VISUAL CUE

DIALOGUE

TIME CODE

SUPER: BOULDER COUNTY COLORADO 2021

00:00:06:04

Aerial, wildfire

[VO] JOE BIDEN: The situation is a blinking code red for our nation.

00:00:12:00

[VO] DONALD TRUMP: Hopefully this is going to be the last of these, because this was a really, really bad one.

00:00:19:01

SUPER: PARADISE CALIFORNIA 2018

00:00:19:06

SUPER: EL PASO COUNTY COLORADO 2012

00:00:25:17

[VO] BARACK OBAMA: Obviously, as you saw in some of these subdivisions, the devastation is enormous.

00:00:26:20

[VO] VOICE TALENT: The flames of the Dixie Fire gutted the entire town of Greenville, California.

00:00:34:23

SUPER: GREENVILLE CALIFORNIA 2021

00:00:38:06

GV, wildfire

[VO] VOICE TALENT: The Caldor Fire has burned 75,000 acres with zero containment.

00:00:39:19

[VO] VOICE TALENT: A record-shattering 93% of the west covered in drought conditions. Fire season's underway, with no end in sight.

00:00:45:01

Aerial, wildfire

[VO VOICE TALENT]: Here's another interesting fact, six of the seven largest wildfires in state history have happened in the span of just a year.

00:00:52:06

SUPER: TALENT OREGON 2020

00:00:54:20

[VO VOICE TALENT]: Residents are now left wondering if there's anything that can be done to keep their community safe from future fires.

00:00:59:13

Interview, Jack Cohen

JACK COHEN: There are reasons how it is that something ignites and how it doesn't. If it meets the requirements for combustion, then it ignites and burns. And if it doesn't, it's because it didn't meet those requirements for combustion, and that makes it a physics problem. I have a high level of confidence that we can prevent community fire destruction during extreme wildfires, because the research that has gone on for the last 30 plus years shows us that we have opportunities to prevent the big community fire disasters. But if we continue our current emergency response approach, wildland urban fire disasters will be inevitable. It's very frustrating for me to realize that Paradise didn't have to happen, and then listen to an interview of a fire professional saying there is nothing that we could have done, because there is.

00:01:11:04

SUPER: JACK COHEN USFS FIRE LAB RESEARCH SCIENTIST (RETIRED)

00:01:11:19

TEXT, CREDITS: A FILM BY BALANCE MEDIA

00:02:35:18

TEXT, CREDITS: DIRECTOR TRIP JENNINGS

00:02:39:17

TEXT, CREDITS: PRODUCER SARA QUINN

00:02:43:17

TEXT, CREDITS: EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR RALPH BLOEMERS

00:02:46:17

TEXT, CREDITS: NARRATOR DAVID OYELOWO

00:02:51:16

TEXT, TITLE: ELEMENTAL REIMAGINE WILDFIRE

00:02:56:17

SUPER: PARADISE, CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 8, 2018

00:03:04:04

[VO] RADIO CHATTER: We have eyes on the vegetation fire, it's gonna be very difficult to access, Camp Creek Road is nearly inaccessible. This has got potential for a major incident.

00:03:04:06

GV, wildfire; Interview, Michelle Simmons

MICHELLE SIMMONS: I got to our local coffee shop and we started seeing ash the size of baseball, softball size, coming down from the sky. So obviously, that's not normal.

00:03:19:05

SUPER: MICHELLE SIMMONS PARADISE, CALIFORNIA RESIDENT

00:03:20:14

Interview, Jesse Alexander

JESSE ALEXANDER: I've been on some pretty significant wildland fires, but there was just something odd and different about how this was acting.

00:03:36:04

SUPER: JESSE ALEXANDER DIVISION CHIEF, CHICO FIRE-RESCUE

00:03:37:04

CU, car

DARREL WILKEN: When we received notice that there was a fire, we were in the process of meeting our patients in the morning, shift had just started. At that point I asked the manager, "How far away is the fire?" He said, "Seven miles." And 15 minutes later, the fire was on the hospital grounds and we were burning. We knew that the only way we were going to get these patients out of here was to load them up in our personal cars. And that's what we did.

00:03:46:23

GV, wildfire

MICHELLE SIMMONS: When I talked to Daniel again, he said, "Go get the kids from school, because it's not right, so we might need to get out." So the only thing I ended up grabbing, even though the back of the SUV was empty, was my daughter's stuffed animal, my son's baby blanket and our wedding rings.

00:04:13:10

Interview, Jesse Alexander

JESSE ALEXANDER: People are just running up to you going, "I don't have a vehicle. What do I do?" "My house is on fire. What do I do?"

00:04:30:17

POV car driving

DARREL WILKEN: So it's 11:38 in the morning in Paradise, and this is what it looks like

00:04:37:08

JESSE ALEXANDER: It was as black at noon as it would be at midnight with no stars.

00:04:46:00

SUPER: DARREL WILKEN NURSE, FEATHER RIVER HOSPITAL

00:04:56:21

[VO] RADIO CHATTER: Ordering an evacuation order now for areas of Pentz Road in Paradise

00:04:51:06

OTF interview in car, Darrel Wilken

DARREL WILKEN: I had two critical patients in the backseat. One individual had battery operated equipment to help keep them alive, and oxygen. The batteries ran out after about an hour. And I thought an hour was plenty of time. I didn't have any idea that we were going to be trapped for so long.

00:04:56:02

Interview, Michelle Simmons and Daniel Simmons

MICHELLE SIMMONS: And the last thing I remember hearing Daniel say was, "Don't worry. I'm going to find you." And then the phone disconnected, and that was it.

00:05:15:06

DANIEL SIMMONS: Fearing the worst, because all I heard was my family screaming. And then the phone disconnecting. When I was first getting into Paradise, it looks like you're driving into hell. So I already told myself, you know, if you don't get out of here, this is what you have to do. You're going to have to get in there and find your family.

00:05:28:08

SUPER: DANIEL SIMMONS PARADISE, CALOFORNIA RESIDENT

00:05:41:00

Interview, Jesse Alexander

JESSE ALEXANDER: You're just flooding those major roads with that many people. And it just takes one traffic accident. One vehicle to break down, stall to stop everything.

00:05:46:16

OTF interview in car, Darrel Wilken

DARREL WILKEN: The road is rough here because all the cars were on fire right here. We're in a really bad spot.

00:05:56:17

POV car driving, wildfire

MICHELLE SIMMONS: So from that point it was total panic. Everybody panicking, trying to go off the road, essentially four-wheeling to get out of our side of town because it was on fire. I remember grabbing my daughter's hand and she was just praying. We knew Daniel was somewhere, somewhere.

00:06:02:03

Interview, Daniel Simmons

DANIEL SIMMONS: Time kind of just went out the window at that point. Don't remember what time it was. Don't remember how long it took me to get there. Just get there. Then I realized that my truck was out of gas. I kind of just threw everything aside, got out and started running.

00:06:21:00

Interview, Jesse Alexander

JESSE ALEXANDER: Hydrants are out. So you're running out of water and oh gosh, we're going to have four or five, six engines run out of fuel here, fighting the fire. And then what do we do? Because there was really no playbook for something like this.

00:06:37:10

POV car driving, wildfire

DARREL WILKEN: We were stuck right here. The heat was so intense. My car started melting. The window is so hot. I can't even touch the window right now.

00:06:55:21

Interview, Michelle Simmons

MICHELLE SIMMONS: I was basically trying to touch my kids because I thought this was going to be the last time I got to touch them.

00:07:02:06

OTF interview in car, Darrel Wilken

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

00:07:08:06

Interview, Michelle Simmons and Daniel Simmons

MICHELLE SIMMONS: All of a sudden, I see a figure running through smoke and I don't know how I knew, but I knew it was him. I knew it was Daniel.

00:07:25:14

Cellphone video, car driving, wildfire

MICHELLE SIMMONS: Oh my gosh. It's hot. We're stuck in it. That is hot. Hot right now. There's explosions everywhere. Oh my God. People's tires are popping.

00:07:39:04

JESSE ALEXANDER: You'd be next to a firefighter. And you'd be like, "Hey, how you doing?" And they'd look at you and go, "Yeah, my house is gone." And you start to ask them, "Where's your family?" "I don't know." That's when it started, the gravity of everything really started to hit me.

00:07:55:20

DARREL WILKEN: Shit. We're in a bad spot.

00:08:20:19

MICHELLE SIMMONS: Oh my God. Ah. It's okay. You guys, it's okay. Just keep going. Keep going, baby. Keep going. Okay. Oh my God. That was so scary.

00:08:28:02

DANIEL SIMMONS: As soon as we broke through that wall of smoke, it was just daylight. It was almost blinding, but we knew that we, we had escaped.

00:08:40:13

Interview, Darrel Wilken

DARREL WILKEN: Myself and my three patients all made it through the fire. We all survived.

00:08:52:14

GV, wildfire aftermath

ALEXANDRA SYPHARD: When I think about the numbers, I feel like my jaw still drops to the ground. Almost 19,000 structures. So many lives lost. It's astounding.

00:09:05:13

SUPER: ALEXANDRA SYPHARD SENIOR RESEARCH ECOLOGIST CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE

00:09:12:23

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: When the 2018 fire season ended, it was the deadliest and most destructive in California history. The Camp Fire burned the town of Paradise, killed 86 people and was the most expensive natural disaster on earth that year. At the time, 2018 was the fourth warmest year in recorded history and a warming climate pointed to even more fire in the future. But how could this disaster happen in California: state that is home to the largest and most advanced firefighting organization in the world?

00:09:20:19

MCU, Tim Ingalsbee walking through forest

TIMOTHY INGALSBEE: Over a 10-year period, I was a wildland firefighter for both the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, many varied experiences doing just about everything in fire except jumping out of airplanes. The primary tactic is to corral fires by creating an un-burnable line around them. You encircle the whole fire perimeter with a trail built to mineral soil, nothing burnable there. And then you start burning inside that line to kind of rob the wildfire of any fuel to burn. You use hand tools, shovels, Pulaskis and rakes. You could use heavy equipment like bulldozers or plows. Then you add in the airshow with helicopters and planes dropping water, retardant. And when you get those different crews and parts working together, that's when it's very effective. But you don't really put out the fire. You put a fire line around the fire and over time the fire will just kind of burn out of any burnable fuel. What the Camp Fire disaster did was it caused a lot of people to see the limits of firefighting, so the question has become how do we protect communities in a changing climate that is becoming hotter, drier, stormier, with more people living in fire prone places.

00:10:28:00

SUPER: TIMOTHY INGALSBEE FIREFIGHTERS UNITED FOR SAFETY, ETHICS & ECOLOGY

00:10:42:01

GV, wildfire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Firefighters work to protect communities is nothing short of heroic and it can be incredibly effective. Most wildfires are put out safely and quickly. The LA County Fire Department is the pinnacle of firefighting skill, technology, and grit. It is amongst the most elite fire suppression organizations in the world.

00:11:45:17

MCU, helicopter

DEREK ALKONIS: So the threat in Los Angeles county, I say that it's probably one of the most dangerous places around because we get the kind of weather that very few places on the earth get, coupled with a vegetation and the topography, the number of people that we have living here. And it makes for a very threatening environment.

00:12:08:19

MIKE SAGELY: Our air operation here is extremely demanding. We have a complex aircraft, we fly a single pilot. We fly it day, night, under night vision goggle, a very diverse and demanding environment that we operate in, doing a very complex mission. Because of the way we are here in Southern California and the way the houses are built into canyons and built into the terrain, the fire danger is quite high. So when you see a fire that is moving towards homes, it definitely puts an added sense of urgency with what you're doing.

00:12:29:07

SUPER: MIKE SAGELY SENIOR PILOT, LA COUNTY FIRE AIR OPS

00:12:52:02

DEREK ALKONIS: There's over a hundred cameras in the LA Orange county areas, in those wildfire-prone locations. And they've got a camera 365 days, 24 hours a day on these areas. They'll be able to pick up a little bit of smoke in a location and then get a response out really quick. The conditions we can fly in and how much water we can drop is unparalleled to any other era of firefighting. But we still on the ground, we basically do the same thing. We're taking hose lines and spraying water on the fire's edge. We're clearing the vegetation from the fire's edge.

00:13:00:08

TEXT, LOWER THIRD: DEREK ALKONIS ASSISTANT FIRE CHIEF, LA COUNTY FIRE

00:13:02:03

Interview, Mike Sagely in helicopter

MIKE SAGELY: The best tactic that we like to use is a combination of the aircraft along with ground crews that are actually on the ground cutting line. And then we support that movement.

00:13:40:12

MS: Firefighter in front of wildfire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Since 1983, an average of 72,000 fires burn each year in the U.S., nearly 98% of them are controlled by firefighters before becoming large and destructive to human communities.

00:13:50:03

Interview, Derek Alkonis

DEREK ALKONIS: But when the winds hit the canyons, they bounce and they move and they shift. If you haven't been in a wind-driven fire, day turns into night, there's so much particle in the air that you have no idea that it's daytime and you've got flame lengths, 30, 40, 50 feet high. And you've got so many embers being tossed at 50 miles an hour, spotting about a mile in front of you. And to think that you're going to stop it by putting a hand line or putting a dozer quickly around it. It's not going to happen.

00:14:10:13

Interview, Mike Sagely in helicopter

MIKE SAGELY: If it's so windy that the water literally isn't even really hitting the ground, then what are you doing other than accepting a large level of risk?

00:14:49:18

SUPER: MIKE SAGELY SENIOR PILOT, LA COUNTY FIRE AIR OPS

00:14:50:17

GV, fighting fire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: To understand how fires move, think of the Camp Fire. On a dry and windy day, a power line falls and ignites nearby vegetation. Extreme wind fans flames and sends hundreds of embers far ahead of the initial fire to start new spot fires, which start hundreds more fires just minutes after the initial ignition. Spotting enabled the campfire to travel six miles in just two hours.

00:14:59:03

ANIMATION

00:15:02:14

DEREK ALKONIS: We don't want anything to burn as firefighters, but you would have to have four to five engine companies there and a truck company there, and a paramedic squad on every single structure to adequately protect it. That's impossible when you've got thousands of homes in the fire's path.

00:15:28:13

POV, driving through fire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: While the number of fires per year stay surprisingly similar, the destruction they cause is increasing at an alarming rate and that destruction is caused by a very small number of fires.

00:15:48:10

Interview, Jack Cohen

JACK COHEN: The 2% of the wildfires that occur, end up being extreme. The wildfires that we can't control at initial attack, they're inevitable. Our disasters, our wildland urban fire disasters are occurring during that 2% of those wildfires. There is no management trend that indicates that we're going to be able to control all wildfires.

00:16:06:18

SUPER: JACK COHEN USFS FIRE LAB RESEARCH SCIENTIST (RET.)

00:16:07:09

Interview, Tim Ingalsbee

TIMOTHY INGALSBEE: There is a perception that firefighters choose not to put out some fires or with more resources, more air tankers, bigger air tankers, they can just put all fires out. And that's a dangerous misunderstanding of the situation.

00:16:34:14

GV: wind and smoky skies

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: This misunderstanding was laid bare in 2020. After a hot dry summer, fires burned up and down the West coast. On Labor day, a 50-year wind event turned valleys into wind tunnels after a record breaking heat wave. In Oregon, live power lines ignited new fires and existing fires were fanned by winds of up to a hundred miles per hour, forcing people in towns across Oregon to immediately evacuate in a replay of the Paradise disaster.

00:16:58:23

[VO] VOICE TALENT: This is unprecedented. This has never happened in Oregon. We have not experienced the tremendous loss and destructive fire nature that we've seen over the last 72 hours in our history.

00:17:30:18

CHRIS DUNN: This massive fire event extends from the Canadian border all the way to the Mexican border, and the damage was significant.

00:17:47:03

Cell video, wildfire

ANTHONY JACOBSON: Wow. Look it above me. Jesus. There's embers floating all over around me. This thing is going to light everything on fire. Look, they're landing on the ground, right there.

00:17:55:22

Interview, Bill Edge

BILL EDGE: Well, you got fire over here. Fire back there. Now there's another fire up here. There's fire on the other side of the river. The helicopter pad was burning. So basically everything's on fire out here.

00:18:06:04

SUPER: BILL EDGE GATES, OREGON RESIDENT

00:18:06:20

GV, smoky skies

[VO] KATE BROWN: Our air quality ranks the worst in the world due to these fires. More than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated.

00:18:18:03

OTF Interview, fire victim

UNKNOWN FEMALE: I had to walk away from everything that we have ever known and lived for.

00:18:26:19

POV, driving through wildfire aftermath

SAM DREVO: This is our property. Man. Oh my God. That hill up there was on fire. The entire hill. And then it just got worse and worse here, clearly. So I'm glad we got out with our lives, you know. It's the most important thing. Just crazy, man. This place is just reduced to rubble. Nothing left.

00:18:40:11

SUPER: SAM DREVO GATES, OREGON RESIDENT

00:19:06:01

GV, wildfire aftermath

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: As residents returned to find their homes burned, a narrative began to spread that more forest management could have stopped the fires and the firefighters could have put out remote fires early in the summer before extreme winds fanned them into destructive infernos. Digging deeper reveals dozens of power line ignitions across the state of Oregon.

00:19:27:21

GV, wildfire

[VO] 9-1-1 AUDIO: There's a branch hanging from power lines that's smoldering and burning. We got a fucking fire. Okay. Give me just a moment. God, honey, look at that. Look at that. It's sparking. Oh God, that was too close.

00:19:49:10

SUPER: 911 AUDIO

ANIMATION

00:19:49:17

Interview, Bill Edge

BILL EDGE: I see something, you know, boom. And my son, he went by and he's telling me he actually seen some sparks flying off of the telephone wires down the road here.

00:20:04:15

Interview, Dimond Edge

DIMOND EDGE: Between those two sections. That's where I seen it spark the whole way down. I didn't think it's going to start this whole hillside on fire.

00:20:15:08

SUPER: DIMOND EDGE GATES, OREGON RESIDENT

00:20:16:03

Cell video, wildfire

BILL EDGE: You know the winds are pushing 65 miles an hour or better and they're coming this way.

00:20:22:11

Interview, Dimond Edge

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Those power line ignitions suddenly threatened thousands of homes simultaneously and immediately overwhelmed firefighting capacity. People fled with no advance warning.

00:20:27:09

Interview, Dan Benjamin

DAN BENJAMIN: Our fire department is not designed to fight a fire with a 95 mile hour wind. We don't have those resources. It does not exist.

00:20:39:20

SUPER: DAN BENJAMIN EMT ASSISTANT-CHIEF, GATES FIRE DEPT

00:20:40:09

Aerial, wildfire aftermath

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: 2020 became Oregon's most destructive fire in history. And globally, it tied previous records for the hottest year ever recorded. California's single largest fire went from 280,000 acres in 2017 to over 1 million acres in 2020. But in the past, firefighting worked. So what changed? One change is people's relationship with fire. The Yurok who had lived in the same fire-prone landscape since before the arrival of European settlers respected and worked with this powerful element.

00:20:57:12

SUPER: THOMAS FIRE 281,893 acres

00:21:08:22

SUPER: AUGUST COMPLEX 1,032,648 acres

00:21:15:03

SUPER: YUROK RESERVATION KLAMATH RIVER, CALIFORNIA

00:21:36:18

OTF Interview, Rick O'Rourke

RICK O'ROURKE: I do not fight fire. I light fire. I think grandma was born like 1910. Fire was a major tool of managing this landscape. She remembers that there was people burning. Great grandma used to tell her, and it's a fire adapted landscape and we're fire adapted people and the application of fire kept us in balance and it gave us enough open territory for our animals and our food sources and everything that we needed to survive and thrive. I was probably 10, 11. As the brush was growing right up next to our house, obviously it's a fire danger. So grandma and grandpa knew this. And so they just decided to cut the brush, move it away, pile it and burn it. Then we started burning it a little more, then a little more. And then, it made sense, if there's no fuel to burn, then you're safe.

00:21:54:21

SUPER: RICK O'ROURKE CULTURAL FIRE MANAGEMENT COUNCIL YUROK TRIBAL MEMBER

00:22:38:02

CU, Margo Robbins weaving

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Fire wasn't only a question of safety. The Yurok people used it to increase food production and improve the creation of raw materials from native plants like willow and hazel.

00:23:07:02

MARGO ROBBINS: A long time ago, each family had their own place that they would take care of. Often using fire. They would have their hazel gathering place. Their acorn gathering place. Their place to gather berries. If it hasn't been burned, then you don't have these single straight shoots. It has many limbs on it. And after fire, it becomes stronger and more pliable, more flexible.

00:23:20:06

SUPER: MARGO ROBBINS, CULTURAL FIRE MANAGEMENT COUNCIL YUROK TRIBAL MEMBER

00:23:20:11

Interview, Rick O'Rourke

RICK O'ROURKE: The land was clear when I was a young man, when I was just a kid, it was a lot of prairies. Elk used to be abundant here, like the herds of the buffalo back in the plains.

00:23:54:05

Aerial photos

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: In the absence of fire, meadows shrink and disappear, decreasing biodiversity and habitat for game. It's a process that began as settlers colonized the West and fundamentally changed our relationship with fire.

00:24:04:12

Aerial, landscape

RICK O'ROURKE: They started prosecuting us and putting us in jail for lighting fires. And then they called us arsonists and renegades. There was a mass public hanging of 17 native individuals and they were hung in public for lighting fires.

00:24:20:09

GV, tree

MARGO ROBBINS: Colonization is the whole reason why fire was taken away from the average person because the colonizers were afraid of fire. They just suppressed them. And so it went from something that was used in a good way to something to be really done away with, to exclude it completely.

00:24:40:19

Aerial, landscape

RICK O'ROURKE: In the last 100, 120 years, there're tens to hundreds of thousands of cultural burns that haven't occurred here.

00:25:13:00

Archival footage

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: At the same time, as the new inhabitants of North America were preventing Native Americans from tending the land near their communities with fire, they were busy suppressing wildfire through a new organization called the Forest Service. In the 1920s, its mandate was to extinguish all blazes as quickly as possible. And it's easy to understand why. The early 20th century was a hot dry period. We know of the 1930s as the Dust Bowl, and it wasn't just crops that suffered. There was lots of fire which prompted a ramp up in fire suppression. By the 1940s, surplus military equipment from World War II mechanized and professionalized the effort, but large fires still burned homes and forests. Then something happened that confused our understanding of fire for generations. Ocean currents shifted and brought cooler, wetter conditions to the Western U.S. making fires far easier to fight.

00:25:47:16

ANIMATION, GRAPH

00:26:12:20

Interview, Chris Dunn

CHRIS DUNN: We had these incremental wet periods during the summer. Incremental rains every week or two. Just enough to tamp down fire behavior and support the fire managers to get out there and suppress those fires.

00:26:59:13

SUPER: CHRIS DUNN WILDFIRE RISK SCIENTIST OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

00:27:00:08

Archival footage

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: At the same time, cattle grazed heavily in the Southwest, consuming fuels that might have historically burned. Fire suppression was very successful. Acres burned per year on Western federal land plummeted from 7 million to around a million by the 1960s.

00:27:14:06

Graph animation

CHRIS DUNN: That's where we started, in the Western United States, really interacting with the landscape and developing our expectations on what the landscape could provide for us. And that's the period of that great expansion. We see communities expanding. We see the land utilization expanding. We've expanded our recreation resources. We've expanded our water infrastructure. We expanded our power infrastructure and we've expanded our timber bases under the expectation that's sustainable into the future

00:27:31:13

Archival footage

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: In the minds of people who grew up during the 1950s and 60s, fire was unlike hurricanes, tornadoes or floods. It was a force they could expect to control. Since then, the situation has changed. But for many people, expectations have not. By the 1980s, the Western United States left that cool wet period and entered a prolonged drought. And the number of acres burned per year began to rise. Now, increased drought and heat makes long wet periods a distant memory. And there are more people in nearly every fire-prone landscape, creating more potential for ignitions.

00:27:59:09

Satellite images

DEREK ALKONIS: Yeah. I mean, how has fire changed in my career, people ask me all the time, "Has it gotten worse?" And I tell them look at the list. If you look at the list of most destructive fires in California, largest fires in California, deadliest fires in California, most of the fires on the list have occurred in the last five to 10 years. I think that tells a story right there.

00:28:42:14

Graph animation

00:28:19:03

Timelapse, wildfire

TIM INGALSBEE: We have a real problem. Whole neighborhoods and small towns being incinerated by wildfires we cannot stop, we cannot put out. The strategy in recent decades, okay, we'll prevent these wildfires by removing the fuel first. And that's what people are talking about when they say forest management. On public lands it's mostly thinning where trees are selectively removed and on private land, they're talking mostly about clear cutting. So we're really counting on this fuels reduction to work to start reducing fire damage because almost all the money spent each year on preparing for wildfire is spent on it.

00:29:12:12

GV, tree falling

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: After decades of clear cutting older forests on public land, the Forest Service transitioned to thinning forests with the goal of reducing fire risk.

00:29:58:03

Archival footage

[VO] RON WYDEN: So the focus is on prevention. Going in there and thinning out those millions and millions of acres of overstocked stands.

00:30:12:01

SUPER: SENATOR RON WYDEN DEMOCRATIC PARTY, OREGON

00:30:12:16

[VO] TOM MCCLINTOCK: Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It is either carried out or it burns out, but it comes out.

00:30:21:05

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: This logging and thinning, dubbed fuel treatments, became the principle tactic to reduce the growing risk fire poses to homes and communities.

00:30:30:08

GV, Tania Schoennagel walking in forest

TANIA SCHOENNAGEL: So here's an area that's been thinned. The purpose of a thinning typically is to remove the smaller trees in a stand so that there's a larger distance between the trees. If a fire came through here pre-thinning, and it was very dense, some of those smaller trees serve then as what we call ladder fuel. So it would carry the fire up that smaller tree and up into the tree tops and then could run along in a canopy fire, where most of the trees would then die. So the hope is that a fire would come through here. It would lay on the ground. If firefighters could get in here that it would be a more defendable place and that hopefully the fire wouldn't get in to the community.

00:30:56:03

SUPER: TANIA SCHOENNAGEL LANDSCAPE ECOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO

00:31:17:23

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Now more than 30 years into this experiment, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year reducing fuels in forests. But the number of families who lose their homes to fire remains devastatingly high and firefighting costs continue to skyrocket. So Dr. Tania Schoennagel decided to examine why.

00:31:41:04

Interview, Tania Schoennagel

TANIA SCHOENNAGEL: So many things have to happen kind of perfectly to make that fuels reduction treatment work. Firefighters have to be there. It doesn't just go out on its own in a fuel treatment. You have to have people on the ground or aerial attack. And then it has to actually modify the behavior. And a lot of these treatments remain untested and we don't know how well they will do under these extreme conditions that are so destructive.

00:32:06:11

GV, wildfire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: But these are difficult questions to answer without being on the ground in a thinned patch of forest during a wildfire. To answer them, one would have to know where fire would burn before the forest grows back.

00:32:36:09

Interview, Tania Schoennagel

TANIA SCHOENNAGEL: We said, "Well, what's the high order question?" That is, do they even encounter wildfires? How often do they have an opportunity to do their job? Which is to reduce fire severity. If they don't encounter a wildfire, they don't have even the opportunity. And so what our group did is looked at all the recent treatments conducted in Western forests. And independent group just about at the same time, did a study that looked at all ecosystems across the West. And we came to the exact same conclusion. The results showed that over the last, say decade and a half, less than 1% of the area treated even encountered a wildfire.

00:32:49:05

GV, wildfire

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: For example, the forest around Fort Collins, Colorado was cut for over a decade to reduce fire risk. Then in 2012, the High Park fire burned 87,000 acres, but encountered almost none of the thinned areas on its way into town, where it destroyed 259 homes and killed one person. Zoom out to the entire country and we find a pattern that helps explain the increase in homes destroyed. We can't know where wildfires will burn. But some fires are so large, they burn through many fuel reduction projects. The town of Greenville is nestled in the forests of Northern California. Over the past decades, tens of thousands of acres have been cut and extensive fuel breaks have been created on the promise that these actions will protect nearby communities, lessen smoke, and reduce the costs of firefighting. But driven by winds and extremely dry conditions, the Dixie fire quickly swept through treated areas and jumped over fuel breaks to burn nearly 1 million acres and destroy over a thousand homes, leveling most of Greenville. While fuel reduction and timber harvest may have changed fire behavior for better or worse inside the burn, the tens of millions of dollars spent on cutting the surrounding forests did not help local residents, nor did it reduce the firefighting burden, and the 6,000 firefighters could not stop the blaze from becoming the state's second largest.

00:33:50:10

ANIMATION

00:33:52:07

ANIMATION

SUPER: GREENVILLE, [DATES], IGNITION AREA

00:34:31:22

OTF Interview, Tania Schoennagel

TANIA SCHOENNAGEL: So here we have one of many vistas where you see just a vast ocean of forests, and the idea that we can fireproof this huge landscape of flammable material is simply an impossible task. It's like trying to scoop out water out of the ocean to make it less wet. These areas are just so vast in the west that there's no way that we can remove enough trees to make them non-flammable. So what that means is that the vast majority of the treatments are just sitting out, laying wait, and waiting and waiting, and probably expiring in terms of their period of effectiveness, because of course, trees will grow back and fuels grow back. So what that told me is that even if we double or triple the number of effort in terms of area treated, it is not going to have a significant impact on wildfire.

00:35:31:11

Interview, Tim Ingalsbee

TIM INGALSBEE: You know the big shift in forest management and fire management came right at the early 1990s. And at that time, two things happened, one, scientists started measuring, "Hey, climate is affecting wildfire behavior," but secondly, they were clear cutting old growth to the point of driving species extinct. And so there were some court ordered legal restrictions on clear cut logging. And just like that, the focus of the agencies kind of morphed. They had charted out prescriptions that basically any tree made a wood was subject to being salvage logged or thinned as hazardous fuel. Now, this is all very different from prescribed burns. The real hazardous fuel load is the layer of small diameter fuels, the dead needles and limbs, shrubs and saplings that accumulate on the ground surface every year. This material is left behind by logging and thinning.

00:36:57:21

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Forest protections do limit logging in some areas of public land, especially when compared to private land. So fires in the west have been blamed on laws that protect natural older forests from being cut down. Testing this belief is tricky because fire conditions vary wildly from forest to forest, slope to slope, day to day, even minute to minute. Finding two fires that burned in identical conditions in different forests under different land management is challenging, but Oregon state university scientists were given the opportunity when a fire burned into an unusual area of land management in Southern Oregon.

00:38:05:11

Interview, Chris Dunn

CHRIS DUNN: This historical land allocation and management regime, where every other square, mile alternate between private, industrial land management strategies and public lands. It is very strange because nature doesn't operate on square lines, where you have right next to each other conservation type management versus timber production type management. In 2013, a fire burned through this checkerboard landscape and that it afforded us this opportunity to really ask this question, how does different forest management regimes influence the outcome of these fires? So what we found through this research was really surprising. In the Douglas complex intensive forest management increased fire severity relative to the less intensive public land management.

00:38:47:07

SUPER: CHRIS DUNN FIRE RISK SCIENTIST, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

00:38:47:23

CU: Chris Dunn in airplane

[VO] RADIO CHATTER: Weather pattern five thousand and five, temperature one six, dew point one one

00:39:43:13

CHRIS DUNN: And you can see looking from above that real impact of fire and land management. Well we're heading down to the Holiday Farm fire that burned along the McKenzie river and what's burned in that is I think 70% private, 65% of that being private industrial forest.

00:39:47:10

POV aerial from airplane

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Dr. Chris Dunn's work tested the long held belief that forest management made communities safer. If true, the towns engulfed by the 2020 Holiday Farm fire burning east of Eugene, Oregon should have faired better than those surrounded by natural forests.

00:40:13:19

Aerial, burned landscape

CHRIS DUNN: You could really see that fire behavior from one ridge to the next, with each of these crown fires.

00:40:33:10

PILOT: Vida should just be up ahead on the left.

00:40:41:23

CAMERAMAN: Oh my gosh.

00:40:44:18

CHRIS DUNN: So this is really where apparently, where the fire front was pushing through all these clear cuts and older plantations. And it really, really cooked them off.

00:40:45:14

PILOT: To the left, that's Blue River. Burnt.

00:41:03:05

CHRIS DUNN: I see a lot of management and a lot of mortality and a community lost. Smaller trees have thinner bark, which increases our susceptibility to any kind of fire. You have this perfect fuel bed of very uniform crowns, crowns touching. It's more easy to ignite those crowns and carry through the crowns than on the public lands that have more diverse crown structure. Now, looking at these Labor Day fires from the air and looking broadly across this landscape, you can see that these private industrial forest management regime, like we studied in the Douglas Complex, did not afford protection to these communities. Instead, what we saw was complete devastation of communities. The idea that you can push out a solution to do more forest harvesting to prevent that is fairly naive.

00:41:08:12

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Two thirds of all forests in the United States are available for timber production and extraction. The removal of older trees across so many acres often leaves rural communities nestled between clearcuts and young tree plantations. As the climate warmed in the late 1990s, Dr. Beverly Law began to ask what it might mean in terms of total carbon stored to shift the makeup of so many forests to younger trees.

00:42:23:01

GV, Beverly Law walking in forest

BEVERLY LAW: We're going to visit our mature pine Ameriflux site. It's about a 90-year old forest, and there's a climbing tower that takes us to the instruments at the top. And it measures the carbon dioxide exchange between the forest and the atmosphere. Well, the theory has always been that old forests are net carbon sources to the atmosphere or they are net zero. It's a theory that's driven a lot of decision making on old forests. We set out to say, "Well, what does it take up?" It started off with about 10 of us in the U.S. and 20 globally. And so when we all got together, we said, "Gee, we need to get our act together." And so we have comparative measurements and if we do it all the same way, then we can see how these different systems react to climate. And so now we have about a thousand worldwide and we have instruments on the towers and the towers are used to get them way above the tree canopy. And the aim is to get this net of carbon dioxide being taken up by the forest and given off, taken up, given off. And what's the net of that over different timeframes. Well, we found that these forest are much more important than people imagined. Mature and old forest are the workhorses. They take up more carbon annually and they have a lot more stored in the wood.

00:42:53:07

SUPER: BEVERLY LAW PROFESSOR EMERITUS, GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY

00:42:57:03

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: First, she and her team proved that theories about old forests losing carbon were based on flawed assumptions. And the exact opposite was true. Older forests continue to uptake carbon in huge quantities proportional to their size.

00:44:38:08

CU, climbing tower

BEVERLY LAW: This site is known as a young pine site, is pretty well known internationally. Trees here are about 28 years old and we have a young site and a mature site, and they're in about the same climate. And so we are comparing those carbon dioxide exchange with the atmosphere between these sites. Well we found that the young forest, it is a net source to the atmosphere for those first 20 years, every year, there's more respiration from the soil surface than there is photosynthesis in the uptake of carbon by the trees. So, 20 years they're going net zero.

00:44:59:09

CU, forest floor

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Her team's findings have sweeping implications for forest management. Young forests are actually contributing to climate change while old forests fight it. So how do her team's findings apply to a fire burned forest? Is it still storing carbon?

00:45:41:06

GV, Beverly Law walking in burned forest

BEVERLY LAW: When we look at fire emissions, they're a lot less than people think. So what you see here is the trees, they're still standing and about half of what is here is carbon, and it can stay here for decades to centuries. But these big trees, those will be centuries. And that's carbon that's not in the atmosphere. It's here in the forest. It's not in the atmosphere, the stuff that goes in the atmosphere is a small stuff. It's the small trees, the duff, shrubs, that kind of thing. These trees are still here. They may fall, but they'll still be here long after we're gone. And then new forests grow up where the seeds came down after the fire. And we found when we were doing our work on emissions, that the emissions from harvest were five to 10 times as much as they were from fire emissions. When a forest is harvested, there's carbon that's lost on every stage, from leaving debris on the ground, to wood that's lost to the landfill. So you're putting carbon into the atmosphere much quicker than you might have from the forest.

00:46:17:03

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: During the 2020 fire season, the forest where Dr. Law's team made some of its most important discoveries burned. The forest was the longest running carbon research site in the global network.

00:47:37:20

CU, driving car

BEVERLY LAW: I've been working at that site since about 2000. So 20 years of measurements, of continuous measurements at the site. And little fires had occurred in and about the area because that's just normal frequency, but it burned in 2020, the fire ran right through our research site. So we're going to see what it looks like, what the fire did isn't so bad, it’s what happened afterwards. Oh my gosh, there's the tower. Oh my God. It's been heavily logged. This is just wide open, huge area, huge area that's been logged. Carbon is carbon in the atmosphere. Whether you burned it for heat or you put it in the atmosphere some other way, adding more is not a good thing. We need to go carbon-free with our energy. Three decades. That's all the time we have. Before we reach a tipping point. I feel sick about it because the science was never considered. As a scientist, I didn't spend my whole career learning about all of this - decades to not have people use the science. Oh, what can you do?

00:47:55:14

SUPER: FALL 2019

00:50:16:20

SUPER: SPRING 2021

00:50:24:23

Aerial, forest

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: And Dr. Law's site is not alone. But her research shows that logging or even thinning forests releases more carbon than fire itself. This carbon is added to an already warming atmosphere as fire seasons grow longer, homes burn down, and lives are lost.

00:50:29:00

GV, bird on tree

JACK COHEN: Fire occurrence has been part of the natural history of North America since the retreat of ice sheets during the Pleistocene, humans were here when that was occurring. Humans were lighting fires. Lightning is the other principle igniter of fires. So fire occurrence is clearly not the disaster.

00:51:25:10

GV, Maya Khosla walking in forest

MAYA KHOSLA: I am a poet and also a wildlife biologist. I was sent out to the burned forest to work with a group of scientists and follow them around and quickly realized that these forests were so rich and biodiverse that if I didn't capture this in photos, film, words, no one was going to believe it because how on earth is a burned forest so beautiful and rich. This is really an alien landscape to most people. Once fire goes through, people just assume nothing is there, that it's destroyed, but it's not true at all. This is a place that's still intact with biodiversity and animals returning to the area. Right after fire, there's a flush of new vegetation that happens. All kinds of berry producing plants stimulated by fire. You see all the wildflowers coming in. I've seen carpets of morel mushrooms coming in right after fire. Smoke detecting beetles come in right after the fire. And they zoom in to the charred trees, lay their eggs there and woodboring beetle larvae grow inside the wood. Now, this draws a whole other layer of life in, which is the black-backed woodpecker. And they are specialists. They love these intensely burned forests, and they know exactly where to go to find the woodboring beetle larvae. And not only do they have their food source in these trees, they build their homes in the trees as well. Fire in the American West is like this grand reset button. Everything starts from that point onward. It's just an amazing thriving intensity of life, coming up from the ground, responding to the light that's available, there're resources available and animals coming into feast on all this.

00:52:07:08

SUPER: MAYA KHOSLA INDEPENDENT BIOLOGIST & WRITER

00:52:39:08

Wildlife camera

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Small mammals find abundant food in the new roots and leaves emerging after a fire and their numbers often rise, but small mammals are also food. A secretive family of goshawks have found a tree to nest in surrounded by high intensity burns where hunting is easier. And bears, bears love burned landscapes for the diversity of food. On this cold spring day, roots and berries are late to grow, but this bear finds plenty of grub worms in trees down by fire.

00:54:32:03

GV, bear in forest

MAYA KHOSLA: So it's like waves upon waves of new life coming in. I probably have about 12 cameras, all in all, all over the Sierra Nevada. I've been focusing on mammals with the remote cameras. I've seen foxes, bear, deer, mountain lions, bobcat, amazing shots of bobcat. And very recently in two locations, the Dixie Fire being one of them, Pacific fishers, right in the heart of a post-fire forest, right in the heart of the high intensity areas. When you see so much life in unexpected places, it makes you be so respectful of something so much larger than you that's happening and has happened for millions of years. And it's got a machinery that is mysterious and beautiful. It may not look that way to most eyes, initially, but it just is this mysterious unfolding of life. And that to me is the most amazing part of being here.

00:55:29:01

Timelapse, forest

TIM INGALSBEE: You know, wildfires do a lot of good work for free. They're part of an ecological stimulus that rejuvenates the landscape, but we have a real problem. We're failing to achieve our objectives, keeping people safe. What's needed is not just more of the same, but a completely different approach. I call it a shift in our paradigm and our whole approach to how we relate to fire on the land and what we do to live with fire on the land.

00:56:56:19

MS, Jack Cohen

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Enter Jack Cohen, a research scientist for the largest firefighting organization in the world.

00:57:33:06

GV, exterior of Forest Service building

From my standpoint, one of the major contributions of the research that I've done is to redefine this problem. But the main point here is that it's a home ignition problem, not a wildfire control problem. The big problem with us defining wildland urban fire disasters as a wildfire problem is that we focus on and put all of our energy into attempting to eliminate the wildfire to begin with. We're 98% successful in our initial attacks. So we're putting our energy into the very, very difficult margins of control during the severe conditions. And we're not gaining. In bold face, it basically tells us that we're going in the wrong direction. We want to do fuel treatment. And particularly since 2018, we have emphasized the idea of doing fuel treatment, maintaining the wildfire definition of the problem, instead of taking the opportunity to be more practically effective with regard to changing the ignitability of the thing that gets destroyed, which are the structures.

00:57:40:04

SUPER: JACK COHEN USFS FIRE LAB RESEARCH SCIENTIST (RET.)

00:57:49:02

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: But is it possible to separate home ignition from a wildfire. To find out Jack would need large blocks of forest, something to represent homes and a flame thrower

00:59:17:23

Archival footage

RESEARCHER: This is plot number five, right here, panning into it. This camera will be in this box. This is the one that we're hoping to burn about five o'clock.

00:59:31:04

JACK COHEN: So I'm asking the question, how big an area do we have to do vegetation control, vegetation treatment in order to eliminate the ignition producing exposure from a wildfire? How far away do I have to do this in order to keep those big flames from igniting my house? So I got involved in doing four years worth of crown fire experiments, where I built wall sections and exposed them to the big flames of crown fires at 33, 66, and 98 feet from this big wall of flame.

00:59:42:12

ANIMATION

01:00:07:11

RESEARCHER: And Jack Cohen has his shelter in there, or his wall section. That's over here. I’ll zoom in on that.

01:00:24:12

JACK COHEN: So here's what it looks like. We have these square blocks carved out of the boreal forest in the Northwest Territories. And we ignite that with essentially a mobile flame thrower. 75 gallons of jelly gasoline in about 45 seconds along the ignition line. And we were able to produce crown fires.

01:00:40:07

RESEARCHER: There we go. Oh. Yeah.

01:01:17:14

Interview, Jack Cohen

JACK COHEN: And now what I want to know is what is the effect of this crown fire?

01:01:37:06

Archival footage

RESEARCHER: Jack's in there somewhere. There goes Jack.

01:01:44:10

RESEARCHER: All your towers are still up, Brett!

01:01:57:19

RESEARCHER: Got some good video?

01:01:59:11

RESEARCHER: Got Jack running into the smoke.

01:02:01:06

JACK COHEN: At 33 feet, we got four out of seven of the wall sections to ignite. At 66 feet, the big crown fire flames didn't even char the wood. So now I've essentially scaled my zone of treatment to keep the house from burning down to within a hundred feet of the house. And that's become essentially the home ignition zone size.

01:02:10:07

Animation

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Jack calculated that thinning vegetation in a gradient, starting a hundred feet from the house and clearing more and more, as you move closer to the home is all that is needed to eliminate ignitions from flame exposure. But, there was another type of ignition that persisted.

01:02:40:11

Archival footage

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

01:02:58:19

JACK COHEN, ARCHIVAL: I was seeing things during fires that I just sort of filed away in the back of my head. Things that didn't quite match what my expectations were. I started really paying attention to not only the things that were destroyed during a wildland urban interface fire event, but also maybe especially those things that survive.

01:03:13:13

OTF, Jack Cohen at computer

JACK COHEN: One of the interesting things about this photo is that we have largely forest, both conifer as well as deciduous surrounding total destruction. And yet when we look, if we back out and we look at where the fire came from, we see that all the trees, the tree canopies are unconsumed before it gets to the total destruction of the mobile home park.

01:03:39:00

Archival interview, Jack Cohen

JACK COHEN, ARCHIVAL: More than half the time, the big crown fires aren't igniting these structures. It's something else.

01:04:18:23

POV from car

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Understanding that something was crucial for Jack's theory to work.

01:04:26:13

Interview, Jack Cohen

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

01:04:37:08

GV, fire in building

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: And with that, Jack created the modern understanding of how fire moves through a community. He found the mechanism that burns houses and why wind creates so many ignitions.

01:04:57:20

Interview, Roy Wright

ROY WRIGHT: 90% of those are from embers.

01:05:11:18

Interview, Alexandra Syphard

ALEXANDRA SYPHARD: Embers are flying ahead of the fire front.

01:05:15:08

Interview, Derek Alkonis

DEREK ALKONIS: So many embers spotting in advance of the fire.

01:05:17:12

Aerial, exterior of Institute for Business and Home Safety

JACK COHEN: So we had to do experiments where we could generate a blizzard of burning embers on a full-scale house, and then begin to experiment with where the ignitions occur and see if a specific design was vulnerable to ignition from burning embers.

01:05:26:17

Interview, Roy Wright

ROY WRIGHT: We have a major test chamber. It's the size of an airplane hangar, whether it's against hurricane hail or wildfire, we crash test structures here. We're convinced that there's a point where you can prevent the loss.

01:05:56:18

SUPER: ROY WRIGHT PRESIDENT & CEO INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS & HOME SAFETY

01:05:57:21

GV, exterior of Institute for Business and Home Safety

JACK COHEN: There is nothing else that I know of on this planet where we can actually go in and do full scale experiments with burning embers.

01:06:11:05

OTF interview, Daniel Gorham

DANIEL GORHAM: We have a wall of fans. It's 105 fans, and we're able to create realistic wind speeds and wind gusts. So all that wind comes at us here. And then we also have these ember generators. These are the ducts that you see coming out of the ground, but what is happening underneath the ground is we have a burn chamber where we're feeding in wood chips and dowels, and when that starts to burn, up out of the duct comes these glowing, smoldering embers. And that's what we see in a real wildfire, the wildfire exposure that impacts buildings and homes. What we have here is a mock test building. Half of it is wildfire-resistant, and the other half of it is more traditional building structure. And here in the wind chamber, we're going to shoot embers at it. And when they come and impact the building, we're going to see the difference in wildfire-resistant building and non-wildfire resistant building and how they performed to that ember exposure. I get really excited about burning houses down.

01:06:20:20

SUPER: DANIEL GORHAM WILDFIRE RESEARCH ENGINEER INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS & HOME SAFETY

01:06:37:03

CU, researcher at computer

[RADIO] DANIEL GORHAM: Final safety check. We have water curtain on, attack line and backup line in place. Fans are on. We're about to start generator starter procedure.

01:07:16:21

[RADIO] RESEARCHER: Control room ready

01:07:27:15

[RADIO] DANIEL GORHAM: Copy.

01:07:29:14

[RADIO] RESEARCHER: Alright generators are ready, on your mark Dan

01:07:30:16

GV, inside of Institute for Business and Home Safety

[RADIO] DANIEL GORHAM: Copy, test starts in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Generators on.

01:07:34:11

[RADIO] RESEARCHER: Alright all crews all going

01:07:42:11

Interview, Jack Cohen

JACK COHEN: What this all means is that we have huge opportunities to change the requirements for combustion such that it doesn't happen. We don't have to control the extreme wildfire in order to keep the house from igniting and burning. And we don't have to live in a concrete ammo bunker to prevent the next Paradise.

01:08:32:23

GV, landscape

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: There are currently no laws in the United States requiring houses to include all of the recommendations from the researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. But California began to require houses and fire-prone areas to incorporate some of the recommendations in 2008. Dr. Alexandra Syphard looked at 4,000 homes that either survived or burned in California fires.

01:09:01:20

Interview, Alexandra Syphard

ALEXANDRA SYPHARD: There are a range of strategies that can be taken to increase the chance that homes could survive a fire. Those strategies that are closest to the house are more effective. By far, the most important factors were the structural characteristics that you would associate with preventing ember penetration into a structure. Vent screens, enclosing eaves, multipane or double pane windows, and defensible space done from the structure out to five feet. And then going out to about 40-60 feet you got some significant benefit of defensible space. And anything beyond maybe 60-70 feet was not significantly beneficial when it comes to structure loss. Vegetation management can control behavior, it can make fire slower, and in a strategic places, even in wind driven weather, it could buy a little bit of time for defense. But serving those functions is only relevant if it is near an asset that you are trying to protect. If it is not, even if it does slow the fire, it doesn't matter.

01:09:33:00

SUPER: ALEXANDRA SYPHARD SENIOR RESEARCH ECOLOGIST CONSERVATION BIOLOGY INSTITUTE

01:09:33:22

GV, fire in building

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: Even in the face of compelling research, we continue to spend billions on thinning forests and suppressing fires, and very little on preparing homes to resist ignition. So what does the industry whose bottom line depends on an accurate assessment of risk care about? Decades of research that tells us how to keep homes safe. Based on this, the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety has honed a new certification program that focuses on the home itself and five feet immediately around it. But, the small amount of money spent to support homeowners goes primarily to clearing vegetation up to 100 feet from structures, rather than focusing on the most effective actions. So what drives the destructive fires that burn homes and kill people? Wind and drought. In favorable conditions, firefighters are often able to slow flames and prevent community-wide destruction. But not all fires burn in favorable conditions. A warming climate is increasing the frequency of extreme fire weather, yet for the vast majority of Western forests, high-severity fires, in dry, windy conditions are nothing new. For evidence that these forests evolved with intense fires, just look up. In the Rim fire that burned near Yosemite in California, spotted owls occupied nests inside the burned forest at similar numbers to before the fire. Recent studies show that owls raised their young in forests burned at low intensity and prefer to hunt in nearby high intensity burns. The new green growth attracts small mammals and provides abundant food, even for a wobbly owlet, hoping to fly for the first time.

01:10:53:12

Timelapse, flowers

TIMOTHY INGALSBEE: There's nothing that influences fire like fire. And last year’s fire storms in California, during the peak of their runs, the only thing having any effect on their fire spread or their fire behavior was bumping into recent fires. That's what stopped the progression of the wildfires. So that's what the fire community believes. You got to get as much fire on the ground as possible now, to hedge against the wildfires of the future. So what does living and thriving with fire look like? Preparing our homes and communities, so we can live with more wildfire on the landscape, combined with the careful use of controlled burning by indigenous fire practitioners and prescribed fire professionals.

01:13:33:02

SUPER: YUROK RESERVATION KLAMATH RIVER, CALIFORNIA

01:14:23:04

MS, fire professionals

RICK O'ROURKE: We are in the fifth day of our 2019 fall TREX. We're on the Yurok Reservation on the Klamath River and what we're doing is a training exchange. And we welcome all of these people that come in, folks from Spain, from Mexico, Canada.

01:14:29:05

ROCK WOOD: We want to burn it all the way into these bushes here. So if you're on holding, you got to move back into bushes. It's going to come around those trees. And we want to get fire into this big group right here. That's invasive, right here. That's 40 years growth right here. We're going to see if we can kill some of this.

01:14:44:11

Interview, Margo Robbins

MARGO ROBBINS: The community here from Wauteck to Weitchpec decided that the number one issue facing our community of most importance was to bring fire back to the land. Our ancestors had a fire regime that included regular cycles of burning, so fir trees did not encroach on the prairies. There was not all these non native, invasive species. Fire is definitely a part of restoring the ecosystem to balance. And so it's like, it’s a sacred obligation and responsibility and a privilege to be in this time, in this place, and to bring fire back to the land and to the people. It's awesome. I can like, just totally see the vision when this is pure prairie again. You can tell it's coming. I can almost see the elk here. It's good stuff.

01:14:59:11

SUPER: MARGO ROBBINS CULTURAL FIRE MANAGEMENT COUNCIL YUROK TRIBAL MEMBER

01:15:00:06

Interview, Elizabeth Azzuz

ELIZABETH AZZUZ: Well we have a 100 years of fire suppression as you can see around us, there is blackberries, a lot of brush, brambles, so the high mountain Elk and the coastal Elk haven’t been able to get to each other for a quite a while and this is one of their historic corridors. So it is going to take a lot of young people to come out here to continually come back year after year and help us burn in the spring and in the fall to help restore this land to what it was before.

01:16:18:22

SUPER: ELIZABETH AZZUZ CULTURAL FIRE MANAGEMENT COUNCIL YUROK TRIBAL MEMBER

01:16:19:21

MS, fire professionals

ELIZABETH AZZUZ: Please. Grandfather, grandmother, accept this blessing today and give us the blessing of fire. We will care for it as you had cared for it in the past, in the present and in the seven generations to come. [Yurok]

01:16:52:06

FIRE LIGHTER: Give us guidance, clarity of mind, purity, and we are going to carry this out with the best intentions.

01:17:13:16

MARGO ROBBINS: Oh, I love that sound. [laughs]

01:17:37:19

RICK O'ROURKE: It's good for our ecosystems. It's good for our water, our hydrology, our prairies. There's just so much that I'm learning about that it's amazing just the sheer necessity of fire on the land. We have 300,000 acres to do, and we're doing 15 of it today [laughter], but it's 15 that we didn't have done yesterday. So every time we put fire on the ground, it's a step in healing. All of us.

01:17:46:16

GV, smoke in forest

MARGO ROBBINS: That is freaking amazing [laughter]. So happy.

01:18:21:18

Fade out/in

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: But there are challenges. The majority of homes that are lost to wildfires are not in forests. In California, eighty percent of wildfire-burned homes are lost in grasslands or chaparral. And if we compare our situation today to cultures that have lived harmoniously with fire since time immemorial, we see a very different landscape. Forests are now crisscrossed with roads and power lines. Older forests have been logged and converted to young tree plantations. Many forests are lined with suburban development. While prescribed and cultural fire restores and revitalizes the land, we struggle to bring it back in this challenging environment. Still, communities in any fire-prone landscape can find hope in those that survived. On Labor Day in 2020, fires devastated communities across the State of Oregon, including the community of Elkhorn.

01:18:56:23

Aerial, forest

MARY BRADSHAW: Everything burned. All of the trees. Most of the homes. It's just was unbelievable. When we saw how devastating the fire had been and how much loss there had been, we really didn't know whether our house had survived. We knew that most of the neighborhood was destroyed. Totally gone. Nobody here thought we would ever have a forest fire, but we did the research and planned for the event and when you live in the forest, that's always an eventuality.

01:20:01:08

SUPER: MARY BRADSHAW ELKHORN, OREGON RESIDENT

01:20:33:11

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: While many residents had cleared vegetation around their homes, few knew of the far higher odds of survival that hardening a home provides. But Mary Bradshaw did.

01:20:44:07

Interview, Mary Bradshaw

MARY BRADSHAW: We built the house with metal roof. We put no gutters up because gutters collect pine needles. We have no vegetation against the house. Our patio and our porch are concrete. We have cement fiber board siding. We have closed soffits so that nothing can get up underneath and catch fire.

01:20:57:09

Aerial, forest and homes

[NARRATION] DAVID OYELOWO: When the fire blew through the forest and into the community, Mary's home survived.

01:21:17:06

Aerial, forest and homes

MARY BRADSHAW: The house was basically unscathed. We were shocked. We wanted to live in the forest. We didn't expect the forest to adapt to us. So we built with the forest in mind, and I think it saved us.

01:21:26:01

Timelapse, ferns

TIM INGALSBEE: What we can do right now is prepare homes and communities. Because that's something we can do. We have all the tools and technology and ability to do that right now. In a few short years, we could maybe eliminate that problem of homes and communities being destroyed by wildfire. And when we get there, that expands all of our options and opportunities of how to work with fire on the land, how put more fire on the ground, safely and sustainably.

01:21:57:13

Black

01:22:51:18

CREDITS

01:22:59:19