Mendocino County Fire Safe Council Welcomes GrizzlyCorps Fellow Emily Lord

This is an installment of an exciting series of podcasts and companion articles we are collaborating on with journalist Sarah Reith. You can listen to her podcast by hitting the play button below or you can read a version of the story below. 

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, which is part of AmeriCorps, is a science-based vocational fellowship that was 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 a late-summer heat wave, Emily’s feet were firmly on the ground. She 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.

She’s not just here to take in impressions, though. She 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 was there on the day of a 400-acre burn to gather observations about weather conditions and fire behavior. She was hand to make 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, who is 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 into 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.”

She got a lot of drip torch time the next day on a burn in Potter Valley, hiking into the wilderness with a lighter and a prescription, which is a set of objectives and permissible weather conditions. The procedural nature of the operation is designed to turn something with potentially catastrophic power into a routine set of surmountable tasks. 

During the first of several briefings, the burn boss will inform everyone of the objectives of the burn: is it for fuels reduction or habitat restoration, like protecting mature oaks? How is the weather going to change throughout the day? What is the plan if conditions slip outside the prescription? Safety and medical information, from the proximity of the closest hospital to   advisories about poison oak and rattlesnakes, are also included.

In short, she’s packed in a lot of learning about what it takes to run a prescribed burn. There is a lot of successful burning activity already happening in the area.  But not nearly as much as we need to bring down our risk of intense wildfires. We need to pick up the pace.  That is where all of that training will pay off as Emily begins putting together things like guides for landowners on how to navigate the permitting process and helping them with tools to assess potential burns. Planning and preparing for a burn can take months or even years, as crews prepare the site for maximum safety and effectiveness. Emily is working to help make that process as short and easy to understand as possible.

So why, with so many contingencies, permitting hurdles, and the primal fear of flames, would anyone deliberately set their property on fire?

“It does seem counterintuitive,” Emily agreed. But “prescribed fire is very different than wildfire. There’s less smoke, the flame lengths are lower, (and) it’s low intensity. You’re not killing everything in its path, by any means. We have  a fuels problem in California. There’s been a historical regime of suppression for a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, when indigenous people were banned from burning their own land, after doing it for thousands and thousands of years…now we have a problem where every time a wildfire comes through, it burns so hot it burns everything in its path. Prescribed burning is a tool. It’s not the only tool, but it’s certainly a very valuable one, in reducing the amount of fuel on the land in order to not prevent wildfire entirely, but lessen its intensity when it does inevitably come.”

To learn more about prescribed burns and how you can use this ancient tool to manage your property, visit California’s hub for Prescribed Burn Associations at https://calpba.org/.