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Nine months before Big Basin Redwood State Park suffered its worst fire in recorded history, one of the park’s environmental scientists gave a podcast interview revealing that a prescribed burn had not taken place within the park in three years.

“Does that raise your anxiety at all about the potential for something catastrophic?” asks Peter Jordan, a docent who created the podcast “What the Docents Know” to give the public a deeper understanding of Big Basin.

Sixteen uncomfortable seconds pass — an eternity in radio — during which the scientist, Portia Halbert, can be heard sighing and swallowing (jump to 21:00 of episode 3 to listen). According to Jordan, who was with Halbert in her office, she was in tears.

She finally composes herself and says she’s thinking about Paradise, the city that burned to the ground during the Camp Fire in 2018. “Given the right conditions, we’re poised to have catastrophic wildfires all over California,” says Halbert, who works for the Santa Cruz District of the California State Park System. “So what’s my anxiety level like? I think we’ve been really lucky to avoid something very extreme here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.”

Halbert goes on to say that Big Basin's geographic location, fog and cool summers had seemingly insulated it for a while. But during the 100-plus years the park hadn't seen fire, flammable vegetation had built up, and new trees had grown between other trees, she said. In certain wind conditions, those trees could act as "ladder fuels" that would ignite the canopy.

"I don't know that just the last three years of us not burning really has built my anxiety level," she said. "But witnessing what's happened in California with these wildfires has definitely made me feel, say, more empowered to try and get burns accomplished to sort of prevent that possibility for this area."

The fact that prescribed burns have not taken place in Big Basin for years is a surprise even to people who work for the park and partner organizations.

After the CZU August Lightning Complex fires engulfed the park’s 18,000 acres, destroying its headquarters, main lodge, ranger station and other historic structures, the Sempervirens Fund — a nonprofit organization that helped create the park in 1902 — issued a statement about the fire, including a reference to prescribed burning.

“Big Basin, in particular, has benefited from the longest, continuous program of prescribed burning anywhere in the state since the purposeful burning done by indigenous people who tended this landscape for thousands of years,” the fund’s website states.

Elizabeth Hammack, Big Basin’s manager of interpretation and education, said it wasn’t her department but she believed the scientists were “always doing prescribed burns.”

But for more than three years leading up to the CZU Complex — which as of Tuesday evening had claimed 79,640 acres and was 19% contained — the burns weren’t happening in Big Basin.

A search on the California Air Resource Board’s Prescribed Fire Reporting System shows that no prescribed fires have taken place in the park since 2018, when the Monterey Bay Air Resources District began reporting its data. According to Richard Stedman, a pollution control officer with the district, Big Basin did prescribed burns on 410 acres between 2000 and 2015, but nothing since.

“We haven’t done a large burn in Big Basin in the last three years because the weather hasn’t lined up,” Halbert says in the podcast. She brings up other bottlenecks to prescribed burns including permitting issues, staffing, and a short — or nonexistent — window for favorable weather conditions.

Big Basin burns can only happen in the fall. The fuel, composed of vegetation and plant material that burns easily, can’t be too wet or too dry. There must be some rain, but not too much. Winds must be blowing away from populated areas. If the winter rains come, the opportunity is gone.

Strict guidelines established by the Clean Air Act and enforced by air-quality districts can also prevent burns. “It’s a great thing to protect public health, but it makes it challenging for us to actually implement prescribed fires,” Halbert says.

For these reasons and more, prescribed burns have been underutilized not only in Big Basin but throughout California, according to a recent Stanford study published in Nature.


https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Big-Basin-was-at-risk-for-a-15514626.php