By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair
On September 6, 2019, without much notice, the California legislature passed SB 632. This little bill said the following:
“SECTION 1. (a) The Legislature finds and declares that many of the most destructive and deadliest wildfires recorded in California’s history have occurred in the last two years, and the proposed program environmental impact report for a vegetation treatment program serves as an important public safety component to reduce the risk of loss of life and property from high-intensity wildfires.
“(b) The Legislature therefore intends that the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection complete the proposed program environmental impact report for the vegetation treatment program as soon as practicably feasible and that the report be used to complete priority fuel reduction projects to protect communities vulnerable to wildfires.
“SEC. 2. Section 746 is added to the Public Resources Code, to read:
“746. (a) As soon as practicably feasible, but by no later than February 1, 2020, the board shall complete its review, pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act (Division 13 (commencing with Section 21000)), of the vegetation treatment program pursuant to a notice of preparation, State Clearinghouse Number 2019012052, filed by the board with the State Clearinghouse on January 30, 2019, and certify a final program environmental impact report pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act.
“(b) This section shall remain in effect only until January 1, 2021, and as of that date is repealed.” SB 632 requires Cal Fire to approve the Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP). Fortunately, they did not make a statutory exemption from CEQA over it, because this may well end up being litigated by some organization. 5
Here’s why.
When we conservationists read the VTP introduction, the following phrases kind of leaped out: “While vegetation treatments under the CalVTP may not be able to slow or halt the extreme fires, most fires that occur within the state are not highly wind driven, and the proposed vegetation treatments can help slow and suppress them. Vegetation treatments can also play a valuable role in containing the more extreme fires, when weather conditions shift, wind subsides, and fire intensity decreases.”
“Certain wind and weather conditions lead to high-intensity, fast-moving, wind-driven wildfires. Although the most individually destructive, these extreme fires represent a small number of the total fires that occur each year.”
The VTP as a whole seemed to want it both ways, to say that they’re complying with the legislature’s intent to “reduce the risk of loss of life and property from high-intensity wildfires,” but they also say that they can’t control them. And they also claim that this doesn’t matter, because extreme fires are rare.
That confused me, so I decided to turn to Cal Fire’s own published data. Oddly enough, Cal Fire reorganized their website right when they published the VTP, so all the data they cited in the VTP was unavailable at the links given. However, good ol’ Wikipedia came to the rescue, because someone had been scraping the data from Cal Fire’s sites and publishing pages containing summaries of the data, with easy-to-find titles like “2018 California wildfires.” Cal Fire backed its claims with data from 2010-2018, so I got data from 2008-2018 to see what was going on. And it’s kind of interesting.
It turns out that between 2008 and 2018, California averaged just over 8,000 fires per year. These burned on average 838,990 acres per year. Of these 8,000 fires, on average the five largest fires accounted for over 50% of the acreage burned. On average, only 42 fires were over 1,000 acres, but they accounted for almost 84% of the acreage burned each year, sometimes almost all of it. While there’s a trend of increasing fires from 2010-2018, 2008 and 2009 (not to mention 2007 and 2003) do not fit this trend line.
Let me unpack that for you: less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the fires in the state burned over half the acres burned, and less than half a percent of fires burned a vast majority of the acreage. The other 99% of the fires burned a minority of the land.
My take on this is that California’s firefighters are actually really, really good at their job now. They control almost all the fires every year. However, there are a few monsters they can’t control, and these monsters cause most of the damage. The legislature intended for the VTP to deal with these biggest fires, and even Cal Fire thinks the VTP is incapable of doing this.
This is one of the big problems with the VTP, but it’s not the only one, and that’s why I suspect someone will litigate when it passes as mandated. “Suspect” does NOT mean that CNPS will definitely litigate on this. Rather, there are a lot of unhappy environmental groups out there. I’d love for the legislators who voted for SB 632 thinking it would make things better to also be unhappy, but politics doesn’t seem to work that way.
As for what we should do about extreme fires, there’s a growing body of research that suggests that clearing the vegetation won’t keep people safe. Instead, the data suggest that the best solutions are to not build in high fire areas or, failing that (and we’ve failed that for maybe a million homes or more), then those homes need to be hardened against fire and maintained properly. If you want to read more about fire, there was a great article by Bettina Boxall in the September 11 Los Angeles Times: “Forest thinning projects won’t stop the worst wildfires. So why is California spending millions on them?” (https://www.latimes.com/projects/wildfire-california-fuel-breaks-newsom-paradise). There’s also new research showing that mega-fires are not increasing across the west, that they’re an endemic problem like earthquakes and floods (https://phys.org/news/2019-09-megafires-large-high-severity-natural-western.html).
Finally, CNPS just published the updated Fire Recovery Guide that you can download for free at https://www.cnps.org/give/priority-initiatives/fire-recovery. This one focuses on what to do about your land after a fire, and it improves on the last guide. Some paper copies are available, but they’ll go fast.
There’s not an elegant way to end this, except to note that every environmental group right now needs you to give to their litigation fund. That includes CNPSSD. The VTP isn’t the end of it, and we need resources to keep fighting.