Napa Valley: A Burning Issue

challengeoflifetime_lead
Working together to manage forests and stay a step ahead of fires, rather than chase them from behind
challengeoflifetime_lead

In the hills framing the Napa Valley Wine Country and the forestlands linking Napa and Sonoma, the marks of last year’s megafires are still a fresh assault on the eye. To anyone living here, the view is a daily reminder that while we live in a beautiful place, it can burn again. The only question is not: Will there be another bad fire season? But, how bad will it be and how prepared are we? How resilient can we be, and what must we do to get there?

Napa bears down on fuel mitigation

“I think it’s safe to say Napa County is ‘woke,’ says Christopher Thompson, CEO of Napa County Firewise Foundation (NCFF). He is a volunteer firefighter and resident of Deer Park, a community devastated last September by the Glass fire. “We all drive around in a blackened community now,” he says. And though spring has come, and new growth is greening the charred ground, the reassurance it offers is superficial. Just because forest has burned does not mean, as some might think, that it is impervious to future fires. Not so.

“What happens is that the understory starts to re-grow and we get seasonal grass and invasive species,” adds Thompson. “That creates what we call ‘flashy fuel.’ When it dries, in late summer, it can ignite very quickly and spread very fast.” An afternoon’s drive around Napa or Sonoma County will show how much visible acreage now stands covered with blackened trees, a fire hazard. Who’ll be removing those dead trees?

“I’ve had discussions with the Farm Bureau, with the Napa Valley Vintners, and of course with the board of supervisors,” says Thompson. “I’ve spoken with Senator Dodd and Mike Thompson. I think people realize that this [megafire] isn’t a one-time event.” The effects of mega-fires breach all boundaries and up and down and across the economic scale.

 

What is being done?

One immediate need after a fire, such as the Glass fire, is to eliminate the “vertical fuel” from the burned hills so they do not serve as tinder for another fire the next season. To facilitate this work, FEMA has classified such burned areas as Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG) areas, so that work on the burned area can be facilitated and begin as soon as funding is available. But there is a catch.

Bell Canyon Reservoir before and after the Glass Fire. [Photos courtesy of Chris Thompson]
The FMAG classification lasts only for 12 months, starting right after 100 percent containment of the fire, which caused the burn. This means that funding has to be in place and the work on the burned areas accomplished, within that 12-months period. “So, we are racing [against] the clock right now,” says Thompson, “to come up with funds to do a number of projects to take advantage of the FMAG. Then, once we have the funding in place, we will go into those areas and push hard.”

He asked the board of supervisors for $7 million for this work. “We also went to the Farm Bureau. We went to the Napa Valley Vintners,” says Thompson. “We said, ‘This is your world! This is not all the responsibility of the county!’ We all own land, and we all need to be stewards of that land.” Thompson reminded them that there are vineyards that encompass hundreds, if not thousands, of acres and they can’t just keep gobbling up land as a function of ballots that get passed for ag shed and watershed and viewshed and just sit on that land and do nothing with it. Thompson is passionate about this. During his 16 years with the NCFF, he has witnessed some of the worst fires in California history. One, the Glass Fire, which destroyed 67,484 acres and 1,520 structures, ignited close to a place he found special both for its beauty—and its known, serious fire danger.

 

A cautionary tale

Bell Canyon, a main source of water for the City of St. Helena, was the embodiment of Thompson’s worst fears. It was a beautiful area, long overgrown, and vulnerable to fire. “I used to go there on my own,” he says. “It was like stepping into the place that time forgot.” He took a forester there once, who said, ‘Christopher, this is now the place that’s going to keep me awake at night, because if something happens here, there’s no stopping it.’”

Bell Canyon had not seen a fire in more than 100 years, which meant the understory (a layer of vegetation beneath the main canopy of a forest) was highly overgrown. Thompson began walking through and inspecting the area with foresters and battalion chiefs who recognized the danger of “other side” of the beautiful, timeless-looking forest: excess fuel—kindling for a major fire. As a result of their observations, Thompson proposed some necessary forest management work on the area to reduce the “fuel”—trees, undergrowth, stuff that burns—to slow down a fire and prevent the foreseeable disaster. “This is not clear-cutting,” Thompson hastens to explain. “It doesn’t mean going in and decimating forests.” The work is called “fuel mitigation” or “fuel reduction,” which is about managing the forest, selectively clearing the understory, or “ladder fuels,” to keep fire from spreading up to the canopy where it can meet the wind and go out of control, showering embers, at speed, into neighboring areas. Rather, “mitigation” means clearing the saplings so the mature trees can have the space to grow. “The idea is not to stop fires cold,” he says, “but to slow them enough to give firefighters a chance to stop a catastrophe.”

“If you want to change fire behavior, you have to change the fuel that feeds the fire.—Chris Thompson, CEO, Napa County Firewise Foundation

He remembers imagining a worst-case scenario: that a fire would start in or near Bell Canyon, just as the Glass Fire did on September 27, 2020, and would move quickly up into Sanitarium Road, threatening the Adventist Health hospital and the communities of Deer Park and Anguin. He is convinced that the mitigation work he proposed could have made a difference. “In talking with a number of fire chiefs who had boots on the ground in Bell Canyon [during the Glass Fire],” Thompson recalls sadly, “they said that if the work had been done, it would have allowed the firefighters to take a stronger stand and would have slowed [the fire] down.” Deer Park might have had a chance.

 

Fight fire with foresight

“If you want to change fire behavior, you have to change the fuel that feeds the fire. If I want to change the way fire could impact my home, then I have to change the fuel around my home. If we want to change fire behavior around Anguin, we have to change the fuel around Anguin.” This does not mean you can guarantee the fire behavior you want, as anyone knows who’s seen a wind-driven fire up close, as he has. But you’ll likely have a fighting chance should fire come.

“My goal at the end of my tenure is that we have a significant amount of money coming in that allows us to as quickly as possible start to do this fuel mitigation work and catch up on essentially years of everybody in the county not paying attention to this problem.” As of this writing, he is buoyed by a groundswell of support and recognition of the need for forest management––and for the funds necessary to accomplish it. The agencies are coming together and the money—real money—is being organized around the scale of the task. Part of the energy around funding this massive and crucial challenge of forest management is an overall recognition of the need to meet the issue of fire head on. As part of his program of information, he is proud of the completion of an extraordinary on-line information tool that can be used by and will benefit the whole community—Napa’s County Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). This powerful, digital tool will be an on-line source for all stakeholders including residents to go to, learn from, and share together with a place online where they can find up-to-date information on all fire-related topics in our area.

 

Pepperwood: an ecological laboratory

“We joke at Pepperwood that we’re all kind of fire ecologists now, like it or not,” says Lisa Micheli, Ph.D, president and CEO of the 3,200 acre Pepperwood Preserve, in the Mayacamas. “What we’re learning is that hydrology (understanding the water balance) and projecting how much moisture is in the soil is a tool for predicting live fuel moisture (the moisture content of living trees and other vegetation). And the level—or lack of—live fuel moisture is one of the major predictors of fire behavior. So the watershed ends up being a critical driver of fires.”

“Our approach to fire for the last 75 years has been sort of ‘suppress at all costs,’ which has been, inadvertently, a major intervention in our system.”—Lisa Micheli, Ph.D., president and CEO, Pepperwood Preserve

Pepperwood is an “ecological laboratory” where the science can have immediate results. For example, in 2016, they initiated a program of prescribed burns. In 2017, the Tubbs fire roared through, burning everything except for the areas it had burned before. “About 20 percent of the property and all the structures burned that first night [during] that very extreme, wind-driven event,” says Micheli. “The remainder of the property burned over the following 10 days in a slower-moving ground fire.” That slow-moving fire worked much like the prescribed burns. Two years later, when the Kincade fire came through, Pepperwood suffered less destruction because of the nature of the previous burns. It also helped that CalFire, a working partner in Pepperwood’s research, and whose firefighters supervised Pepperwood’s prescribed burns, knew all the roads in and around Pepperwood. “Because of their relationship with us as an open space, and because we’ve been doing our prescribed burns, the fire slowed down at Pepperwood so we could help control it.”

The Firesmart Lake Sonoma Team. [Photo courtesy of Ag Innovations]
According to Micheli, the heavy “fuel load” of our forests and woodlands today is the result of a long-standing, well-meaning ethic that fires should be put out and nature should be left alone. “Our approach to fire for the last 75 years has been sort of ‘suppress at all costs,’ which has been, inadvertently, a major intervention in our system.” This approach, without fire, without the dense animal life munching through the forests keeping the undergrowth down, has led forests to become overgrown, subject to disease and now, with climate change, vulnerable to catastrophic fire. “So now our question is: Can we embrace fire as part of the ecosystem and as part of our toolkit for preventing catastrophic fires?” And if so, how is everyone to pay for it?

 

Paying for wildfire resilience

There are risks and benefits of areas with forests and woodlands. “Robert Ewing has this idea of the risks and benefit,” says Micheli, and it begins with a question. “How do we fairly share those benefits and the risks, so that there isn’t a small group of people bearing the brunt of the costs and the damage?”

Robert Ewing, Ph.D, is a resource management expert who grew up in Yosemite and is the son of a third-generation park ranger, knows forests and has seen the changes in forest conditions as result of time, fire suppression, the hands-off management style and climate change. “One of the things we’ve been trying to do is use a sort of social enterprise approach.” His idea is to find actual revenue from forest activities and not rely completely on philanthropy or government grants to pay for the tremendous cost of mitigating the impact of wildfires.

He likes to think in terms of cost avoidance. “That is simply having insurers and the state, and other people recognize that the cost of dealing with the catastrophe when it happens is so enormous that you’re better off underwriting the treatments that lessen fire hazards and the risks of fire.”

Another idea is “trading” on greenhouse gas. “We’re trying to think through having a state work with a county or a group of counties to accept greenhouse gas fund money, and to have it essentially allocated based on how well you’re doing in sequestering and storing carbon,” he says. For example, if you do appropriate thinning in these stands, he adds, referring to local forests, you’re not only reducing the risk of fire, but improving the stand’s ability to sequester carbon. “So why not use greenhouse gas money to do that?” The money, he suggests, could flow into an organization of landowners or some kind of social enterprise so landowners and larger entities such as counties could essentially draw money to manage their lands from cost-avoidance and carbon credits.

Lisa Micheli planning to plant Toyon trees by measuring the distance between them. [Duncan Garrett Photography]
Saleable products are another category of almost old-style possibility. “Some of the material removed from the forests (chips, biomass) can be used, [and] turned into wood products that can be sold in the marketplace.” His point is not to try to sell anyone one concept or another, but to open the minds of those involved to a whole range of ideas, including recreation and businesses such as consulting to help landowners to help themselves and each other.

However enticing these ideas may seem, they won’t take hold unless groups who recognize they share common set of concerns—such as location, neighborhood, water, fire and landscape issues—work together. “I’ve interviewed a lot of people on how to get this done,” he says, “and most agree that an overarching organization is needed to get people to work together effectively and generate sustainable financing. “But that’s a tall order to figure how to do it,” he adds.

 

Learning how to work together

Lake Sonoma is a reservoir surrounded by forested hills, ranches and popular recreation area. It is also the water source for 600,000 users in Sonoma and Marin. While the reservoir itself is owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, the surrounding lands are almost entirely privately owned, divided into parcels both large and small. In 2017, recognizing the impact a fire could have on so many people, Genevieve Taylor, executive director of Ag Innovations, took action and applied for a grant, along with Sonoma Water, from PG&E’s Better Together Resilient Communities Grant Program. (Ag Innovations is a nonprofit organization based in Sebastopol and dedicated to helping bring people together to solve complex problems related to agriculture, food, fire and water in California.)

The grant, as written, was designed to create a process of bringing the Lake Sonoma neighbors together with fire and land management, forest resiliency experts and relevant public agencies. They found that people in the area were aware of fire risks, but no one really imagined what a megafire could do to their own community or surroundings until the Tubbs fire hit, in September 2017. “It really affected the Lake Sonoma residents,” she says. “They really held it.”

The Ag Innovation team discovered a quite diverse set of landowners. Many of the properties were second homes, so owners could flee in the event of fire, but others were retirement homes and were the owners’ main asset. The team discovered, to their surprise, that residents did not share a common identity based on land area, such as watershed or forest. Instead, they found that people tended to identify with socially defined areas, such as their immediate neighborhoods. “They think of themselves as, ‘We live in Yorkville,’ or ‘We live on Rockpile Ridge Road,’” says Taylor. But fire is not restricted by social boundaries. “So, we had to totally rethink that.”

“Nature and most ecosystems do require active stewardship in one form or another, if only to undue the damage, often unintended, that has been done.”—Robert Gould, senior facilitator, Ag Innovation

Robert Gould, Ag Innovation’s senior facilitator, lives in Marin and sees up close the difference in ideals of land use. “There is a preservation mindset, almost like a museum mindset,” he says, holding that nature is best left untouched by man. This view holds the human at a distance—out of relationship with, and largely separate, from nature to the detriment of the forest. “Nature and most ecosystems do require active stewardship in one form or another, if only to undue the damage, often unintended, that has been done,” he says. “I think that is, as Genevieve has said, an evolving mindset in the environmental community. Most indigenous cultures have had an active, yet very reverential relationship with landscapes for centuries.”

It takes space to bring people together

“In our workshop, one intention was clear,” says Gould. “[That is] how important it was for us to give space to residents to talk about their concerns, the opportunities, and lots of great ideas.” They needed to share thoughts with each other, to build upon each others’ ideas and perspectives, [and] to imagine new opportunities, he adds.

“During each workshop, we would visit a couple of homes with fire safety and forestry professionals and look at what they were doing around home defense, their 100-foot defensible space and vegetation management,” says Taylor. “There, they also had time for questions, and that was probably the most powerful part, actually bringing the community out into properties and walking it with them. Everybody was walking in each other’s shoes at that point and the fire safety professionals were sensitive to that.”

To bring people together, to make this kind of communication work, takes special people with special skills. “Our role is as facilitators,” says Taylor. “We hold the space. Our role is to serve a group of people in accomplishing what they want to be doing.” They bring to the table a recognition that all participants hold pieces to the puzzle that are needed to help them find solutions and create a systems perspective.

 

Think change to bring change

To solve these complex problems, the most fundamental change to make is in mindset. And the only way a mindset can be changed, or softened, according to Genevieve Taylor and her team, is by helping people see themselves, the problem and each other in a different way. “That’s not going to happen by someone saying, ‘This is the way you should think about it.’” Says Taylor. “It’s going to happen by you saying, ‘Here’s what I think,’ and then pausing and really hearing someone else and what they think. We work to set things so you’re able to unlock new solutions based on that.”

“You’re helping people see and understand the systems we’re working with from different perspectives, which in turn helps them see them more holistically,” says Gould. “The firefighter speaks to the biologist. The biologist speaks to the Boy Scout. The Boy Scout speaks to the retiree who has a place in the country. Whatever it is, we’re also facilitating these spaces, hopefully they’re safe spaces, where people can feel like they can speak up and be heard and share ideas.” Key to this working, he reminds us, is that participants practice speaking and listening respectfully. “It’s not about winning an argument, even if one is passionate about their point of view,” he says. “It’s trying to understand each other, so we can solve the bigger problem. It’s what we call both-and collaboration versus either-or conflict.”

Becoming a resilient community in the face of climate change and the inevitable fires, couldn’t be bigger or more profound in how we live where we live. Creating any positive change, especially within such a challenging arena as mitigating fuel loads in our forests to become resilient to catastrophic fires, may require certain adjustments in points of view. But to achieve success will take whole communities waking up and joining together in the work.

“It’s so important to be thinking about how we can be involved and to frame it from a larger lens,” says Taylor, who believes the success of the process starts with opening our minds. How can we embrace the challenge going forward? “It’s fire resiliency, but it’s also healthy watersheds and healthy communities and, if you frame it from that larger lens, like what we are looking towards as opposed to what we are protecting ourselves from, it resets our collective relationship with how we think about open spaces around us.” It will reset our view of how we see the world.

 

A Digital Road Map

By the time NorthBay biz goes to press, Napa Communities Firewise Foundation will have posted on its website the first ever county-wide Napa Community Wildfire Protection Plan, (CWPP). This is a “living” updateable, digital road map, an extremely high-resolution, detailed map of county lands made possible by LIDAR (laser-driven) technology. LIDAR is a remote sensing system that can make an extremely high-resolution map of a landscape using light emitted by laser that can measure distance, elevation and density of trees and show how susceptible to fire an area is likely to be. Anyone with interest or a concern can visit the Napa Communities Firewise Foundation website and learn about fire, forests and how to learn to live with resilience in our changing relationship to fire. The CWPP road map is a product of a year’s cooperative work of all stakeholders—Napa Resource Conservation District, Open Space, Land Trust, Fish and Game, and people involved in water systems, like Lake Hennessey and the various reservoirs. People visiting the CWPP can see all the areas that need work, what work is in progress, what work has been done, when it was done, and how much was spent on it. It is a major accomplishment and, says Thompson, the first of its kind to take advantage of the LIDAR technology.

Looking toward the next fire season, Christopher Thompson, NCFF CEO, is optimistic that the funding needed do the work to prevent more disastrous fires will be forthcoming and that the road map will show funding partners what is needed and why. “We have that map now. No need to be guessing. Everybody knows what needs to be done and where it needs to be done.” Whether he’ll the exact amount he requested, he doesn’t know. He does know that up to this year, NCFF was getting $100,000 a year for mitigation, which everyone now knows is inadequate to the task. “We’ve been told we’ll be getting millions now,” he says. Whatever the figure, it will be stretched, given the scope of the task, but with a board strengthened with new members, he’s beginning feel support for moving toward crafting a ballot measure for a tax “of some sort” to bring in a continuous stream of funds to the County and in particular the NCFF to prevent calamitous fires. “The disposition of our politicians and a lot of the residents and agencies in the area believe that this is something we have to move forward with because if we don’t, we’re not going to solve this problem.”

 

A huge win for everybody!

On April 6, 2021, the Napa County Board of Supervisors, in unanimous agreement, granted the request by Napa County Fire Chief Geoff Belyea and Napa Communities Firewise Foundation (NCFF) CEO Christopher Thompson and supporting community leaders, to fully fund the first year of the NCFF Five-Year Plan to reduce wildfire risk in Napa County. Of the approved $6.4 million, $1 million will be available immediately, so that the work of fuel mitigation in key areas can begin. The remaining $5.2 million will be available in July or August to continue the work, as outlined in the NCFF Five-year plan. Christopher Thompson called this community response, “a huge win for everybody.”

The Napa County Community Wildfire Protection Plan can be read at: https://bit.ly/3mpvIXn

Watch the Board proceedings on video: http://napa.granicus.com/player/

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