State's wildfire policy that overlooked SoCal is course correcting

BOILING POINT

- BY NOAH HAGGERTY

At last month's meeting of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force in Redlands, director Patrick Wright remembered the group’s early days: “Candidly, when I started this job, we got an earful from Southern California.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom created the task force in 2021 and at the time, Southern California’s wildfire experts told Wright that he and other state leaders “didn’t understand Southern California was different. Its vegetation is different. Its fire risk is different.”

It’s true— the coastal chaparral native to much of Southern California is entirely different from the mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra.

More than a century of humans attempting to suppress nearly every fire meant the low-intensity burns that northern forests relied on every five to 20 years to promote regeneration no longer came through to clear the understory. As trees and shrubs grew in, they fueled high-intensity fires that decimated both the forest and communities.