Climate and Living with Fire with Jennifer Gibson

A conversation with Jennifer Gibson, who coordinates post-wildfire response for the National Park Service. This episode was recorded in May 2024.

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Gaby Eseverri, Peri Sasnett, and Madeline Vinh.

Glacier Conservancy: glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

Climate change in Glacier: www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/climate-change.htm Whiskeytown National Recreation Area: www.nps.gov/whis

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri Sasnett: This is Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. My name is Peri, and I find the ecology and politics of wildfire endlessly interesting. However, I also recognize that wildfire can be challenging and scary to live with, and at times even deadly. And all of this is made worse by a warmer climate. For this episode, my co-host Daniel interviewed Jennifer Gibson in the spring of 2024. She's the post-wildfire coordinator for the National Park Service. She tells a gripping, emotional, and frankly stressful story about when the park unit she was working at burned almost entirely in a matter of days during the 2018 Carr fire. You probably remember hearing about that fire on the news, and just for clarity, it spelled C-A-R-R, not like a car that you drive. That fire eventually burned 230,000 acres and killed eight people. [mellow beat begins to play] And this story is not as unique as you might think. In 2022, 95% of Sunset Crater National Monument burned. That same summer, a wildfire burned over 95% of Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site. A year later, three national parks in the famously wet Pacific Northwest all had their largest fires on record: Olympic, North Cascades and Redwood. So this conversation is about one person surviving a deadly wildfire. But it's also about how the National Park Service is surviving in a new reality of wildfire, accelerated by climate change. [beat plays for a few seconds and resolves, marking a transition into the interview]

Daniel Lombardi: Jennifer Gibson, welcome to Headwaters. Thanks for coming on. Maybe start with just telling us what's your job.

Jennifer Gibson: Hi. Thanks for having me. My job now is the National Park Service's post-wildfire programs coordinator. So I'm based out of the National Interagency Fire Center. My job now is to assist and help parks in recovering from wildfire. And that's essentially overseeing the Burned Area Emergency Response program.

Daniel: What did-- what was your title during the Carr Fire at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area?

Jennifer: The Chief of Resources and Interpretation.

Daniel: We're talking specifically about the Carr Fire in Northern California. But this story, as dramatic and shocking as it is, it could very easily happen pretty much anywhere in the American West. Of course, it could happen here in Glacier National Park. Obviously, we have big wildfires here, but the kind of unprecedented, fast moving and property and life threatening wildfire that you're describing, there's no reason that couldn't happen here in Glacier.

Jennifer: Yeah, it can happen in Glacier. It can happen in North Cascades. You know, it could be another Whiskeytown or, some parks are burning down, like 70% of Lassen Volcanic National Park burned in the Dixie Fire, 80% of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation burned in the Woolsey Fire. Look at Lava Beds. So 70% of Lava Beds burned in 2020, the remaining 30% burned in 2021.

Daniel: And we're not necessarily pinpointing any one of these fires and saying this is, this burned the way that it did because of climate change. But larger, more frequent, more intense wildfires is exactly what we expect in a hotter climate that we now have.

Jennifer: Yeah, Whiskeytown had the hottest days on record and the lowest fuel moisture for 1000 hour fuels on record. It's not just one thing. When it comes down to it, it's this... Is it climate change or is it everything coming into an alignment with climate change as a contributing factor? And that could be a really dangerous combination, because I really don't think I don't think science is keeping up with the changing environment. I don't think our management and policy is keeping up with the changing environment. I feel like a bunch of us resource staff or park staff, all of us together, interpreters, whomever, facility managers, we're all standing here now in this age, 2024, and we're watching our parks rapidly change around us. Like, I think this cohort that we have now working in national parks, we are definitely challenged with this whole new unexpected thing called climate change. And with that's intermixed with all these other factors. I feel like we're witnessing the change in our national parks.

Daniel: Yeah. The entering, into a, not a new reality, but a, an unstable and ever-shifting reality. [beat plays to mark a transition] So Whiskeytown has kind of a funny name. What-- what is Whiskeytown, really simply? It's, it's a national recreation area, part of the Park Service.

Jennifer: It is. It's a unit of the National Park Service. It follows the mission of the National Park Service. It is a recreation area, so it's really like the, it's like Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. It's really about recreation for the local visitors.

Daniel: And living there for 20 years, it probably became like a pretty important place to you to.

Jennifer: Yeah, I lived, one mile from the park boundary, so I had a really short commute. So my weekends, if I wanted to get a hike in, if I wanted to go botanizing, kayaking, I always went up to the park. The whole community loved Whiskeytown.

Daniel: For someone who doesn't-- isn't familiar with Whiskeytown, one of the key features is a large dam and a reservoir, a huge lake right in the middle of the park unit. There's a lot of urban areas right next to the the park unit, and it's all a pretty mountainous, forested area.

Jennifer: It is extremely diverse. It goes from 600ft in elevation, up to 6200ft in a really short distance. So it's really steep. So it goes from oak woodlands and grass up to subalpine fir, like Red Fir forest and montane chaparral. It has old growth forests and spotted owls in the higher elevations, but in the lower elevations it has chaparral and chamise and things that you would see at Santa Monica mountains. So that's one of the reasons why I love that park so much, because it was so incredibly diverse.

Daniel: It's basically like all of California smushed into one park unit.

Jennifer: Yeah, totally. And it was great. Like really crazy biotic assemblages living together in the same location, like Pacific giant salamanders and whiptail lizards, like something from a, Pacific Northwest meets the desert, you know, in the same campground. So it's, it's a really cool place, but it has waterfalls, lots of biking trails, lots of hiking trails, kayaking. It's-- it's a really nice place.

Daniel: So we're going to talk about what happened at Whiskeytown in 2018, which was a big wildfire. Just big picture, this was one of the larger fires in California history. What's wild is it's moved down a lot of notches on that records list since then. But this happened in 2018 and it burned-- this is in Northern California around the town of Redding. When did the Carr Fire start for you?

Jennifer: It started the day of initial attack in July 2018. It was hot. We were on the, I think, July in Redding and Shasta County, we were at, triple digit weather, like, it was hot even for Redding for July. About 1:00, 1:30, we heard over the radio that there was a fire near Carr Powerhouse Road, which is next to our historic district, the Tower House Historic District, which is like a concentration of your most important cultural resources, layers of history there, prehistoric, historic.

Daniel: So it's July 2018. The temperatures are getting up into the low 100 degrees. It's very hot. I'm imagining it's not cooling off a whole lot at night.

Jennifer: I think it was like 113, 114, we were bumping up against the highest temperatures ever recorded in the park.

Daniel: Wow. So it's very hot, very dry. And you hear on the radio, okay, there's a fire. And I bet-- I'm guessing that at that point that wasn't unusual. You've heard a lot of fires come in over the radio, maybe even some that summer. And so you go to check it out. At that point, everything feels routine, I guess.

Jennifer: Yeah. No, we -- it was something we do regularly, like, you know, there's fire. We could stand on the highway, tie in with the duty officer, make sure, you know, just be there if they need information, not get in the way. We give them advice if they need it. This is what we do. But this one just went completely sideways. Seeing fire taking off so... spreading so rapidly and erratically, the weirdest thing that I saw was fire zipped around a hillside sideways. Like fire goes uphill, right, naturally, and it follows winds. And it wasn't really that windy out, but it went around sideways, and I'm like, well, that's really weird. And then the fire spotted into this historic orchard where we have these really old orchard trees that were planted in the 1800s so they're unique heirloom varieties. And all of a sudden I started watching them burn and I'm like, oh my God, it's like 20 years of restoration, if not more, trying to save these orchard trees and stabilize them, and we've been working so hard, and we'd just grazed this whole area with goats to keep the weeds down and for fire supp