This is the final installment of our ‘California Burning’ series that originally ran in Fall 2020. The series was awarded First Place for Investigative Reporting by the National Newspaper Association. We are reprinting the series—with updates for 2021—because the threats to our Mountain Communities continue as we enter 2022. We will all be safer when more of us understand the urgency of these issues, including why fire-hardening homes needs to be a community-wide effort.

By Bryant Baker, Los Padres ForestWatch, Dominick DellaSala, PhD, Wild Heritage and Chad Hanson, PhD, John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute

Former Mount Pinos District Ranger Tom Kuekes portrayed wildfire issues as “complicated” in Part 4 of the “California Burning” series in The Mountain Enterprise. It would be hard to disagree with that. Wildfire is complicated, and it is only becoming more complicated as climate change worsens.

When he first took the job here as district ranger in 2001, Kuekes told of his concerns about how unprepared these Mountain Community towns were for a major wildfire. That is why he decided to keep his family in Bakersfield.

Before he retired, Kuekes was named Ranger of the Year.

Almost 15 years have passed since then.

New tools such as multi-dimensional big data with space-time pattern mining from satellite imagery have emerged to drive analysis of changing precipitation patterns and the behavior of increasingly frequent high velocity wind-driven fires and their aftermath in our state.

That data, combined with on-the-ground field surveys in fire-resilient …(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

Top 10 Ways to Protect Your Home From Wildfire

(L-r)Dominick DellaSala, PhD, and Bryant Baker of Los Padres ForestWatch are deeply concerned about fire safety for rural towns.

Creek Fire perimeter from the National Interagency Fire Center (Oct. 26, 2020). All vegetation removal project data collected from the U.S. Forest Service FACTS database and Cal Fire by Bryant Baker (bryant@lpfw.org)

Note: Darkest blue (left, in fire perimeter) is the area covered by the Creek fire in its explosive first 24-36 hours, Sept. 5-6, 2020. [See the narrative about this event on page 5] In that time, the fire sped through “fuel thinning” areas that had been burned over previously. In the next 24 hours it destroyed 2,500 structures and took 15 lives. The fire slowed down when it reached the natural forest.

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This is part of the December 31, 2021 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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