The ambitious plan to protect Northern California’s Plumas National Forest from wildfires
To shield the forest and its communities from the next megafire, the Forest Service plans to burn it - intentionally.
This investigation was originally published by The Plumas Sun and Bay Nature, a nonprofit news outlet that connects San Francisco Bay Area residents more deeply with the natural world.
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Years earlier, U.S. Forest Service crews had removed the brush and smaller trees, reducing the most flammable vegetation. Then they set fires, burning what was left on the ground in slow-moving spurts of flame. When Dixie arrived, the same fire that melted cars and torched 800 homes hit this stand and dropped to the ground. Here Dixie was tame, a docile blaze meandering across the forest floor with only occasional licks up the trunks of trees, says Ryan Bauer, Plumas National Forest fuels manager for the past 18 years.
If only there had been more active forest management like this, laments Bauer. Instead of 100-acre patches, "if we had burned 10,000-acre patches, we'd have 10,000-acre patches of surviving forest. We just never did," says Bauer, who recently retired and is now working with a nonprofit to adapt communities to fire.
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Urged on by scientists, the Forest Service, and other natural resource agencies, Plumas Forest officials have launched a plan for a dramatic change in forest management. To mount it, they are using chain saws, drip torches, and an array of gigantic machines that include masticators, feller bunchers, grapples, and hot saws. The goal is to thin, log, and intentionally burn what experts say are unnaturally fire-prone forests. If their work can stay ahead of stand-converting flames, they hope to leave a vast swath of trees resilient to future fires. The project, which targets 285,000 acres of forest, is called Plumas Community Protection, and Congress in 2023 gave the Forest Service $274 million to carry it out.
This plan is visionary and ambitious but untested in scale. Its success depends on rapid accomplishment by a bureaucracy seldom known to be nimble, and now in the hands of an administration that has laid off thousands of workers and frozen millions of dollars of federal funds.
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