{"id":65228,"date":"2022-01-26T16:10:02","date_gmt":"2022-01-26T23:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=65228"},"modified":"2022-01-26T16:10:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-26T23:10:02","slug":"edgeley-camp-fire-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/edgeley-camp-fire-research\/","title":{"rendered":"After a wildfire, how does a town rebuild?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three months after the most destructive fire in California\u2019s history, while the residents of Paradise were sifting through the rubble of their houses, moving out of shelters and into less temporary but not permanent housing, considering the future of their home\u2014while they were still grieving the 86 people killed\u2014Catrin Edgeley<\/strong> took her notebook and recorder to the destroyed town. She wanted to understand the ecology of the human response to the Camp Fire. For how often this happens, there are still so many unknowns.<\/p>\n

Edgeley works at the intersection of forest management and sociology, studying how human communities adapt to wildfire and how they prepare and recover. Despite the significant human toll of wildfires, particularly in recent years, as fire seasons in the West have gotten longer, more severe and closer to development, most research has focused on the ecological effects and response.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe human side is really challenging because it\u2019s always evolving,\u201d she said. \u201cHumans move, fires come through in different ways, dynamics change\u2014the same community could be completely different after a few years. There are always new things to be looking at, which makes it a lot more challenging than basic ecology. We often have a good idea of how vegetation is going to return, but we don\u2019t necessarily know how people are going to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DestructionThis research, \u201cExploring the social legacy of frequent wildfires: Organizational responses for community recovery following the 2018 Camp Fire<\/a>,\u201d published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction<\/em>, examines not just how the people of Paradise and the surrounding communities responded but also how lessons learned from one fire could be applied to future fires. For all the similarities of wildfires in American West, there is a surprising amount of discontinuity in the responses. A community today could respond to fire differently than it did five years ago. The same fire could hit communities differently. Or, as is increasingly common, fire responses are layered\u2014organizations are still responding to one fire when another fire requires a response, and two months later, while in different response phases for the first two fires, a third occurs. There is not a manual that tells a community the correct way to respond because each fire and each community are distinct enough to require a more specific approach.<\/p>\n

How the research started<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Three months after a fire is early for a sociological study. Edgeley collected the data then because the initial emergency response was winding down and the long-term recovery was ramping up. FEMA and the American Red Cross were leaving, shelters were closing, people were returning and planners were asking how\u2014and whether\u2014to rebuild.<\/p>\n

\u201cI could see back and I could look forward in terms of timing and where they were,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In Paradise, a town of about 30,000 people, she interviewed locals involved in the response\u2014city and school district leaders, county government, nonprofit leaders, the Rotary Club and so on. She asked what they were struggling with, from where they got information and resources and what roles state and national organizations played in the recovery. What she found were people who were attempting to navigate the recovery with little to no experience and no how-to manual. Many hoped, for instance, that FEMA would take a leading role in recovery. That was somewhat true early on; FEMA and the Red Cross have the resources to set up shelters, provide food and water and provide emergent care. But they are not set up to continue leading the response.<\/p>\n

That put pressure on local groups to lead the response. They had to figure out how to get information and resources and what processes had to be put into place to initiate long-term recovery. Edgeley found that one of the best sources of help was when interviewees could connect to people with the same jobs in other fire-affected communities, of which there were many.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with those two approaches is no two communities are the same and no two fires are the same, so the lessons are useful but they\u2019re not 100 percent transferable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"DestructionLessons learned\u2014and the more complicated question of how to apply them<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In fact, the scale of destruction from the Camp Fire was more in line with the effects of Hurricane Katrina. It was a \u201cmelting pot of all the challenges we might face in recovery,\u201d Edgeley said\u2014a rural, low-income community with a large elderly population who had difficulty evacuating and without a lot of resources, financial or otherwise, to facilitate rapid recovery. And it raised questions about equity in recovery, how certain populations bear the brunt of such fires and how even fire can run along demographic lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a recognition that recovery isn\u2019t equal\u2014it doesn\u2019t happen the same way in every household or community or across the same fire,\u201d Edgeley said. \u201cWhat people define as recovery, the way they experience it, the resources they get\u2014there\u2019s hasn\u2019t been as much conversation about that for wildfire recovery yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

She found looking to other disaster responses, including hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding, offered lessons to wildfire responses, since more research exists on the social effects of those disasters. From the academic side, Edgeley believes a variety of case studies of community experiences after fires can help as well; even if no fire and no response are exactly the same, having such tools will provide a mix-and-match set of solutions that will guide communities and organizations in how to respond and help them know what to expect, who to ask and for what they need to ask. Increasingly, that work needs to include ways to respond to multiple fire disasters in various stages of recovery at the same time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge was figuring out what lessons were learned after these fires. Those lessons usually become apparent a year or two in, but the next disaster is already happening,\u201d she said. \u201cBack-to-back fires have really created these condensed periods of time where everything\u2019s going on and those involved in recovery only come up for air when they have the time, so those reflections might not be available yet by the time the next community is facing a wildfire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Edgeley\u2019s research includes recommendations:<\/p>\n