Wildfire disaster, recovery, and resilience: what have we learned?

Crystal Kolden, Associate Professor of Fire Science at UC Merced, breaks down the key barriers — including regulatory roadblocks, infrastructure loss and worsening housing shortages — that make wildfire recovery significantly slower than other disasters. With many communities still struggling to rebuild years later, Kolden also explores how social inequities, underinsurance and post-fire gentrification further marginalize vulnerable populations — and what strategies can help build more fire-resilient communities.

Auto-generate transcript from lecture held Feb 3, 2025
https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/article/wildfire-disaster-recovery-and-resilience-what-have-we-learned/

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And when we look at where these disasters are and what the facets of them are.

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What we see is that the number of wildfires that have a higher number of fatalities, so 10 or more fatalities, that has been increasing over time. And those fatality wildfires have really been all over the globe.

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They are on six continents. But when we look at economic losses, we've seen this dramatic increase And really this spike in the last seven, 10 years of these high economic loss wildfires, right? And overwhelmingly, those fires are occurring predominantly in North America.

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So the colors on this charter are related to which content these things are occurring on, right? So really.

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We're leading the way, unfortunately, in these mass high cost fires.

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And interestingly, where these disasters are occurring are not the places where we have the most fire.

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So where we have the most fire globally are places like, as I mentioned in Africa on either side of the equator where we get into Savannah regions. And then in South America, where we have a substantial amount of both

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Agricultural birding and then some level of deforestation burning that's going along to that right And then also in the tropics in Indonesia, there's a substantial amount of deforestation there as well that shows up as a lot of fire And in Northern Australia where there's extensive intentional burning

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In the subtropics there, right? So those are the places with the most fire But where we see the disasters occurring.

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Are predominantly in the extra tropics. And particularly in Mediterranean ecosystems.

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So we have a hotspot in California, the southwestern U.S. We have another hotspot all around the Mediterranean where we have a high number of disasters.

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And we have a third hotspot in South Africa. And in southeastern Australia as well, of course. So these are all Mediterranean ecosystems They are places that are evolved to burn.

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But they don't have the level of fire that we see in these other regions that have the most fire activity.

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And we're defining disasters in a couple of different ways here, as I noted on the previous slide, we're talking about high fatality events. We're talking about economic loss events. There are other ways.

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That fires become disasters. But those are the two types of metrics that we have some level of global data for.

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And the US is seeing these increases pretty dramatically. So in the US, we have long had an actual decline in the number of wildland firefighter fatalities. There's some pretty high profile wildland firefighter fatality events in the 60s, 70s, 80s, even the 90s.

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But we've actually gotten pretty good at enacting changes in protocols and safety measures such that wildland firefighters are not dying as frequently very much anymore.

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Whereas civilians For a long time, we didn't have very many civilian wildfire fatalities in the US.

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Big civilian losses in the late 19th century, in the 1880s and 1890s, even as late as the early early 20th century, there was a fire 1918 maybe 430 people die Minnesota on a fire, but nothing really since then, right? We got to handle

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On wildfires And we're able to not have a lot of civilians die Until a few years ago.

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And now we have seen numerous high fatality wildfire events in the US. And of course, these peaks on this graph, and I've actually included the two recent fires here in LA in the 2025 bar there.

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Those two big peaks, of course, are the campfire in 2018 and Lahaina in hawaii 2023.

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The thing about fatality events and actual individual numbers and fatalities is, well, they're really episodic.

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The thing that concerns me more in this trend is actually looking at the number of fatal fires. We're not talking about a fire here or a fire there. We're starting to see years with five six seven or more fatal fires, right? So this is really concerning as a trend.

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Similarly, we are seeing trends in structure loss as well, right? And, you know, of course, we've had wildfires in the past where we had a lot of home loss. And again, they were relatively episodic, right? A fire here, a fire there. Southern California has by far led the tally for many, many decades because the Santa Ana's and the grasp that they bring are nothing new here. But we've had large structure loss fires all over the country, right? Our harbor made.

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In 1947, right? Several fires in California, almost 3,000 homes lost in 91 up in the Oakland Hills on the tunnel fire.

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Those were all really isolated individual fires. Now, again, what we're seeing is, yes.

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Some big events like these two fires this month here in LA, but a lot of fires that have 10 houses, 50 houses, 100 houses.

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So many, many individual fire events with structure loss um and I don't actually have a trend line on there because we hadn't managed to compile that data yet we're still working on that.

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So what are the causes of these disasters? You've heard a lot about downslope winds the last few weeks, which is what the Santa Ana winds are called locally here, right?

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The name for those downslip winds or catabatic wind events right and a much higher proportion of structure losses occur with those downslope wind events.

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Much higher proportion of wildfire fatalities occur with those downslope wind events.

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And Devil wins are they're really isolated to specific places across the country, right? They require a topographic factor. They require a certain setup of high and low pressure to produce a gradient. And of course, Southern California is one of these places that just has

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Incredibly high incidence of these downslope wind events.

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Which is why there are so many disastrous fires here. But we have also seen these in other parts of the US.

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Similarly, when we look at things like what's the vegetation factors? Well, it turns out that the vast majority of our structure loss fires occur in a couple of types of vegetation You know, these types of vegetation, they have a pretty

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Relatively narrow range In California, the number one vegetation type where we see structure losses, now I will admit this is before we look at this year's fires, because this is going to change things a little bit.

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But the number one structural loss vegetation type or structural loss fired vegetation type Is California Lower Montane, Blue Oak, Foothill, pine blueland, and Savannah?

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It's a mouthful, right? It's this bathtub ring around the Central Valley and along the coast range where the shrub lands, the chaparral that's in the lower elevation meets where the timber comes down and they mix and they create this incredibly dense fuel bed

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Particularly when we suppress wildfire for a century. And when we don't use prescribed fire and we don't actively manage that landscape.

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And when people build their houses in that matrix And it all goes up in smoke.

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So it's only 10% of California, but it's almost half of the structures lost.

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In wildfires in the period that we looked at. Similarly, conifer, forest, and woodland, again, where we have a lot of manzanita, we have a lot of shrubs, stuff that's providing this fuel matrix.

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A high proportion of the homes relative to the proportion of the state that has that vegetation type.

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We know that fires are growing faster. So this paper from Balsch et al. I was part of came out in October and we looked at the growth rate on fires, right? When fires move fast.

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They are harder to suppress. You don't have as effective a suppression mechanisms as you do when fires move a little bit slower, in part because oftentimes your aircraft are grounded under wind events, which of course we saw in the last few weeks. And what we see is that

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Really there's this point where you have basically Anything over about 600 houses.

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Is only when we lose over 600 houses in a fire, it is only during a fast growing wildfire, right?

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And so there's a lot of factors that contribute to that fast growing fire, but overwhelmingly.

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It tends to be wind and extremely, extremely dry conditions which climate change is showing us is happening more frequently and at greater intensity.

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The other thing that we see with wildfire disasters and what I've been focusing on a lot the last few years is that there are social factors.

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That predispose some communities to be more vulnerable to disaster and wildfires than others.

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So when we look at things like wildfire fatalities among civilians and we look at what the age groups are.

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Of who is more likely to die in a wildfire. When it's firefighters, it's young people mostly in their teens and 20s.

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But when it's civilians, like many other hazards, it's overwhelmingly an older population.

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And many of that older population also have mobility limitation issues. They can't drive, that sort of thing, right?

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And so they are considered a highly social vulnerable population. When we look at not the fatalities themselves, because we don't have a lot of demographic data on individuals, and we instead look at, well, where do these fatal fires happen?

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What we see is that four fatal wildfires When we look at census tracts that have burned in fatal wildfires.

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That those census tracts are older populations again. So at the census tract level.

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They are older than the average across the state for a census tract.

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And similarly, they are much poorer census tracts. And so this is a lot of those rural counties across the northern part of the state and just here in Nevada.

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You know these two fires would be outside of this. They would function as anomalies to some extent.

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Because those attracts look very different. Most of the fatal wildfires that we've seen have happened in these rural counties, predominantly white counties.

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Predominantly people who are older and have lower levels of income.

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So when we start looking at this all together and we ask, all right, what makes these communities vulnerable to wildfire disasters? Why am I even asking that question?

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If we want to be able to instill resilience to wildfire in our communities, we have to understand what makes them vulnerable? Because resilience and vulnerability are the inverse of each other.

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So what makes them vulnerable? Well, we've focused a lot on the environmental risk of wildfire, right? You could go into Google and type wildfire risk for California and get probably 10 different maps All made by different people, different stuff. But they all focus on that environmental risk.

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But what we are looking at now is that now There's two other legs of the vulnerability triangle.

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And one of them is social vulnerability. So those demographic factors, right? What makes you more vulnerable to having your house destroyed or to potentially injuring being injured or killed by a wildfire, right? And then What is the adaptation strategy

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That you or your community has employed. Have you done anything to try and be more resilient? Have you been more adaptive? Because if you do those types of things, then you lower your vulnerability.

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And so all three of these things are really critical to understanding Where we have disasters and how to actually prevent those disasters from happening in the future.

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And I say prevent those disasters because I want to make it clear we are never going to prevent wildfires. That is not possible in our highly flammable state.

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That has a lot of lightning missions, that has a lot of accidental ignitions that we simply cannot prevent. So we are always going to have wildfire. But what we want to work towards is preventing wildfire disasters.

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All right, so what have we learned about this recovery process. So there's sort of a straw man assumption for wildfire recovery, like other types of natural disaster recovery, right? And the strong assumption is, well, okay, houses get destroyed.

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And we rebuild them and everything's all better, right? And‚Ä¶ It may sound extremely simplistic, but believe it or not, this is actually the assumption that a lot of the agencies tend to work under. I have been doing a lot of work with HUD, Housing and Urban Development at the federal level and at the state level, the HUD counterpart is at California HCD, which is

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Housing and community development. And when they have been working on their wildfire disaster recovery programs.

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They have actually gone into these recovery projects Assuming that every house was going to be rebuilt.

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Imagine their surprise When that didn't actually happen.

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And so they have been asking us, and we're partially funded by HUD, they've been asking us.

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Okay, well, what is being rebuilt? What isn't being rebuilt? And why? Why do we not have full recovery? Why do we have differential recovery across different communities, right?

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Part of the reason they're asking this is because they've been focusing on trying to recruit homeowners and property developers to come and take advantage of these funds that we have to rebuild communities. And so they're not sure what's going on. So we started doing this work a few years ago.

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And one of the first things that we've been trying to answer and build a database for because it doesn't As we've been trying to ask this question, okay, well, what is the recovery rate?

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Across different communities. What is the level of rebuilding? And one approach is not an easy question to answer, believe it or not.

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One of the approaches that we've used has yielded some pretty interesting numbers.

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Where we are looking at a set of fires, this is probably about 30, 40 fires, and we have a If you're using a Microsoft Buildings data set for remote sensing, we're saying okay Right. X number of years after a fire, one through six

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How much of the housing has been rebuilt that is lost?

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Which we know because CAL FIRE, thankfully, has this fantastic data set.

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About structures destroyed. Overwhelmingly, what we see is that even five or six years out, we don't have a high rate of rebuilt houses across a lot of the fires that we're looking at.

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And this is imperfect, but it's actually reflective of several of the buyers that we're directly working on.

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And we are conducting a case study in Paradise. I've been county which of course burned in the 2018 campfire. We had better data there because we were working with a local builder who was tracking permits. And when we asked the builder, okay, well, you know.

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You actually know how many building permits have been pulled and how many occupancy permits have been issued, right? So that's going to be really able to move the house. What we have seen is that it took them a long time to start rebuilding.

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After the campfire, right? The first houses after the campfire weren't built for over a year.

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And then they started to see a little bit of an uptick where in that two to three year post-fire window. And this was impacted by COVID.

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Because that hard burn in November of 2018. So, you know, 18 months after the fire was when when lockdown started.

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Effectively in that two, three year window, they had a big pulse of people who were owners of homes in that area pre-fire And they got their insurance or they got funding from other sources and they were able to rebuild their house but

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By about three, three and a half years after the fire, most of the people who were going to rebuild based on insurance or other payouts initially had done so. And we see this drop off of the homeowners rebuilding.

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And right around the same time, we start to see an uptick in the number of houses that are being built by their spec homes.

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That are built by developers who come in, they buy up a property, a lot of the properties, a lot of the lots were for sale.

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In Kurt us after the fire. And they build a spec home And sell it to somebody.

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And the question we asked was, well, are they selling it to somebody who used to live nearby?

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Or are they selling it to somebody from somewhere else? And the answer overwhelmingly was that they were selling it to somebody from somewhere else.

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Usually the Bay Area or Sacramento. So this particular area Paradise has only rebuilt today six plus years after the fire. They've built less than 40% of the housing stock that they had.

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And they lost 13,000 some odd units um in that event, right? So even more than the number of residences that we've seen lost in two fires here.

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And it's not coming back, right? And it's not just in a place like Paradise, which is rural and has challenges.

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We are also seeing lower levels of rebuild rates in places like Ventura County.

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This is an area that Midburg and the Thomas Fire in 2017. It's a pretty well-off neighborhoods, right? And when we went through and actually tried to map some of these communities as case studies.

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What we saw was that a lot of these structures have not been rebuilt yet.

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And so we saw here about a 70% rebuild rate seven years after the fire, almost 30% of these lots are still bare, no signs that they're going to rebuild. And interestingly, they're kind of all over the place.

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In these neighborhoods, right? Dirt lots next to rebuilt lots It changes a community.

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It also changes. The fuel load in the neighborhood, because when you have a bare lot in the middle of a neighborhood.

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And nobody's maintaining the grass. The grass gets about yay high And you've got more fuel for the next fire. So it's a major concern for these neighborhoods that these houses are not being rebuilt.

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So when we started realizing that these recovery rates were much lower than we thought they were going to be, we were said, okay, why?

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Why are we not getting this housing rebuilt? Where do these people go?

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Right? It's not like they just vanished. So we started asking What is the reason that they are struggling to rebuild this housing? In a state with a housing crisis.

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Why are we not seeing housing being replaced? And several things came up for us in both the qualitative and the quantitative work we were doing.

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First of all, there's a different timeline for recovery then the funding agencies thought there would be.

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What do I mean by that? Funding agencies provide funding at pretty specific time intervals. So right now, FEMA is coming into these recently burned areas. Immediately there was a lot of Red Cross aid and then FEMA comes in. We've all heard lots about FEMA and disasters in recent months.

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And FEMA will be here for a while, but then their response period ends, right?

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And after FEMA is done, we sort of have this window where for a period there's insurance trying to kick in and then sort of the last potential resource for funding to try and rebuild comes from HUD, and it's called a Community Block Development Grant for Disaster Recovery.

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Oh. Give me a second house.

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Okay. Try to keep going and see. How this goes.

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Excuse me.

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Okay, I apologize to those of you online who have no idea what's happening.

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I am getting over a cold. So every once in a while, I have this horrible cough that kicks in.

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And I, oh, it's okay. I just need to keep drinking.

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I can read your slides. Yes, this does give you time to look at my slides.

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So um After a couple of years, these HUD grants start to kick in.

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And they're administered by the state But effectively.

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They are the backstock. They're the last things that are supposed to kick in.

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Oh, good. Okay, I'm going to just keep talking and grab it.

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I actually have a cough drop because I was smart about it today.

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These hub grants kick in and they're the last thing that kicks in and they are meant to support the people who didn't have insurance.

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They're meant to support the people that didn't get a a payout or an insufficient payout um whoever was held liable for the fire.

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And in many cases in campfire. It was PG&E. So there was a settlement from PG&E. Some people got funding from that, others did not.

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But what's left at the end of the all of those different funding sources is these community development block grants.

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And I'm hoping this is not going to happen. That's what the‚Ä¶ The audio too much here.

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Oh, good Lord.

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I told them before we started that this is what I feared most.

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So I hope you all will forgive me and just Play along. All right.

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So with these community block development grants, they were actually developed for flooding.

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So they're developed for hurricane country and flood country back east.

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Why am I telling you about all these timelines? Because these community block development grants were built for a timeline that is consistent with how people recover after flux.

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Or how they recover after hurricanes. And what we started to realize is that the timeline is really different for wildfire compared to other types of natural disasters. So all these programs, FEMA, hot everybody right even insurance companies they had been thinking about the post-disaster process in the context of

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Other types of disasters that they've dealt with over the years.

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But in wildfires, we have a very different process and it's a much longer one.

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Why is it a longer one? Well, first of all, there were hurricanes in North Carolina, in the east in October, November, right? And almost the next day After the hurricane is done.

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You see people able to get back into their homes. They are evacuated for a while they're able to get back into their homes if it's still there, right? And a lot of them were.

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Some of them got swept away in flooded rivers a lot of those houses are still there. Hurricanes where you have the high water coming in, right?

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You have a period where people are evacuated from their homes. It's a really short period and then the water recedes and they're able to get back to their homes.

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So it's a relatively short evacuation period. And wildfire, that is a very much longer period, right? There are people that are not able to They have not been able to get back to their homes.

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Yet, even if their home didn't burn here in LA, why?

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Because they have so much toxic smoke in their home. Or they're in an area where utilities are not yet restored.

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Or there's a boil water order for some of these areas because of toxicity in the municipal water supply associated with all those melting plastics and things.

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And they just say, you know what, I can't be in this house because I don't have clean water to drink.

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So you have this much longer period where people are evacuated and that's if their home didn't burn.

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For people whose homes did burn, right? They have nowhere to live. That's really different from even tornadoes evacuation or tornado evacuations, flood evacuations people will go back in and be able to salvage things from their homes. They don't lose

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Everything unless their home gets swept away. But if it's still there, they can usually start salvaging things they start focusing on mold remediation, things like that.

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It doesn't happen in wildfires. It's all gone. And so you have this much longer period. And if you have a lot of fatalities, so in a campfire.

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People were literally evacuated for weeks to months.

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Because they were doing remains recovery and they wanted to keep everybody out of the area. And the other thing that they wanted to do is keep people safe.

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So there were all of the trees that had been recently burned They are determined to be hazard trees. They could fall over at any time.

00:34:44.000 --> 00:34:57.000
And they want to get in there and cut out all those trees before people come back in to the area where their house used to be or still stands, right? So they have a much longer evacuation where they're not allowed in.

00:34:57.000 --> 00:35:02.000
Seeing this right now in real time. And then there's this debris removal process.

00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:13.000
Where we've got‚Ä¶ a different type of debris than we see with hurricanes and floods and things like that. This is really toxic debris.

00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:17.000
And so they have to figure out where this is going to go.

00:35:17.000 --> 00:35:34.000
They have to remove any standing dread trees on the property before they can even think about coming back in and rebuilding. And realistically, all of these lots where these houses have burned last month, they're going to have to scrape the lot down to the soil.

00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:49.000
You have to take out everything. And then if your pipes burned down into the ground, now you've got to restore your infrastructure, right? You have to come back in and have all your water and sewer lines replaced. That doesn't happen in another disasters, right?

00:35:49.000 --> 00:36:01.000
And then they can finally get started on the whole permitting and contracting part that is where most other people are pretty close to starting, right?

00:36:01.000 --> 00:36:04.000
So they can now get started on permitting and contracting. But here's the kicker.

00:36:04.000 --> 00:36:24.000
A lot of the places that are impacted by floods and tornadoes and things like that right there, they're in relatively semi-urban or urban areas, particularly floods are predominantly in more urban areas um but wildfires, you know, this is the exception actually here in LA most of the time

00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:43.000
They're in more rural areas. So it becomes really challenging trying to get supplies and contractors into rural areas in the volume. So it's another delay If you have a subsequent evacuation, not something we generally get with hurricanes and floods and things like that.

00:36:43.000 --> 00:36:58.000
But it's actually somewhat common for wildfires. And part of the reason it's so common for wildfires is Okay, fine. The fire's finally done. Sometimes you get re-evacuated because there's another fire that has happened in California many times in recent years.

00:36:58.000 --> 00:37:06.000
But the more likely thing is what LA is already experiencing is you get a rainfall event.

00:37:06.000 --> 00:37:27.000
And we have enough rainfall on that fresh ashen chart that there is concern for mud flows, right? And the reason this continues to be a major issue And that we tell people to leave and evacuate again When there's a high amount of rainfall in the forecast is because of things like

00:37:27.000 --> 00:37:40.000
What happened in Montecito in January of 2018 after the Thomas fire burned, Montecito was largely spared from the Thomas fire. I mean, the fire came down, but they were able to successfully stop it there.

00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:53.000
But then a couple of weeks later, they had a microburst in the mountains just above the town. And they had a mud flow that came down into the town from the National Forest and it killed 23 people.

00:37:53.000 --> 00:38:04.000
No fatalities on the actual fire, 23 people. In the subsequent mud flow. And part of that was because people had already been evacuated for three, four weeks.

00:38:04.000 --> 00:38:15.000
They were tired of being evacuated. They didn't want to leave again. So we have all of these things that extend out this timeline for wildfire in a really different way than we do for other hazards.

00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:25.000
The other thing that's the other thing that A major difference for wildfire recovery compared to other types of hazards is that we really have a lack of historical context.

00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:36.000
And as I mentioned earlier, for a century, we got really good at suppressing fires. We just didn't have too many fires outside of sort of wilderness areas really far away.

00:38:36.000 --> 00:38:41.000
With the sole exception of the occasional fire in Southern California that was problematic.

00:38:41.000 --> 00:38:52.000
And that led to this sort of perception that, well, we don't have to worry about wildfires in our cities or in our suburban areas.

00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:09.000
We didn't have that many wildfire disasters. So there wasn't this fine tuning of recovery programs based on experiences, right? Based on repeated experiences of wildfire disasters.

00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:18.000
So part of that is also that because we didn't have those repeated disasters, there's a really limited regulatory framework for wildfire, right?

00:39:18.000 --> 00:39:37.000
Floods the national flood protection act i always get that wrong, is from the 1960s We have earthquake building codes in this state that are a century old. I live in Fresno. My house has to be built to the earthquake codes, even though I don't live anywhere near

00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:44.000
A fault line, right? We only have wildfire building codes in this state for less than 20 years.

00:39:44.000 --> 00:40:00.000
Chapter 7a codes in the WUI areas wildland urban interface came into effect in 2007 and we don't actually have much more stringency than that in terms of building codes. And they're not everywhere. They're not blanket.

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:03.000
They're only in areas that are considered high risk by CalFire.

00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:12.000
And the problem with wildfire is that it can happen literally anywhere where vegetation goes. Wildfire is not defined by floodplains.

00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:19.000
Or the way that coastal regions are really the only impact areas that are impacted by hurricanes.

00:40:19.000 --> 00:40:33.000
We're not worried about a storm surge. Very far inland along the coastline. So there are defined boundaries for most natural disasters. Wildfire can happen anywhere.

00:40:33.000 --> 00:40:46.000
And it has. 98% of the country is really burnable. If you get the right combination of vegetation buildup i should say drought and an ignition.

00:40:46.000 --> 00:40:53.000
Another thing that we've learned about wildfire recovery is that we're seeing gentrification.

00:40:53.000 --> 00:41:07.000
In the areas that are recovering from wildfire. And so in Paradise, we just had a paper published on this where the low income housing is actually the slowest housing to be rebuilt.

00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:16.000
So in this graphic, what we're showing is that there are four different types, or sorry, three different types of housing that we looked at from tax data.

00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:32.000
Paradise and the area of the campfire, there was a lot of mobile homes in that region and a lot of them are in mobile home parks. I think they had 32 mobile home parks in Paradise. But then a lot of them are also people with a mobile home out on acreage in the country, right?

00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:55.000
And so there was so there was some level of the single family homes that have already been rebuilt slightly less yet to rebuild as we fragment here than mobile homes. And really what they've rebuilt the most of is multifamily housing apartment complex.

00:41:55.000 --> 00:42:06.000
So that's actually been a little bit of a better success story for them but still not even 50% rebuilt yet.

00:42:06.000 --> 00:42:10.000
For the multifamily housing we're renters would be looking for housing.

00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:32.000
Right. We saw that as a sign of One sign of gentrification, right, where we're not getting that lowest income housing back the mobile homes. But the other thing we saw as a sign of gentrification was that in this region, in the campfire, most of the

00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:49.000
Homes were owner occupied, right? So before the fire, two-thirds of the housing was owner occupied. Only a third of it was renters. But after the fire, over half is now renters, not owner occupied.

00:42:49.000 --> 00:43:03.000
And so we've seen this major decline in owner-occupied housing. And so that is, and it's predominantly people from out of area that are buying in this area and renting things out, right? Especially those spec homes.

00:43:03.000 --> 00:43:25.000
Other things that we've learned about this post-fire recovery process. So, you know, we've got this change in the types of housing that's available now, it's a lot less housing that's available now. And still the agencies are really interested in asking, well, okay, but we've got money to build more housing. Why aren't people applying for it?

00:43:25.000 --> 00:43:28.000
Why are people not applying for these grants and coming back?

00:43:28.000 --> 00:43:38.000
And so part of our qualitative work is understanding how those other factors matter in trying to recover from wildfire.

00:43:38.000 --> 00:43:51.000
So things like basic amenities, right? And so we've heard a lot in the news this last month about Yes, there was a lot of homes that were destroyed, but there were other things destroyed too.

00:43:51.000 --> 00:44:18.000
Grocery stores, child care centers, churches. A lot of the types of basic day-to-day services that people need for themselves, for their children, for aging family members right Those were no longer available. And in Paradise, not only did several of the schools burn down, their only medical center burned down, the hospital burned down. It closed.

00:44:18.000 --> 00:44:29.000
Will not reopen. And so now anyone who requires Medical care in Paradise in a hospital situation has to go an hour down the hill to Chico.

00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:38.000
That changes your math If you're trying to decide whether to rebuild, if you have specialized medical needs.

00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:47.000
You know, they lost internet they lost a lot of the utilities that they would have depended on, things like that. These were all gone.

00:44:47.000 --> 00:45:02.000
For a very long time. And it's not just even that there's basic amenities that they require. It's that there's also social factors and social community that are required as part of this recovery process.

00:45:02.000 --> 00:45:14.000
Right. So it's a really complex process to do all the paperwork, to get recovery funding, things like that. And if you are not someone, I mean, you know, we're mostly academics, right?

00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:21.000
We're used to like completely arcane, obnoxious paperwork with lots of red tape.

00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:33.000
For people who are trying to navigate this that are maybe older and don't have a skill set For the persistence to try and navigate this, it becomes really, really challenging.

00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:43.000
Mental and physical health. Are a big piece of why a lot of people have not moved back to these areas.

00:45:43.000 --> 00:45:57.000
Many of them are suffering from PTSD. And one of the things that has been really limited from all these recovery resources, right? People are donating clothes, they're donating food, they're donating diapers.

00:45:57.000 --> 00:46:10.000
You know what they really need is therapy? And it is a struggle to convince yourself to move back to a place where you have lived through the worst moment of your life.

00:46:10.000 --> 00:46:16.000
For many people, they also lost their entire social support network.

00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:22.000
If it's intact, then they might want to move back to that place. But for a lot of them.

00:46:22.000 --> 00:46:27.000
They lost that social support network. What do I mean by that? And particularly with older people.

00:46:27.000 --> 00:46:33.000
As they lose their ability to drive. Or they lose.

00:46:33.000 --> 00:46:38.000
Their ability to go grocery shopping, right? They've got all sorts of issues.

00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:48.000
They rely on a network of people to take care of them, whether it is family or whether it's the people in your neighborhood that just come over and check on you every once in a while, right?

00:46:48.000 --> 00:47:00.000
And I've already heard stories of this coming out of the Eaton fire. Oh yeah, so-and-so would come over to check on me, you know, every few days You know, maybe that person passed.

00:47:00.000 --> 00:47:07.000
Or maybe that person chose to move and live somewhere else, right? If that person's gone.

00:47:07.000 --> 00:47:19.000
It's a challenge. To move back to a place where you no longer have that social support network. And for many people who are older They just don't want to start over again and try and rebuild.

00:47:19.000 --> 00:47:31.000
It's too much work. If they don't have the mobility to be in these areas. Transit is often down for a long time or doesn't come back. That's the case in paradise.

00:47:31.000 --> 00:47:40.000
They've lost all of their community transit. In part because they lost their whole tax base, so they can't support a lot of those services now.

00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:47.000
So you can't live there if there's no transit. You need to take the little van to go to the doctor, right?

00:47:47.000 --> 00:48:06.000
And if you're not replacing mobile homes and lost rental units, what is the availability of affordable housing if it's being gentrified and you're having higher housing costs, how are you going back to this place? And importantly, one of the things that really matters a lot in these rural areas, smaller towns.

00:48:06.000 --> 00:48:12.000
Is jobs. So your whole town burns down and now there's no job.

00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:21.000
How are you going to move back to a place that doesn't have a job and the job won't come back until the town repopulates, but there's no job for you?

00:48:21.000 --> 00:48:27.000
She gets positive feedback cycle where there's nothing there for people to come back to.

00:48:27.000 --> 00:48:38.000
And I, you know, I kind of call this the the whole set of factors that kills some of these small towns that were already sort of dwindling rural areas.

00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:47.000
And a good example of this is Greenville. So Greenville burned in the way up in the Northeast, burned in the Dixie Fire in 2021.

00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:52.000
You know, Greenville was only about 400 or 500 people before the Dixie farm.

00:48:52.000 --> 00:49:04.000
What's this cute little town. And they lost 75% of their housing, right? So I know this is tough to see, but you can start to see all these little squares.

00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:09.000
Each one of those is a lot. There was a house there. There was a commercial enterprise there.

00:49:09.000 --> 00:49:14.000
Great. And all of this is gone. Greenville.

00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:19.000
It was an old timber town, right? Mining town, timber town, all these natural resource extraction towns.

00:49:19.000 --> 00:49:24.000
That are all over the rural parts of the West.

00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:33.000
They were already in decline. They were places with The average age was much older than the state more broadly.

00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:38.000
Because that's who still is there. And so when we talk to these people in these areas.

00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:48.000
The answer is, yeah, we're just it's too much work We're not going to stay here. And so it is effectively He's sending the demise.

00:49:48.000 --> 00:50:08.000
Of these rural natural resource towns. So those places people are not moving back to And so we put all these together in this sort of crazy conceptual wheel That is really difficult to read. But it effectively identifies, yeah, there's a lot of different factors. It is not

00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:15.000
Just rebuilding the housing. If you build it, they will come, does not apply.

00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:34.000
To wildfire recovery. Because there are so many other factors that contribute to people's decisions to move back to these places based on whether all of these other components are available to them that can help them live or even thrive.

00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:41.000
And, you know, we said we did this pretty in-depth thing in paradise and we thought, okay, well, what's a place we can compare it to that's really different?

00:50:41.000 --> 00:50:50.000
And so we looked at Santa Rosa, which had a couple thousand housing units, whole neighborhoods lost in the 2017 Tubs fire.

00:50:50.000 --> 00:51:02.000
And in some ways, these fires were really similar, right? You had a fall downslope wind They have different names in Santa Ana up in the northern part of the state, but it's the same basic idea.

00:51:02.000 --> 00:51:08.000
And Santa Rosa, almost 6,000 structures, about half of those were homes.

00:51:08.000 --> 00:51:21.000
You know, Paradise three times as much. And importantly In Santa Rosa, it's a city, right? It's the county seat of Sonoma County. So it's only a small proportion of that city.

00:51:21.000 --> 00:51:28.000
Where's Paradise? It's the whole town in a rural region, right? Decent number of fatalities on both fires.

00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:45.000
But importantly, some key pieces were different in Santa Rosa. And I think that this left side is going to be more applicable to what we see in Los Angeles, right? Because when you're part of a larger metro area.

00:51:45.000 --> 00:51:56.000
Most of your critical infrastructure is still intact. And so, yes, there were a lot of pieces of critical infrastructure lost on these two fires.

00:51:56.000 --> 00:52:16.000
But you only have to go a few miles And that critical infrastructure is still in place. So other parts of the county will be able to help with things like getting permits and finding builders and helping a lot of the childcare and medical and all those support systems have already started to shift

00:52:16.000 --> 00:52:22.000
In a ripple effect out from the epicenter of these fires, right?

00:52:22.000 --> 00:52:30.000
Overall, this is a much lower social vulnerability and LMI is HUD's code for low and moderate income.

00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:48.000
So we have lower social vulnerability in these regions. There are still highly vulnerable populations, but not like we saw in paradise. Importantly, a really important thing, in paradise, everything was still like paper records sitting in the town clerk's office which

00:52:48.000 --> 00:53:01.000
Part of which burned down. There was a lot of lost data in that event and it was really challenging for them to try and figure out, okay, do we have backups anywhere? Can people reconstruct them?

00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:08.000
Whereas in Santa Rosa, the county offices, the county offices didn't burn down.

00:53:08.000 --> 00:53:13.000
So those digital records were still intact because they'd also been digitized.

00:53:13.000 --> 00:53:20.000
You know, different rates of insurance when you have higher rates of insurance, it's easier to rebuild. And a big one.

00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:24.000
In Santa Rosa, there was only one senior mobile home park that was destroyed in the parade.

00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:38.000
So different rebuild rates, Santa Rosa five years post-fire was almost double what Paradise was. And Santa Rosa actually had really limited displacement and migration.

00:53:38.000 --> 00:53:48.000
From the communities there because there was all these things that helped facilitate recovery Instead of making it more difficult.

00:53:48.000 --> 00:53:59.000
So we've compiled this and tried to start thinking about how all this looks in terms of trajectories. For a place that is recently burned, right?

00:53:59.000 --> 00:54:13.000
What does our trajectory look like? How can we predict this? And part of What determines your trajectory is if you are somebody that is already pretty socioeconomically stable.

00:54:13.000 --> 00:54:32.000
Or if you are somebody that had pretty low socioeconomic stability to start with, right? And those are two really different trajectories Because people who have testability, right, I know a lot of people at this university had to evacuate They have places to go.

00:54:32.000 --> 00:54:48.000
Even if they left with nothing. And even lost their house. They still had places to go. They had options And if they lost their host, then they are able to start that process uh you hopefully they've got records they've got

00:54:48.000 --> 00:54:51.000
All sorts of things that allow them to start that recovery process pretty quickly.

00:54:51.000 --> 00:55:04.000
Quickly, whereas places with lower socioeconomic stability It just is that set of challenges, right? People are precariously housed. They have a lot of challenges trying to navigate recovery.

00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:12.000
And challenges and access to recovery programs leading to permanent displacement and gentrification places.

00:55:12.000 --> 00:55:35.000
You know, and A lot of people have asked me in the last few weeks What do you think is going to happen in LA, right? And I look at Both of these areas that have had major home loss are places that they have advantages, right? There's a lot of critical infrastructure close by. They still have a lot of options. But there were a much

00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:41.000
Much higher proportion of people in the Eaton fire mountedina.

00:55:41.000 --> 00:56:00.000
That follow into this lower socioeconomic stability category, right? I mean, it's not just that they were socioeconomically unstable, a lot of them didn't have insurance They were in multi-generational homes that they may or may not be able to afford to rebuild.

00:56:00.000 --> 00:56:19.000
And they will face a lot more challenges as they go through this recovery process as compared to the higher socioeconomic stability population that there's a higher proportion on the Palisades fire.

00:56:19.000 --> 00:56:28.000
It would be very interesting to watch. I know a lot of people here are going to be working on this, how these two recovery processes play out over time.

00:56:28.000 --> 00:56:35.000
You know, because really what we are concerned with a lot is that we're seeing a recovery gap.

00:56:35.000 --> 00:56:41.000
Right. And this is just a conceptual view. Not based on any data because we don't have data that can support this yet.

00:56:41.000 --> 00:56:47.000
But what we think is happening Just like in ecology.

00:56:47.000 --> 00:56:52.000
And I was a fire ecologist first before I started doing a lot more social work.

00:56:52.000 --> 00:57:03.000
What we see in ecology is that we have effectively a stasis in general process.

00:57:03.000 --> 00:57:10.000
Where you have a level of resilience in here, I'm going to call it the sum metric of prosperity and you have a disturbance event.

00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:31.000
Right. You get the drop in whatever your metric is of process or resilience or whatever the thing is that you're looking at, right? So you have this turtle that drops And then over time you get recovery. And when you have really high resilience, whether it's ecologically or socially.

00:57:31.000 --> 00:57:38.000
You recover pretty fast and you're back to the same level.

00:57:38.000 --> 00:57:52.000
Get back to the same level, right? But when you have really low resilience, and we see this in ecologically vulnerable systems, right? Ecosystems on the edge. They're stressed by so many things, climate change, not the least among them.

00:57:52.000 --> 00:58:04.000
And then we get a disturbance and they do not return to their pre disturbance We are seeing this in California and all over the Western U.S. With forests that are not growing back.

00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:21.000
As an example. We are also seeing this where communities are not recovered, they're not returning to that pre-disturbance state. And so we have this gap and they are the most vulnerable populations.

00:58:21.000 --> 00:58:27.000
Okay, so how do we actually recruit how do we improve this recovery process and become more resilient?

00:58:27.000 --> 00:58:35.000
First. We can learn from other hazards. I talked about all the ways that fire is different from other hazards.

00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:48.000
I talked about all the ways that fires differ from other hazards, right? But there are some ways that fires and disturbances actually kind of the same. Mobile homes are wildfire magnets, just like they are tornado magnets.

00:58:48.000 --> 00:58:56.000
Mitigation is the lowest among socially vulnerable populations, right? And we have housing shortages, particularly in California.

00:58:56.000 --> 00:59:04.000
Post-fire, right? But elsewhere as well. So we can learn from other areas with how they're dealing with those housing shortages.

00:59:04.000 --> 00:59:19.000
Always rural areas have the biggest challenges to recovery because there's a lack of resources. And there's a lot of secondary and prolonged impacts. One of the interesting things we see with disasters in general, and you're seeing with wildfires too, is that

00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:37.000
Fatalities down the road. From the lingering effects of not just the physical effects of like smoke and the stress of the evacuation, heart attacks, things like that. But a lot of the PTSD that continues down the road.

00:59:37.000 --> 00:59:42.000
So we can learn from what that looks like in other hazards as well, right?

00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:58.000
And that we still have a high level of on an underinsured homeowners. Obviously, we have an insurance crisis in the state you know, we're going to continue having insurance related recovery challenges until we get the insurance pieces puzzle figured out.

00:59:58.000 --> 01:00:17.000
And a lot of confusion about the process for accessing recovery resources, right? And this was very clear when we saw massive levels of confusion and misinformation about FEMA after Hurricane Helene, just incredible confusion about what's going on, what does this process look like?

01:00:17.000 --> 01:00:25.000
And as we figure out how to improve that communication for other hazards or even for wildfire, we share it across hazards.

01:00:25.000 --> 01:00:38.000
And climate change is just going to make everything worse. It's challenging and it's only going to get worse. So wishful thinking magical thinking is not going to help us at all.

01:00:38.000 --> 01:00:51.000
We can do certain things to narrow that recovery gap that I talked about, right? Planning and especially planning that focuses on the needs and options for socially vulnerable populations.

01:00:51.000 --> 01:01:05.000
Databases. I noted several times here, we don't have the data for this. We don't have the data, but we're really creating data for things because we don't have a lot of that social data Which was a massive wake-up call for me coming from ecology where we just have lots and lots of cool data.

01:01:05.000 --> 01:01:26.000
We don't have a lot of data on the social components and we need that data And the centralized databases will help both facilitate case management for survivors, but also provide data for scientists that can better develop proactive approaches, right?

01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:41.000
Right now, we have a lot of really interesting programs where NGOs come in and work on post-fire recovery, they build the houses, that sort of thing. They run into a lot of barriers.

01:01:41.000 --> 01:01:53.000
And so adding some flexibility to what they are able to do will help them to be able to support more more housing rebuilding.

01:01:53.000 --> 01:02:12.000
And, you know, a really important thing is always place-based approaches, right? What worked for Paradise is not going to be the same things that work for LA. Completely different place culturally, completely different place historically. So we have to identify place-based solutions that work.

01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:20.000
And looking at infrastructure recovery is a big piece of narrowing that recovery gap. Because when we started this project.

01:02:20.000 --> 01:02:34.000
And Paradise is one of these weird places that uh they did not have a wastewater treatment Every house in the town was on a sewer system.

01:02:34.000 --> 01:02:55.000
Really weird. And so part of their rebuilding process has been trying to figure out how to get money for a centralized wastewater treatment plant. They also had to They also had to prepare their municipal water resource, right? Because a lot of their climate houses were on wells up in that area.

01:02:55.000 --> 01:03:02.000
And so that infrastructure recovery process, there was not initially funding allocated for that, but it's part of wildfire recovery.

01:03:02.000 --> 01:03:06.000
So the agencies are learning that they need to do that.

01:03:06.000 --> 01:03:10.000
And of course, knowledge sharing is part of all this. Okay, some examples.

01:03:10.000 --> 01:03:17.000
Right. Trying to wrap up here. What works, right? What do we know works? What have we seen works that we can try and do other things?

01:03:17.000 --> 01:03:39.000
Master planning helps a lot. To facilitate more effective recovery. In Santa Rosa, I mentioned that there was one mobile home park that burned in Santa Rosa. They had already in their planning process identified that they wanted to build Affordable housing in a transit oriented way that was right next to their light rail

01:03:39.000 --> 01:03:51.000
And when that mobile home park burned down, they said, this is our opportunity, right? They bought the lot, they put in this fantastic senior affordable housing apartment complex. It's right next to transit.

01:03:51.000 --> 01:04:05.000
It's great. It's such a success story. And the people, a lot of the people who lived in that mobile home park have now moved into this affordable housing, right? But they had this idea already in their planning process and they were able to implement it

01:04:05.000 --> 01:04:16.000
To take advantage of what the fire did. And the thing is that planning, this is some work from a PhD student here at UCLA, actually, that works with us, Cheney Zhang.

01:04:16.000 --> 01:04:27.000
And she's done this fantastic thing of looking at Well, okay, planning such a big deal. How many counties are actually addressing wildfire in their county general plan.

01:04:27.000 --> 01:04:43.000
And the answer is not very many. General plans are how you get money from the state to run your county and do big projects. And most of them don't even acknowledge wildfire very much at all. They're certainly not addressing

01:04:43.000 --> 01:04:49.000
Issues of wildfire vulnerability and how they can better support improved housing options, transit options, all those sorts of things.

01:04:49.000 --> 01:05:11.000
You know, we can also focus on things like mitigation. Great. And of course, there is happening right now, as there has been after every wildfire disaster in recent memory, a discussion of manage and treat and liz kosloff And a colleague wrote a fantastic paper in ERL last year and then an op-ed in the New York Times recently

01:05:11.000 --> 01:05:23.000
That address this issue of, well, does this make sense right What do we actually mean when we're talking about managed retreat from wildfire? What does that look like?

01:05:23.000 --> 01:05:38.000
And for years, I have said, manage your treat for wildfire is not the logical thing that it is for some of the other hazards, right? For a whole lot of reasons. One, by the way, wildfire can happen anywhere. So nowhere safe.

01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:49.000
It's not well defined, right? But two, and most importantly, wildfire requires fuel control the fuel, control the risk.

01:05:49.000 --> 01:05:54.000
We know how to control fuel. Our houses are fuel, so we make them non-flammable.

01:05:54.000 --> 01:06:06.000
The vegetation in our yards is fuel. So we plant non-flammable stuff, we irrigate it where we absolutely have to, right? We do all the things that Cal Fire says we need to do for defensible space.

01:06:06.000 --> 01:06:12.000
You know, I used to live in the foothills in the Sierra Nevada. We burn stuff. That's my seven-year-old burning.

01:06:12.000 --> 01:06:22.000
Right. Start them young. That's what I say. So we can control the fuel.

01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:31.000
And in a state where we've got a massive housing crisis, it makes a lot more sense to me to think about how we build in a way that controls the fuel.

01:06:31.000 --> 01:06:41.000
And controls the risk rather than trying to figure out where we're going to put every single person who we think might need to be retreating from a high risk area.

01:06:41.000 --> 01:06:50.000
Because those high risk areas are everywhere. I mean, this is a This is our map from First Street that they put out a couple years ago with the proportion of properties with significant wildfire risk.

01:06:50.000 --> 01:07:08.000
Across the US, I would say this is actually an underestimate Because there's been massive disastrous wildfires in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan. Oh, and by the way, the Northeast had a whole bunch of wildfires last fall, like in and around New York City, right in New Jersey.

01:07:08.000 --> 01:07:13.000
So all these places under the right conditions can have wildfire risk.

01:07:13.000 --> 01:07:18.000
If we control the fuel and make it non-burnable, then we reduce that risk.

01:07:18.000 --> 01:07:30.000
These things are everywhere. I always love shocking people. And I'm like, yeah, look at it. We have had more people die from wildfires and more houses burned in wildfires on the East Coast.

01:07:30.000 --> 01:07:33.000
Than we have on the West Coast. Just was a while back.

01:07:33.000 --> 01:07:53.000
And part of that focus on mitigation and controlling the fuel is developing community partnerships, right? So thinking about how do we adapt communities, we have to do all these different things. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet solution. So what's really important is that we do things at the individual scale in our homes.

01:07:53.000 --> 01:08:12.000
But then we also are part of a broader community strategy that uses a lot of different methods and approaches. And some examples of this where it's been successful again success stories, right? One of the things that I've said several times is that mobile homes are wildfire magnets.

01:08:12.000 --> 01:08:26.000
A lot of people live in mobile homes, especially socially vulnerable seniors. Nevada, California, up on the other side of the Bay Area, they've come up with a great strategy where they basically put giant fuel brakes around the home of the park

01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:38.000
There's over 300 seniors live in this mobile home complex. It's owned by the city. And they've said, okay, well, we can't just remove all those people, right? So instead.

01:08:38.000 --> 01:08:44.000
We're going to put in huge field breaks and they bring in goats every single year and they just graze all the vegetation around.

01:08:44.000 --> 01:08:49.000
All the graphs around the mobile home complex. And it works great.

01:08:49.000 --> 01:09:03.000
For keeping the fire out of that mobile home park. Similarly, in South Lake Tahoe, they have been doing fuel breaks for years. It burned in the 2021 Caldor fire. And they had done all of this work. And then when the fire from

01:09:03.000 --> 01:09:11.000
Came over from the west side. It started coming across, right? And tons and tons of houses burned. All these red things are burned houses.

01:09:11.000 --> 01:09:16.000
But they had done all this fuel treatment work. They had controlled the fuel.

01:09:16.000 --> 01:09:22.000
And they didn't lose any houses, even though this was a fire that even a mountain range didn't stop.

01:09:22.000 --> 01:09:28.000
So it was very effective. To control the fuel and reduce the risk.

01:09:28.000 --> 01:09:40.000
Okay, in summary, these disasters are increasing globally and locally, importantly for us uh but They're in hot spots that have these really complex relationships historically.

01:09:40.000 --> 01:09:46.000
And what we've learned is that from these disasters is that post-fire recovery is really slow.

01:09:46.000 --> 01:10:01.000
And it demonstrates some key differences from other hazards that are making it really challenging for communities to try and recover and that there's really some big differences in social factors that influence that recovery.

01:10:01.000 --> 01:10:07.000
And so to be resilient, right, take away lessons as LA embarks on this.

01:10:07.000 --> 01:10:12.000
There are a lot of successes that you can learn from.

01:10:12.000 --> 01:10:18.000
And a lot of the people that are on the ground, people in the other communities that have recovered from these things, they already reach out.

01:10:18.000 --> 01:10:24.000
You know, they're already letting people here know like, hey, we're here, we'll come down, we'll help you guys.

01:10:24.000 --> 01:10:35.000
People from paradise, people from Santa Rosa, right? They're already here on the ground helping to teach those success lessons, right?

01:10:35.000 --> 01:10:44.000
Also that good planning ahead of time ahead thinking about instead of having wishful thinking, yeah, we're not going to have a fire in our county, right? Instead saying, okay.

01:10:44.000 --> 01:10:54.000
Fire is going to happen. Let's figure out what happens What are the types of things that we can do to help facilitate transformation.

01:10:54.000 --> 01:11:00.000
We want to live in a better community how do we facilitate transformation?

01:11:00.000 --> 01:11:04.000
And we do that through community partnerships. It doesn't happen in isolation.

01:11:04.000 --> 01:11:19.000
And again, it is about controlling the fuel. You don't have the fuel then you're not going to have this stuff burnt. And we are already seeing some of the houses that survive these two fires, right? You've all seen the pictures. Oh, here's an isolated house.

01:11:19.000 --> 01:11:29.000
Some of it's just luck. But a lot of those houses were built to incredibly high standards and that's why they didn't burn even when all their neighbors houses burned down.

01:11:29.000 --> 01:11:33.000
Okay. I've gone on very long. I apologize for massive coughing fit.

01:11:33.000 --> 01:11:39.000
I'm happy to answer questions.

01:11:39.000 --> 01:11:53.000
And I believe there are microphones. Yes. Oh, yeah. So I'll just help to manage the questions, but thank you so much. And we're sorry for a few minutes behind here, but I think we could have maybe a few minutes of questions and discussion.

01:11:53.000 --> 01:11:59.000
For those folks who can stay. Open the floor up.

01:11:59.000 --> 01:12:07.000
Marit, you want to kick us off? Well, the mic is for the people that are online to be able to hear you.

01:12:07.000 --> 01:12:27.000
I can try to be the runner. My question actually is less about the research and more about the applications. This was so informative and wonderful. And I'm wondering if you are in touch with city officials yet. And if not, I'd be happy to help facilitate some of those connections. It seems like

01:12:27.000 --> 01:12:31.000
We should really make sure that this informs our recovery efforts.

01:12:31.000 --> 01:12:50.000
Yeah, so great question. Thank you. And the answer is I am not in touch with city officials because I don't live here. Remember, one of my points was place-based approaches. And, you know, I have many colleagues at UCLA that I've been talking with and people I work with in Southern California.

01:12:50.000 --> 01:12:59.000
And we say, okay, there's a lot of this that we're happy if asked to help convey, to inform the discussions.

01:12:59.000 --> 01:13:09.000
But really a lot of the You know, a lot of the real work gets done by the people who live here and are going to the meetings.

01:13:09.000 --> 01:13:25.000
And are engaged in that community process. And as I mentioned, the people who have lived through this process in Santa Rosa, in Paradise up in Santa Barbara County, in all of these recent wildfires in Lahaina, right?

01:13:25.000 --> 01:13:32.000
They have a practice of actually reaching out immediately to their counterparts locally, whether they're planners.

01:13:32.000 --> 01:13:54.000
Whether they are some of the local insurers, right? Whether they're you know very represents the building industry. So they actually are reaching out as well right and so I am not reaching out to anyone because people here know that I'm involved in this work and already have a lot of conversations about this.

01:13:54.000 --> 01:14:02.000
My MO was sort of I am happy to come and tell you what we've learned.

01:14:03.000 --> 01:14:15.000
But I have gone through this process personally, right? And there's people that have the help, a fantastic amount of information And I think a lot of what we're doing, since it's also published in the literature and we've had a lot of these conversations.

01:14:15.000 --> 01:14:31.000
It will help inform that more academic discussion. But it really has to be community up buy-in processes for it to be successful right Yeah, thank you very much. I just think there's some lessons learned.

01:14:31.000 --> 01:14:45.000
Oh, yeah. This is going on YouTube apparently. So, you know, you're so inclined, you can send it to the council and Nandy Skyl will be kind enough to edit out that like three minute copy.

01:14:45.000 --> 01:14:56.000
Yeah, other questions?

01:14:56.000 --> 01:15:03.000
Thank you for all the information. It was super rich and all the knowledge that you bring.

01:15:03.000 --> 01:15:27.000
And my question, I think it's very a minor question, but you mentioned the role of the vegetation And there are certain species that might be well prepare for this kind of event. So are you aware of any database of those species i mean they probably change from ecosystem to ecosystem but

01:15:27.000 --> 01:15:34.000
Is there any effort going on to gather these species? Yeah, so here's where I'll put a plug in for UC A&R.

01:15:34.000 --> 01:15:41.000
If you are not familiar with the UC Ag and Natural Resources, our extension arm that they write.

01:15:41.000 --> 01:16:04.000
They are fantastic about collaborating with the local fire department and across the state level to produce local lists of vegetation for landscaping particularly right that is because everybody wants, okay, we want native stuff You want drought resistant, but it's also got to be fire resistant, right? Like that's the unicorn vegetation. It does exist.

01:16:04.000 --> 01:16:17.000
It's often not the things that we have seen a lot of In LA and SoCal because you know we have sort of legacy ideas of what we want our landscaping to look like.

01:16:17.000 --> 01:16:25.000
If you have any Italian cypress or juniper bushes in your yards, I encourage you to get rid of them immediately.

01:16:25.000 --> 01:16:40.000
They burn like the dickens. When juniper starts to burn, it's got a really high resin content, and I often say it goes off like a roving candle, just shoots fireballs everywhere. So, you know, that stuff's really bad, right? Even though it's drought tolerant.

01:16:40.000 --> 01:16:48.000
But things like succulents, right? Succulents don't burn. I mean, they can cinch. Cacti certainly will sitch.

01:16:48.000 --> 01:16:53.000
But they don't provide fuel that will then help your house burn down.

01:16:53.000 --> 01:17:05.000
Maintaining trees, things a lot of our native trees, especially oaks, things like that As long as they're well trimmed, they don't actually like to burn very much, right?

01:17:05.000 --> 01:17:23.000
And so those type of lists of, oh, here are the different types of plants. A lot of the deciduous perennials, nice beautiful flowers, gorgeous, right? As long as you maintain them and don't have a woody debris build up and things like that.

01:17:23.000 --> 01:17:28.000
Those things all work great at the UCANR, and Cal PAR works with them too, right?

01:17:28.000 --> 01:17:36.000
In the different regions around the state, they have lists of these are great defensible space plants.

01:17:36.000 --> 01:17:41.000
Because they won't fuel a fire rate. They won't bring your house down.

01:17:41.000 --> 01:17:55.000
And just quickly, Theodore Pain Foundation, which is their local native plant horticulture foundation, has great resources on SoCal natives that can work with a fire resistant landscape so

01:17:55.000 --> 01:18:02.000
Do you have any information on prescribed burns on urban areas?

01:18:02.000 --> 01:18:10.000
It's a big challenge in Los Angeles. Yes. So a lot of people have asked me about prescribers in the last few weeks.

01:18:10.000 --> 01:18:22.000
We might broaden the question to the chaparral and stages crop generally. Yeah, and so particularly this is like over in Santa Monica, there's a lot of questions about prescribed rating. Prescribed rating is really challenging.

01:18:22.000 --> 01:18:29.000
In the sort of sagebrush chaparral areas, right, for a variety of reasons.

01:18:29.000 --> 01:18:37.000
First of all, increasing fire frequency is actually really bad for a lot of the native shrubs. Coastal sagebrush in California.

01:18:37.000 --> 01:18:55.000
Is really in danger of being lost to repeated wildfire because it doesn't, unlike a lot of chaparral species, which re-sprout after fire i have seen After the 2009 station fire up on Angeles National Forest, just up the hill from the fire.

01:18:55.000 --> 01:19:11.000
Like two weeks after that fire burned, the chaparral was already resprouting. It hadn't even rained That stuff is like, yes, fire, let me grow, right? A lot of other native plants are not that way. Coastal sage is not that way.

01:19:11.000 --> 01:19:22.000
Right so too much fire is actually bad for those areas, particularly where you want to maintain that biodiversity like in the Santa Monica Mountains.

01:19:22.000 --> 01:19:28.000
So that's a real challenge. In other places, prescribed fire, you know.

01:19:28.000 --> 01:19:42.000
When we talk about prescribed fire, we tend to talk about things that like landscape scale, but really where it can be most effective in a lot of these urban areas is in very small amounts, right? Pile burns and things like that where

01:19:42.000 --> 01:19:45.000
You take out a lot of the heavy, dense woody material.

01:19:45.000 --> 01:19:52.000
How many of you have ever stood and been on a trail somewhere and there's like 20 foot high manzanita over your head?

01:19:52.000 --> 01:19:57.000
So we go in and take a lot of that stuff out and do piles and burn them.

01:19:57.000 --> 01:20:09.000
But that's just to get rid of fuel. It is a really challenging thing to do in Southern California because there's a fear that it's going to escape And it produces smoke.

01:20:09.000 --> 01:20:20.000
And it's a real challenge when you're adjacent to an urban area to make sure that that smoke is not negatively impacting people that are supposed to be protected by this prescription.

01:20:20.000 --> 01:20:38.000
There's so many sensitive populations. So it's really, in my mind you know this is what I tell all the reporters that ask me this I think of this area as one that I don't see us increasing a lot of prescribed burning very successfully.

01:20:38.000 --> 01:20:54.000
I really wish everybody would just really turn to goats and say, oh, these are the best critters ever made because they're very effective at reducing fuel without the level of risk and smoke that we see with prescribed by.

01:20:54.000 --> 01:21:17.000
Just a quick follow-on. Could you comment on there i think there is there is a an argument that I've heard that in chaparral Just because, especially in these downslope wind driven fires that The fuel loads are not the drivers really of how large the fires get, that it's actually just the winds driving the embers.

01:21:17.000 --> 01:21:28.000
That ultimately control the fires and their sizes and even some of the very low fuel load landscapes like invasive grasses often will contribute a lot to a large fire in that environment.

01:21:28.000 --> 01:21:36.000
Prescribed burning just isn't effective in this environment because the fuel loads are just not the determining factors in the fires themselves.

01:21:36.000 --> 01:21:49.000
Yeah, that's a great point, Alex. And it's part of this larger discussion i mean the interesting things that the media comes up with. I've heard many, many times in the last few weeks, as we always do.

01:21:49.000 --> 01:21:54.000
Nothing could have stopped these fires, right?

01:21:54.000 --> 01:22:07.000
And I think to myself. No, there are things that could have stopped these fires in terms of having the preparation done, the mitigation work done ahead of time.

01:22:07.000 --> 01:22:17.000
Once they start in that fuel load with the flammability of those houses, I don't even want to talk about water. You have to be a water pressure, I'm not going to answer.

01:22:17.000 --> 01:22:24.000
You know, if we've got that reduction fuel and houses that won't burn.

01:22:24.000 --> 01:22:36.000
Then these fires absolutely will. It's not that they can't be stopped. On a grassland, everybody's fires have a grass.

01:22:36.000 --> 01:22:51.000
Because they were fast and they were hot and then the first problem, right? But when you have a reduction in the type of fuel that produces embers right or you have housing that is not flammable it doesn't have all that nice flammable

01:22:51.000 --> 01:23:02.000
Vegetation right around it under the windows, climbing up the trellis along the side of the house then what happens is the fire goes through pretty easily.

01:23:02.000 --> 01:23:19.000
Or all of you saw pictures whether you were terrified and watching to see if your own house was going to burn down or you were just watching the news. You see these pictures of, oh, firefighters trying to put out these fires with hoses from trucks or fire engines or whatever right

01:23:19.000 --> 01:23:24.000
Or airplane drops moving across these landscapes. When it's just grass.

01:23:24.000 --> 01:23:35.000
It is actually pretty easy to dissipate that energy and stop fires much easily and stop them at roads or trails or the edge of a cul-de-sac or something.

01:23:35.000 --> 01:23:41.000
But when you have that higher fuel load, particularly around the house.

01:23:41.000 --> 01:23:50.000
Where you can cache those embers in your landscaping and we'll catch those embers in your gutters that are filled with leaf debris, things like that it burns down.

01:23:50.000 --> 01:24:02.000
The whole house and that that's when nothing will stop these fires So this sort of, you know, this question about, well, should we even have fuel breaks, right? Should we even have prescribed fires? Nothing will stop them.

01:24:02.000 --> 01:24:11.000
Stop these fires and these high winds Well, we're not talking about, again, we don't want to stop the fires We want to prevent the disaster.

01:24:11.000 --> 01:24:21.000
And the disaster is the fatalities. The disaster is escape routes getting cut off and people panicking because they can't evacuate.

01:24:21.000 --> 01:24:29.000
The disaster is thousands of houses burning down. Right. If we have landscapes that are resistant to that.

01:24:29.000 --> 01:24:35.000
How many of you saw stories about Pepperdine University sheltering in place in the Franklin Fire in the fall?

01:24:35.000 --> 01:24:50.000
There's a fantastic example of what it can look like if we manage the fuel properly, right? Pepperdine was built to shelter in place. Those buildings are non-flammable. They have huge amounts of clearance around the buildings.

01:24:50.000 --> 01:25:07.000
They don't have places that will catch embers and catch buildings on fire, right? And they really reduce their fuel load just immediately adjacent to campus. So when fires do come, they run right up two where the edge of the grass is.

01:25:07.000 --> 01:25:15.000
They do not burn the campus down. And we don't have you know we don't have students dying trying to evacuate in school.

01:25:15.000 --> 01:25:20.000
So that's the type of landscape I look at and think like, yes, this is doable.

01:25:20.000 --> 01:25:26.000
And we don't have to use a ton of prescribed bar to get there.

01:25:26.000 --> 01:25:42.000
Just manage the fuel in a way that it is immediately around the houses is a lower fuel load. The houses themselves are not flammable right and that's And then we're not trying to stop the fire right it's stopping the fire from burning the building.

01:25:42.000 --> 01:25:50.000
Letting fire waste through the grass.

01:25:50.000 --> 01:26:01.000
Thanks for an excellent talk. I have a question. You were talking about one of the gaps for communities who face fires is access to mental health services.

01:26:01.000 --> 01:26:19.000
And I was wondering if you have through any of your prior work some examples of how it's been done well, both in the short term with thinking about the trauma itself and then the longer term either with community members who are deciding whether to come back and rebuild or the community who

01:26:19.000 --> 01:26:35.000
Is still here, but maybe has lost access to other parts of you know the you can think here the the trail system or other services as well. I was just wondering if you have any examples from your work about when it's been done well that we might learn about here.

01:26:35.000 --> 01:26:45.000
Yeah, so Paradise has paradise and Santa Rosa both have been working on this a lot over the last several years.

01:26:45.000 --> 01:27:05.000
Part of it is that they have they did not used to bring in mental health professionals in the immediate period post fire right as part of the Red Cross response or as part of disaster case management like disaster case management is, you know.

01:27:05.000 --> 01:27:21.000
Come in, you say, I've lost things This person is meant to help you navigate, okay, what do you need? We do a needs assessment to figure out what that is Right. And so they have really previously focused on sort of basic amenities, right? Food, water shelter.

01:27:21.000 --> 01:27:46.000
And now they're expanding that needs assessment to better reflect needs for mental health and other types of support that way. And then as they go long term, they have actually recognized the utility in bringing in different types of facilitated mental health because let's be clear, in a place like paradise, if you've never been to rural Butte County.

01:27:46.000 --> 01:27:59.000
This is not a hotbed. Of, you know, I'm going to take care of my mental health. It's the type of place where people power through things and don't feelings. It's very old school philosophy that way.

01:27:59.000 --> 01:28:18.000
And so they've done things like have you know just have just facilitated sessions. There are a few people in town that have been starting to do this and they've done like nature journaling sessions um Which has been a really interesting thing for me to observe. I use nature journaling in my

01:28:18.000 --> 01:28:31.000
Classes to help my students deal with mental health issues instead of they've been bringing in these like, oh, we're just going to have a we're going to have a drawing session, right? To pull people in.

01:28:31.000 --> 01:28:54.000
But it's really been about disguising therapeutic activities in the guise of other types of community recovery Right. And so bringing it into all aspects of their community recovery process and then has been a really important part.

01:28:54.000 --> 01:29:09.000
Of them dealing with it and you know. I think for a lot of the kids, this has been very traumatic thing and We're still working on some of the schools have been starting to do PTSDA work in the schools as they've reopened.

01:29:09.000 --> 01:29:21.000
To better support those kids because the number of them that have nightmares. They've had to re-evacuate. It's horrific, that sort of thing. They really struggle.

01:29:21.000 --> 01:29:27.000
Okay, maybe one more question and then If anyone has one more.

01:29:27.000 --> 01:29:36.000
Yes. Thank you so much. This was a really informative and helpful talk. My question is a bit on the gentrification piece.

01:29:36.000 --> 01:29:48.000
Which I guess I'm not sure how much you can weigh in based on kind of the case studies and other fires you've mentioned but I was volunteering actually this weekend at the disaster recovery center down at the west side pavilion just

01:29:48.000 --> 01:30:02.000
On behalf of UCLA. And we were just helping people get replacement diplomas, basically. But a woman came up to us a lot of people were just coming up to us kind of to talk in the midst of dealing with FEMA and all the state and city agencies.

01:30:02.000 --> 01:30:18.000
And she was just understandably expressing a lot of concern and fear about her house had burned down in Malibu and her family had bought it in the 90s. Obviously at a very different time for a very different price. And she was talking about, you know.

01:30:18.000 --> 01:30:29.000
She felt like developers were watching like a hawk and fear of not even getting enough money from insurance and all these other forms of aids and grants that are coming up to be able to rebuild. And I guess my question is.

01:30:29.000 --> 01:30:44.000
Do you have any like examples of things that have worked or sentiments of hope for people like that who fall into the middle where they might not qualify for for fully affordable housing or subsidized housing, but they still want to rebuild but are concerned that

01:30:44.000 --> 01:30:53.000
Even though their property value might be really high, they don't have that cash on hand and insurance might not be enough for them to rebuild.

01:30:53.000 --> 01:30:56.000
Just given the time when they kind of bought into that area.

01:30:56.000 --> 01:31:02.000
Yeah, so this is a This has been a major problem in all the areas that we've studied.

01:31:02.000 --> 01:31:18.000
And part of the reason that HUD funded us to do this research is because they want to figure out where some of those gaps and problems are One thing I noted in the slide I didn't really talk about it was this issue of duplication of that's

01:31:18.000 --> 01:31:35.000
Which means that this is It's like the Stafford Act from Congress says that you can't give double amounts of money, right? So people right now are getting you know if they're potentially applying for aid from FEMA, they have to have some place to live

01:31:35.000 --> 01:31:43.000
So they're going to take that money and some of them will go buy a fist wheel and live on their lot or some of them will get an apartment for a while, right?

01:31:43.000 --> 01:31:50.000
And when they go to actually apply for the full loan to help rebuild their house.

01:31:50.000 --> 01:31:59.000
The amount that they already got, they can't receive that again, even if they already spent it on just sort of day-to-day is living in housing expenses.

01:31:59.000 --> 01:32:15.000
So that's why they end up with not enough money to to rebuild and so you know they they We're working with her to try and figure out how do we better because hunter had no idea that it took so long after fires for people to get back on the property.

01:32:15.000 --> 01:32:21.000
Right. They were like, why are people still living there three years later in a Or a trailer or something.

01:32:21.000 --> 01:32:28.000
Right, this is the reality. So they're working to revise the program to reflect that.

01:32:28.000 --> 01:32:50.000
I would say one of the big wins, how many of you caught Newsom's executive order a couple weeks ago where things that he said was for people who have been under Prop 13 for decades, right? Their house, their amount of tax they pay is based on a value that's much, much lower than the true value of their house.

01:32:50.000 --> 01:32:54.000
That was kind of the media sort of glossed it over and didn't really get into it.

01:32:54.000 --> 01:33:15.000
But that is actually, when I saw that, I was very excited to see that because that has been a major problem for many of these areas is that people in Santa Rosa the whole coffee park area re-gentrified post-fire. And part of that was because people have been there for decades. They bought their houses in the 60s

01:33:15.000 --> 01:33:28.000
Thanks to Prop 13 if they're, you know. That neighborhood houses are over a million dollar value if they were recently sold that a lot of people were only paying taxes and of $100,000 train.

01:33:28.000 --> 01:33:35.000
And so they did not have an executive order there. And what we saw was that people couldn't afford, even if they could afford to rebuild.

01:33:35.000 --> 01:33:45.000
So Newsom's executive order should actually address that, right? Insurance will be a different story.

01:33:45.000 --> 01:33:51.000
And that's a part of the insurance commissioner's office that we're trying to figure out how to address those.

01:33:51.000 --> 01:34:08.000
So yeah, there's little things, right? Changes in the way agencies are running programs getting feedback from us and from people on the ground about how they can do it differently and things like the governor stepping in and saying, okay, we're not going to

01:34:08.000 --> 01:34:17.000
Assess you at the higher tax rate when you rebuild. We're going to basically keep your taxes at what they were at your old assessment.

01:34:17.000 --> 01:34:25.000
So that will help tremendously and then you know, there'll be more things and it's an ongoing process to figure out what they are.

01:34:25.000 --> 01:34:32.000
Okay, let's thank Dr. Colvin again.

01:34:32.000 --> 01:34:42.000
And thank you again for joining us. Look forward to seeing you all next month for the Kingston Robertson Talk, with details to come about that.

01:34:42.000 --> 01:34:48.000
Look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.

01:34:48.000 --> 01:35:01.000
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