Laura McCarthy welcome and thanks for joining me today be here so it is not over yet but this has been a historic Fire season in New Mexico were you among the surprised at all I was I definitely was not expecting that by the 12th of April we would be in a full-blown Fire season you may remember that the hermit's Peak fire started on April 6 and then April 12th was the start of the McBride fire so why did I mean I know we we know this but why why this fire season this year so I think there are a bunch of different factors one is the kind of monsoon season that we had last year that was pretty average that resulted in a lot of vegetation growth a lot of grasses and robust shrubs and they dried out over the fall and winter and then our winter moisture was we had some it was below average the temperatures were higher so the effect of each snowfall in terms of recharging the ground like as it melted uh was less it and we we ended up in late March with uh not much soil moisture snowpack that had had left early and all this dry grass and brush from the previous summer that set us up in terms of fuel conditions then it started it got windy and we've done some analysis to ask the question well how windy because most New Mexicans know April is always windy but we have data that shows that April and May were both a lot windier than normal or I shouldn't say than normal they were a lot windier than the previous 20 years that's the time period we looked back over and of course we know that Forest Services role in the Hermits Peak half Canyon Fires for people who aren't always paying attention to Land Management issues there can be some confusion sometimes between the U.S forest Service and your Agency New Mexico State forestry does the state have a say in what the forest service is doing on federal lands and has that changed since the spring could this change that's a complex question so uh legally we have no say we try to influence them and we are a reciprocal partner and we sometimes pay for projects which gives us more of a say because if we're going to transfer money then we're signing a document and that document will have uh management intent in it but at the end of the day and especially in terms of those two prescribed burns the that they were different one was the hermit's Peak fire was a broadcast burn and the calf Canyon was a pile burn so different techniques we had no say at all in either of those fires uh we uh were not involved in the planning we were not involved in developing the prescriptions and uh we did not have any management role in the implementation so um since May which is I mean since April which is three months now I've been requesting interviews with the U.S forest Service to talk about those fires but more broadly about what tools we really have as a society as Forest conditions are changing with warming prescribed fire is an important tool there's also thinning but I'm curious I would love to hear from you I know you've been thinking about these issues for a long time what tools do we really have to deal with our forests as it gets warmer drier windier so scientists keep telling us that fire is essential in in Southwestern ecosystems and it's not a one-size-fits-all so the forest you see behind me is in the Gila National Forest it's in the wilderness it's in an area where fire is not uh it's often managed for a resource benefit and I'm just going to slide over a little bit and you can see like you've got this cohort of young trees coming up with grass and around it bigger trees and a lot of space between trees and this is what fire does it cleans out the undergrowth and if you were to have a fire right now in this Forest it would stay out of the Treetops which is what it's supposed to do it would burn along the ground and it would thin out those baby trees maybe a few of them would survive but that's Nature's Way of managing the forest and so uh prescribed fire is an important tool and my view is that climate change out paced our prescribed fire protocols and I can dive into that a little bit if you would like yes please okay so I started really pondering this actually as soon as I understood the impact of the hermit's Peak fire escape and just running over it in my mind comparing it to the Cerro Grande fire which for me personally was a career changing fire in that um I really hadn't been involved professionally in fire except as a firefighter uh and then I kind of left firefighting and then the Sarah Grande fire happened and I started after that I got very involved in fire policy and the thing about the Sarah Grande fire that stuck with me was that everything they did was within their prescription and they they were burning in an area that could be very wet and they had tried to burn it a couple of years previously and it was always too wet so they waited for it to dry out enough to burn but what they didn't count on was the conditions of the Ponderosa Pine Forest a thousand feet elevation lower and so when it escaped and that ember went down a thousand feet it took off and was uncontrolled not terribly dissimilar from what happened here and um so a couple of the Lessons Learned I think and these are things that um that I know are being considered as the forest service does their review so one of them is um in the planning are you looking at the fuel conditions outside of the area you're trying to burn are you asking the question of if an ember were hypothetically to travel a mile so north south east or west of of where your burn area is what what are the what's the fuel condition like there and what would happen with an ember that mile away I think that is something given climate change and the non-linear nature of how climate change affects forest ecosystems that we have to start thinking that way so adding new layers of contingency to our planning that's one like tangible thing that it would narrow our window of opportunity to burn but it could also really make it somewhat safer