Term Member Virtual Meeting: Recover, Rebuild, Resilience: California’s Post-Wildfire Future

Panelists discuss the aftermath of the wildfires in California and how the region can recover from the catastrophe and rebuild a more resilient future to prevent future disasters.

MAZZUCA: Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations virtual meeting “Recover, Rebuild, Resilience: California’s Post-Wildfire Future.” I am David Mazzuca, lead instructor at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and special advisor at the National Emergencies Trust and I will be presiding over today’s discussion.

We are joined by three distinguished individuals to discuss the recent wildfires in southern California and what recovery may look like. They are:

Laurie Johnson, an urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management. She is principal at Laurie Johnson Consulting and previously served as chief catastrophe response and resiliency officer at the California Earthquake Authority and Wildfire Fund.

Jorge Ramirez, president of Resilient Strategies Group—he is currently supporting disaster recovery programs in Puerto Rico and Maui. He previously served as deputy director of the Coastal Resiliency and Recovery Program at the Texas General Land Office.

And Ed Struzik, fellow at Queens Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at the school of policy studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, and author of several books including Firestorm: How Wildfire will Shape our Future and Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire.

Welcome, everyone. With that, let’s dive in.

Ed, I would like to start with you. Please set the scene for us. What happened in Pacific Palisades and Altadena? How does it compare with prior urban wildfires?

STRUZIK: Well, interestingly, I was hiking in that area last May after I gave a talk at UCLA and it was really a classic case of weather whiplash, a contrast between extreme shifts in wet weather which we had in California and extremely dry weather which we had from October until January.

This fire started around 10:30 a.m. on January 7 and then expanded to 11,000 acres in just twenty-four hours totally out of control. To put it into perspective, it was one of the nineteen of twenty worst, most destructive fires in the last twenty-one years.

This one stands out because it actually started in January. We’ve never had a destructive fire as big as this happening at that time of year because it’s usually raining. So we’ve never seen anything quite like that and I think that it is really a sign of what’s to come. Almost every year since the Cedar fire of 2003 has produced something unusual and head spinning.

MAZZUCA: Great.

Now, to expand a little bit let me turn to Jorge. Why does disaster recovery take so long in the U.S. and what role does federal agencies like FEMA, HUD—that being Department of Housing and Urban Development—play in the process?

RAMIREZ: OK. Well, let’s start with the roles of FEMA and HUD.

FEMA handles immediate response, short-term assistance like temporary shelters, emergency repairs, initial cash assistance. HUD, on the other hand, through—and it’s a mouthful—CDBG-DR—let’s just call it disaster recovery—funds long-term recovery. Rebuilding of homes, infrastructure, economic recovery.

But the funding must be approved by Congress on a case by case basis and I believe this is where the delays happen. In answering why recovery takes so long there are a number of answers so I thought about the most meaningful one and it’s starting over every time.

Imagine that launching a DR program is like starting a billion-dollar company from scratch, and it’s over and over again. Like, there are some states like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, they have so many disasters that they do have a cadence but each funding allocation has different rules and it cannot be easily combined with the previous ones.

So if states had a permanent CDBG-DR structure they could manage more efficiently instead of creating new programs every time. And, by the way, FEMA assistance is automatic but HUD requires congressional approval, which adds months and sometimes years to the delay.

Every federal dollar comes with a compliance requirement. While oversight is necessary, these requirements can slow down recovery more than intended. So I’m confident that there are ways that we can look at the current compliance requirements and maybe improve them a bit, and it also depends on how you design your program.

So make CDBG-DR permanent and allow states to have a permanent recovery infrastructure I think would expedite the process a little better.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you.

Laurie, let me turn it over to you. After a disaster event communities must be rebuilt as quickly as possible. Yet, many residents struggle with insurance delays, funding gaps, rising costs. How do we balance the urgency of rebuilding with making communities more resilient for future disasters?

JOHNSON: Thanks, David, and I couldn’t agree with some of the recommendations Jorge just made already that would be helpful.

You know, we don’t—at this point we have a very formalized emergency management process across the United States. We have the National Incident Management System structure, which is based on something that firefighters created called incident command system, and our national emergency response framework is then emulated and repeated at the state level and at the local level so that everybody can talk and interface together.

We have—since Hurricane Katrina and the post-Katrina reform act there has been an effort at the national level to create a national disaster recovery framework and some states have started to emulate that process by having state recovery frameworks.

Some local governments have done that as well. But it’s not a requirement in the same way that NIMS and the incident management system is. So that, one, automatically creates a challenge that goes to all the things that Jorge discussed of programs having to be stood up as well.

But if you don’t actually know how you’re going to manage recovery and you’ve got to stand up a recovery structure post-event that will also create delays. Overall there’s also something that I just want to throw into the mix which is, really, as urban planners one of the things that we looked at over all the disaster cases that I’ve been involved in either helping to manage and plan for or research afterwards, and what we found as an urban planning phenomena is something we call time compression and, really, what it means is that when you think about a jurisdiction it takes, you know, whatever many years it took for a place—like, Altadena a hundred-plus years to get the fabric and the structure that it has.

And also there was replacement going on. Houses were being upgraded at a certain pace. Piping and infrastructure is being upgraded at a certain rate. When a disaster happens all of that, you know, gets forced into a compressed time frame where so many decisions and so many actions need to be made simultaneously and that alone just means we see these—we call them delays but when you think about what actually happens in reconstructing these areas it’s really not—I mean, some of these things are just incredibly fast.

Doing debris removal on the scale that’s going on in Los Angeles right now if that can be done in a year that’s incredibly fast compared to what that would look like to tear down and rebuild 18,000 housing units, you know, on normal days.

So it takes coordinated effort, collaboration, and a lot of planning to execute any one of these recovery activities including the insurance claims adjusting process and all these other things that have to happen before we get paid.

MAZZUCA: And actually, I will ask a follow up. In regards to the insurance industry what is going on in California at this point? I think in the media it’s often covered that insurance companies are pulling out. Insurance companies are not renewing policies. Maybe you could elaborate on that just a little bit.

JOHNSON: Sure. Yeah.

So it has—the fundamental problem goes back to a voter initiative that occurred—I don’t remember exactly when but I think it was the ’90s and it was really not about property insurance but it was about insurance rates going up.

And so the voter initiative had some language in it that described that insurance rates needed to be based on actuarial information. So that’s sort of like looking to the past. You know, think of it as, like, active—the thing we always talk about, actuary tables for life insurance, right? But when it comes to property insurance, especially in a changing climate, then looking to the past is not necessarily indicative of the future.

And so one of the limitations in that assumption by the insurance commissioner was that you couldn’t use catastrophe risk models to project into the future what losses are likely to be from large cats, and that’s a problem for wildfires because we had historically suppressed wildfires. We weren’t having them at the rates we’ve been having them recently and, you know, we had some drought years and some other things as well as, you know, overall climate change trends.

But that if you’re looking to the past then we just didn’t have the record that insurers could use to base rates in the future for something like a catastrophic urban wildfire. So we only had a couple—Oakland Hills in 1991 and a few others.

So that’s really the—been sort of the fundamental problem is that insurers started to pull out of the state saying it just really wasn’t fair to be sort of underpriced, and when you compare our insurance—homeowners insurance in California compared to many other states where they’re looking at, you know, average rates of tornado risk in the Midwest or hurricane risks in Florida, then our property insurance rates have actually been quite suppressed.

And so there’s been a lot of reform going on, a lot of negotiation between the insurance industry representatives and the insurance commissioner, and a whole program is being rolled out, a sustainable insurance program that has many conditions, some on the insurer and some on the homeowner.

But one of the conditions is that, going forward, the insurance industry will be allowed to use cap models for pricing. They’ll be allowed to include their reinsurance costs in the pricing. In return, they have to also value the price of or the value of mitigation that homeowners actually do to reduce their risk.

So there’s a whole series of attributes that people can undertake, a classic being, you know, a high-quality fire-resistant roof and that you should get a discount on your insurance policy if you have these various mitigation measures in place.

So we’re hoping that those reforms will kick in over the next year to two years and that that will help stabilize the market, bring the insurance market back in and also allow—and create a marketplace for doing more mitigation incentives and making our built environment more resilient.

MAZZUCA: Thanks, Laurie.

That’s a great segue to my next question for Ed, thinking through individual responsibility and types of mitigation measures out there. How do we balance out, you know, fire-smart homes, what individuals can do with systemic changes like insurance reform, better building codes, and possibly government incentives for relocation?

STRUZIK: It’s tough because what you’re doing is imposing restrictions on the way people live and people push back on that. So you do need better building codes. You do need to have people fire smart their homes, you know, as maybe part of the insurance policy.

I look at my own home which is actually in a fire area and I’ve got the hundred-year-old spruce trees out front and I’ve got ornamental cedars by the front doors and I’ve got an asphalt roof.

So I’ve really got to do—take some responsibility but I’ve been resistant to that, and I think that’s what most people, you know, feel that they want to live the way they’ve lived for the past twenty or thirty years, not recognizing the fact that, you know, the nineteen of the twenty most destructive fires in California have happened since the turn of the century, since the Cedar fire.

And, Laurie, you note, had said it very correctly. You know, the only, really, fire of note before that was Oakland Hills of 1991. So I think it really speaks to individual responsibility but I think, you know, the government at some point has to step in as the insurance industry, I think, is doing now and saying, you can’t build here or you can’t build that type of house anymore.

And I think the other thing that we’ve got to do is, you know, recognize the fact that 84 percent of the fires in the United States are caused by people. That’s far more than any other country in the world and there are things that can be done.

In California, you know, we knew that there was a weather whiplash situation coming when the rains didn’t come in October, November, and December. So I think what you do is that you just start closing off some of those areas to, you know, the partiers because we know that maybe it was some partiers that started that fire.

We can bury transmission lines. Only one-third of the transmission lines in California are underground. It costs two to ten times more to do that but at the same time it costs a heck of a lot more to pay for all of the damages.

So, I mean, there’s a wide range of things that can be done and they’ve been—you know, I think I was at the 2019 California wildfire summit. All this came out and the response has been, you know, kind of baby steps and we really have to recognize that this is a freight train that’s gaining momentum. It’s already got to the top of the hill and is now starting to chug down. And so there’s a lot of things we can do but we’re just not doing them fast enough.

MAZZUCA: And, Ed, in your work have you found successes out there? Communities that have rebuilt more smartly, more intelligently?

STRUZIK: Yeah. I mean, you know, this is probably a shocking example but if you look at the community of Jasper and Jasper National Park in Canada they started preparing for a fire about twenty years ago because of the mountain pine beetle devastation. You know, I think they have, you know, 264,000 acres of dead trees up there and they knew if a fire came in this would just advance it exponentially from previous years.

So they started to fire-smart homes, businesses. They started to thin the forest around the town site, and then they had this big fire that ignited last summer and, you know, many people looked upon it as just a national tragedy. People from all over the world just thought, oh, my God, you know, this beautiful national park burned down.

But the reality is, is that only a third of the town site burned. Had they not done anything it would have been all gone. So I think, you know, it just shows you how long it takes to prepare for a catastrophe like this, a meteorological event like this, and I use that term not lightly because, really, wildfire is a meteorological event like a tornado or a hurricane that cannot be stopped.

It can be slowed by, you know, water bombers in the air. It can maybe—you can turn it away. But, you know, in the places like California with the Santa Ana winds blowing there’s nothing going to stop it but the Pacific Ocean.

So I think, you know, that’s the lesson is, is that, yes, there are communities across North America that are preparing for it but, you know, the caveat with Jasper National Park is that it was a, you know, national park town with funding and a tax base to be able to prepare for it and most of these places, you know, are small communities that really don’t have the wherewithal or the tax base to be able to, say, hire somebody to come in and say, here’s what you need to do.

And I think that’s what, say, a national wildfire program could put into place, is that—underwrite some of the costs associated with making smaller communities more resilient. And Los Angeles is a classic example of a town that should have seen this coming but they didn’t, and they’re paying the consequences now and it’s going to take decades to rebuild.

MAZZUCA: Thanks.

Laurie, back to you.

Can you explain to us the role of community engagement in a post-disaster environment? What are some of the actions that community leaders, not government, can do right now to improve the recovery process in places like Altadena and Pacific Palisades?

JOHNSON: Well, that’s happening actually. Altadena has formed a recovery commission. It’s an unincorporated area so there is some confusion. There’s many jurisdictions involved in this disaster.

So in both fires there’s some areas that are unincorporated so the county is managing them, and then there are some cities. So Los Angeles City is predominantly the jurisdiction authority having jurisdiction in the Palisades fire. The majority of the properties in the Altadena fire are in the unincorporated area with some smaller cities—Sierra Madre, Pasadena, La Cañada Flintridge having some structures as well.

So that makes—first of all, that makes for a collaboration—significant collaboration challenge, which is going incredibly smoothly. If you go to L.A. Recovers, the county’s website, you will actually see that they have linked up with state, federal, and city-level reporting and information and, you know, that’s the first thing that’s very, very helpful for communities to start to organize.

One of the biggest challenge of a community organization is really what happens to people after an event—how far are they displaced and how easy is it for them to kind of reconnect. And so, you know, that’s, like, one of the first things I hope community organizations do ahead of disasters is really figure that out.

How are they going to stay in touch with each other post event? Is there a networking way where they can communicate outside of government and help residents connect and reconnect to each other?

In the case of this fire, you know, we’re hearing people that couldn’t find housing in the immediate L.A. area. They’ve gone out into the Palm Desert. They’ve gone north and south. So displacement is pretty widespread at this point and so that’s going to create a challenge.

But the engagement process, I think, number-one it’s—you know, what’s really important is for neighbors to reconnect with each other and collective grieving is not something insignificant, just getting together and being with each other and starting to begin to share resources and support for each other.

What can happen is really, you know, organizing and pushing for policy changes or things that people want. So, you know, in Altadena I know there’s, you know, consideration now around making sure that land speculation doesn’t come into the area and people are displaced, that they help each other out.

For those people who didn’t have insurance or underinsured there’s people looking at opportunities for trying to create a more equitable recovery in terms of a pool of resources to help out those who don’t have as much as others do.

There can also be wider-spread change. People can work together to hire contractors and designers. They could even, you know, amalgamate lots and relocate to create a buffer zone around their neighborhood in ways that would be more resilient than the current land use pattern. Those are hard to do but they have been done or tried at least with some moderate implementation.

So there’s a number of things that the communities can do to coalesce, push forward policies, and ask for support either from government or even from philanthropic societies and foundations which play a huge role in disaster recovery and community support.

MAZZUCA: Thank you, Laurie.

Jorge, next to you. Disaster recovery often gets bogged down in government bureaucracy. This we see again and again and again after every disaster.

What structural reforms would make the process faster and more effective? Would shifting more control to the states, for instance, accelerate the process?

RAMIREZ: Well, I’ve been thinking about the shifting of control.

So, first, who really controls disaster recovery? When it comes to FEMA it has direct control over an immediate response in short-term relief. So FEMA does have control but HUD does not control the DR program. It monitors and regulates. The states are in charge of designing and implementing them.

So I would say the challenge isn’t necessarily in state control, although it could be given. I would categorize it more as the complexity of the federal requirements that limit the flexibility in implementation because fires are very different from hurricanes, very different for tornadoes and everything.

So the flexibility in a state being able to modify yet still meet the requirements I think is something that’s a little harder to do. So, yes, control—a little more control might be better but I think reducing the complexity would improve the process a lot more.

What structural reforms would I make? I will say it again because I think it’s really important is create a preapproved federal disaster fund of some sort. Easier said than done but a good goal to achieve.

If states had preapproved recovery funding, by the way, like a fire department, because it’s not if it’s going to happen but when it’s going to happen in a great number of states. As a matter of fact, I think there’s a video out there of me saying that it’s going to happen again before Harvey because I was working for Ike and Dolly.

So they could start rebuilding immediately if they have a preapproved recovery fund. This will eliminate the delays caused by waiting for Congress to act, and if they had preapproved funding there could also be some sort of a permanent structure especially in those states that are constantly getting hit so they don’t have to reinvent all these policies and shut down.

It’s very ironic that you have one—some states get hit constantly but there are states that have a small gap, and once you have that gap you lose the staff, the policies. Somebody else comes in and says, you know, I think I’ve got a better way of doing it, which delays, even though it may be better.

Streamline compliance without sacrificing oversight. There are a lot of requirements out there that we just need to review. Why exactly do we require this and is there a better way that we can—that we have this compliance. Audits, QC—is there some sort of way that this can be done better?

Give states more flexibility while maintaining the federal standards. States already manage these funds but federal rules limit their ability to customize the programs, like I mentioned, to the local needs. And sometimes it’s not a state—it’s a county. I’m working with a county right now.

HUD should focus on maybe setting clear performance standards and allowing that flexibility to the state instead of restrictions. That’s just a thought experiment. I don’t necessarily know how to do it but if you have performance standards financial as well then that could reduce fraud, waste, and abuse.

So a better model for the future, I would say, is treat disaster recovery like an emergency response with prefunded, flexible, and permanent recovery programs. Reduce all unnecessary delays by aligning federal oversight with real-world conditions.

So unnecessary delays is kind of a strange word. We’d have to have a long conversation of what is an unnecessary delay because some delays are necessary but we do have a lot that are unnecessary. And maybe empower states to act quickly but with clear accountability to ensure the funds are used effectively.

So the real problem isn’t state versus federal control or just—or isn’t just state versus federal control but it’s the disaster recovery is structured as a reactive system instead of a proactive system. And if we want to speed up recovery we need permanent funding. Streamline compliance and a structure that allows the states to act without waiting for bureaucracy just to be faster.

MAZZUCA: Great. Let me open up that question to both Ed and Laurie and just change it up a little bit.

If there’s one change to federal policy to improve disaster recovery what would it be? What would you advise?

STRUZIK: Oh, a tough question.

I think that, you know, one of the easiest ways of mitigating the impact, really, is just get back to a wetland policy. One of the reasons why California has burned up so big over the past twenty years is that they’ve destroyed—drained all their wetlands for agricultural purposes, for urban purposes, and so essentially created a tinder box in this era of climate change.

I think one of the big things that we have to understand as well is that we’ve got to start protecting the headwaters of our rivers that supply water to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles because if you have a major fire pouring a lot of carbon into, you know, the Sacramento River and other rivers that feed those big cities it could actually take out their water treatment plants. That has happened—that happened in Canberra, Australia, in 2003. It almost happened in Fort Collins when fires burned in the mountains there in Colorado.

So it’s something that I think that you can do, use Mother Nature to help you along. I think that right now the problem with our fire management is that we’re simply in response mode, you know, running around putting out fires without trying to understand how fire behaves.

We still have this fundamental belief that if you have boots on the ground and air bombers in the air you’re going to be able to stop a fire. But, you know, really, a fire like the one in the Palisades fire which was, you know, being blown by Santa Ana winds that were over a hundred or seventy miles per hour getting very close to hurricane force, there’s just nothing that you can do to stop it.

So I think we’ve got to start looking at other ways of, you know, early detection—you know, prescribed burning. It’s interesting that, you know, it was a California lumberman George Hoxie in 1910 that said—you know, saw this coming and said that, you know, unless we take control, you know, fire is going to be our master and we’re going to be the slaves to it.

And everybody was in agreement at that time but then there was a huge, huge fire in 1910 that scared everybody so badly that the government just decided that the best way of dealing with it is just to suppress fire. And we’ve got—you know, it’s a cultural problem right now is that we think that we can handle it—you know, send out an army to stop it and that’s just not going to happen. We’re just seeing that playing out here in California year after year after year.

MAZZUCA: Laurie?

JOHNSON: Yeah, I agree. I agree with everything Ed said. I’ll take it back kind of to some of the points Jorge made because I think I’d like to link up a couple of things.

You know, back in 1988 we did a massive reform to the Federal Disaster Act. We call it the Stafford Act now from those reforms. After that came the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. In that time period FEMA started attaching as part of a presidential disaster declaration a portion of what is paid out for repairs, and for individual and public assistance there’s a set-aside for hazard mitigation.

And then with the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 the teeth got stronger in requiring state and local governments to have FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plans for it to be eligible for this post-disaster hazard mitigation money and better cost sharing opportunities for that money.

And so what that really did was kick in, you know, two decades of work that I think is paying off, that now you have localities that are coming into disasters with policies in place around how they’re going to recover more resiliently.

They’re investing ahead of time according to those plans. Those plans become, you know, tools they can use to advocate and apply for federal funds, for pre-disaster hazard mitigation, or BRIC funds—the two programs we had at FEMA—but for also nongovernmental funds.

So they’re great policy guides for resilience and we could do the same for recovery. If we had requirements for pre-disaster recovery planning, then the things that Jorge talked about, if we had, you know, some sort of funds then you could attach, you know, that you will get those—some portion of those funds in an expedited way if you have a preapproved recovery plan.

And if you have policies in place for how you’re going to rebuild and, you know, what—you know, the community engagement process you’re going to use and, you know, the standards at which you’re going to rebuild, a whole bunch of things we can link into that. So we’ve done it before and it’s been highly effective, and we could do it again for recovery with our longer-term federal investments.

And I guess I’d just throw one thing into the mix about that federal versus state thing. I think, you know, we have to recognize that states are not equal. I live in California. I would call it a pretty high-capacity response and recovery state because we have so much experience doing it.

But there are a lot of states that don’t, and especially when you get down to a local government level there are local governments, you know, that are much smaller, very limited staff. Keeping somebody around with the expertise to help you rebuild is just not, you know, a feasible choice for many governments.

So, you know, they have to stand up these and respond to these processes with new skills and that takes time as well, and so I think, you know, thinking that we can just sort of give this to states we have to recognize that there needs to be some sort of technical assistance or, you know, capacity building that goes with that if we’re just going to give money because not every state is going to be able to act as nimbly as states like Texas, Florida, and California do because—and New York because they’re big and they have disasters on a regular basis.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you.

All right. At this time, I would like to invite term members to join our conversation with their questions. As a reminder, that this meeting is on the record, and let me turn it over to the operator who will remind you how to join the question queue.

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)

We don’t have any hands raised just yet, David, but I can cue you if you want to go on a little bit more.

MAZZUCA: Sure. Sure.

One thing we’ve not talked about in detail is the nonprofit sector, whether it’s nonprofit organizations or nonprofit builders.

So, Jorge, let me turn to you and ask what is the role of nonprofit organizations, your experience in Texas and other communities, and they have a very important role but one that I think many of those who are not in the industry don’t fully appreciate.

RAMIREZ: Nonprofits—so CDBG funding is funding of last resort. So you have to utilize everything before you get to it, which is ironically everybody right now is saying, you know, get the funds there first. But, really, you have to expend everything—FEMA, SBA, everything that you have—until you start using funding.

But no matter how much funding you get you are likely to have an unmet need of some sort. You’re going to have a gap and not be able to help everybody. I think nonprofits, like, add capacity in several ways, not only knowledge but in construction, in funding. Sometimes they supplement the funding.

So they’re a vital part of disaster recovery. I think they help along in the disaster. And I wanted to say something with respect to what Laurie had said and that is along these lines is that there’s a dichotomy between states and local communities that needs to be utilized somehow or improved upon where the local community—like, I’m with a county right now and they know their population. They know what went wrong in this disaster.

But they—you know, states may be more capable of it so there has to be more of this technical assistance between the states and the counties and the federal government, and it’s sort of like teamwork and that goes to nonprofits. They’re part of the team that helps a community recover, and if they’re a nonprofit typically they’re very involved within the local community.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you.

I see we have a couple questions. Meagan, let me turn it over to you.

OPERATOR: We do. Our next question will come from Rob Kabera.

Q: Hi. My name is Robert Kabera. I’m a term member calling in from Atlanta, Georgia.

My question is some of the larger fires that were started are started by power companies and I’m very passionate about this space. I’ve been working in it for twenty years. What role can power companies play to help society be more resilient in this space since they have so many resources and they do contribute a more than larger amount to some of the problems we’re discussing here?

MAZZUCA: Great. Thanks, Rob.

Laurie, maybe I’ll throw that to you to start with, given your work in California with the utilities.

JOHNSON: Yeah, and, Ed, jump in as well because I know you see this more from an ecological and landscape space.

So I won’t talk about triggers. I think Ed covered that. It is, you know, power—electricity is a major—electrical ignitions is a major source of fires, whether that be at a house or on a power line.

In California the problem, you know, became so bad that the electrical utilities in California could no longer get insurance and it was so costly. It was literally a dollar for a dollar on a seasonal basis almost, so if you were a power company you might expect—you know, let’s say you wanted to insure for a fire like just happened, you know, then, you know, to buy $20 billion of insurance you would need to be spending, you know, $19 billion a year for that insurance.

So it was an untenable situation, and in 2019 the state legislature stepped in and created a mechanism that is kind of like a risk pool for the three large privately-held electric utilities in California that has allowed them to pool their resources.

And so they have put their own money into this pool and then also the ratepayers are paying a very small amount on a monthly basis over a long period of time to get them to the point fifty/fifty—essentially, getting to a $20 billion fund. So this is what’s called the California Wildfire Fund.

In exchange for the state allowing them to pool their money they are—and the savings they’re getting on an annual basis that money needs to be driven back into mitigation on those systems. And so then there’s a whole another part of this legislation that sets up something called wildfire safety certificates and requirements that the utilities submit wildfire mitigation plans.

Those plans are evaluated and their progress is tracked on an annual basis, and then they on a multiyear basis for those—those plans have multiyear timelines. But on an annual basis they have to have a wildfire safety certificate in order to—for some—people say access the fund. That’s not entirely true. They can access the fund, but in terms of requirements around how they might have to reimburse or can just draw down from the fund like insurance they have to have that safety certificate in place.

So it’s actually creating a mechanism by which, you know, the utilities are now more publicly talking about their wildfire mitigation, the investments they’re making into their systems, and if you live in California in the Bay Area we have commercials pretty much every evening on our TV stations from our utility company telling us what they’re doing in various communities.

In Paradise where the devastating fire occurred in 2018 all the lines there are being undergrounded as part of the rebuild process. As Ed said, that’s really expensive, underground distribution and transmission lines, but it can be done and, hopefully, with time we’re going to get more cost effective at doing that.

But there are also other things, something that other companies have used called covered conductors which will help when lines are pulled during wind events. Keep those sparks contained within those covers.

So there are a number of ways systems can become more resilient.

MAZZUCA: Ed, do you have anything to add to that?

STRUZIK: Only to reiterate that, you know, only a third of the transmission lines in California are underground and it’s pretty clear that in those areas it has reduced the fire hazard rather significantly. It is a solution but an extremely expensive one, one that I don’t think the utility companies can afford on their own.

So there has to be some kind of a mechanism in place, Laurie said, to help underwrite the cost of, you know, these big, big projects—very expensive projects, and I guess I would compare it to, you know, what the Biden administration did to try to, you know, kickstart solar and wind energy by underwriting the cost—you know, tax breaks and whatnot.

You know, I’m not an economist but I think, you know, when you look at the billions that have been lost that perhaps—and there will continue to be lost because we’re just not seeing this slowing down. It’s accelerating from year to year. We have to factor that in that maybe we just have to bite the bullet and figure out some way to bury, you know, these lines especially in areas where they’re very vulnerable to fire.

So I think it’s a tough solution. There’s no easy—you know, cheap way of dealing with this and tough decisions have got to be made. It just—you know, the status quo—business as usual is just not going to be successful and progress is being made but not quickly enough, I don’t think, and this just—this Eaton fire and the Palisades fire just demonstrated that.

You know, we’re seeing now year-round fire danger in California and it’s spreading to other parts of the United States and, you know, it’s head spinning. It really requires a lot of—lot of investment ahead of time.

MAZZUCA: Great. Meagan—

JOHNSON: David, I feel like I didn’t quite answer Rob’s question.

So I just want to—with those wildfire mitigation plans, what this is also creating is a culture of engaging with communities, which is what Rob was asking about, where they are actually working with local fire authorities now on vegetation management plans so that these things are synced up.

They’re coming in and they’re trimming vegetation around their power lines but also syncing that up with the investments that are being made on the peripheries of certain neighborhoods to control vegetation so that we’re inoculating an area in a more coordinated way.

The utility companies have installed weather monitoring and camera systems across, you know, vast areas. So that’s being done by universities, by the various Forest Service agencies at the federal and local level. But then you also have the utilities investing in those systems as well.

So we’re now able to watch, you know, across vast areas and see when fires break out, something that we didn’t have before. So we’ve kind of got more of a monitoring system evolving, at least here in California.

So these are all things that the utilities are doing. They have community preparedness coordinators now in these private utilities companies that are working with various communities and making sure that the mitigation they’re doing is connecting with the mitigation that others are doing.

MAZZUCA: Meagan, let’s go on to our next question.

OPERATOR: Sure. Our next question will be from Peter Turner.

Q: Hey, there. So my name is Peter Turner. I’m with Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

My question is what role do startups and innovation play in improving climate disaster prediction, preparedness, and response? And often I hear from entrepreneurs who are the key customers that are driving the commercialization of those technologies?

MAZZUCA: Jorge, do you want to dive in first before we go—

JOHNSON: Yeah, I’ll join. Yeah, I think there’s really—when it comes to wildfire in particular I think there’s been sort of two major client bases. One has been the firefighting emergency response space so a number of innovative work—innovative startups have happened in that space doing prescribed burns.

There’s been some incredible technology developments that would allow for real-time monitoring, so as firefighters are out doing these off-season controlled burns that they actually have—I think it’s called BurnPro3D or something.

UC San Diego has developed it. But it allows them in real time to be monitoring the air, the wind flows, you know, everything about that fire so that it doesn’t get out of control. So a lot of technology advances around firefighting and fire management.

The other place where there’s a lot of technological advance is, really, on the insurance side, being able to understand and evaluate wildfire-related risks, and that can be looking at vegetation, vegetation density, looking at topography where you get these wind tunneling kinds of effects and modeling those, and then also just looking at the build environment, being able to tell insurers this is a place where people still have, you know, non-fire-grade roofs.

This is a place where vegetation is overhanging houses. People don’t have—they have leaves in their gutters. I mean, they are looking at the details of what’s in those first five feet around people’s houses now in California as part of the underwriting process.

And people are getting as part of their renewal notice very specific things. You need to have vent covers on your vents. You need an upgrade on your roof. So a lot of technology advancements in that area as well.

STRUZIK: And we’ve been pretty good, I think, as well. Our fire prediction technology has improved dramatically and I think—unfortunately, they can tell us, you know, as they did that California was ripe for a big wildfire in—late in the year.

But the problem is, is just implementing the response and I think that, you know, it’s great that some communities are preparing themselves for this. But too often it happens after the disaster and I think that what’s needed really is just a massive education campaign.

And I’ll allude to something that I was really impressed by when I visited Texas a number of years ago to do a project that I was working on for the Munk Global Center at the University of Toronto on groundwater, and what impressed me about it was that most of the groundwater and most of the water in central Texas comes from an aquifer, and the state of Texas—this surprised me enormously—ended up taking over that aquifer when the federal government following a Supreme Court decision threatened to move in, and they decided to manage it.

And part of the management was—and I think this speaks to what Laurie says—was that they really got all of the communities engaged and they had the television stations putting on little logos saying what the level of the aquifer was. OK. So that—it was at code red, you know, don’t take a shower today or don’t water your lawn.

And I can remember getting out of the taxi when I went, you know, from the airport and the taxi driver was telling me, you know, we’re on code yellow so if you go to your hotel, you know, just take a twenty-second shower instead of a two-minute shower.

And, you know, San Antonio has been able to grow over the last twenty years and not use any more water and it’s, largely, because the community bought in and I think that this is what we need to do with the wildfire hazard is to get the communities to understand they are all vulnerable, and if we can repeat what Texas did. And if Texas can do it, you know, California can do it with wildfire and I think other states as well. It really does need community engagement.

MAZZUCA: Great points.

Jorge, let me throw it to you for that question. Any comments on startups?

RAMIREZ: Actually, I was trying to figure out if it fit within disaster recovery. Could you—Peter, could you ask the question one more time?

MAZZUCA: Can we have—there we go.

Q: Yeah. Let’s see. Can you hear me?

RAMIREZ: Yes, sir.

Q: There we go. So, you know, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the role that startups play in disaster prediction, preparedness, and response and who those customers could be. It doesn’t have to be limited to wildfires. It could be any climate hazard. But curious for your thoughts.

RAMIREZ: And I think that excludes recovery. (Laughs.) So I was—there’s—I’m disappointed that—

Q: Well, it certainly could. I don’t want—I don’t want to be prescriptive.

MAZZUCA: Well, he brought in the question for recovery.

RAMIREZ: Yeah, I’ll broaden the question for recovery—are we using any technology in recovery. And recovery is basically a huge project management—it’s project management so getting something from A to Z in a process that is complicated.

One of the things that we’re doing that I really like is we use Matterport to—I’m sorry. When you are—when you have to go look at a home and gauge the damage that this house has, not here because the house has burnt down but in a hurricane where the water went up to six inches or whatnot you have to do a damage assessment.

The damage assessment tells you whether you’re going to repair the house or whether you’re going to rebuild the house, and you have to turn it in and it’s one of the requirements. We use Matterport to do that. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Matterport. It creates a 3D image of the house.

So the person’s going in there and putting it all over the house and you end up getting a 3D map and once you get it you push a button and it gives you all your sketches. It has—it’s videos in case you didn’t write everything down.

So it not only made the process faster but more accurate. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing to manage the projects, but nothing too exciting.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you.

All right. Let’s move on to our next question, Meagan.

OPERATOR: Sure. Our next question will be from Azum Ali.

Q: Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the great panel. My name is Azum Ali. I work with AiDash where I also work in the space of vegetation management and using technology to spot ignition events for that purpose.

And, Ed, something that you said earlier in the conversation kind of stuck with me about, you know, seeing it before it happens, right? And so, certainly, I appreciate the role of recovery but it strikes me that more attention might need to be paid to prevention and more prevention of acute events like observing fuel load or triggering a PSPS shutoff type event.

What tools are available at low cost to allow communities to, you know, kind of have that visibility or seeing it before it happens, as you mentioned? And, certainly, that question is open to anyone.

STRUZIK: Sure. The simplest way is just for a community to hire somebody who’s an expert in this area and it’s a growing profession now.

They can come in and they can assess, you know, the density of the vegetation, fit it into a climate model, and do kind of a virtual burn to see how intense that that burn might be, and they can point out those hot spots and say that, you know, if you want to mitigate the intensity of a fire should it come then you need to start clearing out some of the more dense areas.

And it’s fairly cheap. I know that some of the people that are doing it; it’s pretty low cost. They’ve got the technology. You know, it involves a bit of, you know, drone work—you know, getting out there on foot. And it’s fairly easy to understand and plug into, you know, a kind of local weather pattern or climate model.

I think the only big challenge is, is that those models keep—you know, keep changing, as we saw in California now. So that’s one thing that I think is really simple, fairly low cost, that it’s just not well enough known. I think I’ve spoken to maybe twenty, thirty communities that have done it and have been really happy with the results.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you, Ed.

I have a question for myself and maybe I’ll direct this to Jorge. What happens when recovery takes too long?

Communities that are waiting for funding and then waiting for government to release programs and for individuals to be able to get funds that are released by those programs. Can you walk through what happens in those situations?

RAMIREZ: Oh, boy. That’s a big question. I’m going to use Hawaii.

Disaster recovery—I mean, as you know, the disaster happened sixteen months ago and people have been waiting. So let’s walk through it. As people are waiting we’re spending more money on temporary shelters. The economy of the island is suffering. Businesses aren’t getting the help that they need. The population is leaving the island.

And then the disaster starts, and I don’t know if this number is going to scare anybody but disasters take eight to ten years so once you get the funding. I believe Laurie said clearing Los Angeles in a year will be a miracle—removing the debris. That’s amazing.

And I saw the debris removal here in Hawaii and it was—it’s really amazing because it’s a lot more complicated than people would think. There are hazardous materials. You have to weigh the stuff. It’s just a very complicated process.

But the longer a disaster takes the more money you’re spending. So we all have a clear goal here, let’s do it as fast as possible. And I think that that’s where you align the federal requirements more towards, you know, yes, we have to stop waste, fraud, and abuse but it needs to be aligned with getting the program done faster.

One of the things that I would do with my QC staff is—I jokingly call them the meter maids because they would just leave a ticket on the car, oh, you did this wrong, and then the staff had to go fix the problem. And making the QC part of the process to solve whatever happened that sort of brings the team together.

So—and I think I went off on a tangent—because I think that all the requirements that we have they’re good but they could be better aligned because the longer you take the more money is actually being spent by the community, by the federal government, by the people.

The numbers are probably—that would be a great study. How much money is Hawaii losing because they’re waiting for the disaster, and I actually saw a number that the businesses were—my God, I don’t want to throw out a bad number but millions of dollars a day in economic losses because of the tourism industry.

So let me add that. Hawaii lives on tourism, and people thought for the longest time, oh, don’t go there because things burn down. Let me pitch for Hawaii. Come over here. It’s beautiful and it’s open but they’ve lost all these businesses and they suffer.

So economically it’s a lot of money, and if you can imagine the people that are displaced they don’t have homes for years and they’re relying either on federal government, family members, their wits, or they have to move out. It’s just—it just exacerbates a problem.

MAZZUCA: Yes. Thank you, Jorge, for that answer.

Laurie, I just want to turn over to you before we close out. I would like you to mention the video from 1962 on the Bel Air fire, if you could.

JOHNSON: Oh, thank you for unmuting me. For some reason I lost my screen.

Yeah, it’s a—somebody gave it to me, a resident of L.A. They said this was produced—it’s painstakingly produced—a reconstruction of the 1962 fire—Bel Air fire and the firefight and the lessons learned.

And it’s so prescient and so sad that, you know, we had that experience in the same place almost of the Palisades fire, in sites around the canyons, around the vulnerability of certain kinds of building materials. All of that was known then, and we didn’t heed the lessons and we didn’t have the mechanisms in place to heed those lessons.

So it’s a great watch just for the cinematography from 1962 alone but I think it’s also very telling and we shouldn’t make the same mistake fifty years from now.

MAZZUCA: Great. Thank you. And this is a video that’s produced by L.A. Fire based on the 1962 Bel Air fire and it’s called Design for Disaster and you can find it on YouTube.

Well, with that, we are at the top of the hour right now, so I want to thank everyone for joining today’s virtual meeting and a big thanks to our speakers for joining us as well.

Please note that the video and transcript of today’s meeting will be posted on CFR’s website. Again, thank you, everyone.

STRUZIK: Thank you.

JOHNSON: Thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.