This is Democracy – Episode 245: Wildfires

[00:00:00] Intro: This is democracy,

[00:00:07] Intro: a podcast about the people of the United States,

[00:00:11] Intro: a podcast

[00:00:11] Intro: about citizenship,

[00:00:13] Intro: about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next

[00:00:22] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

[00:00:29] Jeremi: We took a few weeks off this summer, and I have to say I missed our conversations. I’m sure our audience did. Zachary, did you miss our conversations? Definitely. I mean, it’s, it’s really important every week to focus on how our democracy is changing and how we can improve. Don’t you think?

[00:00:47] Zachary: I would

[00:00:48] Jeremi: agree completely.

[00:00:49] Jeremi: Well, we are fortunate to get restarted at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall with a really important and eye opening episode that we’re going to have today. We’re going to talk about wildfires. Wildfires are in the news, particularly in Hawaii and elsewhere. They’re an old problem, but an old problem that seems to be getting far, far worse and far more dangerous for all of us.

[00:01:13] Jeremi: And, uh, As as citizens in a democracy, it’s absolutely crucial that we understand the environmental and social and fundamental challenges that wildfires pose and what we can do about them. We’re joined today by two experts, two people who will have a lot to share with us about this topic in many dimensions.

[00:01:33] Jeremi: Uh, Denzer. Randy has more than 30 years in the fire service. He’s one of the highest certified and qualified wildland firefighters in central Texas. That’s, that’s pretty amazing. Uh, Randy, you you’ve been doing this for a long time, huh?

[00:01:49] Randy: I have, I’ve been doing it since, uh, I guess right around the, the mid eighties, late, late eighties.

[00:01:57] Randy: Uh, and I started in Southern Arizona, kind of got my feet wet there, and then just grew through the, through the years of being in the, in the, uh, Fire service as a career,

[00:02:08] Jeremi: we’d say in my field, you have 10 year in firefighting.

[00:02:11] Randy: Yes, I can now say it’s funny because in front of all my certification now, they they’ve added the word master, which you know You have to it’s funny when that happens because you’re like, how did this happen?

[00:02:24] Randy: You know, but I guess now I’ve mastered the art. So

[00:02:29] Jeremi: And, and Randy has officially retired, uh, last year for, as Operations Battalion Chief of the Austin Fire Department, but as I’ve had the chance to get to know him a little, it’s clear to me you’re working as hard as ever, Randy, right? You’re not really retired, are you?

[00:02:42] Randy: Well, my wife will argue that I haven’t retired at all. So I just switched kind of platforms and what I’m doing, and now I do still respond to, uh, uh, large wildfires in Texas, and I respond to, uh, uh, devastating hurricanes. Like last year, I spent a lot of time at Hurricane Ian and stuff. And I do incident management now.

[00:03:04] Jeremi: And Randy has a very long, impressive resume. We will put his full biography on the website for all of you. I did want to mention one other thing. He has dabbled in policy as well. He sits as an appointed member of the International Association of firefighting task force committee in Washington, D. C.,

[00:03:25] Jeremi: which has an appropriately long, incomprehensible title. for any serious policy organization. Um, so Randy is accustomed to the big policy issues we also discuss, uh, on this podcast. In addition to, uh, Randy Denzer, uh, we have, uh, with us, uh, city council person, Alison Alter. Uh, Alison represents District 10, uh, here in Austin.

[00:03:49] Jeremi: She’s been on our podcast, uh, a few times. It’s good to have you on again, Allison. Glad to join you. Okay, before we get into our discussion with our two distinguished experts here, we have, of course, uh, Mr. Zachary’s scene setting poem. I have to say, Zachary, in the few weeks we took off, I think I missed your poems more than anything else.

[00:04:09] Jeremi: Well, I missed writing them, for sure. Well, we are excited to hear this one. What’s, what’s the title? When the Fire Comes. Sounds almost like James Baldwin. Perhaps. Alright, well let’s hear it.

[00:04:23] Zachary: One must remember, in this day and age, that when the fire comes, it will not be a pillar of smoke from above, a burning bush, or a tree.

[00:04:33] Zachary: One must remember that each conflagration starts with a breeze and a clank, as some piece of metal starts falling. and hit some dry riverbank. One must remember the fire will not be seen or tamed until you are standing at the edge of a pier under a mountain of smoke and a wall of flame, choosing to die on the land or drown right here.

[00:04:59] Zachary: One must remember it will feel at peace this world that eats us up by nipping at our feet. One must remember that there will be only one road. Be quick, be fleet, for all of us might simply stand still or look away from each other. One must remember when the fire comes, one can only be lost and alone together.

[00:05:24] Jeremi: Very moving, Zachary. What is, what is your poem about? Well,

[00:05:28] Zachary: my poem, uh, starts by weaving a lot of the stories, um, from the terrible disaster in Lahaina, um, in Hawaii, uh, that, that we’ve encountered, uh, over the past few, uh, weeks, uh, together with, uh, um, a sort of broad universal statements about that experience, because as much as we like to isolate it to one place, uh, in the middle of the Pacific, for a lot of us, It’s, it’s, and for most of us, it’s much more real than that because what happened there could happen in our communities.

[00:05:58] Zachary: Um, and I think that this poem is really about trying to come to terms with that and, and recognize not just the horror of those disasters, but also the, um, the chance, uh, perhaps for, for more cooperation and, and work towards work towards ending that threat or, or managing it

[00:06:17] Jeremi: better. Yeah. I felt the pervasiveness of the fire in your, in your poem.

[00:06:21] Jeremi: It’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous, right? Certainly. Randy, is that, is that a good place to start? Is that a fair, fair way to think about the threat of wildfire in our world? Yeah.

[00:06:30] Randy: I, I, there’s a couple of things that in that poem that really stick out to me, uh, first and foremost, you know, it isn’t a pillar of, of, of smoke.

[00:06:39] Randy: Um, something I try to explain to everybody, uh, when you’re responding to these fires is that. You know, we, we have this kind of perception in our mind that it’s like it is on TV where you can actually see the fire and the smoke and it’s very, you know, it’s very clear air, what I would call clear air and, and everything.

[00:06:58] Randy: And that’s not the way it is. Uh, the, the folks in Maui, you know, uh, rest their souls, you know, and know, and, and, uh, hope, hope everybody’s, you know, recovering as much as they can. But they didn’t have, you know, a clear view of this thing when you’re in front of one of these big wildfires, uh, It’s basically like being in a fog with embers flying everywhere.

[00:07:19] Randy: Uh, it’s very different than I think what people perceive and that sticks, that stuck out with me in a poem. And then, uh, it is, it is very intrusive right now. We’ve, uh, we’ve put ourselves in that position. I’ll talk about that a little bit later on, but I think we’ve, we’ve kind of, uh, expanded ourselves into a situation that, uh, that I hope, you know, that people You know, can figure out that we really do need to manage

[00:07:45] Jeremi: and, and, and we have to be preparing well in advance.

[00:07:49] Jeremi: Right? Because as you say, it’s not obvious when, when the wildfire is approaching

[00:07:54] Randy: us. Right? Yeah. And I’ve operated in a whole bunch of different facets and different, uh, uh, things like, uh, aircraft rescue, firefighting, um, and operations, firefighting wildfire by far has the most politics in it I’ve ever seen.

[00:08:09] Randy: And the reason, the reason wildfire has politics in it, cause there’s so many different people that are. Involved when you start talking about managing the risk, you know, you’re going to have the biologists, you’re going to have different groups of people who, you know, don’t want their land clear cut. I don’t either, by the way, you know, they don’t want to build fire breaks for one reason or another, but I think we’re getting to the point, you know, all across the United States and Canada where this, we really have to start doing something and.

[00:08:41] Randy: It’s a very difficult situation, very difficult topic because the answers are all expensive, you know, to undo some of the risk. But one thing I would really like to point out is, you know, uh, me and Allison have worked together on a lot of these issues in Austin. Um, and. I think she heard me years back.

[00:09:03] Randy: I’ve been saying for a long time in West Austin alone that we have an incredible issue there. We’re going to, we are having an incredible risk and we kind of got to do something. Um, the Maui fires, what I found most interesting about them over the past couple of weeks since they happened was that I, uh, read a, uh, article.

[00:09:23] Randy: About a group of people who were warning that this was going to happen. So the risk was there, it was identified, and, uh, I don’t know whether it was private or government land ownership, but somebody didn’t take care of the issue. And, uh, there were people who were really trying to, to, to get some stuff done to, to reduce the fuel loading, at least near the city there, and it never happened.

[00:09:45] Randy: So, so… I think we recognize there’s risk. We recognize there’s an issue. We need to start acting on it. And that’s, that’s the hard part. That’s where the politics comes in.

[00:09:59] Alison: So Randy, you and I have been working on this for, for quite some time. And I think that here in Austin, we do recognize the risk. I think we have an opportunity now that folks are seeing what these fires, Can do and how they’ve played out so catastrophically in so many other communities That people are paying attention and people are acting the kind of responses We’re now getting for education that we’ve done about being ready to be part of our war in Central, Texas to really focus on hardening your home are important and they are steps forward.

[00:10:33] Alison: The challenge we have is that the risk is enormous. Um, and in any scenario, we were never going to be able to a hundred percent mitigate because fire is a natural

[00:10:42] Jeremi: phenomenon. Alison, as you look at this as someone, uh, in the belly of the beast, uh, dealing with these. really difficult politics, as Randy said, and it really sticks with me.

[00:10:52] Jeremi: Randy, they’ve said that these are the most difficult politics you’ve seen. That’s saying a lot. How do you, Alison, understand, and how do you convey to people why wildfire is more of a risk today than it’s been in the past?

[00:11:05] Alison: So wildfire is more of a risk today because of climate change and because of how we’ve chosen to build out.

[00:11:12] Alison: our communities. Um, there’s a place that we call the wildland urban interface, which is where the wildlands come together with the urban area. Um, and it’s in that interface where you have the most risk from wildfires to life and to structures. Um, and the more you build. in the wildlands, the more wildland urban interface you get.

[00:11:32] Alison: And if you build in those areas and you don’t take certain steps, which we now know matter, like hardening your home. So there’s things that you can do when you make choices about your roof, how you deal with your vents, how you do it. build out your vegetation around your home. If you fail to harden your homes in those ways, you’re putting more and more people in harm’s way.

[00:11:52] Alison: If you do that, and you don’t have exits, and you don’t have, um, multiple ways out, you increase the risk of the impact of the wildfire. The other thing which, which Randy alluded to is we have Forgotten that fire is a natural phenomenon and it is part of the life cycle and as we’ve had more and more people move into these areas, we have, um, prevented that natural phenomenon from playing out and so I think that’s also a problem with climate change.

[00:12:23] Alison: We have drier conditions. Um, you have to have the right conditions to have wildfire here in Austin. We’ve been very fortunate because we have had you know, the dryness and we’ve had, um, the prolonged heat. Um, but we haven’t always had the wind conditions. One of the things we know is with climate change, our wind conditions are going to change.

[00:12:44] Alison: And so it’s going to be even that much more likely that we’ll have wildfire.

[00:12:47] Jeremi: Zachary, you wanted to follow up on this. And, and Randy,

[00:12:50] Zachary: does this, uh, experience or, or this, uh, analysis match what you’ve seen on the ground and, and what you and your colleagues have seen play out over, over the past, uh, decade or so, uh, fighting fires here in the Southwest?

[00:13:03] Randy: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m, I’m going to stop you real quick, uh, Zach, because it’s not just the Southwest. This is not just a California problem. It’s not just a Texas problem. This is, this is everywhere. So, you know, who would have thought six months ago or a year ago before the Maui fires that we had that problem in Hawaii?

[00:13:22] Randy: Even though we. You know, those in the fire business that operate in D. C. You know, we’re aware of this stuff. New Jersey, Massachusetts, you know that Massachusetts has the highest density of urban interface in the country. Um, so we’ve watched this urban sprawl into our, you know, I mean, and I hate to tell, I hate to say this, but I’m sitting here talking to you guys basically doing.

[00:13:51] Randy: You know what? Everybody else is doing. We’re all trying to get out of the inner city and move out to someplace where it’s really pretty. I’m looking out at a beautiful lake and woods all around me. That’s what people want to do, right? We want to move out someplace where it looks good. The problem is every time we we stick a house in one of these areas, all of us, we have to then be able to protect that house.

[00:14:11] Randy: And we do that through this age old practice of putting out every fire Um, You know, so between fire suppression and fire exclusion, which is the practice of not allowing prescribed fires and stuff between those two, two uh, practices, we’ve now have a higher fuel loading than ever. And Allison’s dead on and everything she just said.

[00:14:32] Randy: And I’m telling you that. Whether or not you’re a, uh, you know, whether or not you believe in climate change or not the climate change is happening and I’m, you know, I was never a big global warming guy or whatever else. And I sit on the AMS fire weather and technology committee. So, you know, I’m in there with a bunch of really smart people and we talk about this and we all are very, it’s very clear to us that climate change is absolutely happening.

[00:14:58] Randy: Our fuel loading is going up because we’re not allowing natural fire to go through the landscape anymore. You know, and so all those things are, they’re adding up to these, these. Mega disasters, you know, we’ve been having mega fires in California. We’ve had seriously bad, you know, really bad fires in the past, you know, 15 years here in Texas.

[00:15:19] Randy: It’s just, it’s getting worse everywhere. Um, Dr. Laurie Moore, who is in charge of the U S fire administration, I’ve gone and done some, some talks with her up in Canada of all places. And, uh, she’s so aware of this also, and they’re, they’re trying to make shifts even at the federal level in, You know, not necessarily spending all their time worrying about wildfires, but realizing that the real problem isn’t the wildfire.

[00:15:45] Randy: You know, wildfires are a natural process that we are stopping. The problem is, is defending structures that we’ve built in these areas, these wildland areas. And, uh, it’s a, it’s a very, very complex issue. And I’d like to just say real quick so that we can kind of focus on these things. Allison alluded to the fact of home hardened homes.

[00:16:06] Randy: So there’s. There’s something across the nation and actually in Canada also, that’s been done over the past 15, 20 years, which, you know, you get these consortiums together where you get experts from all over the place. And one of them, uh, got together many years ago and, and, uh, basically said, Hey, how do we solve this problem?

[00:16:26] Randy: And they came up with a basic, a three pronged approach. One is effective response, which includes training, you know, equipping firefighters and proper PPE, having the right apparatus and all that stuff. The second prong is, uh, resilient landscapes, basically meaning we have to do something about the landscapes, right?

[00:16:45] Randy: We, the, the lands around the urban interface have to be managed somehow. And then the, uh, last one is basically building structures that withstand to these fires. In all honesty, If we had a community and I’m not going to, uh, Alison’s right. We can’t make it perfect, but we can reduce what happens during these devastating wildfires just by building our houses the proper way.

[00:17:10] Randy: Um, so, so I’d like to, if we’re, when we’re having these discussions, just understand that there’s those three pronged approach, and I think everybody agreed across the United States. That’s how we kind of have to, to, to look at this issue. How do we solve it? I’m going to tell you that I think that, uh, the toughest of the three.

[00:17:28] Randy: Really is going to be the landscapes creating, you know, safe landscapes around these places. That’s going to be the most, the biggest expense, but Allison helps spearhead the, uh, uh, Oh, the WUI code and Austin, which had some components to it that were left out. I wish that weren’t left out, but, uh, but Austin was the first city in the state of Texas.

[00:17:51] Randy: To adopt a wildland urban interface code, which, which requires new structures being built to be home hardened and basically, long story short, in layman’s terms, you can build your house to where it won’t catch on fire, you know, well, you can’t build it to where it will absolutely not catch on fire, but you can build it to where the, uh, the chances of it catching on fire are greatly reduced and city of Austin has done that.

[00:18:17] Randy: So all new construction basically. Thank you. They have to have certain things in place to, to, to make it to where the house is going to be a lot less combustible.

[00:18:28] Alison: Randy, I have good news for you that some of those missing pieces we’ve have implemented and others are in process that hopefully within the next year we’ll be doing the vegetation but buffer and other things here in Austin to add those to the WUE code.

[00:18:41] Alison: So that’s great. I wanted to alert listeners that they can go to atxwildfire. com and find links to a whole bunch of resources there, including. Uh, information about fire adapted communities, which will help you with the hardening and give you some ideas of some of the steps that you can take, um, for your own.

[00:19:00] Alison: And that would be

[00:19:01] Jeremi: relevant for our listeners who are not in Austin too, right? Because these are, these are issues and suggestions that are useful elsewhere, right?

[00:19:08] Alison: Absolutely. That website has information about what you need to take with you if you want to have a go. bag. It has information about, um, what you can do to make your home Firewise.

[00:19:21] Alison: The Firewise, uh, program is national. We have one of the highest concentration of Firewise communities here in Austin, but all those materials, um, are transferable to other, other cities for sure. I did want to add one piece to the policy. conversation that isn’t really captured in this three pillar approach, which is we have to get beyond folks thinking that wildfire is just the fire department’s problem.

[00:19:49] Alison: Wildfire is everyone’s fight. And while that phrase is common within those who are fighting wildfire, it misses on the policy level that lots of, say, city departments have to be engaged and actively trying. to mitigate against wildfire and be prepared to respond. So if you have an energy utility and they are not doing proper vegetation management, they are not managing their risks, you are creating conditions that you can have a wildfire ignite.

[00:20:21] Alison: Here in Austin, our water utility, our water treatment plants are located in the wildland urban interface. And so we need to actually do what you need to do to your home to our water treatment. plants. You have a, we have a lot of beautiful parks and preserves here, and our parks department has to be managing, um, their landscapes.

[00:20:44] Alison: When you have a storm like we’ve seen over and over again here in February in Texas, and there’s a lot of debris left over, if you don’t remove that debris, you are creating fuels. that can load the wildfire. If you actually have a wildfire, your emergency management department has to be ready. Your police department, your transportation department, they have to be able to evacuate.

[00:21:05] Alison: And to the extent that those departments think, well, wildfire is not their job, you have a problem. And so one of the things we’ve been working on and that I’ve been really focused on in my role as a council member is raising that awareness and getting all of these other departments to see wildfire. as something that they have to plan for and mitigate against from their infrastructure to their personnel policies to their emergency plans all the

[00:21:33] Jeremi: way through.

[00:21:34] Jeremi: So I think this gets us, Allison, to one of the key questions in what we do. Um, obviously, uh, as both you and Randy have been very eloquent on, we have to be aware We have to be educated, uh, it sounds like Randy is a full time educator around these issues, um, and we have to know that this is a threat, and there are things we can do, as you’ve said, in our building code, in our landscape design, but when you talk about a, a, a whole city, a whole community, community res, re, readiness program, being ready as a full community, um, that takes a lot of money, and there are other demands, right?

[00:22:11] Jeremi: So if all of our agencies, as you say, are going to put resources into this, they might not be putting resources into something else. So, so how as a political leader do you manage that? Do you manage the multiple demands? Because of course, wildfire is one of the biggest dangers, but it’s not the only one.

[00:22:29] Alison: So here in Austin, I think wildfire is one of our biggest risks. And so we really do have to put a lot. of resources behind that. But moving beyond that statement, I would say that we take a multi hazard approach. And a lot of the things that you might think about, say for evacuation for wildfire, if you’re thinking about them appropriately, you’ll understand, well, if there’s a flood or there was some other situation, you’d also have to have those evacuation plans, that coordination, that communication happening.

[00:22:59] Alison: for instance, um, with respect to, um, the hardening of homes for individuals. Some of that is education and people have to make choices. It is not, it is not true that hardening your home costs more if you do it from the very beginning than just building something else. But if you don’t know that you can and should, you won’t make the choices, even if they’re cost neutral for you.

[00:23:23] Alison: So there’s a lot of education that has to happen. there. Um, one of the things that we try and do is, um, you know, Make, make sure that we’re anticipating multiple hazards at the same time so that we can give folks, um, key information as a city, though, one of the things that’s going to happen across the country, and we’re starting to see that is the insurance industry is upping their assessment.

[00:23:51] Alison: of wildfire as a hazard. And so we are now in a situation where people all over the country are not going to be able to be insured because of the wildfire risk if they don’t harden their homes. And so here in Austin, we are in the early stages of working on a program that we would get. Certification that you have hardened your home against wildfire, and you’d be able to share that with the insurance agency, um, so that you would be able to get insurance.

[00:24:20] Alison: And so we’re trying to use the free market as well to create the incentives and provide the education for folks so that everyone can do the piece that is there. responsibility,

[00:24:31] Jeremi: right? So as I understand it, you’re trying to create multiple benefits for people investing in this so that it helps them with wildfire, but perhaps with other issues as well, perhaps other financial benefits, other mitigation of other, other risks, other damaging activities, all of that one in the same in the sense.

[00:24:50] Alison: You have to find where addressing wildfire overlaps with other goals. That’s going to definitely help you, um, to achieve the mitigation and the preparedness.

[00:25:00] Jeremi: Zachary, you had a question. How do you

[00:25:03] Zachary: think, uh, this is a question for, for both of you. Um, how do you think that, that this work on the local level, both in mitigation and then, uh, emergency preparedness, uh, can…

[00:25:13] Zachary: can work in tandem with, um, efforts on a state and the federal level. I’m sure, Randy, for example, that you’ve seen a lot of cooperation among, uh, different states and, and federal agencies, uh, and local governments when it comes to fighting a specific fire. But what does that look like before the fire or in the aftermath of a fire?

[00:25:33] Jeremi: Randy?

[00:25:33] Randy: Well, that’s an interesting question because I’ve seen. Exactly what you’re laying out. I’ve seen it kind of work and I’ve seen it not work and I’d like to go back to the The first thing you said about local government, you know local governments where most of this stuff needs to happen, right? I mean, it’s the JHA who really needs to take charge now It needs to be supported by the federal level in the state level.

[00:25:59] Randy: Obviously Andy. What’s the JHA? Uh, uh, jurisdiction having authority. So it’s basically whether it’s a township, a County, you know, whatever else I consider that all kind of local, you know, the local government. So it really kind of has to happen at that. But what I’ve been watching, uh, through the years, uh, what I’ve been watching happen is that, you know, you get somebody like Austin, you get, first of all, I’m going to.

[00:26:24] Randy: I’m going to toot a horn for Allison Alter for the Councilwoman Alter because she’s been remarkable since the first time we, we first met, you know, and I was working with the, uh, the Austin Firefighters Association. She’s been remarkable and she’s picked up the ball on this thing and she’s been a champion for this for the people of West Austin and all of Austin.

[00:26:43] Randy: But, uh, also the people in her district, which I used to be the battalion chief over and she lives in a, or she’s managing or a council woman over a district that has, has the, uh, is listed as the fourth or fifth highest risk in the United States. So she really recognized this and she’s done a phenomenal job.

[00:27:01] Randy: But what I’ve, what I’ve watched happen is local governments, when they do it, right, all of a sudden neighboring governments, you know, neighboring local governments start asking questions on the federal side. You know, the, the U. S. Fire Administration has put out two to, you know, every five years, they put out a fire report, basically.

[00:27:19] Randy: And in that fire report, it says, hey, this is what firefighters in America are facing. And just so you all know, both 2015 and 2020, the number one problem in the United States was listed was the wildland urban interface, which, just so you all know, Includes not only the structures, but it also critical infrastructure.

[00:27:39] Randy: So, so going back to what Alice was talking about in terms of water plants and power substation stuff, that’s all part of the Louis, but it listed them as as both both both times 2000. 2015 and 2020 has been the number one issue, which was interesting to me because I was excited in 2015 when that report came out because I was trying to explain it.

[00:28:02] Randy: That’s really our number one issue, especially in Austin, in terms of, of possibility for a catastrophic. And, uh, so when it came out, I thought it would make things move faster at the federal level, the federal level. It hasn’t yet. Um, 2020 came out and kind of reinforce that. And things are happening. We have the right person now in charge up there.

[00:28:26] Randy: She’s, uh, I can’t say enough about Dr. Lori Moore. Also, she’s, uh, Uh, she gets this, she understands the problem very well aware of it. And, you know, and she has a great group of people around her who are trying to come up with solutions to that problem. But, uh, I think at the federal level, one of the biggest things that’s happened over the past couple of years, uh, has been that the Biden administration has earmarked, I want to say, and I don’t know what the exact number I’ve heard, uh, anywhere from five to 50 billion, uh, over the next 10 years towards this issue.

[00:29:01] Randy: And that money is going to go, uh, primarily towards, uh, that one prong I talked about with the, uh, uh, resistant, uh, landscapes. So basically fuels mitigation across the country. So there ha there is stuff that’s happening. I I can’t say it enough. Back to the original question. I think that local government, uh, Is needs to be the driver of this thing.

[00:29:23] Randy: I know sometimes think that the federal government needs to be the one that fixes everything. But, uh, they need to be the one who are are coordinating stuff. But I think it starts at the local government and places like Austin has been fantastic. And, you know, I’m just going to tell you that with all the work that’s been done in Austin.

[00:29:43] Randy: Most of that stuff wasn’t really created in us. A lot of it was. There’s been some pretty cool stuff come out. We, we, we came up with some solutions. We’ve come up with some new stuff, but most of the stuff we’ve, we’re adapting from California because California has been doing this for years before we, before we recognized it.

[00:30:00] Randy: And so we get up, we pull a lot of stuff from California and that’s from the state. So the state of California has a WUI code in place for the whole, whole state. And obviously, if you have, if you’ve been watching the news, that even though you have a full WUI code going in, it doesn’t absolutely protect everybody.

[00:30:18] Randy: We’re still having megafires. There’s still stuff that needs to be done. So, great question.

[00:30:24] Jeremi: Randy, I, I, I love that you as a, um, hardworking and committed Texan have praised the federal government and California in the same answer that, that, that, that shows how committed you are to this issue. Yes. Yeah.

[00:30:40] Jeremi: Well,

[00:30:40] Randy: so I, uh, I’m on a whole bunch of committees. I haven’t, there’s some of them not even listed and I’m on a bunch of work groups that I work with a lot of guys from Cal fire that I have a lot of respect for. They’ve, they’ve been trying hard. Uh, and I hate to say this, but we all have to set our politics aside when it comes to disasters as much as we possibly can.

[00:30:57] Randy: I know that a lot of the disasters turn into being political, you know, things, but, you know, I’ll just say this when, when, as an operations or a first responder. You know, that’s my thing. Um, I go into these places and try to do our best to help people out. And, you know, that’s a core of what we do. We, we, we kind of put our politics aside.

[00:31:19] Randy: You can be sitting in one of these command posts or in a fire engine someplace. And. You know, this is, is, even though it’s the most political topic I think I’ve ever dealt with, you know, the guys and girls in the field don’t really even pay attention to that when the stuff’s going on. And so we got to make sure we equip and train them right.

[00:31:38] Randy: We got to, we got to give them the tools they need. We got to make sure that, that we’re prepared before the fire, which is all the other stuff. You know, but, uh, but it’s hard for me to say good things about California. I’ll tell you that.

[00:31:50] Jeremi: But I appreciate I appreciate what you just said. So eloquently, Randy, our whole podcast is about exactly that.

[00:31:57] Jeremi: Understanding the issues, seeing the issues more broadly so that although we all bring our politics to the table, and that’s fine, that we can actually focus on solving problems in our democracy. And this is a big problem, a problem for which there are some uh, solvable pathway, some pathways that will make our society better.

[00:32:16] Jeremi: And it doesn’t matter whether you like California or Texas, uh, you can still, in both California, Texas, and elsewhere, work through these issues in the ways that you’ve, you’ve described. Allison, uh, Randy has praised you appropriately. For the work you’ve done in northwest Austin on these issues in an area that I’m just learning now is the fourth most vulnerable area to wildfires and in the country.

[00:32:41] Jeremi: Apparently, how have you been able to do this? Because you have a community of educated. But citizens who like Randy want to live on plots of land with beautiful wooded views and don’t want anyone telling them what they should do on their property and people who don’t like to follow rules and regulations that come from somewhere else.

[00:33:02] Jeremi: So, so how have you, how have you navigated this space?

[00:33:07] Alison: Well, I think it’s important to recognize that. Wildfire, while it is political to make change, is not a partisan issue, and a lot of it has to do with education. For better or worse, people can see that wildfires are a problem all over the country, and they can look out their window and see the fire keg.

[00:33:30] Alison: that is there. And so they begin to pay much more attention to what they need to be doing and what the city might be able to do. I want to be really clear though that wildfire is a risk for the entire city. There’s a ring around the city. If you go to the atxwildfire. com that you can see on our wildfire hub, there’s a week.

[00:33:51] Alison: Um, ring around the city where the risk is the fire danger. I’ve heard this WUI

[00:33:55] Jeremi: thing said a few times.

[00:33:56] Alison: Wildland Urban Interface. Okay,

[00:33:58] Jeremi: not just rooting for UT. No,

[00:34:00] Alison: no. Um, the Wildland Urban Interface creates a, you know, a ring of high risk around the city. Now the risks are different. So on the east side of town, it’s from grasses and on the west side, it’s It is, um, more from from trees and the canyons.

[00:34:15] Alison: So there’s different types of fires that we’ll see. Um, so a lot of it is education, um, and, you know, working within the city to get folks prepared, get everyone on the same page to make sure that, um, They know what they’re doing. I want to go back to the earlier conversation because it’s important to understand and it’s important for most policies that where you make a lot of traction.

[00:34:40] Alison: The International Firefighters Association, which Randy is a part of and has been, um, pushing out for more training. They have been really instrumental, I think, in creating the building blocks that You We’re using here in Austin and that other cities in turn are using, um, we’ve adapted, um, their wildfire training, uh, responding to the interface as a second level of wildfire training that we’re now training every one of our firefighters in, um, so that they know the difference between a wildfire and a structure.

[00:35:12] Alison: I’ve had an opportunity to speak on several panels, um, and the reason that forum is important because it’s one of the forums by which we pass knowledge from one jurisdiction to another. Wildfire is an area where you can learn from other jurisdictions and what worked well and what didn’t. You don’t have the time to do all of that yourself.

[00:35:32] Alison: And so they are one of the bodies that’s really helping to do that transfer of information. We in Austin also do that. So, you know, after the fires in Maui, we’re sharing them what we learned in setting up the WUI code because when they rebuild in Lahaina, they want to rebuild in a hardened way because they now see the risks and because you can rebuild.

[00:35:55] Alison: Um, in a way that’s fire adapted without adding costs. If you do it from the beginning, they need to build that in and so we are talking and sharing knowledge with them of the materials that we have to share with our builders here in Austin. Um, we are also working regionally. So we are about to launch our next, um, community wildfire protection plan.

[00:36:17] Alison: And I, and as you know, as a, as a policy professor, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And so right now here, Texas, across the country, we’re scared to death about wildfires. And so we need to take advantage of this time. Hopefully we won’t have a wildfire, but we need to take that momentum and that attention and translate that to help us move forward and take leaps.

[00:36:40] Alison: In our own prepared that makes

[00:36:42] Jeremi: that makes perfect sense. And what I like is this conversation has gone from an apocalyptic opening with Zachary’s poem and some of our discussions of these, these really scary risks and dangers from wildfire to, I think, a very positive discussion about. Some of the progress we’ve made, clearly not enough, and some of the avenues by which we can make more progress and make our communities safer without having to fundamentally change our lifestyles.

[00:37:09] Jeremi: Um, Randy, we always like to close, uh, with trying to bring together some of this, uh, deeper historical perspective to think about what it is we can do going forward. Uh, and I know you’ve thought and work very hard around these issues. What are the two, three things that you think we all need to prioritize whether we’re in Massachusetts or in Berlin or in Austin as we think about this issue as citizens, regardless of whether we’re a homeowner or not?

[00:37:41] Randy: So that’s a great question. And I love this question because it gives me a little bit of a platform to Throw out there what I think is the most important part of all this. And I think, and Allison knows this, cause I hear that RTI program, the responding to the interface, which is the training program that, that Austin just implemented over the past year or so.

[00:37:59] Randy: I hear it’s a really good program. Isn’t it Allison?

[00:38:02] Alison: Yes. And I think you might’ve had something to do with

[00:38:06] Randy: it. The reason I I’m joking around about this, I was on a. Uh, basically a design team with, uh, Justin White out of, uh, uh, Colorado Springs and Phil Veneris out of, uh, Cal Fire, the three of us built that program.

[00:38:21] Randy: And, uh, so I’ve been out all over the place, all over the United States and Canada, not only implementing it, but also kind of pushing for it. I think that, that. The citizens need to demand that their firefighters are actually properly trained to respond to one of these fires. The reason that’s important and why I got involved in this is because I responded to the Steiner Ranch fire, and I thought we knew what we were doing and found out within 15 minutes we had no clue.

[00:38:48] Randy: Right? We thought we, we had the right policies in place and, you know, the policy makers in Austin Fire Department at the time, they kept saying, telling me that they didn’t want to train the whole fire department, but only the outer, uh, stations. And we learned within the first 15 minutes that we ran out of those outer stations.

[00:39:06] Randy: So we had to get crews from all the way from downtown Austin. So this is everybody’s fight. I can’t say that enough. When the fires, uh, happens in Box Springs or whether it happened in Maui, whatever else, Every firefighter needs to be trained how to respond to that fire. The truth is that 75 to 80% of the United States firefighters, professional firefighters, have had little or no training on how to fight these fires.

[00:39:35] Randy: There’s the, the program we built was actually one that kind of took all the, the latest and greatest, uh, uh, strategies and tactics out of California and kind of apply ’em in a way. I had to really de honestly, this is really going back to the California thing again, but I, uh, I had to de California is the program.

[00:39:53] Randy: So what we started building, we built it for California, then de Californias it, and, and it turned out to be pretty good. I mean, it was, it was, uh, actually a very big. Process to actually make it to where whatever tactics and strategies we use in California will work in Massachusetts. There is no national standard on this stuff.

[00:40:14] Randy: This is the greatest fire problem we’re facing today. And yet the firefighters aren’t trained. The ones who are, who will say they’re trained, have eight hours or less. And this is… This was, uh, done through surveys we did years ago, uh, from fire departments all across the United States and Canada. The, the ones that say they have training are eight hours or less.

[00:40:32] Randy: They’re not really trained. So, that’s a big issue to me. I think that, that every firefighter should be trained the same, so that when Dallas firefighters show up in Austin, they know what they’re doing. That’s number one. Number two, Randy, if

[00:40:46] Jeremi: I could just stop you on that. So you, you, you think there should be a sort of national academy like what we do, for instance, with sending members of the National Guard to get federal training?

[00:40:56] Randy: So, so yes, but I think that you can do it with a national standard that creates regional, uh, training centers. And that’s what I’ve been working on both in the United States and Canada is just setting up regional training centers. And then you do a train a trainer program. Uh, I’m, I’m going to say it again.

[00:41:11] Randy: Allison was. I brought it to her, you know, a couple of years ago and said, Hey, we need to do this. This is important. And she picked up the ball and ran with it and made sure that it happened at without her support. Uh, the, the Austin firefighters association would have never got that push through. I mean, I was trying so hard and was hitting so many, uh, dead ends, you know, within the department.

[00:41:33] Randy: Cause there’s, there’s obviously everything costs money. Nothing I talk about is free. I wish there was something I talked about that was free. Everything has a price tag to it, you know, training, fuel mitigation, everything else. But speaking of money, that brings up the second point. And I think everybody really needs to know this because it’s.

[00:41:52] Randy: It’s very important, it’s gonna have an effect. If, if it’s not affecting people living in these areas today, it will in the near future. And the reason I know that this has an effect is because I’m constantly recruited to go into the indu in, into the, uh, insurance industry to do surveys or, you know, assessments of neighborhoods to see whether or not they should insure ’em anymore.

[00:42:15] Randy: And, and so that’s coming. And I, I’ve been warned about that in West Austin. It, and it, it. Just like Allison said, it will eventually affect everybody, but it’ll start. It already has started in river places and places in West Austin where people are having a hard time getting insured because the, uh, insurance industry is catching on to the fact that these are, these are going to be just as costly as a, as a, you know, as a moderate hurricane.

[00:42:41] Randy: You know, if you get a big enough event like Santa Rosa, California, there was 12, 500 structures lost there. That’s, that’s a big price tag. So insurance industry, I think will probably end up driving some of these, this stuff. I really like hearing, I did not know that we’re doing all the WUI code. And I really liked the idea of the fact that if somebody does.

[00:43:06] Randy: You know, do the right things. They should get a certificate saying they’re doing the right thing. And the insurance industry should be forced to give them a break, you know, for doing the right thing. So that’s the second thing. Insurance is going to get there. And then, and the last one, which is the biggest, hardest thing.

[00:43:21] Randy: And, uh, years ago, uh, me and Allison were in a conversation and she did something to me that jammed me up for months. And still to this day, I go back to that same question. She said, Randy, if I gave you an unlimited budget, You can do it. What would you do to fix the issue that we face in West Austin?

[00:43:39] Randy: Which is much different than the grasslands at East Austin. She goes, what would you do if I if you had an unlimited budget? And all of a sudden for the first time I think in many years of preached about this stuff I stood there and said oh crap. What would I do? Because this is a gigantic Issue and it’s going to take, you know, an enormous effort to get it fixed, but fuels are going to remain a big issue.

[00:44:03] Randy: And the reason fuels are a big issue and why it’s so political is because people like trees, right? And I don’t understand why they like cedar trees, but they love cedar trees too. I don’t know why they like them. In my opinion, you know, I can go into the. Ecology side of it, you know, and tell you that the multi stem cedar trees or the ash junipers we have in West Austin were never, we’re never supposed to be as prolific as they are, but we start, we started that motion back in the early 1900s.

[00:44:31] Randy: But fuel reduction is, is going to have to be a balance. You know, we have endangered species in places. We have reasons why we need to have trees. There’s not a single firefighter that I work with that would like to see everything completely mowed down. So, we all recognize there has to be a balance. You need to keep the landscape to as its natural state as possible.

[00:44:53] Randy: You know, but that natural state… Includes prescribed fire the problem with prescribed fire using as a tool for for fuels reduction, which we are doing to some extent in Austin, but we’re not hitting high fire danger areas. We’re doing it in areas that, in my opinion, don’t have much of an effect. The stuff that we really need to be doing is going to take an enormous, as Allison says, educational component to it, but the for fuels reduction, I believe that the answer is going to be more prescribed fire.

[00:45:25] Randy: The problem with prescribed fire is that people don’t want smoke in their house, right? But that’s better than having your house burned down. But people don’t want the smoke in the house. We have, one person will have asthma, you know, on a back road someplace. As soon as you light the fire, it triggers their asthma and you have to shut everything down.

[00:45:42] Randy: But somehow we need to get our society to understand that we need to reintroduce fire as a natural cycle. In our fire, in our, in our, uh, higher risk areas.

[00:45:54] Jeremi: It, it, it’s counterintuitive, right, Randy? Because what you’re basically saying, and I think I understand the biology of it, or at least I can pretend I understand the biology of it, but what you’re basically saying is we have to light more fires to stop big fires.

[00:46:07] Randy: Yes, absolutely. And, and they need to be done in a controlled way. In a controlled way. And here’s the problem. You know, the problem is, is that, you know, you can’t make it 100% absolute. So. It’s funny because, you know, they’ll be, I’m going to use New Mexico as an example. They do prescribed fire a lot in New Mexico, but the first time a fire escapes, which it does on occasion and burns down a couple of homes, all of a sudden they shut the programs down.

[00:46:34] Randy: It’s, it’s terrible. It’s terrible and terrible because people aren’t really focusing on the, the, the right thing that they’re doing, which is, you know, what’s really being done is they’re actually saving. Thousands of homes in the work they’re doing, right? Thousands and thousands and thousands. Who knows how many homes they’ve saved by doing the work they’re doing.

[00:46:53] Randy: And it might come at the expense of, you know, the fact that a fire escapes and burns down somebody’s home. We have to be ready to, to respond to that, that, uh, when it happens. But I don’t, I don’t know how we do that on a national, you know, or North American level, which is, this isn’t just a fact in the United States.

[00:47:11] Randy: I’m getting ready to go to Canada next month. I teach in Canada just as much as I teach down here. It’s a Canadian issue too, but what’s different in Canada right now is that they, I think have done a better job. And the more rural areas saying, Hey, we’re going to just manage these fires. We’re not going to put them out.

[00:47:32] Randy: And that’s why the smoke in New York and all the plays up in the, you know, the, the Northeast, they were freaking out on that smoke and stuff. Those fires were not being stopped in Canada. They recognize that those fires have to happen. To bring back, you know, a more natural landscape.

[00:47:49] Jeremi: It’s a really important point, and thank you for elucidating that.

[00:47:53] Jeremi: I think I, for one, understand that particular issue a lot better now. Allison, what are your bullet points for citizens going forward? What can they do? What do you want your constituents, and constituents like yours, in Massachusetts, in California, in Germany, in France, what do you want them to be thinking about?

[00:48:13] Alison: Well, if you start from the premise that Wildfires, everyone’s fight. You need to get educated about what you can do to mitigate your own family’s risk, being prepared, um, to be able to evacuate, to have the materials you need, know where to go, know how to get that information beyond those, um, channels. You can go to atxwildfire.

[00:48:33] Alison: com and see what Austin’s doing, but also link to a lot of the national resources, um, that can provide you with guidance. If you are a policymaker, you can look at what we’re doing in Austin and use that as a, as a model moving forward as a policymaker. faced with a very daunting challenge. You know, we’re, we’re never going to eliminate the risk completely.

[00:48:55] Alison: You have to just do kind of what I’ve been doing, which is kind of bite off each piece as you can. Remember the three pillar approach. Incrementalism. Incrementalism. Um, You know, remember the three pillar approach of effective firefighting, fire adapted communities, and resilient landscapes, um, and just kind of figure out which pieces you can do when, have an idea of all of the different pieces, and start moving.

[00:49:23] Alison: If you, if you get overwhelmed by how big of a challenge it is. you’ll never make any progress.

[00:49:29] Jeremi: Right, right. Zachary, as a as a young person who cares about wildfire, you wrote a beautiful poem about it, obviously. Is this discussion helpful? Is this is this an issue that young people can start to think more about and to put it quite frankly can, Can your generation, you think, solve some of the problems that Randy and Allison have described that have been left to us by a generation that’s built all these homes in places they didn’t build homes before in ways that aren’t the safest?

[00:49:58] Jeremi: Is there a generational motivation here? I think

[00:50:03] Zachary: so. I think one of the things that my generation has to do is to think not only about how we can live more sustainably and take advantage of new technologies to do so, but also rethink the relationship that we have with the natural world. And in this case with fire.

[00:50:21] Zachary: Um, and I think that it will require not just a renewed mood. Thank you. attention to mitigating wildfire and preventing wildfire from destroying our communities. Um, but also a renewed attention to these broader attitudes towards fire and, uh, towards, um, in particular, uh, controlled, uh, fire, uh, for us to really see.

[00:50:45] Zachary: Uh, substantial progress on the issue. Right,

[00:50:47] Jeremi: right. So in a way, it’s, the way you’re describing this, Zachary, it’s, it’s not that different from issues surrounding civil rights or other, other topics, where, where attitude is probably the most important element of this, yes? I think so. Well, I think on that note, that leaves us with both, both an imperative for action, But also a sense of the possibilities here, uh, the, the problem is large.

[00:51:11] Jeremi: We started there, uh, with, with Zachary’s poem and with, uh, Randy and Alison’s descriptions of the problem. But as Alison just said so well, and as Randy laid out, uh, with his three focuses or three areas of work, um, there really are things we can do. Every single day. And a democracy works, as Allison just said, not when we sit and stare at a big problem and lament that we can’t do anything about it, but instead when we incrementally take steps to, uh, mitigate and to shift.

[00:51:41] Jeremi: the way we behave for the purposes of serving the larger community. That is what Franklin Roosevelt, who of course is the inspiration for our podcast, what he himself said almost a century ago, that policy change is about taking one problem at a time to deal with the larger challenges around us. And I think, uh, Randy Denzer and Alison Alter, uh, embody that in the best sense, in a nonpartisan way, in a way that’s focused on addressing a problem, understanding it, educating oneself and others about it, and then taking the small steps that are necessary toward a larger set of improvements that we hope to see.

[00:52:21] Jeremi: Randy, thank you so much for joining us, for sharing your insights, and also for all the work you do. Randy Denzer is, I think, in many ways a hero around these issues. Thank you for being with us, Randy.

[00:52:31] Randy: Thank you very much for letting me speak on it. It’s very passionate about it.

[00:52:35] Jeremi: We can tell, and please continue to share that passion.

[00:52:38] Jeremi: Allison, you are also passionate about this, Councilperson Allison Alter, thank you for sharing your time and for all the work you do around these issues.

[00:52:46] Alison: Thank you, and I’ve had a great tutor in, in

[00:52:49] Jeremi: Randy. Well, you guys are kind of a dynamic duo. I mean, it’s, uh, it’s so nice to see, uh, public officials who try to understand a problem.

[00:52:57] Jeremi: and actually try to work toward solving it for the greater good. Um, we don’t see enough of that. It happens a lot, but it’s not the kind of story we see in front of us. And it’s a story we need to tell and model. And Zachary, of course, thank you for your thought provoking, inspiring poem for your wonderful questions and for your generational hope.

[00:53:17] Jeremi: Zachary, thank you most of all to our listeners for joining us for this episode of this is

[00:53:32] Outro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:53:39] Outro: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week.

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