Travis Khachatoorian:
You are listening to SageCast, the podcast of Pomona College, featuring Sage Hens making a difference in the classroom and in the world. I'm Travis Khachatoorian.

Marilyn Thomsen:
And I'm Marilyn Thompson. This season, we're doing things a little differently. We're handing over the mic to professors to guest host conversations with alumni on the topic of what's next in their fields of expertise.

Travis Khachatoorian:
Today, professor Char Miller is leading the conversation. Char is the WM Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College and has done extensive research on wildfire policy in the West.

Marilyn Thomsen:
Char's guest is Pomona Alumnus, Nate Dailey, class of 2023. Nate has gone on to work in wildfire hazard planning and participate in prescribed burns. He currently attends Cal State Chico to research the intersection between computer programming and geography as it relates to wildfires. His focus is on developing computer models to detect overgrown areas at risk of burning out of control.

Travis Khachatoorian:
Nate has a close relationship with wildfire. His family's home burned down in one of the deadliest and largest wildfires in the state of California, the Camp Fire. Here's their conversation on what's next for wildfire management in our new climate reality.

Char Miller:
Welcome to SageCast. My name is Char Miller. I'm a professor at Pomona College in the environmental analysis and history programs and joining me today is Nate Daley, and we're going to be talking about a pretty tough California topic about wildfires, their consequences, the implications of them, and particularly the Camp Fire, which Nate and his family endured and has shown enormous resilience. So Nate, if you could take us back to 2018 and give us a feel for what you and your family and your neighbors and your classmates all experienced on that horrific night.

Nate Dailey:
So this was in 2018 in November 8th specifically and I was a senior in high school at the time, so it was a year before I came to Pomona, and it happened really early in the morning actually. It was really strange because there was kind of some buzz in the neighborhood about a fire that was nearby potentially, and we could all see it in the sky, and really what was scary first was there were some burning embers that were falling down and so everyone was like, "Okay, this is different. This is serious." Because we had been evacuated before, but this time it definitely seemed different and there was no official evacuation or anything because all of the systems failed on that morning, and so it really was a neighbor to neighbor type of thing.

Char Miller:
Can you give us a feel for the sky, the color of it, the smell of it? Especially as those embers were coming down, there must've been multiple cues as to like, "It's probably time to go."

Nate Dailey:
It was extremely windy, which really goes along with the whole wildfire, and I remember almost like a purple color in the sky, unlike anything I've ever seen and actually before me and my family left, a small fire started in the ditch in front of our house from an ember, and at that point everyone was like, "Okay, we need to leave." Basically everyone was making sure that all the neighbors knew what was going on and we just took some time to grab some things and then we left, and pretty much right off the bat, down the street there was somebody's shed was burning already also from an ember and so the embers really sent the fire way ahead of the main fire that was still in the canyon that was on the East side of Paradise. It took about three hours to get out of the town.

Char Miller:
Wow, because everybody is going down the one road.

Nate Dailey:
Yeah, exactly and that was what caused the real tragedy of the Camp Fire was just the infrastructure of the town and only having one way out of the town with not very many lanes, and so it really took everyone a long time to get out and that's why one of the main reasons the death toll was so high.

Char Miller:
For the listeners, the Camp Fire is still the most destructive and most deadly in the state's history, modern and earlier, and although at one point was the largest by acreage that has been superseded unfortunately multiple times such that we're looking at something like 19 of the 20 largest fires have burned in this state since 2003, and the anomaly in that list has been moving down the list as more and more fires have erupted here, but one of the things that's really intriguing to me about the Camp Fire and other fires is how little conversation there is about the psychological, the emotional responses to folks who have endured them. There's only one really good book about it, and I'm particularly interested in to the degree that you're willing to talk with us about it, sort of the escape is one thing and thank God, but the sort of ongoing emotional turmoil maybe if that's the right word for it, how you and your family and your peers, your classmates dealt with these kinds of issues.

Nate Dailey:
It's definitely like a trauma bond for sure between everyone in the town, it had this effect where suddenly we all had this really tragic thing in common, and I was lucky to have a lot of community around after the Camp Fire, and my family, most people from Paradise ended up in Chico, which is just 15 miles away, and it was kind of the obvious option for everyone, and so within Chico, there was a strong Paradise community.

Char Miller:
And that was sustaining also for you as a high school student that even though you're disrupted, there was the mall school. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Nate Dailey:
So yeah, that was the first place that Paradise High School set up was at the Chico Mall, and basically there was this big room where they put a bunch of desks and just set up shop basically, and we called it mall school and then after that, Paradise High got an office building that was kind of on the outskirts of Chico near the Chico Airport, and so we set up a bunch of desks and barriers for classrooms there, and we called that airport school. So we had mall school and airport school, and that was really special just to be with all of my classmates from Paradise.

Char Miller:
Right, yeah and it's interesting that for example, one could have imagined y'all going to a high school in Chico, right? That you would've fanned out and would've done that. It probably was pretty smart to keep you all together as opposed to maybe just I don't know how many high schools Chico has, but there probably several, and that would've sort of been its own set of issues.

Nate Dailey:
Totally. Yeah, definitely sticking together was really helpful during that time.

Char Miller:
And I mean you had to graduate, so you tell a wonderful story about the meaning of that graduation, obviously for you, but also for the larger community of which you were a part of. Could you share some of that story?

Nate Dailey:
So Paradise High School, only portions of the school burned in the Camp Fire, and most of it was left standing, but it was really damaged from the fire and so having graduation up there was this big goal from when the Camp Fire happened up until the graduation itself, the people in charge worked around a lot of red tape and made it happen. It was really meaningful. We all got to graduate on Paradise High's football field. It was a really big community event. Definitely a lot of people came to it and it was kind of a celebration of recovery since the Camp Fire. Definitely a big achievement.

Char Miller:
Yeah, no, given that it was between November and that June I guess. When you graduated, that's actually kind of amazing given the damage that ripped through Paradise and the other towns that were incinerated in the process. So when you were thinking about colleges writing your applications, were you thinking about how you might do the kind of work you're doing now, or was that something that in part you may have come to while you were at Pomona?

Nate Dailey:
So shortly after the Camp Fire, it was a major problem for everyone to find a place to live in Chico because every apartment was filled and the town had such a big influx of people, and so me and my two brothers lived in a converted school bus that we were borrowing from a friend, and we were really grateful for it too and that's actually where I did my college applications and where I applied to Pomona was sitting in the bus. Yeah, and at the time, I really didn't know what direction I wanted to go academically. I had always been interested in maps for sure. I was always really into Google Earth and such as a kid, and also going to Pomona, the Camp Fire had just happened and so it was definitely heavily on my mind, and I think at Pomona, I was really inspired to pursue something that was connected to the Camp Fire and also my interest in computers and maps, and now I've been able to put all of that together and I think my Pomona education really helped me with that.

Char Miller:
As we've talked in the past, I'm really interested in the work you're you did or doing at Chico State and sort of the kinds of ways by which you've thought through how you recover effectively or at least have made peace with fire and sort of have thought about that there are bad fires and clearly the Camp Fire was one of them, but there's also good fires, and so how did you get to that place where you could distinguish one from the other?

Nate Dailey:
Learning about prescribed burning was really important to me and learning about the relationship with the land and fire, which you can definitely speak to, Char, but yeah, getting involved in prescribed burning has been really meaningful and just kind of learning all of the details about the different plants here and the relationship with fire down to how long the pine needles are and just different things like that have been really meaningful to me to understand.

Char Miller:
Yeah, there's a wonderful video and I suspect we'll have a link to it in which you're on a prescribed burn and you're talking about the star thistle and I don't know that plant, so I'm very interested in is that an invasive that they're trying to burn out? Is it an indigenous plant that they want to regenerate because it regenerates with fire?

Nate Dailey:
Yes, star thistle is an invasive plant. I can't remember exactly where it's from. It tends to kind of take over in this area in the grasslands, the blue oak savanna grassland type of area. It's really spiky and kind of annoying also, so people tend to dislike it and so the goal of that prescribed burn was just to reduce it and come back and burn the area multiple times on different years in order to kill the seeds.

Char Miller:
Because the applied part, but there's also this theoretical intellectual piece that you're doing through data science at Chico. Tell me how that plays out for you.

Nate Dailey:
So I'm really interested in maps and using the analytical approach of maps to understand fire and topography and vegetation, and so I'm doing a grad program in data science just to get more skills for that domain, I guess.

Char Miller:
And anything that sort of emerged out of that that you would not have known otherwise?

Nate Dailey:
Definitely just a lot of low level tools and skills and practice, and also the opportunity to work on my master's project, which is going to be all about mapping vegetation in Paradise since the Camp Fire six years ago.

Char Miller:
Good, and that's another whole piece that I think is really interesting that when I write, when others write, we talk about acreage burned and or incinerated or blackened, and the assumption is that everything got destroyed. I mean it's a language of destruction, but what you're describing is something a little more nuanced and complicated than that. If you think about the data development that you're doing and that you're going back in to look at regeneration, like what's growing, what's coming back, I mean in and of itself, that's really interesting. It's also part of a recovery of the land and the people on it. So could you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing on the ground itself now six and a half years since the Camp Fire, what are you seeing in the landscape?

Nate Dailey:
My main observation is a lot of brush has regrown really rapidly since the Camp Fire, specifically Scotch Broom. It's kind of exploded since it has so much access to sunlight, which I know tends to be kind of an impact after major fires where the brush below has as much sunlight as it once with the trees above gone, which I think is kind of a characteristic of an extremely destructive wildfire, which is maybe not part of the area's natural fire regime, but anyways, I really want to study the Scotch Broom regrowing in paradise since it's a fire risk itself and I'm worried about it burning again, honestly.

Char Miller:
Yeah, with good reason. So have you had a chance, and I can't remember if you said that you've worked with Don Hankins or who for folks listening in is Plains Miwok fire manager extraordinaire, and he's written beautiful articles about fire suppression, but also this notion that you're describing of good fire, of prescribed fire coming back in. Is he sort of a player in the kind of work that you're doing?

Nate Dailey:
He's definitely a lead figure in the prescribed burn community in Butte County. Yeah, he has so much knowledge and wisdom about prescribed fire and how it interacts with each plant and he's spoken at a variety of prescribed burn events and he always has amazing info to share.

Char Miller:
Actually, one of the things I learned from him and while I was working on a book that just came out this fall called Burn Scars is the relationship between fire and oak, which I always knew sort of theoretically, but he has a way of explaining that connection that didn't make sense until I actually stumbled upon a conversation or had a conversation with a Forest Service employee who told me about one of his first days on the job in the 1970s. He was up in the Trinity Alps, which is Northwestern California, and he's hiking around and he's suddenly seeing something that made absolutely no sense to him. He's in a Doug Fir forest, massive trees, 120, 150 feet tall, and underneath that canopy were these old huge oak trees, almost all of which were dead, but they had what he called ghost trees and he had no way to understand that.
That was nothing that he had ever heard in graduate school as a forester or worked on the forest service, and he went and talked to an archeologist who said, "Oh, well what you're looking at is fire suppression. If you suppress fire, Doug Fir is going to come up. If you allow fire as the Plains Miwok, and the Klamath and the Orook and others have done or did in the past, you get oak." Because they wanted oak and it was like a light bulb moment for him and also for me, because I was thinking about how to tell these stories, and there is a way to think about Paradise and the Camp Fire and the big ones between 2003 and this year as partly caused by that very same process of suppressing fire, but what I love about Don's work, Don Hankin's work and the stuff that you're doing is that that's the sort of counterweight to fire suppression.
I mean since the Spanish missionaries arrived, we've been suppressing fire like crazy because it didn't fit within what settlers thought was useful, and now we've got a very different approach. We've got a very different way to think about it, but part of what the book does is sort of trace that history through the documents themselves, and not me talking, but really sort of letting writers of the 19th century, 18th, 19th, and 20th century talk about fire and there are different approaches to it, and you're growing up. I mean the part I love about your story is that you are let's say a victim of one of these fire suppression driven fires, also wind and climate change and all these other issues, but you've sort of moved your way into a different way of thinking and basically a different methodology of thinking about fire and its purposes on the ground.

Nate Dailey:
Yeah, it's been a really cool way to heal since the Camp Fire and be involved and understand how it all works, and I think also a lot of people tend to want to blame one single thing for something like this and in reality, it's just the history and a variety of factors coming together and it's been good for me to be involved with prescribed burning to kind of understand how all of that works.

Char Miller:
Yeah, no, I mean it's both laudable and probable because it does seem to me to be a much more generous approach to a single fire on the one hand, and a much smarter approach ecologically that we have experimented with for 50 years, but have never done it at scale and it's expensive of course, and there are times when prescribed fires get away. There are big ones in Bandelier in New Mexico and other places, but if we don't do this at some larger scale, whether it's mechanical means or fire or some combination of things, we're not going to get a handle on things like the Eaton Fire or the Palisades Fire or any of the others that have blown up, and we had a huge fire in Claremont in September of this year, 50,000 acres. So actually much quicker than Palisades in Eaton, and the second part of that story is that we've had a ton of rain in the last three weeks, and the mudslides up above Claremont have been pretty dramatic.
They're not getting any press, which is fine, but at least in Southern California we have this dynamic of flood and fire or fire and flood, which is tied to drought and deluge. It's less severe usually in the central and northern Sierra, but these things come together in a way that good fire can have a huge role, and I think we've been talking about this since the 1980s, at least since the 1980s when big Yellowstone fire blew up and everybody was screaming about the destruction and then 10 years later, you're looking at forests growing like crazy. Are you seeing that up in and around Paradise that there yes, the Broom is there and other sort of brushes that are emerging, but that some of the trees that one thought were dead actually aren't?

Nate Dailey:
It's really amazing seeing some of the trees come back that I totally thought were dead and especially the year after the Camp Fire, just the electric green color that comes through with the fresh grass through the black char is really amazing.

Char Miller:
Yeah, I'm heading to look at the Eaton fire uphill anyway fairly soon in part because of that, because the Chaparral, unless it's totally incinerated, is going to come pushing back up. These rains, they bury themselves in their roots and then they come flashing back in a way that is quite dramatic and has always dumbfounded some scientists who assume that this can't happen, and so they want to plant something else to replace it, and it's like the Chaparral out competes it. So the grasses become somewhat of a way by which you stabilize the soil and then other things that can move in. So maybe one final question for you in thinking about the work that you're doing, and as you said, the healing that comes from that is how are things in Paradise and how are people rebuilding, thinking about Altadena and the Palisades, but let's focus on Paradise because it becomes an exemplar perhaps of what we can expect here.

Nate Dailey:
The town is looking really good right now I would say. A lot of homes have been rebuilt, and it's been a really cool place for young families to set up and a place where you can build a house, and the town had kind of a fresh start in a lot of ways. I would say The town is doing really well. My family decided not to rebuild in Paradise mainly just being afraid of the fire risk since it continues. So yeah, but the town itself looks really good.

Char Miller:
Good. Great, and is the high school open?

Nate Dailey:
It is, yeah and they've been able to build some new buildings and make the high school look really nice and so that's been great to see.

Char Miller:
Yeah, that is great and it's a hopeful sign obviously, for Paradise, but it does suggest that however long it takes for Altadena and Palisades to recover, and it's going to take a while. It will happen, it just may happen in a different way and as you say, you guys aren't living there, but you're sort of aware of those kinds of transformations, and I have to close on this. So I need to know about yo-yos and your international competition or your competitive experience with them.

Nate Dailey:
Yeah, totally. So I'm a yo-yo competitor, and I've been playing yo-yo since I was 10 years old, and it's a huge passion of mine and I've competed at competitions all over the world in China, Iceland, and Japan. I went to Japan shortly after graduating from Pomona in 2023, and this year I am less of a competitor and more of an organizer because I'm organizing a competition here in Chico, California state, which is going to happen on April 12th and so I'm excited for that.

Char Miller:
That's fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us on SageCast.

Nate Dailey:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was great.