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This week we will discuss what is a relatively understudied component of wildfire management--human recovery and change after wildfires. We will also discuss ways to monitor or respond to human impacts after wildfires, including different types of impacts across populations.
Please submit at least three discussion questions based on the readings for the week. Feel free to link your comments and/or questions to other topics we have covered in class, or any important considerations of wildfire management you feel that we have not yet addressed. Finally, consider how we carefully weigh the benefits and negative outcomes that can come from wildfire. How do our approaches for wildfire management reflect those realities?
Please submit your comments by noon on Monday. That will give our discussion leads adequate time to prepare for their duties.
Edgeley and Paveglio (2017) interviewed folks impacted by the Carlton Complex Fire one year after the event. Even a year out from a disaster, emotions are raw and recovery is a tangled mess; is it possible that just questioning a community about the fairness of assistance received might bias them to say no, it was not enough?
ReplyDeleteAnd do folks agree that this really a problem of FEMA not understanding “rural western communities”? Or could this be part of larger, systemic and structural environmental justice inequities that hinge on class and economic power rather than geographic location? What examples from more recent fires and disaster might we look to?
Paveglio et al (2015) assert that a “community is best characterised as a place where people share a common landscape and infrastructure and have the opportunity to interact frequently in a way that develops shared norms and values” (H), while Schumman et al underscore the many challenges that may accompany post-fire recovery due to the often competing interests of diverse local stakeholders.
If post-fire community cohesion has a limited temporal span, perhaps disintegrating at precisely the stage when the affected area may be most vulnerable to the re-occurrence of fire (due to both net increase of housing and returning grasses and shrubs), could the proposed model of transformative adaptation ever be effectively implemented? And if implemented, what would the long-term transformations need to be to achieve the zero-loss of lives and properties that constitutes the normative conception of fire “adaptation”?
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ReplyDeleteEdgeley et al., 2017: It would’ve been interesting to know something about resident attitudes/thoughts on pre-fire mitigation actions. The 2013 Okanogan CWPP (updated from 2009) describes the wildfire potential around Brewster and Pateros as “moderate to high” with “large expanses of open rangeland or pasture [that] provide a continuous fuel bed that could, if ignited, threaten structures and infrastructure under extreme weather conditions” (pg. 48). The CWPP lists 3 of 9 “Prevention, Education, and Mitigation” action items as being deleted due to lack of funding, including 6.2.e: “Maintenance of home site defensible space treatments” and 6.2.f: “Re-entry of home site defensible space treatment.” The document also shows 5 of 7 action items for “Infrastructure Enhancements” being deleted (things like evacuation signage) due to insufficient funding. However, all of the county’s “Resource and Capacity Enhancements” (new engines, land, FF equipment) were in the process of being met. What story does the Okanogan CWPP tell? An under-resourced community caught by wildfire before it could acquire capacity/resources? Or one hyper-focused on using resources to fight fire, without adequate attention given as to where or how to safely fight one?
DeleteWhile Paveglio et al. (2015) advance a more holistic approach to understanding the social impacts of wildlife, discussion of any positive social impact of wildfire is limited or absent. Rural communities are keen to take advantage of post-fire landscapes for recreation purposes (skiing, hunting, foraging...etc.). Should these positives inform our assessment of fire’s social impact?
Schumann et al., 2019: Where does prescribed fire fit into their ‘coupled social-ecological model’? Why isn’t prescribed fire discussed as a means of reducing future vulnerability to wildfire?
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ReplyDeleteAfter the Carlton Complex, FEMA assessed aid needs via a 3-day windshield survey (Edgeley & Paveglio 2017). If they had instead embedded an agent within Okanogan County for a week or two to spend more time with people affected, would people have felt differently about the assessment? More broadly - could a solution to this issue be hiring local FEMA agents to work in high-risk communities' forestry/agricultural/VFD field offices to prepare ahead of time for accurate assessments and to help people feel heard? Why/why not?
ReplyDeleteFor rural communities attempting to move on after a fire, a major roadblock to receiving aid is the fact that FEMA prioritizes easily measurable metrics like structures lost/damaged and number of people affected. How can other, more difficult-to-measure things like loss of day-to-day routines, loss of connection between social groups and loss of connection to the aesthetics of a landscape be quantified so they are represented when accounting for damages? Is this kind of quantification possible?
In Edgeley & Paveglio 2017, the stages of disaster recovery are described as: impact/immediate aftermath, community cohesion/mutual aid, disillusionment and reconstruction. This reminded me of the Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Like the bargaining stage of grief, the mutual aid stage is described as a "honeymoon" period filled with hope and altruism that precedes a period of disillusionment, similar to the depression that may follow a bargaining stage. These stages, much like the stages of grief, are just concepts with thresholds to demonstrate how people may move through a tragedy and are not necessarily a roadmap. However, there could be parallels here - acceptance and reconstruction are both concepts that require grappling with changed circumstances. Could the concept of acceptance be translated into the language of risk governance? How could this be communicated to people who may need to rethink strategies or rebuild entire communities to protect themselves from the next disaster?
Edgeley and Paveglio indicate that the intermediate post fire needs can lead to controversy- using the example of salvage logging. Looking back to the CWPP, could that planning process be used not only for determining mitigations but also making decisions ahead of time about priorities for recovery? I think we can both acknowledge that although we would like the plan to mitigate these problems that is a long game and would be wise to hash out some decisions on how a community will recover in the case of catastrophic fire. This could have the potential to preserve local relationships that are built during the CWPP process, thereby easing the social burden of recovery.
ReplyDeleteConsidering the shortcomings of FEMA’s response to wildfire, local distrust in external government, and NGOs having an important role as identified by Edgeley and Paveglio - could this be an opportunity for fire minded NGOs to fill a gap while taking advantage of the “hot moment” as suggested by Schumann et al? The Nature Conservancy, and The Ember Alliance are examples that come to mind- the missions of these organizations revolve around a better relationship with fire. Perhaps engagement after a fire assisting communities with the recovery process would then place these NGO’s in a position to help pivot these recovering communities into fire-adapted communities. Do you think that this would be a feasible way to not only help communities recover but to do it in a fire-adapted manner?
Paveglio et al
I think the idea of at least getting a rapid assessment of social impacts could start to provide a data set that allows for broader insight. Attaching a check box, or yes/no assessment to fire reporting would at the very least provide more data for researchers. The inclusion of social impacts in the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) could provide widespread data on the social impact of not just wildfire but all types of emergencies and disasters. How could this reporting be incentivized? For some agencies (Federal, State) it may require a policy change and modification to report form, but in the case of local agencies it is not uniformly mandatory, and it is possible that agencies that are not currently reporting into NFIRS are protecting communities that may see greater social impacts.
Edgely & Paveglio analysis of recovery following the Carlton Complex Fire revealed similarities to the Columbia Complex Fire where the some of the respondents perceived a lack of effectiveness in FEMA's assistance. How could FEMA's disaster recovery assistance framework be altered to better account for the values of western communities?
ReplyDeleteEdgely & Paveglio mention, "Exploration of the social influences on hazard recovery also may encourage additional preparation for future hazard events through the recommendation of mitigations that best reflect local values-at-risk or that reduce what are perceived as the most significant potential impacts from a given hazard." (pg. 138). How would this generally apply to the WUI?
Schumman et al. mentions utilizing the "hot" moment of recovery as a pathway for creating fire-adapted communities (pg. 2). How can it be ensured that this progress translates into management that lasts longer than the typical disaster recovery period?
Edgely and Paveglio 2017
ReplyDeleteHow much has changed since the Carlton complex in terms of FEMA's response and understanding of wildfire? The last 9 years have had numerous devastating fires that FEMA undoubtedly played a role in. Are the complaints leveled against the agency still valid? Was community wildfire recovery addressed in any meaningful way in recent legislation (i.e., Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act etc)
To what extent do VOADs and disaster response agencies (chiefly FEMA) work in tandem to solve the same problems? Are these organizations good at interacting with one another? Is there potential for conflict between these organizations as they try to accomplish similar tasks?
Paveglio et al 2015
In defining emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes, I noticed part of what makes a disaster is exceeding local capabilities. If we see communities increase their capacity to deal with wildfire, could we see a shifting baseline of what a wildfire "disaster" will be in the future? I could also see a scenario where megafires become more commonplace and burns with smaller perimeters are no longer treated as disasters, even if their impacts are severe.
Paveglio 2015
ReplyDeleteNorthern CA saw 1 million acre fires in 2020 and 2021 but these did not appear to spur any type of paradigm-shifting change. In fact, there hasn’t been much change at all. Can we implement paradigm-shifting changes without catastrophic events? If instances like the Carr Fire (2018, Redding, CA), Camp Fire (2018, Pardise, CA) and the Dixie Fire (2021, Greenville, CA) aren’t trigger points for this type of change, what will that have to look like?
Edgeley/Paveglio
Would an organization of Okanogan county property owners have been able to more effectively advocate for the interests of private citizens? Would something like this help to gain access to the macrostructures (Steelman) we discussed last week?
Schumann
While Schumann et al. discussed the possibility of rebuilding with fire adaptation in mind post-wildfire, it is still largely from the perspective that fire is a catastrophic, but potentially manageable, natural disaster. In Ponderosa Pine, Jeffrey Pine, mixed con, and other ecosystem types where fire return intervals are as short as 15-25 years, this is a flawed perspective. Is it politically feasible to build sustainable communities within the context of fire as a natural and recurring part of their ecosystem, similar to other damaging but regular weather events like heavy snowfall or precipitation?
In Edgeley and Paveglio there were several surprising responses from residents; the most surprising was the response with the comparison ”I’ve got a restraining order against my ex-wife and I’m gonna sue her because she didn’t mow the lawn.” What was the difficulty when working with these individuals? Is it surprising to have a response similar to this?
ReplyDeleteSchumann et al. provides a table with definitions of key concepts from the model of coupled social ecological recovery from wildfire; was this table helpful to others? Often researchers use terminology with the intention everyone understands in the same way; more often or not this is not the case.