“It was bedlam,” recalled Elfin Forest resident Nancy Reed. “Absolute bedlam.”

After being trapped in traffic during the 2014 Cocos Fire, Reed is among many looking to avoid previous evacuation woes. Reed, who scrambled to load her animals and connect her trailer to her car, was unable to evacuate due to traffic along the road. Other residents were unable to make multiple trips back to rescue all of their animals after mandatory evacuations began. 

Reed owns five horses, two dogs and two cats. She credits Jazzi, her 18-year-old competitive riding horse, with helping her through her husband’s death in 2006. 

“There is no way in hell I am leaving her with a fire,” she said. “No way in hell. You wouldn’t do that with your child. You would do whatever you had to do if it was your child.”

Wendy Said, a horse trainer in Harmony Grove, loaded her donkey and two horses in her 40-foot trailer the evening before the fire closed in. She waited two hours to pull out of her driveway and onto Country Club Road, a dead-end passageway that feeds onto the main road. 

“It’s a mess every single time,” Said lamented. “I’ve lived here for 33 years; it gets worse every time.”

Reed and Said are among two neighbors who conducted a census of horses in Elfin Forest Harmony Grove. Coordinating with local and state officials, Reed is working on plans for staging areas when the next disaster strikes. 

“We’ve got to do something better because you cannot let family members perish,” Reed said.

Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove are home to more than 500 horses, according to the neighborhood census, which also includes chickens, goats, and alpacas. When fires strike, residents are at the mercy of the unpredictable nature of the burn — as well as crowded traffic conditions that are exacerbated by cattle trailers and multiple trips required to evacuate pets. 

Residents fear future neighborhood developments may further complicate evacuation. The town council has sued San Diego County over two proposed developments — Valiano and Harmony Grove Village South — that, combined, would add more than 700 homes to the area. Council Chairman JP Theberge said the developments’ approvals violate a “good-faith promise” by the county that it would not approve more housing in the area.

Both of them surround Harmony Grove Village, a 700-home development approved in 2007. The site is estimated to be completed in 2020, according to the company website. Theberge said the new residents have become a part of the community; however, he’s unsure how a full neighborhood will factor into evacuation. 

“We’re still not clear on what’s going to happen when the next fire comes and we have 750 homes already built,” Theberge said. 

Said, whose property is near the site for Valiano, describes the proposed development a “tomb.”

“How would we, in the best case scenario, get our horse trailers onto Country Club Drive?” she asked. 

Said and Reed, both longtime residents of Elfin Forest Harmony Grove, attribute the success of Elfin Forest Harmony Grove, as well as the support they’ve received on forming protocol, to the shared culture of autonomy and ownership.

“This is a resilient community,” Reed said. “People take care of one another. They care about one another.”

Kailey Broussard

Kailey Broussard is a master’s student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. As an undergraduate, Broussard reported on historic flooding in south Louisiana, as well as fraternity hazing at her alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her work has won regional recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Southeast Journalism Conference. She also served in various reporting and editing positions at the university’s student publication, The Vermilion. Her previous work can be found in The Advocate, The Current and The Independent. View her work on her website here.

kaileybroussard.com

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Bounce houses, barbecues and face painting are recurring trademarks at the annual White Mountains Community Firewise Block Party. But this year included a new attraction, presentations from the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire (CPAW) program. 

The program is funded by the U.S. Forest Service and other private foundations to work with wildfire-vulnerable community and provide fire safety training, land use planning, hazard assessments and wildfire risk trend research to make the community fire adapted. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group defines that as “a human community consisting of informed and prepared citizens collaboratively planning and taking action to safely coexist with wildland fire.”

Since its establishment in 2015, CPAW has partnered with 30 communities in 13 states across the country to make them fire adapted. 

The program received 27 grant applications from seven different states this year and accepted four. The 2019 communities are Pinetop-Lakeside, Gunnison County, Colorado, Redding, California and Mariposa County, California.

Kelly Johnston, forestry and fire behavior expert and the lead of the CPAW Pinetop-Lakeside project said the program’s decision to work with the community was a “no-brainer” because of the area’s susceptibility to wildfires and the willingness of officials to work together.

In the last two decades, Pinetop-Lakeside has been forced to evacuate twice by two historic Arizona wildfires — the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire and the 2011 Wallow Fire, which collectively burned more than 998,000 acres.

“I’m very excited to have CPAW working with us because they not only save lives and structures, but they make the jobs of our firefighters much safer. It’s a win-win for everyone,” said Jim Morgan, fire chief of the Pinetop Fire Department, who led to the application for the grant. “If we can survive wildfires, we can have a home to go home to and forests to enjoy.”

To make learning about wildfire safety both fun and consistent, the Pinetop Fire Department co-hosted the annual Firewise Block Party for the fifth time, Morgan sees this as a resource to the people.

“If we can get an early start to fire safety education, we can get a multigenerational change to our culture,” Morgan said. “If we start teaching kids to be fire safe it becomes embedded into them. It becomes a part of them for their whole lives.”

On the Friday before the party, the CPAW team hosted a wildfire training day. 

“We are really focused on empowering people to move forward so they can carry on in the long term to reduce wildfire risk through land planning,” Johnston said. “These meetings and sessions are so important because we are essentially passing them the torch.”

The day after the training, Johnston joined other presentations during the party on topics such as homeowner fire safety, defensible space, fire wise landscaping and evacuation preparedness.

Residents of Pinetop-Lakeside join more than 832,000 Arizonians who live in intermixed communities, meaning housing and wildland vegetation intermingle, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2010 Wildland Urban Interface report. Data shows close to 40 million people across the country live in similarly forested communities.

Communities nestled in the forest are more vulnerable to wildfires. Across all the states, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have the largest percentage of their population living in forested communities, according to the report.

The approximately 4,300-person town of Pinetop-Lakeside is located in the largest Ponderosa pine forest in the world. According to the National Park Service, despite the tree itself being fire resistant, forests filled with Ponderosa pine are susceptible to wildfires because of the flammable foliage that surrounds the trees.

“We have not done the thinning that needs to occur to make that land manageable,” Morgan said. “That’s one of the things we are trying to educate our community on.”

The process to make Pinetop-Lakeside fire adapted began in April when CPAW made their first visit to the community. Johnston and other members of his team met with forestry experts, homeowners and the fire department.

“The real test to know whether or not the community is adapted is how well it fares if a wildfire goes through the community … The answer to that we won’t know until we respond to a significant wildfire and evaluate how we did,” Morgan said. “Being fire adapted can take many years and a community can never reach a fully adapted status because there is a dynamic relationship with the environment.”

The wildfire threat has been ever-present this year. According to data from the National Interagency Fire Center, more Arizonan land has been burned by wildfires in the first six months of 2019 than in all of 2018.

Johnston and other members of the CPAW team will present their research and recommendations during their final trip to Pinetop-Lakeside that is being planned sometime between October and December.

CPAW has been operating on yearly budget and within the next few months, will know if the USFS will continue its approximately $1 million funding of the  program. If granted, applications from wildfire-vulnerable communities will be opened in August.

Anton L. Delgado

Anton L. Delgado is a senior at Elon University where he studies journalism and international and global studies. At Elon, he serves as the managing editor of the school newspaper and as a multimedia journalist for Elon News Network. Delgado spent spring 2019 in Morocco as a news correspondent for Morocco World News. He has previously worked for Save the Children Jordan and Town&Country Philippines. Delgado dreams of working as an investigative journalist in conflict zones. View Delgado’s work here.

www.antondelgado.com

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The fire burned nearly 124,000 acres of the Superstition Wilderness and the Tonto National Monument. The difficult terrain made putting firefighters on the ground a potentially deadly risk.

“Our main value is firefighter safety and public safety,” said Dick Fleishman, a fire information officer. “We’re not going to put people in this ground where we can barely get them in-and-out of there.”

Leaving the creation of situational awareness, scale mapping and infrared imagery to Unmanned Aerial Systems, also known as drones.

In the last eight years, the number of federal drone flights has grown from 260 in 2010 to 10,342 last year, according to data from the Department of Interior. In Arizona, drone usage has increased by 184% in the last two years.

Justin Baxter, a drone fire operations specialist, and his three-man team flew a Matrice 600 (M600) during the Woodbury Fire.

“We’ve been doing a lot on this fire with infrared work just based on how rugged the terrain is,” Baxter said.

Assessing wildfire burned land was one of Baxter’s most common missions during the Woodbury Fire. The infrared and normal cameras attached to the M600 allow operators to compare land temperature as they monitor burn zones for hotspots, which have the potential to ignite new fires.

“The drones are not putting out the fires,” Baxter said. “Somebody still needs to go in there and put it out. But we can mitigate some of the risk, some of the exposure and identify areas of concern a little bit sooner.”

New technology now allows drones to not only spot fires but start them.

Attachable infrared cameras and Plastic Sphere Dispensers equip drones to ignite and monitor backburns, a firefighting tactic used to reduce flammable brush in an area that has the potential to fuel an oncoming wildfire.

The dispensers drop what Baxter refers to as “ping pong balls” filled with two chemicals that combine to ignite small fires. The drones then monitor these fires as they burn brush, letting firefighters focus on other mitigation and suppression techniques during an active wildfire.

“Drones are a new technology that we’re trying to implement,” said Ryan Berlin, a mitigation and education specialist who was flown in from Idaho for the Woodbury Fire. “We’re still in the infancy of the drones.”

As of 2018, the Bureau of Land Management had 531 drones and 359 operators in its service and provided support during earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, animal migrations and search and rescues.

According to the Department of Interior’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Program 2018 Use Report, the 10,342 flights of 2018 totaled 1,785 hours in air, a more than 100% increase in both flights and hours in air from 2017. These flights occurred in 42 states and at least two territories, with more than half of the flights taking place in Hawaii, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado and Idaho.

Arizona had the eighth-most amount of drone flights in 2018, with 570. While statistics on the number of drone flights in 2019 won’t be available until the end of the year, drone usage in Arizona is likely to increase, as this fire season has already burned more land than in all of 2018, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

At the end of 2018, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which promoted the Department of Interior’s search for new wildfire management, mitigation and suppression techniques. One of the provisions called for agencies to “maximize appropriate use of unmanned aerial systems” — drones — in wildfire fighting and recovery.

With support from the White House and data showing increasing interest in federal drone usage, Baxter looks forward to seeing the program grow.

“I hope that this tool is just like the chainsaw. You’re going to have the EMT that carries a first aid kit. The sawyer that carries the chainsaw and the UAS pilot that carries the UAS,” Baxter said. “Instead of exposing a helicopter pilot to a recon flight or a captain of a crew to hike a ridge nobody’s ever been up. Give them give them the tools to make their job just a little bit safer.”

Anton L. Delgado

Anton L. Delgado is a senior at Elon University where he studies journalism and international and global studies. At Elon, he serves as the managing editor of the school newspaper and as a multimedia journalist for Elon News Network. Delgado spent spring 2019 in Morocco as a news correspondent for Morocco World News. He has previously worked for Save the Children Jordan and Town&Country Philippines. Delgado dreams of working as an investigative journalist in conflict zones. View Delgado’s work here.

www.antondelgado.com

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“People describe it as one of those little snow globes,” said Stu Brown, the director of parks and recreation of the town that welcomes 20,000 to 30,000 guests on any given weekend throughout the year. 

“It’s living in an endless winter,” he added. 

Even in the middle of summer, whether it be piles on the side of the road, up on the mountain tops or at the resort, snow is visible in Mammoth Lakes year-round. 

The town’s success is dependent on snow, but even Brown said too much of a good thing can turn bad.

“Everyone likes beautiful snowfall,” he said. “Unfortunately, when it gets carried away, that becomes the problem.”

Brown said snow is the community’s source of economy, it also sometimes creates major transportation problems for the four-square mile resort town located 300 miles northwest of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

While most people think of police, firefighters and paramedics as first responders, in snow country, snow removal crews are first responders when emergency vehicles can’t get through to accident sites or hospitals because of snow-packed roads.

Todd Murphy, the town’s public works maintenance manager, and his crew of snow blower operators play a crucial role in assisting fire and police in moving around the snow-covered streets of Mammoth Lakes.

“I always tell people… our roads aren’t cleared to remove the berm [of snow] in front of your driveway, our roads are cleared to get first responders and emergency personnel around,” Murphy said.

While heavy snow can cause problems, it also serves as one of the community’s best lines of defense against wildfires, Brown said.

The snow helps suppress wildfires by covering smoldering brush and preventing the spread of flames. 

The town has seen 55 feet of snowfall during a single winter season in recent years, making for around-the-clock snow removal at some points. 

“A long winter — it’s kind of the best case scenario for California’s extreme summers these days,” said Brown. “That’s why I think everybody is kind of OK with it.”

This year, the town experienced its sixth snowiest season in the past 20 years when 41 feet fell between October and May and arrived in uncharacteristic ways. 

For one, nearly half the town’s snowfall for the year came in a single month.

“207 inches in February,” said Brown. “Divide that by 28. That’s — that’s a lot of snow every day.”

And as winter looked like it may give way to spring, May brought 32 inches to the town, breaking the month’s previous record of 27.5 inches from the 2010-2011 season.

This late-season snow allowed Andrew Schimmel and Jordan Roseberg to make a trip in June from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to snowboard in shorts and Hawaiian shirts at Mammoth Mountain Area where the idea of an endless winter will be on full display until resort officials plan to close for the season in August.

Christian Gravius

Christian Gravius is a recent graduate of St. Bonaventure University where he majored in journalism and minored in English. Gravius covered high school sports for the Olean Times Herald in New York, and worked as a marketing intern at the world’s largest YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado. Gravius covered the St. Bonaventure Bonnies in the 2018 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in Dallas. Gravius won the top award in the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation competition for an essay he wrote about a former teammate’s running career before and after a life-changing accident. Gravius will pursue a master’s degree at South Dakota State University in sports and recreation administration. See his work here.

christiangravius.wixsite.com/website

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