Urban Wildfires: a Burn Scar Bonus
If you missed our Facebook Live panel discussion, now’s your chance to hear it. We discuss how to prepare for urban wildfires in the west with folks you met in The Burn Scar… and the former mayor of Paradise, California.
On December 14, just two weeks before the two year anniversary of the Marshall Fire. The Modern West posted a panel over Facebook Live. We featured Ariel's family and friends, and you'll recognize them from the Burn Scar, along with the former mayor of Paradise, California who survived the campfire that raged to that community. The panel offered our guests an opportunity to share their experience of living through a climate disaster, and presented a look towards the future. In this special bonus episode, we share an edited version of this panel discussion and give you a unique perspective on living in a climate crisis.
MELODIE EDWARDS: I'm going to start right off by introducing you to Ariel Lavery. She's the producer of our newest season, the Burn Scar, that tells the story of what her family endured in the Marshall Fire that swept through the suburbs of Boulder, Colorado and burned down her childhood home in the Enclave neighborhood. But Ariel is also the host and producer of another podcast that I highly recommend called Middle of Everywhere, about issues concerning rural places in the southeastern U.S. She lives with her husband and her two children in Murray, Kentucky. The main character of the Burn Scar is also here with us, Ariel's mom. Vicki Simpson is a retired anesthesiologist and a Marshall Fire survivor whose journey we are following in the Burn Scar, and she lost her house in the Enclave. Then we have one of Vicki's neighbors, Larry Boven. He's on the board of the Louisville Protection District and a Marshall Fire survivor. He also lost his house in the Hillside neighborhood that's just directly south of the Enclave. Lisa Hughes is a Louisville liaison for United Policyholders and is on the board of the group, Marshall ROC, which stands for “restoring our community.” She became involved in advocacy work after losing her home in the Cornerstone neighborhood that's down the hill from the Enclave. And last but not least, we have Steve Culleton, who lost his home in the Camp Fire that burned Paradise, California, and he's the former mayor of Paradise, and currently sits on their city council. Welcome to you all.
I thought that I would start by seeing if we could share some stories. You must have some stories that really punch you, but also some stories of heroism and things that you save in your heart. I wonder if we could start with Lisa and Larry.
LISA HUGHES: I would just say that some of the unsung heroes of the fire was the Louisville public works department who basically risked their lives to go back into the water treatment plant when it was surrounded by flames to turn the water off so that the water system in Louisville would not be impacted more than it already was by the fire. Then to pay it forward, they actually went to Maui after that fire to help out there and share their wisdom.
LARRY BOVEN: There's so many things that will stick with me, how quickly the fire came. I still remember that morning, going out and then seeing my neighbor pulling out of the garage and saying, ‘Larry, I don't you know that we should be getting out.’ And I thought ‘Oh.’ So I looked up and saw the flames coming over the hill. The only thought I had was just to get in the house, grab my wife and dog and neighbor's dog and get in the car. So we left everything behind and just took off.
MELODIE: Vicki, I wonder if you can share stories that you remember that maybe are sticking with you from that experience of going through the Marshall Fire.
VICKI SIMPSON: The fire itself and the whole evacuation process, it was terrible. I was lucky enough to get an alert on my phone by text from the Boulder Emergency Management System. It basically said, ‘You must evacuate now.’ But my husband did not get an alert. So I grabbed my husband, Tom, and the dog, Jesse, as well as a few things: computer, charging cords, phone, and a few clothing items. And I left, really thinking that we would be back the next day, that this would not be a terrible event where our house, much less our whole neighborhood, burned down. I just really couldn't fathom that. And we left and drove out of the neighborhood and drove right into basically a giant traffic jam, very slow moving traffic, because all of Louisville was being evacuated. At that point, we just tried to find the quickest way out and the quickest way west of Louisville, which was South Boulder Road. Many of my friends started calling me and started offering a place to stay because they knew all of Louisville was evacuated, and I certainly appreciated that. We did end up driving into Boulder and staying with some friends. Just watching the news that night, I saw some of the local news broadcasting from McCaslin Boulevard, which is the main road right out of our neighborhood. I saw houses burning in the background there at Harper Lane, which is not our neighborhood, that was immediately across from it. It was just kind of terrifying to see this wonderful neighborhood just in flames. Those are some of my most vivid memories of that day, of those few hours of that day.
MELODIE: Steve, can you share what stories that you might have from the Camp Fire in Paradise, California?
STEVE CULLETON: We're 18-square miles on top of a ridge with canyons on either side of us. We have three roads out. We had about 30,000 people in town. The fire started up in the Feather River Canyon, nine miles away, and it got into our town within 20 minutes. The winds at the high school were clocked at 126 miles an hour. The public safety personnel, the fire department, who has a different communication system, lost all communication for a short time. All of our cell towers went down, all of the things that you depend on when there's an issue, didn't work, I mean, immediately didn't work. One of the things I share with people, if your gas tank is at half full, consider yourself empty. Because when you're trapped in traffic for four or five hours, if you run out of gas, now not only are you in trouble, but the people behind you can't evacuate. Big trucks and bulldozers were just pushing burned up school buses and burned up vehicles and vehicles that were out of gas out of the way so that people could evacuate. We had run into gridlock. I picked up my daughter who lived in another part of town, and the mistake my wife and I made was we took separate vehicles. She ended up in the lower part of town trapped by flames, thinking she was going to die, calling her son and saying goodbye.
My daughter and I, it took us five hours to get out of the flames to get to where we were safe because of the gridlock. It was just a horrendous environment and it's tough because nobody knows how to do that. We practice evacuations in our town. None of that works in that kind of catastrophe because we had 85 people that we know of die in our fire. What happened to you folks, what happened to us, what happened in Maui, you can't practice for that. It's just immediate and all inclusive and and I just don't ever want to live through something like that again.
MELODIE: I wonder if you guys might talk about what you wish you could go back and tell your past self? What you could have told yourself to prepare? Lisa, this has got to be something that you have a lot of thoughts about because of your insight into sort of the insurance perspective.
LISA: As Steve said, you can't really prepare, I mean, you can’t prepare for a disaster of this magnitude. But when there's 100 mile an hour winds, there's only so much even firefighters can do. Knowing what I know now, I would definitely make sure I was adequately insured, for sure, which I know was an issue in Paradise, and it has also been initially in Marshall and Maui and every other place we worked. Also, make sure that you're signed up for emergency notifications. There are various avenues here in Boulder County to do that. I didn't know about it, I wasn't signed up, I had no idea. In Colorado and at least in Boulder County, it's an opt in system, not an opt out system. So you have to make the effort. Now you can put in like five addresses and five phone numbers or whatever but you have to know to do that, which I know is something that both Office of Emergency Management and other local groups have been working on here to get people to sign up.
MELODIE: Ariel, I think that it would be great to hear from you as well, because you have been doing all this research on this issue, what you wish that your family could have done?
ARIEL: This is a tricky one for me because there's nothing that I could have done that would have changed the circumstances, right? Because my parents were well insured, they've been able to come back from this well. There's probably nothing I could have provided that would have changed their trajectory, and the decisions that they made and where they ended up. Maybe I would have taken the entire record collection instead of leaving some of it behind [laughs], because I only took about a third of it. The Tri-State Tornado hit our area three weeks before this fire, so I was still sort of reeling from that event, and seeing the incredible loss of life that we suffered in this region, and then this fire happened. This entire thing has changed my whole perspective on life. So now anytime we have the alert for severe weather coming through this area, I go around and I film the house and I open the drawers and I just go around with my videotape. This is the advice that I've received on the podcast, and learning about how to deal with these disaster events. My behavior has changed. We make sure we always have our bike helmets available. We bring our car seats in the house, doing all these kinds of preventative measures for fire safety in this region.
MELODIE: Larry, I wonder if you might just talk about what Ariel was just mentioning there. You do have a lot of expertise in fire management. If you can talk a little bit about that phenomena of urban wildfires, the idea that a lot of times people who live in a town or in a city, they don't think this is coming for them. Is this something that we're going to see more of?
LARRY: I think clearly we will, particularly, now that we're seeing a lot of climate change all around the country. Specifically, because there's a lot of urban encroachment on a lot of the open spaces and poorest areas around Boulder. We have lulled ourselves into a sense of false security. What we've done is we put a lot of effort into purchasing open space. We have a love affair, I would call it, with open space without really managing it.
Back when I started on the fire department back in ‘88, we had quite a few grass fires, just because most of the area that Louisville now was grassland. Then as time progressed, we ended up becoming more and more urban focused. Our fire risk tactics, we need to go back to the basics again with some of the way we approach the whole concept of fire protection and fire prevention and try to create a more resilient, open space. I definitely think we need to realize that this is not a situation of “if” but “when.”
MELODIE: With that in mind, the fact that these kinds of fires could become more common as you guys have been rebuilding, it seems like there's been a lot of questions about how to go about that. I just think that one of the most amazing things about the Burn Scar podcast series has been that Ariel is taking a look at this question of whether to rebuild in a more green way, considering that this phenomena is part of climate crisis. Vicki, I wonder if you might talk a little bit about your decision making, when it came to rebuilding, and what advice you might have for people who are in your position?
VICKI: Don't make any decisions right away. You have to really step back and think about things. Or ask yourself, “What am I going to do? What am I going to do with my life now?” Initially, I thought we would not rebuild because both my husband and I are older, we're in our 70’s. After a few months and going to a builder's expo that was held in Louisville for all the people that had lost their home, I decided maybe rebuilding was the way to go. I didn't find any other neighborhoods I really wanted to go to. I know the day after the fire, I told our whole family, “We're not going to rebuild. We couldn't go through this. I think it's just something we couldn't handle” But you know, I gradually changed my mind. So now we are rebuilding, and most of my neighbors are rebuilding. I know that all of the neighborhoods in Louisville that burned are mostly under construction now. I think that the question about, “Are we still vulnerable? Could this happen again?” I think it bothers a lot of us and I wonder about that. I'm hoping that we never see anything like that again. But I think that people can also plan neighborhoods and communities to be more fire safe. But in order for this to be effective, just one household during this will not really mean much unless the entire neighborhood is aware and cooperates and does it too. So I'm hoping the whole community comes together and builds with the idea of “Let's be more fire safe as much as possible.” Because apparently this is going to be the natural disaster that we are most susceptible to.
STEVE: That’s a really good point. We have a fire safe council in our community, and we do all kinds of education on building materials and stuff. We also have a lot of people that cannot come back who are donating their land. Like I say, we're on a ridge, and they're donating their land to the local parks and rec department to create a buffer. Now, we created a buffer in our community about 10 or 15 years ago, this really nice big fire break all around our town, but there's no funding to support those types of things. So what we have now, in addition to our fire safe council, and all the new building codes, we're developing firewise neighborhoods. We're doing that because the insurance companies are refusing to write homeowners insurance for anybody in our community. In California, they just go by whole massive areas, zip codes. So anybody in that zipcode, we're not going to write insurance in that area, in that zip code. We're starting through our state insurance commissioner to get the insurance companies, the major ones that have all pulled out of California to say, “Look, you need to look at each home individually to see what they've done.” But they're starting to listen to that, they're starting to say “Okay, the firewise neighborhoods is a really good idea, if you have a community to get everybody on board to do whatever they can.” Then go to your insurance company, to your municipality and say, “Look at our whole street, everybody here is on board,” and it's a really good idea.
MELODIE: Steve, I did get a question. Greg Hunter wants to know, was a new drinking water system and wells, were those installed after the Paradise fire?
STEVE: Our water system was never damaged from the fire. The toxins from all of the stuff burning were incredible. Most of the new construction in our community, that's PVC pipe, and the fire was so hot – even though that's buried a couple of feet underground – it melted the plastic, and when plastic melted, it created toxic gas. When the power was shut off, because all the power lines and everything were down, the water treatment plant shut down, and so the water pressure in the water system went away. So the gasses were sucked up into the laterals. When we did all the testing afterwards, there was no toxicity, nothing in the water supply itself. There was no toxicity in the main lines supplied to town, it was mostly the laterals that had melted, and those were all replaced. It took a while, so we all had clean drinking water. What happened to us – and I think it happens all over the country where people suffer catastrophic loss – the government comes in and we need them to help us. We needed to have FEMA come in there with all their big bulldozers and all their dump trucks and everything and clean up all of the debris and the toxic waste and all that. That's the result of a catastrophic event like that – be it flood, hurricane, tornado, or wildland fire. That's great, but in the course of doing that, they destroyed the infrastructure of the community. Economically, in the rebuilding of our community, I might have a neighborhood with a mile-long private road with 15 or 20 houses on it. That road has been destroyed. There's no money in the payout, there's no money in insurance policies to rebuild that road. I just want to get them to understand when you come in and help the community recover, and you're willing to pay for the damage that recovery process does, by all means, cover it all.
MELODIE : Vicki and Ariel, as you're rebuilding, you have been doing something very different. I think it seems like this could be something that, as people are experiencing these natural disasters, are going to be finding themselves doing creative things in terms of how they rebuild. You guys are considering doing a multi-generational home. I wonder where you are with that, and if you can talk a little bit about your decision making there?
VICKI: Yes, we are. Our house is under construction. We had a two-story house before and we have gone to a one-level house with a finished basement. Still about the same size, actually, it's a little bit larger. We will have enough bedrooms for two families. One of my concerns was my husband who has dementia, who actually lives in assisted living now, I'm not sure he will be able to live in this new home because his needs are really significant. My feeling was, I don't want to live in this big house by myself. I know that Ariel and her husband Chris would like to return to Colorado, and moving from west Kentucky back to Colorado, there's a very big difference in real estate values there. So I gave them the option, “if you ever want to try this house out and live here and have your kids go to the same schools that your mom went to in Louisville, it's an option for you.”
ARIEL: It feels radical still. I mean, it hasn't happened yet [laughs]. But it feels like a radical possibility just because I think the American dream, as it was spelled out when I was growing up was that you don't live with your parents; you move out, you move to a different state, you go to college and you become successful and you bring home your own paycheck and you make your own way and that's the way we're supposed to do it. This idea of moving back in with Mom and Dad was never meant to be talked about by anybody, friends, family. You just don't even consider that kind of thing. So I think the idea that like, “Oh, I want to live green, my mom and my dad can really help facilitate a green lifestyle because they're building this brand new net zero house, and there's room for us, why wouldn't I do that?” I think we're maybe moving into a time where we do need to kind of rethink how we define ways that we live. Since the 1960s, our population density has gone down so severely per square footage in our homes. People lived in homes in the 1960s with four people, on average; today, there's two people that live in those homes the same size. So why wouldn't we maybe return to a model of American living that actually kind of defines a much longer history than just the last 80 to 90 years?
MELODIE: I wonder if other people that you know, or yourselves, were kind of in a similar situation where you were making different decisions about how you are going to live, who's going to live where? If that was something maybe, Steve, that you saw in your community where people couldn't afford to rebuild.
STEVE: In the rebuild, the minimum size home you can build is 750 feet. There are a lot of people that don't need that much space. What's happened to us is there was such devastation, we have people that walked away from their property, they sold it to their neighbor for $50 or $500 an acre of land. Our land was so cheap, right before the pandemic and even during the pandemic, that I have a lot of big developers that are coming in buying multiple pieces of property, and because there's government funding, and one thing or another, they're coming in and building apartment buildings, senior housing, low income housing. They're some good and bad, it's great that they're doing that. But what's also happened with the economy and everything, homes now that they're building, they're paying $300 and $400 a square foot to build because of this spike in building materials and all. We used to be a neighborhood you could afford to live in, you could buy a $150,000 three-bedroom, two-bath home. Nowadays, everything is $350,000 or $450,000. It's just nuts.
MELODIE: Lisa, I wonder if I can ask you if you have noticed whether insurance companies seem like they're adapting to this new world that we're living in, the climate crisis and how that's affecting people? The possibility of these kinds of things happening to more and more communities? Are you seeing that insurance companies are doing things that might help? Or are they making things worse? What are you seeing?
LISA: I do think we are seeing some of the same issues of California in terms of affordability and accessibility of insurance. There are, particularly in the mountain communities above Boulder, people who are getting nonrenewals. There are people in this area whose premiums are skyrocketing, often double, triple, what they were paying before. I think it kind of depends. The more I think that we have that sense of climate resilient/fire resilience housing and communities, hopefully that will help and result later on in discounts or some recognition. Our insurance commissioner, like the commissioner in California, is working on various things to try to help people and he's aware of the affordability/accessibility issues that we're starting to see here. But it's not going to happen overnight.
MELODIE: I wonder if we could just talk a little bit, to build off what Lisa was just talking about there, the question of just your hopefulness for how we are adapting to the climate crisis in general. Are you seeing that, in your community, people are talking and thinking in a new way? Has it changed the conversation in your communities so that you feel like perhaps we might be able to adapt and do something about the climate crisis before it's too late? I wonder if we could just start maybe with you, Vicki?
VICKI: Two months before this fire, Louisville passed new building codes, which stipulates that all houses are going to be basically all electric. I think it's the right thing to do. So I think that our city council was addressing the problem the best way they could, at that point. Clearly, what has to be done for the future, we have to stop a rampant use of fossil fuels and gas and energy sources like that. And I think that's been a big step forward. It was a problem for a lot of people rebuilding because it adds an extra cost to the rebuild. City council did make the decision to allow the people who really could not afford in the rebuild, to incorporate the new building codes to build to 2018 codes. Most of the people in my neighborhood are building to the 2020 codes. We will have an all-electric house and it’s going to be a better house.
MELODIE: Maybe, Steve, I'd let you have a stab at that one as well. Just your hopefulness for what maybe your community has learned and what you maybe can pass on about living in a climate crisis.
STEVE: We're all trying to be green and do the right things and protect the climate. But when we look at some of the electricity, like the windmills, that stuff, they can't get rid of the windmill blades. You look at what it takes to produce a battery for an electric vehicle. How are you going to get a cement truck up a hill in the wintertime? I don't think it's been fair, the way the information that the general public's been given it. Our legislators are mandating things. It's going to be difficult. I hope the planet survives, and we can make incremental changes, we can do things better. I know they're working on coming up with new technologies, but there's a whole other aspect of the Green Movement that people really need to look at behind the curtain.
MELODIE: In the second episode of the Burn Scar, Ariel talks about visiting the site of her home, and she pinpoints this really unusual feeling called solastalgia, which is homesickness without leaving your home. You have all lost your homes, and I wonder if that feeling if has shown up for you? The grieving process, a feeling of homesickness for a home that way?
LISA: I think one of the things that people often overlook is that, even if we are rebuilding or going back to a house, it's not necessarily a home. It's not necessarily that you're homesick, it's that you want the things or the memories that you had before. You are going to have to recreate new ones in your new house. Yes, it's on the same piece of property, but my house is completely different, which I'm happy about. But losing all the stuff my kids had, it's still hard.
LARRY: I'm always going through that. “Gee, I’ll just go get that tool,” for example, or something that I had, and then I realized that I don't have it anymore. There is always that sense of all the other things we had that we won't be able to replace. It's not so much the objects themselves, but it's the story behind how you got those, over time. The Christmas tree with all the ornaments from when your kids were in kindergarten. Many memories of my mom, my dad, grandma and so forth, that I won't be able to recover. Nearly 30 years of living in that home, we had a lot of memories. Because a lot of people say, “Well, those things can just be replaced.” No, they really can't.
STEVE: In Paradise, what the fire didn't take was the sense of community that exists there. We went through a grieving process and for all of those same reasons, the memories and all that, but our community is still there, those people that could come back, or stayed, or are now coming back. We just said, “Okay, it's a brand new beginning, and we're creating new memories. We're trying to not dwell on the past.” We did that on the five-year anniversary back on November 8. It wasn't a remembrance or any of that stuff. Our mission was, “Look how far we've come, and it was a vision to the future. It's a brand new clean slate.”