MENDOCINO CO., 12/14/24 — December’s fire in Malibu is a reminder of the new reality that fire season in California is year-round. In addition to home-hardening and defensible space, prescribed burns are a prime strategy to reduce fuels that can feed wildfires. Native Americans practiced cultural burning for thousands of years before contact with European settlers, who forced them to stop using fire on the landscape.
Far from being a form of glorified arson, a well-run prescribed burn takes place only after permits and weather conditions have been scrupulously analyzed, the land is prepared, and safety measures are in place. Burns are also labor- and knowledge-intensive, with trained burn bosses running crews that have been briefed and briefed again on what to look out for, safety contingencies and specialized roles.
In the season of 2024-25, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council is promoting prescribed burns through its new GrizzlyCorps fellow, Emily Lord. GrizzlyCorps is part of AmeriCorps; it’s a science-based vocational fellowship designed by UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. The program sends recent college graduates into rural parts of California to work on practical responses to climate change.
One of Emily’s main focuses this year is to help expand the number of prescribed burns throughout the county. She started in mid-September and had Fire Fighter 2 training under her belt before the end of the month.
By October, following our late-summer heat wave, Emily had taken part in burns with Cal Fire in Jackson Demonstration State Forest, the Eel River Recovery Project in Laytonville, and with TERA, the Tribal Ecosystem Restoration Alliance, in Lake County. She was all in, waxing poetic about the view of smoke through the canopy on thirty acres of former timberland in Laytonville. “I have such a strong visual of the madrone trees on the eastern side of the burn unit,” she recalled. “I was walking through there in the late afternoon. All the litter had been burned away, and there were all these beautiful red madrone trees. The smoke was clearing, and the sunbeams were coming through the smoke. It was really awesome.”
On another burn at the Middletown Rancheria of Pomo Indians with TERA, she observed the return of Indigenous land management practices. In Middletown, Emily had the chance to witness three generations caring for the land, as the burn boss brought along his mother and two little girls. The personality of this fire was completely different from the one in the oak woodlands by the Eel River. “It’s really interesting to watch how quickly grass catches, as opposed to tanoak litter,” she noted, adding that the burn was done in about an hour.
Emily also took part in a study led by Mike Jones, the University of California Cooperative Extension’s Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma counties. A founding member of the Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association, Dr. Jones runs research burns in Jackson Demonstration State Forest. Emily attended a 400-acre burn to observe weather conditions and fire behavior. She made notes about the rate of spread, flame lengths, scorch height, smoke columns, and to “take a lot — a lot of pictures,” she concluded. “It was really awesome to be part of such a large burn… Watching fire run through a redwood forest was definitely a first for me.”
By the first week of December, she was training to become a firing boss, second in command to the burn boss at a prescribed burn. She was ready for her quiz a few days later, rattling off the variables that come under a firing boss’ purview. These include squad dynamics, how to give a tight five-minute firing briefing, what kind of paperwork needs to be handled, and, oh yes, fire behavior. “I got to meet a lot of fire practitioners from the area and some far-flung ones,” she reported. She also learned how to design a firing plan, which demands a full understanding of fuel conditions, moisture, seasonal variables, “and how you would eventually put fire on the ground.”