a quarter million dollars toward the effort.

“The community will never look the way it did before the fire in our lifetime,” he said. “We know that the community will come back — how quickly and in what form, we’re not quite sure.”

A home being rebuilt after the Caldor Fire frames a tent and RV viewed in the distance, Thursday, August 4, 2022.Andrew Nixon / CapRadio

Almer has already started the rebuilding process, fixing the things within his reach. He replaced the wood fence along his property that burned in the fire and the storage unit that holds cords of wood. 

But some things he won’t replace. Pointing down at his deck, he called attention to several dark spots caused by scorching embers.

“We have spare pieces of decking,” he said. “I haven’t wanted to change it out, because it’s a reminder how fortunate we are.”

The California Newsroom is a collaboration of California public radio stations, NPR and CalMatters.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story stated that "the spotted owl ... is designated as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act.” While most spotted owl subspecies are designated as threatened, the California spotted owl is not. It is considered a "sensitive species" by the Forest Service.

In the foothills of Mendocino County, where stretches of flat grazing land give way to thick brush and towering conifers, sits the community of Brooktrails.

Idyllic, picturesque — and primed for burning. Most of its 3,800 residents fled their homes in 2020 when the Oak Fire ignited north of town. Evacuees funneled onto Sherwood Road, the only route down the hillside and away from the flames.

Residents fear the next blaze could burn straight across the community and the town's only evacuation route won't be enough. 

But the people of Brooktrails don't need to fear being trapped. For two years, a local wildfire safety nonprofit, Sherwood Firewise Communities, has sought to clear a series of old, overgrown logging and emergency access roads that could provide alternative paths out of town. The roads also would allow fire engines into the community, easing congestion on existing evacuation routes. In March 2020, months before the Oak Fire, the nonprofit secured a grant from Cal Fire for over $447,000 to complete the project. But as of March, only four of the 20-plus miles of planned evacuation and access roads have been cleared. Most of the project is still waiting on paperwork and approvals.

Area residents, who had to evacuate before, are worried about the slow progress.

"It makes me very angry, very cynical, [and] frustrated," said Brooktrails retiree Luis Celaya, 85. "This is something that is so important and the potential is so high that a fire could happen." 

A monthslong investigation by CapRadio and The California Newsroom found that projects across the state, like the one in Brooktrails, are encountering a bureaucratic bottleneck before shovels can even break ground. The state's byzantine environmental approval process, required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is slowing projects from Mendocino County to the Sierra Nevada to the Central Coast. The landmark environmental law was intended to protect ecologically and environmentally sensitive landscapes. But foresters worry that the glacial pace of environmental approvals under CEQA may lead to a much worse outcome — extreme wildfires obliterating these areas. 

To combat this, Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration launched a program more than two years ago that promised to break the logjam, by fast-tracking environmental reviews. But that program, called the California Vegetation Treatment Program (CalVTP), hasn't led to the completion of a single project so far. This stands in stark contrast to projections by the state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, which anticipated CalVTP would lead to 45,000 acres of completed work in its first year. 

Keith Rutledge, project manager for Sherwood Firewise Communities in Brooktrails, told CapRadio and The California Newsroom that he had never heard of CalVTP. The nonprofit instead used the established system to satisfy CEQA to clear the first few miles of road, which took over a year. When they later asked a Cal Fire representative about using CalVTP on the rest of the project, the representative discouraged them from using the new program, cautioning it would be even more burdensome, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Just a few yards off of Highway 101, Rochelle Harn barely escaped the flames. A huge storage building was reduced to ash and twisted metal on her property on Oct. 5, 2020.Mathew Caine/Willits Weekly

Other experienced foresters ?said they didn't know how to use the new system, which includes many new bureaucratic processes. The Board of Forestry did not respond to inquiries about its outreach and training for CalVTP; the earliest training webinar available on the board's website is dated more than a year after the program's launch. As a result, many foresters use the sluggish CEQA system they already understand.

Money is not the problem. The state set aside roughly $1.5 billion for fire mitigation and forest resilience last year. Cal Fire is scrambling to get this money out the door, and many projects across the state are funded. But the clock is ticking. Without the green light to complete prescribed burns, fuel breaks and vegetation thinning, nearby communities are at the mercy of another wildfire season that threatens to be just as devastating as the last two, which burned nearly 7 million acres combined.

Though not a single CalVTP project has been completed, Lisa Lien-Mager, deputy secretary for communications at the California Natural Resources Agency, claimed in a series of emails that the state's efforts to speed up environmental reviews have shown early signs of success. She declined repeated requests for an interview. 

Newsom did not respond to an interview request, though a spokesperson acknowledged receiving the inquiry. 

New program, same problems

In 2020, Newsom signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, with USFS and California each promising to perform 500,000 acres of fire prevention and forest management work in the state every year by 2025. 

To help meet the state's responsibility, the Newsom administration launched CalVTP in late 2019. The program promised to streamline the time-consuming environmental approval process for forest management projects. CalVTP completed a massive environmental review on more than 20 million acres in California. The idea was for new projects to cut through red tape by using this existing environmental review template instead of starting from scratch. 

When the program launched, Newsom hailed it as a way to "increase the pace and scale of critical vegetation treatment in a way that safely and responsibly protects our environment."

"The scale of the wildfire crisis in California is unprecedented, and we need a response to match the scale and severity of this challenge," he said.

The Board of Forestry projected CalVTP's output would skyrocket after its first year, setting a goal of accomplishing approximately 250,000 acres through CalVTP — half the state's annual target — every year by 2024. Achieving this lofty target would mean completing hundreds of projects annually, according to the board's estimates.

But more than two years into the program, it hasn't resulted in a single completed project. A handful of local groups have begun projects using CalVTP, but it's unclear how much progress they've made, because the Board of Forestry only collects data on a project when it's finished. As of late March, the Natural Resources Agency said only 26 projects had been approved and another 45 proposals were being reviewed. 

The agency did not provide current figures on the number of project acres approved through CalVTP. In December, it told CapRadio and The California Newsroom that the program had approved 28,000 acres. 

"This is not enough by any stretch of the imagination," said Char Miller, professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College, who has monitored the development of CalVTP. He says California has millions of acres in desperate need of forest management and fuel reduction. 

Nevertheless, officials in the Newsom administration have continued to gloss over CalVTP falling dramatically short of its goals.

"The California Vegetation Treatment Program, this one-stop shop for permitting … is now in action," said Wade Crowfoot, California Natural Resources Agency secretary, at a legislative oversight hearing in early February. "And it's starting to be used."

Lien-Mager, with the Natural Resources Agency, did not address specific requests for comment regarding Crowfoot's remarks. 

In interviews, foresters and fire prevention experts around the state said they still don't fully understand how the program is supposed to work. Others were turned off by the large amount of unfamiliar paperwork required under the program. CalVTP's official workflow template, published on the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection's website, includes a dizzying decision tree of acronyms.

Fire prevention project managers who've tried to use the program have faced unforeseen hurdles. For example, the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association wanted to use a single CalVTP application for a series of controlled burns across Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties. The 10 prescribed burn sites would help protect homes and ecologically sensitive habitats, including freshwater wetlands. The threat of fire isn't hypothetical in this area — just two years ago, the 48,000-acre River Fire burned within 15 miles of one project site.

But the projects straddle two Cal Fire units, according to Nadia Hamey, a forester and environmental consultant working with the burn association. She said each unit wanted a separate CalVTP application for the proposed burns in their area. Completing two versions of the new, unfamiliar paperwork proved too burdensome.

So the burn association decided to use the traditional environmental review process. That required 10 separate project applications. As of this winter, two burns had been completed, with the rest moving through the development and approval process.

Hamey said she would love to use CalVTP — "if it was a straightforward path for the projects we're trying to do."

A few projects breaking ground

In an email, Lien-Mager said the number of projects approved is not the best way to gauge CalVTP's success.

"The measure of CalVTP's success is the time it takes to get projects cleared and on the ground," she said. "The physical work of fuels treatment is an entirely separate exercise." 

"Based on the early data available, CalVTP has significantly expedited projects," she added. 

That claim is at odds with an initial review by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. 

"We didn't find clear data showing that it had significantly expedited projects," Helen Kerstein, an analyst with the LAO, told lawmakers during a wildfire oversight hearing late last year.

Although two years had passed since Newsom formally launched the program, Kerstein told lawmakers that "it's very early days" for CalVTP. 

There are other potential complications. A lawsuit brought by two groups opposed to CalVTP's expedited environmental review — the California Chaparral Institute and the Endangered Habitats League — could invalidate CalVTP completely or introduce more burdensome and timely hoops for forest managers to jump through, according to a memo from the Board of Forestry.

While the lawsuit isn't preventing any projects from moving forward right now, the board memo cautions that project managers should consider the "uncertainty" posed by the litigation before using CalVTP.

Some people using the new program say it is accomplishing what it set out to do. While no CalVTP project has been completed, a few are making progress on the ground. 

JoAnna Lessard, manager of the Yuba Water Agency's Watershed Resilience and Forest Health Program, said CalVTP "allowed us to get out there in the field probably a year faster than we would have otherwise." The program has helped expedite a 5,400-acre project in Yuba County, she said. So far, about 3,000 acres of vegetation thinning and removal have been completed. 

Wood chippers have started thinning ladder fuels between stands of looming trees in the Yuba River watershed in the Sierra foothills, north of Sacramento. Prescribed burning also is planned to help reintroduce low-intensity fire to the landscape. The project aims to protect an essential ecological feature of the foothills, as well as surrounding communities.

The Yuba Water Agency hired the same consulting firm that crafted the giant environmental review document for CalVTP. Lessard said that decision also helped the agency navigate the new approval process. 

"We had the money, we had the people — we just needed the ability to get out there by completing environmental compliance," Lessard said. "And [CalVTP] really did streamline that."

Wolfy Rougle, forest health watershed coordinator for the Butte County Resource Conservation District, also is using CalVTP for a roughly 1,200-acre prescribed burn.

In an email, Rougle said that the program helped save the district $2,000 in fees. And she believes it could be useful for "smaller organizations [without] experience or confidence creating their own" projects.

But, in an email, she noted that "it's not *necessarily* faster" than the traditional project review process.

Still waiting for approval

Still, most project managers are using the old environmental review process. And even relatively simple, low-impact projects can get bogged down. 

Back in the Mendocino County community of Brooktrails, workers have started clearing brush on a few miles of planned access and evacuation routes. But most roads remain overgrown and impassable.

A California Conservation Corps crew works on mitigating small diameter trees and branches off Spring Creek Road atop the Ridge in the Sherwood Corridor to help provide a safe exit to Highway 101 in case Sherwood Road is impassible on Feb. 6, 2022.Mathew Caine/Willits Weekly

After awarding the grant nearly two years ago, Cal Fire advised Sherwood Firewise Communities that the project's environmental impact was likely so minimal that it could apply for a "notice of exemption" — what is supposed to be the most efficient way of satisfying CEQA under the established system. The nonprofit would still have to clear a few hurdles, such as a plant survey and archaeological review — but that process, for only the first part of the project, took over a year. 

They're now preparing the notice of exemption paperwork for the second leg of the project — after Cal Fire discouraged them from using CalVTP.

Rutledge, the project manager, said he understands that approvals for fire prevention projects can't be completed overnight. But he added that he'd like to see the state "step up and streamline their process" for environmental review, especially as it pumps more money into proposed projects.

"Our No. 1 goal," he said, "is to try to keep people from dying."

The California Newsroom is a collaboration of public radio stations, NPR and CalMatters.

Updated Sept. 13, 2021

If you step outside in Northern California during wildfire season, you can often tell that the air quality isn't great. Wildfires throughout the state continue to burn stronger and longer, making it hazardous to be outdoors in some areas while filling the sky with smoke. 

California has always had wildfires, said Cort Anastasio, professor in the Department of Land, Air & Water Resources at UC Davis. But the extent to which they’ve been happening now is much greater. 

“Our summer air quality now is much worse than it was in the past,” he said. 

That can make air quality extremely hazardous. 

But how can you tell when air quality is harmful? And if it is, what should you do? Here are tips from experts about checking air conditions and protecting your health.

How do I know what the air quality is for my area?

Each day it’s smoky outside, you should check an air quality index (AQI), either at Sacramento’s Air Quality Management District website or the Environmental Protection Agency’s site, airnow.gov. That will show if there’s an unhealthy amount of pollution in the air where you live. 

The current air quality index forecast in the Sacramento region. The colors correspond to the level of risk.

The AQI is usually calculated based on five major air pollutants: ground-level ozone, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Each is measured and weighted differently and then combined into a single value — the AQI. 

In the U.S., these air quality measurements range from 0 to 500, with 500 being the most harmful. Any measurement below 100 isn’t likely to affect your health. 

Dr. Kent Pinkerton, director of the UC Davis Center for Health and the Environment, said that people with pre-existing respiratory or heart conditions start to be adversely affected with measurements above 100. 

“When the AQI goes above 151, that’s unhealthy for everyone,” he said. “It would just simply not be a good idea to be doing any outdoor activity, whether it be exercising, walking, that sort of thing.” 

Why doesn't the AQI match what I see?

Sometimes air quality measures may not seem to match what we can see when there is heavy smoke or even ash in the air.

One reason is that smoke and haze can be visible in the air even if it's not at ground level, says Thomas Wall with the Sacramento Air Quality Managment District. 

"That's one are where we see folks who look at current conditions and may see it looks OK, but it's gross looking and dark outside," Hall says. "That doesn't necessarily mean that pollution is at the ground level."

airnow.gov

Still, Hall cautions that there can be big differences in air quality even between neighborhoods. While checking local air quality measures is a good first step, use caution if you can see or smell smoke.

"If you're smelling smoke you're definitely breathing it," Hall says. "It doesn't mean necessarily it's unhealthy, but it's a good indicator it is."

Why does the AQI for my area look different on different websites? What’s most reliable?

Different websites and companies use different methodologies for reporting air quality, according to Amy McPherson, the public information officer for the California Air Resources Board.

“Different sources have different time delays in reporting information, create AQI averages using different time periods and some are integrating many data sources other than just PM measurements (i.e. land use data, satellite, meteorology),” she wrote via email. 

CARB recommends using the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map to look at air quality during wildfire season. It’s run and maintained by the EPA and includes data from several sources. Some of those sources include air monitoring equipment owned and maintained by federal and local air districts; those average AQI over 24 hours and update it around every hour. Another one of those sources is PurpleAir sensors, which average AQI over 120 seconds. 

"PurpleAir sensors typically read higher than the actual AQI, so the data quality can be questionable,” McPherson wrote. “However, they update every few minutes, so they can be a valuable resource during a wildfire, when air quality can change by the minute. EPA worked with PurpleAir to develop an algorithm to adjust the sensor data on the Fire and Smoke Map, so it will be more consistent with other monitoring sources.”

PurpleAir sensor data is also mapped here, and you can look at data by neighborhood update in real-time. You can apply the “US EPA” filter under the Conversion drop down menu to see AQI corrected for the varying masses of wildfire and woodsmoke particles.

How does breathing in wildfire smoke affect your health?

Wildfire smoke contains a complex mixture of organic chemicals including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, plus water vapor, particles, nitrogen oxides and trace minerals. The main concern with smoke is “fine particles” — tiny bits of matter that you can inhale deeply into your lungs. 

Those fine particles can affect your lungs and your heart. They irritate your respiratory system, and exposure to high concentrations can cause persistent cough, phlegm, wheezing and difficulty breathing — even for healthy people.

“A rapid heartbeat, a tightness in your chest or chest pain would be other signals that the air quality isn’t good,” Pinkerton said. 

Studies have also found that short-term exposure to these fine particles over days or weeks can aggravate pre-existing heart and lung disease. Recent studies have also shown that wildfire smoke can worsen COVID-19 cases.

Are some people more affected than others?

Not everyone exposed to smoke will experience health problems. Different factors determine individual susceptibility — including your age and whether you have pre-existing lung or heart conditions, like asthma, COPD or heart disease. 

Most healthy people will recover quickly from smoke exposure, but “sensitive groups” (we hear this term a lot) may experience more acute or longer lasting symptoms.

Experts say that “sensitive groups” include children, elderly people, pregnant women and anyone who has a pre-existing heart or lung disease. 

How long do I have to worry about wildfire smoke? 

Only for as long as the fire is still burning enough fuel to produce significant smoke.

While particles can travel a long distance, like California wildfires polluting downwind all the way to the east coast of the U.S., they will eventually come out of the atmosphere and deposit on the ground, Anastasio said.

The amount of smoke, topography and weather can affect how long the smoke stays in the atmosphere and in ground-level air quality (the air we breathe), though. 

“If the conditions are right, winds can carry the smoke high enough in the atmosphere that it doesn’t affect ground-level air quality,” McPherson said. “Conversely, other weather patterns can keep it from clearing out for extended periods of time.”

What should people do when the air quality is poor?

If the air quality near you is poor, stay inside with the doors and windows closed and limit your physical activity. During exercise your air intake increases, which brings more pollution deep into the lungs. Experts say staying inside and reducing physical activity can reduce exposure by at least a third or more.

You can also upgrade your air conditioner filters, or buy a portable air cleaner. If you have a central air conditioning system in your home, set it to re-circulate or close outdoor air intakes to avoid drawing in smoky outdoor air. CARB has more information on how to keep the air inside your home clean on its Smoke Ready California web page.

Other options to get a break from the smoke include going to public libraries, hospitals, movie theaters and other public buildings with good HVAC systems. If conditions are going to be bad for a long time, you might consider going to stay with a friend or family member where the air quality is better.

Masks can be helpful, but you should reduce your exposure in other ways first — namely by reducing activity and staying indoors.

If you have to go outside, how can you best protect yourself?

If you’re driving, make sure your windows are rolled up and set the air conditioning in your vehicle to Recirculate mode to avoid bringing the smoke into your vehicle. 

Wearing a N95 or KN95 mask will help filter out the particles from the air that you’re breathing when outside, and have the added benefit of protecting against COVID-19 particles. 

“People seem to think the surgical masks with cloth masks that work to keep coronavirus at bay also work for smoke,” said Anastasio. “By and large, smoke particles tend to be smaller than virus particles, so if it’s a smoky day and you go out with your surgical mask on, it’s not really making much of a difference at all.” 

When looking for a N95 or KN95 mask, make sure it fits your face and has a proper seal around your nose and mouth to prevent particles from coming into the mask. This page will guide you through the process of doing a seal check. 

You can find N95 or KN95 masks online or at stores that carry medical supplies.

Sarah Bohannon | NSPR

The Dixie Fire has been burning for more than a month and thousands of people are still dealing with the impacts. Many towns that were threatened by the fire have been repopulated. But those going home are often returning to refrigerators filled with spoiled food, frequent power outages and smoke-filled landscapes that officials say could last for weeks, if not months.

At the same time, those who lost their homes in Greenville were recently escorted to see what the fire left behind and are now dealing with the hardships that life after the fire brings.

Many who have lost homes are now staying in Quincy. NSPR’s Sarah Bohannon recently spoke with Wendi James, Homeless and Youth Services Liaison for the Plumas County Office of Education and Plumas Unified School District. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On the living conditions many evacuees are experiencing

There are so many families camping. My husband and I went for a drive and we were driving down the highway and you could see cars out in the woods. People are living out of their cars off the side of the road. Actually, a worker at Safeway told me that a lot of the employees … that lived in Greenville are in their trailers in the parking lot of Safeway, and they call it the refugee camp. So like, they're just spread out everywhere. There are the lucky ones that were able to get hotel vouchers, and the crisis center is paying for some of them to get hotel rooms for the week, but it doesn't last. A lot of people have left the area as well. And they're enrolling their children in other counties and other schools. So there's not much left here.

On whether or not people who lost homes in the fire will return

That I can't answer. I know that, when I was at the Local Assistance Center, my table, I sat right next to the building department. And I would hear him ask the same question to each person that would stop by. And he would ask them if they were going to rebuild. And the majority of the people either said “no” or they had “no idea”. I barely heard a “yes.” And there were a lot of people that lost their home in the Camp Fire and they moved to Greenville and lost their home there. So you know, it wouldn't surprise me if they were out of here.

On how residents are navigating frequent power outages in addition to the fire

It’s kind of nerve racking because everything that they're putting out to us, all the news, it's all on social media. So it's not like you can just turn the radio on and listen to what's happening. Everything is online. If you don't have power, you can't listen to any of that. And so it's kind of scary having to rely on technology and social media to get your news.

It's challenging living in a rural area. But you know, we do our best. I think we're getting better at it. But with all of this happening, Quincy is so full of people. Just people parked on the sides of the road with all their stuff in their car. It's just, that's heartbreaking, seeing it up close.

On whether people will have a stable living situation by the time school starts on Sept 7

I think it's going to be similar. Because right now, I think where we could have put people would be at the fairgrounds. And that's the center for the firefighters. That's the incident center. I mean, there are tents everywhere. I'm really not quite sure what's going to happen until the fire is out. Maybe we can get some help from FEMA. Maybe. I don't even know that. (I don’t know) what's happening with FEMA. I don't know any of that information. I know that we've declared a state of emergency, but I don't really know what that entails for us at the moment.

On the current plan for Greenville students

At this point in time, they're offering the other school sites within Plumas County for these students. So they can go to Quincy, Chester or Portola.

On the added difficulty for students due to the pandemic

It's been really hard. I think now with the vaccine, I think a lot of the teachers and parents feel a little bit more protected and are allowing their kids to go to school. The mask mandate is back, so I know that the students aren't excited about that, but that's what we have to do to protect each other. And the numbers here keep going up.

On the best way people can help fire survivors

We've had so much help. So many people wanting to donate and help us, it's been overwhelming. I think that the best way to do it would be to reach out to the district office, if they wanted to go that route, or reach out to the resource center. Also, Plumas Rural Services has a GoFundMe that they could donate to as well.

As far as stuff, we don't really have anywhere to store anything right now because everything that we would be able to store, you know, we got firefighters everywhere and they're staying in places where we would be able to store stuff, there's just not really that much room. The resource center is overwhelmed. I think that somebody donated some big trucks for them to be able to store stuff in. And also these people don't have anywhere to live. So they're either camping, or they're at the evacuation center. And so I feel like if somebody does want to help, they can send us gift cards for them to be able to purchase things they need right now. Or they can purchase it later once they find somewhere to live. That's kind of what we're experiencing right now, is we have all this stuff but we have nowhere for these people to put it. We appreciate it very much and we want to be able to give it to everyone, but I don't know that they really have anywhere to store it.

Johnny Cash once sang, “Bad news travels like wildfire. Good news travels slow.” 

The Man in Black’s words hold true for the Dixie Fire, the second-largest blaze in California’s history, at over half-a-million acres. 

For weeks, the devastation — particularly the leveling of Greenville, a gold-rush era town in Plumas County — has commanded headlines and chyrons across the country and around the world. But some communities were spared from the flames, even though their stories remain largely muted. 

Nestled along the west side of Lake Almanor, about four hours north of Sacramento, the small town of Chester survived a fast-approaching firefront, in part due to its strategic location on the water, and also the tireless work of firefighters. Fire maps show a remarkable anomaly in the burn zone: an arching border on Chester’s outskirts, tracing the town’s western flank, leaving homes and businesses untouched. 

The town appears safe for now. But moving forward, the miles of blackened forest around Chester will hamper the natural tourism economy that keeps it afloat. Residents say they’re optimistic the town will overcome this setback. But it might take years, and the place will almost certainly look and feel different. 

“Ultimately, we’ll lose some businesses,” said Plumas County administrator Gabriel Hydrick. “But in their loss, we may see others rise. So it may take some creativity, but I see the town of Chester certainly bouncing back.”

The fire front remained very active on the north side of Lake Almanor Thursday night. An evacuation order in Chester and the surrounding areas will remain in place, despite the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office previously announcing its plans to downgrade the evacuation order to a warning.

“Given the forecasted thunderstorms and associated wind conditions with those thunderstorms, the situation in Chester is very fluid,” said Daniel Bertucelli, captain PIO for Cal Fire’s Incident Management Team 3. “Last night firefighters were able to make a stand, [and] we will continue to be vigilant with our efforts in the Chester area.”

For miles west of Chester, State Route 36 is beset by an ashy forest floor and tall, scorched pine trees. Some are burnt bald from the intense fire front. Others cling to precarious “widowmakers” — firefighter parlance for dead branches that threaten to crush mere mortals below. 

The Dixie Fire burned miles of forestland west of Chester along State Route 36.Scott Rodd / CapRadio

Crossing into Chester, the town sign serves as a reset. Bright green, it boasts the town’s population of 2,144 and elevation of 4,525 feet. Beyond it is more green: shrubs, leaves, branches — contrasted by the occasional splatter of bright pink retardant. 

Below is a handmade sign, dotted with red hearts and gold and blue stars. It reads: “THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS.” 

“It was just tactical patrolling, really, that allowed us to save the main hub of Chester,” said Cal Fire spokesperson Edwin Zuniga. 

Crews cut bulldozer and hand lines to create fuel breaks around the town, he said, and also back-burned to remove excess fuels. 

Zuniga added that Chester benefited from its strategic position on the banks of Lake Almanor, leaving firefighters to defend only three sides of the town. 

The Dixie Fire started in the Feather River Canyon nearly a month ago. The location of the fire triggered flashbacks to the devastating Camp Fire in 2018, which originated in the same area and destroyed the town of Paradise, killing over 80 people. But the fire burned in the opposite direction, heading north into Plumas County. 

Over the next few weeks it gobbled up dense, rugged forestland heading toward Lake Almanor. The fire split into distinct fronts: to the east, the flames blew through Greenville; to the west, Chester survived. 

The overall damage spells trouble for one of the region’s biggest industries. 

Chester has a similar vibe as Lake Tahoe, but on a much smaller scale. The area is a second-home getaway for the wealthy and a tourism destination for outdoorsy-types. It offers ample opportunity for hiking, fishing and water sports — when Lake Almanor isn’t critically low, like this year. 

Lake Almanor, like many lakes and reservoirs in California, is very low due to the drought. The main road in Chester is largely dormant, as the town has been under evacuation orders for over a week.Scott Rodd / CapRadio

August usually means streets and shops buzzing with travelers. But Chester has been dormant for over a week, as evacuation orders prompted most to leave. Open signs hang in the windows of some businesses, but the lights are out, an indication of how quickly people fled. 

But not everyone left, and not every business remained closed.

The Holiday Market has opened a few hours each night, allowing those who stayed to pick up essentials and exchange information on any fire updates. 

Joe Waterman stopped in for some coffee, milk and a few frozen dinners.

“I’m cooking for myself since I sent my wife off,” he said. He added with a laugh, “I’ve lost six pounds so far through this — maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

Waterman spent roughly 40 years working for Cal Fire. The now-retired firefighter says he stayed behind to assist crews however he could.

“I helped them locate dozer line [placements],” he said. “Mainly it’s been just making sure there aren’t any spot fires within our community that we could take care of.”

Cal Fire discourages people from staying in spite of evacuation orders, according to Zuniga, even if they are trying to help stave off the fire. 

Waterman says Chester’s ability to rebound will also depend on the region’s vitality.

“We’re always trying to help one another, look out for one another,” he said. “I think the effort is going to be, not just taking care of those as they come back here locally, but how are we going to take care of those in Greenville, and Canyondam? Because we’re all part of the same community.”

The Holiday Market has opened a few hours each night, allowing residents who stayed to pick up essentials and exchange information on fire updates. Store Manager Emily Rice sorts through produce that can be donated to evacuation centers.Scott Rodd / CapRadio

Emily Rice, store manager at Holiday Market, is already trying to balance the needs of local residents and those in more badly damaged neighboring towns. 

She scrambles every afternoon to make sure the store can open for a few hours in the evening, stocking shelves and installing air purifiers to ensure shoppers are safe as they peruse the aisles. 

She’s also sending thousands of dollars of food to area evacuation centers, housing people across the region.  

“Probably $8,000 worth [of food] on the first truck,” she said. “It was a ton of dairy, it was our entire bread aisle, and a lot of produce.”

She’s even setting aside produce unfit for evacuees that can be used to feed area livestock. 

Rice has lived in Chester for over 20 years. She’s seen the town change and adapt with each passing peak-summer season. But the Dixie Fire could be one of the hardest challenges the town has ever faced.

“The clean-up process, I can foresee that’s going to be a couple years,” she said. “I think that people are going to be very leery to migrate back to the mountain towns when we’re seeing so many fires.”

Rice was the only employee in the market, furiously scanning items at the lone open register. The line of customers grew longer with every barcode beep. 

A firefighter, waiting for the rest of his crew, set down his groceries to lend a hand. His yellow nomex suit was smeared with dirt and grime. Standing by the conveyor belt carrying a customer’s purchases, he snapped open a plastic bag and started to fill it.

Click the play button above to hear the special statewide broadcast.

Guests:

• CapRadio state government reporter Scott Rodd

• KPCC and LAist science reporter Jacob Margolis

• KCRW reporter Caleigh Wells

• Cal Fire Battalion Chief Sean Norman

• Climatologist Dr. William Patzert

• Thomas Fire and Montecito mudslide survivor Doug Margerum

• Camp Fire survivor Stephen Murray

• US Berkeley Urban Planning researcher Dr. Karen Chapple

As Californians grapple with the increasing impacts of climate change, few things have come to be dreaded more than summer heat waves.

This year, the scorching temperatures arrived early, prompting the first power conservation advisory of the summer on June 17 and setting off speculation on social media about how the heat could impact electric car owners.

“California literally just told everyone to not charge their electric cars due to power shortage,” read a June 18 post on Facebook, which was shared more than 46,000 times.

“So California just asked everyone to stop charging electric cars due to power outages … can’t make this crap up,” read another, posted on June 21.

There’s good news for electric car owners — the rumors are missing a lot of context and aren’t entirely true.

But the posts spread quickly online and migrated from Facebook to other platforms, including Twitter. 

They also sparked discussion about whether California has the resources to continue to move toward electric vehicles in pursuit of a greener future.

“California can't provide enough electricity for the homes and businesses they have yet they're mandating everyone drive more electric cars,” read one post on Facebook. “I'm continually amazed at how stupid leftists can be.”

Facebook flagged the posts as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed, so we decided to investigate. (Read more about PolitiFact California’s partnership with Facebook.) 

The Alert

The California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, is the nonprofit tasked with operating and managing most of California’s power grid. It regularly issues power conservation advisories when the grid is facing challenging conditions, such as intense heat or wildfires. 

The advisories, known as Flex Alerts, encourage Californians to shift their energy usage to certain times of the day when the power grid is less stressed.

“A flex alert is not a power outage,” said Gil Tal, director of the Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. “It's a way to prevent outages. We don't like that we are being told not to use electricity, but it's a much better situation than sitting in the dark if the grid is collapsing.”

Usually, the alerts ask that residents conserve power during evening hours, when people are still awake and using electricity but some energy sources, such as solar power, are not available.

“On a good day, solar in California can make up half of the generation,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at UC Berkeley and the director of the Energy Institute at the university’s Haas School of Business. “And so when we start to lose it, we need to have other things. One of the problems that comes up on super hot days when the demand is very high is we may not have enough of the other resources to keep the balance in the system.”

In announcing the June 17 Flex Alert, CAISO encouraged people to voluntarily cut back their power usage from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. The announcement included tips on how Californians could conserve energy and advised residents to complete tasks involving high amounts of energy, such as using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, before the alert to “be as comfortable as possible” during the evening hours.

The advisory never explicitly told Californians to not charge electric vehicles – just to shift their charging schedules, if possible, to accommodate limited resources in the evening.

“This is completely voluntary,” Borenstein said. “There typically aren't even financial incentives. It's just a plea and that applies to electric vehicles as well.”

How Electric Cars Get Charged

Today, there are just under 630,000 electric cars on the road in the Golden State, according to the California Energy Commission. Although they come in many shapes, sizes and models, all of them work similarly — drive, park and plug in as needed.

How long and how often electric cars need to charge depends on a variety of factors, including how far the car has traveled, what the car’s top range is and what type of outlet it is hooked up to.

Borenstein said charging a vehicle fully can take hours.

“If you're plugging into a regular old household 110-[volt] outlet, it can take all night just to replenish a battery that's been driven 100 miles during the day,” he said. “Most houses that have charging have at least a 220-[volt] outlet and charge about twice as fast.”

But most daily commutes won’t completely drain an electric car’s battery. Data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration shows that residents of the San Francisco Bay Area traveled an average of about 20.7 miles per day in 2019. In Los Angeles, that number was 22.5 miles each day and in Sacramento, it was 22.3 miles. 

So most modern electric cars don’t need to be charged on a daily basis, Tal said. 

Many get plugged in every couple of days and are equipped with timers so that owners can schedule their charges. While electric car drivers might initially balk at power outages and conservation advisories, Tal said these events usually pose “no problem.”

“A Flex Alert is a couple of hours and there are very, very few electric car drivers that have to charge their cars in these specific few hours,” Tal said. “Most of the drivers today and in the future will be able to delay it by a couple of hours or a couple of days if needed.”

Does California Have The Power To Go Green?

As of 2019, renewable sources produced just over 30% of California’s power. In 2015, the state pledged to increase that number to 50% by 2030 and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order last year that requires all new cars sold in California to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

“California is really on the cutting edge of integrating wind and solar into generation,” Borenstein said. “California also has much larger penetration of electric vehicles than any other state, and so we are on the cutting edge there, too. That gives us the opportunity to be a leader in coordinating the electric vehicles with the intermittent renewables.”

If everyone drove an electric vehicle, Tal said Californians would “double” their electric use in their homes. But change is unlikely to come quickly, and the current grid is able to support short-term increases in electric cars.

“We can have millions of electric cars on today's grid with no problem,” Tal said. “We have less than a million today and we can go to three, four, five million without doing any serious upgrades.”

In the long run, California’s power grid will need to produce and store more electricity to reliably make the shift to an entirely electrified fleet. But Tal said the process should be smooth if the changes happen “together.” 

Borenstein said it’s not the first time the power grid has needed to adjust to emerging technology, comparing the shift toward electric cars to when air conditioning became popular in the 1950s. Over the years, the grid successfully scaled up capacity to accommodate energy demands.

Air conditioning units tend to kick in at roughly the same times because outside temperatures increase during the day and decrease overnight, which posed an additional challenge for the electric grid of the 1950s. Borenstein said electric cars will likely have an easier adjustment.

“We are going to have to build up capacity here as well,” Borenstein said. “But we probably aren't going to have to build up capacity nearly as much because everybody doesn't have to charge at the same time.”

As California transitions to electric vehicles and renewable power sources, Borenstein said market forces will likely promote charging during times when energy is more plentiful.

“I think that's where we're going,” he said. “We're not going to make it illegal to charge your car at any particular time, but it's going to be cheaper to charge it when the grid actually is more plentiful with electricity and more expensive when the grid is tight.”

Our Ruling

Posts on social media claimed that California told electric car owners to “not charge” their vehicles because of a power shortage.

The posts appear to refer to a Flex Alert that was issued by the California Independent System Operator on June 17. The alert encouraged Californians to voluntarily conserve energy and charge their electric vehicles before 5 p.m. to minimize possible stress on the power grid during the first major heat wave of the summer. 

CAISO officials never said people could not charge their vehicles. Rather, they asked that electric vehicle owners shift their charging schedule to accommodate limited energy sources in the evening.

Furthermore, experts say that most electric vehicles only need a few hours of charging each night and are equipped with timers so that owners can schedule charging periods, making it simple for Californians to voluntarily comply with the Flex Alert.

The posts also kicked off debate about whether California’s grid will be able to accommodate efforts to move toward electric vehicles in the coming years. But experts said the transition should be smooth as long as the shift to electric cars is coordinated with efforts to push for renewable energy sources and improve grid capacity.

The posts entirely misinterpreted the Flex Alert and stoked largely unfounded fears about California’s move toward green energy. Therefore, we rate these claims False.

FALSE – The statement is not accurate.

Sources:

Facebook post, June 18, 2021

Facebook post, June 21, 2021

Facebook post, June 28, 2021

Twitter post, June 21, 2021

Interview with Gil Tal, director of the Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, June 25, 2021

Interview with Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at UC Berkeley and the director of the Energy Institute at Haas, June 29, 2021

California Independent System Operator Corporation, Flex Alert in effect today from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., June 17, 2021

California Energy Commission, Zero Emission Vehicle and Infrastructure Statistics, April 20, 2021

Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics Series: Highway Statistics 2019, Sept. 30, 2020

California Energy Commission, 2019 Total System Electric Generation

Los Angeles Times, Gov. Brown signs climate change bill to spur renewable energy, efficiency standards, Oct. 7, 2015

Los Angeles Times, Newsom orders 2035 phaseout of gas-powered vehicles, calls for fracking ban, Sept. 23, 2020

Gov. Gavin Newsom rolled back a more ambitious wildfire prevention plan set by his predecessor, and this week his administration nixed more than half a billion dollars in promised fuel reduction spending, an investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom has found.

Newsom, who is set to talk wildfires with President Joe Biden and governors of other western states Wednesday, has said the reality of climate change with its hot summers and dry winters, means the state’s approach to wildfires “fundamentally has to change.”

But the plan he trumpets, to treat 500,000 acres a year by 2025, represents a retreat from a 2018 executive order signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, which mandated the state reach that goal by 2023. 

Newsom declined to comment for this story. In an interview, his Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said that the state was making a “quantum leap” in wildfire prevention under Newsom, but was under no obligation to stick with his predecessor’s timeline.

“I can’t speak to what the last administration was focused on,” he said, or “hypothesize on what the last governor had identified or had targeted.”

The 2025 goal is part of an agreement Newsom reached with President Donald Trump last year, where the state and federal government promised to each perform fuel reduction and prescribed burns across 500,000 acres every year. Responding to inquiries from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom, neither Cal Fire nor the United States Forest Service were able to provide details on progress toward those goals.

In the final budget signed Monday, Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders also pushed hundreds of millions of dollars of planned wildfire prevention spending into the future. Newsom had called for over $700 million for wildfire prevention and resilience in his revised budget in May. The Legislature increased that amount to $1 billion in its budget bill. But the final budget deal includes less than half of that — $458 million over the next year. 

Crowfoot said Cal Fire wasn’t ready to spend the money. “We couldn't put all that billion dollars to work on shovel ready projects immediately,” he said.

HD Palmer with the Department of Finance confirmed that despite the need, the state simply wasn’t ready to take on that many projects. Spending a billion dollars on wildfire prevention in a year, he said, would be “like trying to drink water out of a fire hose.”  While substantially less than what Newsom originally promised, the outlay still represents more money than in years past.

The new investigation comes as Newsom already faces criticism for misrepresenting his accomplishments on wildfire prevention.

Last week, CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom reported Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. The governor has claimed that 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of a January 2019 executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number of acres “treated” through fuel reduction or prescribed burns was 11,399.

The investigation also found that after a spike in mitigation work in Newsom’s first year in office, the number of total acres treated by Cal Fire declined precipitously to below levels achieved during the Brown administration.

State Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat who represents the Napa and Sonoma Valley wine country, which have been ravaged by wildfires in recent years, said he was “not pleased” that the prevention work dropped and was initially “taken aback” by the last-minute budget trim. Dodd said he suspects Cal Fire doesn’t have the capacity to ramp up its prevention work.

“You’ve seen what Cal Fire has been able to get out the door this year, whether it’s prescribed fire or any number of other things,” he said. “And it’s not as quick as we’d like to have it done.”

Republican lawmakers seized on the investigation and demanded oversight hearings. Assemblyman James Gallagher, who represents the fire ravaged city of Paradise, offered amendments to the state budget that would shore up wildfire prevention funding — which were squelched by the Democratic majority. 

Gallagher said he was unaware that Newsom pushed back the state’s goal of treating 500,000 acres annually to 2025.

“It’s another example of how the Newsom administration isn’t treating this issue with the urgency that’s needed,” he said.

The Newsom administration and lawmakers say that even though they’ve reduced the wildfire mitigation budget this year, they plan to add an extra half a billion dollars to next year’s budget. By then, they argue, Cal Fire will be better positioned to implement those projects as the state continues to build toward the annual 500,000 acre goal.