In my earlier years as a reporter, I covered a lot of natural disasters and each has a certain emotional rhythm. A tornado surprises people. Where it touches down feels random. It's like a cosmic joke. A hurricane exhausts you. The fight or flight decision making as it builds the storm itself with its one two punch of whipping winds and rising water. But fire is a different story. It's destruction, absolute flames, terrifying blackened skies and ash... everywhere there's ash. Even the people who fight fires can be awed by the totality of it. Listen to Tasha Pagdilao of the Maui Fire Department.

Can you speak to what it was like on the ground battling these flames that at times. Were moving. More than a mile a minute. Because of the high winds?

It seems surreal. It seemed like like an apocalypse and everything seemed to be on fire and... Yeah, I'm not going to lie, it was really hard to focus at times, but we had a job to do and stood by people that watched their houses burn and they kept continuing to fight and yeah. It's it's still surreal and I think no matter how many times we see it every day going back to help clean up and help put spot fires out, or... It just seems like a nightmare that we're trying to wake up from.

Wildfire season was off to a slow start here in the U.S. until it wasn't. The wildfire in Maui is now the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than 100 years.

Chaos and panic as the relentless wildfires continue to ravage the paradise island of Maui, leaving loss and destruction in its wake.

On Tuesday, the fire came with no warning. More than 2000 homes and buildings destroyed.

Some residents escaping by boat watching the flames engulfed their town as they sailed away.

And officials say about 1000 people have been reported missing. The death toll is expected to climb.

As reporters, we try to make sense of disaster. We try to draw direct lines between cause and effect and cram them into reports that can be 30 seconds, 3 minutes or 30 minutes.

And this sort of gets at one of the key issues here, is that this is an extraordinarily complex issue and often it gets distilled down to these wildfires are caused by climate change, which is wrong, or these fires are not caused by climate change and have no links to climate change, which is also wrong.

So what is it like to be on the frontlines of the fire debate? What is it like to talk about climate change and fires for a living? And what's it like to face down bigger, faster moving and more intense fires year after year? What's it like to do all this while skeptics hair split data and you're watching everything burn? I'm Audie Cornish. This is The Assignment. There are certain people that journalists know they can call when it comes to a breaking news story that is a natural disaster. And Daniel Swain gets a lot of calls because his Venn diagram of expertise is weather climate change and Western U.S. fires. And I didn't know this, but that's actually uncommon, mainly because climate and weather are not the same thing.

Climate might be, for example, your personality, but weather might fit your mood on a given day. Climate might be your full wardrobe of clothing, but whether it might be your outfit on a specific afternoon.

He's currently a research scientist at UCLA, a research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a California climate fellow at the Nature Conservancy. We wanted to give him a chance to talk about what wildland firefighters are up against.

It's hotter and drier. Put very simply, it doesn't mean it's drier all the time everywhere. But the driest dries are drier and the hottest hots are hotter. And often it's less important what happens on average in a given place. The real question is what happens when the conditions are most extreme?

Then there are other elements of what we call just extreme weather events. Right? So maybe these kind of superstorms, maybe the droughts, maybe tha like, are these things also kind of contributing to the wildfire scenario?

Interestingly, it does depend what ecosystem you're talking about. Some ecosystems, droughts are conducive to more intense fires, some ecosystems. You actually need wetter conditions for more intense fires. And in other ecosystems, the sequencing matters. You can imagine how in some places, if it's really wet for a period of time, you get a lot of extra vegetation growth because of all that moisture in the soil and then it gets really hot and dry. That can actually be worse than it just being dry the whole time, because if it's dry the whole time, you don't get as much growth of potentially flammable vegetation. So this is an extraordinarily complex issue and often it gets distilled down to these wildfires are caused by climate change, which is wrong, or these fires are not caused by climate change and have no links to climate change, which is also wrong. But think of it this way. Could you really make that causitive, declarative statement about wildfires being caused by anything in particular?

Well, people. Right?

Well there's ignition sources.

Yeah.

So the initial spark could create a fire. Sure. You know, it could be a lightning strike. It could be an errant cigaret butt or a power line. In most ecosystem globally, humans are the primary ignition source. But questioning whether or not there are changes in ignition sources is a completely different question than asking about what happened to those fires given a spark. So often, what I like to do is sort of ask the question, okay, assuming there are plenty of initial sparks or fires, what does the fire then? Does it smolder for a few minutes and sputter out? Does it burn at a moderate pace that's easy to extinguish or instead does it immediately explode and take off and start generating its own fire weather conditions by virtue of its own intensity? And that, I think, is the crux of the climate and wildfire conversation, not as climate change increasing the number of fires. No one is really making that argument actually on the scientific side. The question is what is happening to those fires that do occur across a broad range of ecosystems? Are they larger, more intense, more destructive? Are they producing more carbon emissions? And the answer to many of those questions in a wide range of ecosystems now appears to be pretty strongly. Yes.

Okay, that's super helpful because it is very easy to get bogged down in the is this even real conversation? Like, does the data really show that there are more fires? And you're saying the basic argument coming out of the scientific community is just who cares? Once they start, it's getting a little crazier.

Yeah, more than a little crazier. But yes, scientists are not really arguing that there are or will be more fires. In fact, there isn't even an argument that the total number of wildfire acres globally will increase. But that's a really heavily caveated statement. And the reason why, and this has been used in recent opinion pieces to I think deeply mislead people, is the total global fire acreage for most of the 20th century and probably for much of history and pre-history really was dominated by fires in grasslands. So tropical savanna and subtropical savanna, we're talking about sub-Saharan Africa, south of the equatorial zone. We're talking about the Australian outback, we're talking about the Great Plains of the United States in some places and northern Eurasia as well. And fires in those regions over the 20th century dramatically decreased. The reason, mainly a fragmentation of the landscape and development. So we kind of moved a lot of the contiguous grasslands from the world we built on them. We built highways and roads, cities, farms, All of these are I wouldn't call them unburnable, but they're certainly not going to burn at the same rate as open grassland and extend over millions and millions of acres. So when you look at a global fire metric, the total area burn trend is mainly because of fragmentation of grassland and savanna landscapes in subtropical and and tropical regions around the world.

Given that this is an issue that really can be picked apart, right, all those little nuances can be picked apart till some skeptic can say this isn't even a problem at all. What's it like trying to talk about it? What are the areas you try and like focus on?

Well, I know it's always dangerous to emphasize complexity for broad audiences. Sometimes it's easy. It's easy to just become an academic and start with the caveats. But when it comes to wildfire, I don't think we can have this conversation unless we talk about the slightly complicated parts of it, because there is just so much that's going on. It's not--

Do you think there are progressives who fail at that, too, or climate scientists who fail at that?

Yes, I think there are folks on the political left and right who fail at this. There are climate scientists and even fire scientists. I think sometimes, sorry colleagues, who fail in having a conversation that is both nuanced but also accessible to broader audiences, because climate change is a big part of this. It's also not the only part of this. There are a lot of other very influential things that have changed. So I think what is clear is that we do have a wildfire crisis. Things have definitely gotten worse, but there are changes in the climate, of course, that are driving a good chunk of this. There are also changes in demographics where people live. So some folks will say it's not climate change, it's urban development. And people, you know, moving into high risk wildfire zones. Well, it is that also. That is very true. And that is part of the reason why we're seeing so many more losses. Other folks will say it's the legacy of land management. And that is also true in many ecosystems, especially in American and Canadian. Forests where we artificially suppressed natural fires for the better part of a century, where we made illegal indigenous and cultural burning for over a century. We removed all the sources of beneficial fire, which led to an accumulation of vegetation in those ecosystems. But now, on top of literally adding fuel to the fire through those historical policies, now we're kilm\n drying the extra fuel with climate change and we're moving people into the kiln. So you can see how all of these things, they're additive. Maybe they multiply to each other in terms of risk. But the one thing that's true everywhere, and this is what I like to emphasize at the end, we're seeing climate change everywhere.

So in the face of increasing fire danger because of climate change, I wanted to talk with firefighters about what they think about this. That's next.

Have you ever experienced something where you wish you could just put it back in the box and you just didn't know everything that you do?

Megan Fitzgerald McGowan used to be a wildland firefighter back between 2003 and 2016. I say used to, but it's pretty clear that it's not really a job. It's a life and it's one that isn't easily left behind. She refers to the part of herself that does this job as "Firefighter Megan". So, for example, here's "Firefighter Meghan" on buying a house with her husband.

And when we're looking at all these areas around where I live, it's like I don't want to live there. If look at all the trees, look at all the vegetation I'm going to have to manage because fires happen here and I know what it takes to do that and I don't want to.

I talked with her and Riva Duncan, who just retired in 2020 after more than 30 years at the U.S. Forest Service. And this means that Duncan started before the department really had a dedicated wildland fire service.

It was all what we call collateral duty. So if you're a forester, if you if you were a wildlife biologist, if you were in recreation, we all answered the call then to go fight fire. It was an expectation. I really didn't have a choice. A lot of us didn't. It was just. That's what you did. Nobody asked me.

We're not just talking to them because of what they used to do, but because of what they do now. Instead of fighting fires, Megan now works at a program focused on teaching people how to adapt to a life of fire risk. It's at the National Fire Prevention Association, and Riva Duncan lobbies Congress for better pay and benefits for federal fire workers because what was once considered a seasonal job is now year round work. She's vice president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. And climate change is a specter hovering over their work. Megan, when did you even start thinking about climate change in the context of your work?

Oh, you know, 2014, 2015, we started to see some of these shifts with like the El Nino and La Nina patterns. But so Washington winters, typically a lot of rain on the west side, snow in the mountains. And we hit a drought cycle where the Olympic Mountains there on the Olympic Peninsula. So I worked in Olympia at the bottom of the sound in Washington and would look north. And typically in the spring and summer, those Olympic mountains are snow covered. Beautiful. And then one year where we had just not a lot of rain and snow. By early spring, they weren't covered in snow. They were gray. They were rock. And it's not so much that that causes fire. Right. But it's that availability of areas to burn that normally aren't there until later in the year.

And so rest of us look at that landscape and we think beautiful, you know, and you think fuel.

And that's how I look at everything these days. When I'm driving or just in the world, the lens and how I see the world has changed.

Woah, walk me through that. Into what?

Hazards. All I see is like, oh, look at that tree. That's too close. Look at that stuff on the ground. You need to do so much work, like a little bit of joy in what I do day to day has gone because I just see the perils. And I think about like, oh, if I was still a firefighter, how would I get in here? You know, how are these firefighters accessing this community? It's just like my day to day is forever changed.

Riva, can you help me understand for you you're now in the actual work of advocacy and actually trying to talk about climate change on purpose.

Yes.

But are people as free with their thoughts about that as Megan just was?

Yeah. I mean, we talk actively and when I was still working for the Forest Service and I would say probably in the early 2000s because I was in fuels and, you know, and management. And so we started noticing things on the landscape. We started having these persistent droughts. I remember when, you know, the whole front range of Colorado, all their trees died because they were under severe drought and then the bugs moved in and killed them. And we are we are thinking, how are we going to safely fight fire here? This is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And it and it certainly was. And so we were shushed under the second Bush administration, we received an official memo in the Forest Service where we couldn't mention the term global warming. We were not allowed to talk to the media about it. We were not allowed to put it in any of our papers. And Forest Service, we have our own research branch, right? They weren't allowed to say it.

And we should say this memo actually came to light a few years later. And was the subject of a lot of discussion. They sort of trace the conversation back, I think, to Frank Luntz, the pollster for Republicans and the idea was like global warming sounds scary. Don't use that term. What kind of effect did it have on you, someone working in the industry at that time?

We just thought it was ridiculous. We just thought it was, you know, poking our heads in the sand, people poking their heads in the sand, because there's also this huge debate still about is it human caused or not? Right. And and I--.

But did it in one act your ability to have any kind of conversation about it?

Not internally. It did not. It allowed we were still able to do the work we needed to do and recognized the issues facing it. And then as the administrations changed and we were able to finally publicly talk about it, our researchers started to be able to publicly research the effects of climate change and wildland fire and ecosystems. Then, then that certainly made it easier. But we were talking about it internally and figuring out what we were going to do about it.

You come from a community of people who are advocates,.

Right.

Meghan Fitzgerald McGowan, what's the dialog like just in the regular engines on the ground?

I think firefighters are there to do the mission. They have the questions, they see the work, but sometimes their role isn't one to engage more in those climate change conversations. And I think that's for you see the shift in people who maybe leave the firefighting space and go into a role like mine or Riva's or others where we can only get so far here. How can we advocate for better ideas, better solutions, holistic approaches, right? Firefighting is only one piece of addressing climate change within the space. It's also land management, community planning, It's policy. And that's where there's the chance for effective changes to help moving forward.

You talked about the idea that it might mean having to leave the profession that you love in order to have conversations like this. Is that what you two have experienced?

We do have firefighters, you know, boots on the ground, firefighters and fire managers leaving, but they're mostly leaving because they just can't make ends meet financially anymore.

Right.

Or it's impacting their mental health or it's impacting their family life. And we have a much higher divorce rate in wildland fire, much higher suicide rate in wildland fire. But these tied directly to climate change because of these longer fire seasons. That means being away from home longer. Right. And this reliance on overtime that they get on fire assignments. So it's a double edged sword because you maybe don't want to be gone as much, but you have to make that money so you can make it through the winter. Right. So it is they're all also connected and interrelated.

The job has gotten harder under this circumstance under where we are climate wise.

Much harder, more dangerous. Yeah.

But there's a whole host of other things you have to do to prevent it from escalating to a point where the fire can't be fought. And can you talk about what some of those changes have been as the fire season has gotten longer and the fires have gotten more intense? What are some of the things people were doing where you worked or the advocacy groups have been pushing that are a result of the fire seasons we've been seeing?

Yeah. When I when I look at the space, I guess that I work in, and that I'm adjacent to around wildfire, there is a lot of interest growth, participation in how do we help communities be ready ahead of these fires. Right?

Which we're clearly not. I think as we saw in Hawaii, people were literally just running. Right. And there's no real alert system. There's no real like we're for something we know about. We're all surprisingly sort of underprepared for fire as a natural disaster.

Yeah. And and I will say people who work in Hawaii and wildfire, they knew the risk and they were trying to help communities on the ground. But it's the scale. How how do we get the attention of just the general public to say, hey, you live in a wildfire area and you need to do something about it? You need to sign up for emergency alerts. You need to do some maintenance around your home. You need to be supportive of your fire department, Natural Resources Agency.

And Megan, I understand this is your work now, right? Kind of dealing with communities. What is it like trying to have a conversation where, for instance, maybe people are climate change skeptics? How do you have a dialog about the things that they need to do moving forward without alienating them with that kind of language? And I don't know if I'm using too strong a term noticing that.

No, it's exactly it. Yeah. I don't say specifically climate change, but I do say, look, we're looking at longer extended fire seasons. We're looking at a change in how our fuels are on the ground. It's like, hey, and did you know that your home is a part of that? And sometimes it's sometimes people don't care about one thing, but they have another asset that they really value. Like, maybe they really value their watershed. And so you say, Oh, well, doing this work will help protect your watershed. I, I guess I don't always call right out climate change because I work with everyone across the U.S.. Right. So I have to find that that balance and conversation. And if you read the room, you have to you know, where you are. You kind of get a feel for how the conversation is going to go. Can you be just blunt and honest or do you need to kind of throw in some caveats and work your way through it? So I tell you, what I didn't ever sign up to be was a social scientist. But that's what a part of my my daily job is, is reading people and finding ways to have those effective conversations where where we talk about like, well, you know, managing your your trees here could really help for this, this and this. And maybe it's a different hazard that they care about.

You guys were talking to us about these longer, hotter fire seasons, but as a result of this, has it changed at all the way that you fight fires? Meaning are there new techniques that are being used or are there new approaches to the act of, as you call it, fire suppression?

I'll go first. This is Riva. So we do have better technology with um, we have some great apps folks use where they can get real time weather, you know, because again, like weather is really critical. We've had people get killed because of an forecasted weather conditions.

meaningg just a shift in the wind or...

Yeah. Shift in the wind or it wasn't communicated, right? People knew, but it didn't get down to the firefighters. And so we have a lot of great apps with that can track lightning. We're using unmanned aircraft now, a lot more drones and they don't have the capacity to drop water like helicopters or drop retardant like fixed wing aircraft. But they can do infrared so they can detect hot spots along the perimeter where they might have a problem. They can also scout out ahead, you know, and look for areas that we can't see. Well, is it safe enough to put anybody in there or should we not even go in there? You can send a drone in there and take a look. So those those are tying really nicely into a lot of the safety and risk management things we're doing.

But all of this is focused on who's out there and what they're dealing with.

Correct.

There's no new way, it sounds like, to put out a fire. No, it's still wet stuff on the hot stuff.

Or dirt on the on the hot stuff. And but it is making us because the fires are larger and the fire behaviors more dynamic, so it's not safe to put people close to it. We are looking at those those fire footprints getting larger and doing more indirect suppression.

So as as we talk more about the ways that climate change and prevention and adaptation as as those things loom larger in this conversation, should we be talking less about firefighting? It seems like that's the end of the road when you have a big uncontrollable fire.

Yeah, and I'll jump in again. Sorry Megan, Riva. I'm super passionate about this.

Like, does it make sense to be thinking... The way it's going can you still plausibly call yourself firefighters?

Yes. And, you know, there's even debate internally. We there's kind of a shift to be some people are calling us responders. Right. And we I am a big proponent of prescribed fire on the landscape and also using good wildland fires to do good things for the ecosystem and remove fuels when it's not a significant risk to communities. Right? But that's there's a hot internal debate even within the federal fire services and the state agencies. And there's there is a lot of strong feelings about that one way or another. I work with people who think we should put every fire out as small as it is. But that's to me, how we got into a lot of this mess, right, is a hundred years of fire suppression even good fire in the backcountry.

Both of you ended up kind of leaving day to day wildfire fighting. Right. How much do you miss the work versus how much you look at the news? Right. You turn on cable television and see the reality of what the job is now.

I miss it every day. I mean, I see my friends who are still engaged and I think about them. And I drove by a fire station last week and there was a DNR truck there. And I was like, oh, look at the truck. You know, it's 20 years since I was on my first engine and I just had this like wave of emotions of, Gosh, I wonder what it would be like if I was still in fire. Hopefully by this point, supervising engines are, you know, in a higher role. But but then when I look at the fires, it's it's just heartbreaking and devastating. And the worst is when you see these fatalities, they still hit you like it's still like gut punch. So it's it's a I miss it. I'm also glad I'm not in it. What I'm doing is making a difference. It's it's complex.

Yeah, I miss it. I miss it a lot, too. And when I see, like, you'll probably think this is crazy, Audie, but when we see the most devastating fires or the biggest fires, I just want to go, right.

Go why? What's happening in your gut when that happens?

I just want to be in the thick of it, right? I want to be helping. I want to be strategizing. I want to be, you know, working with people to we call it Bringing Order to Chaos. Right. But I have to tell you that in hindsight, when I look back, I'm glad I had mandatory retirement because. The profession really affected my mental health, and I'm finally becoming comfortable talking about that with people because I think it's it helps others. And I think being retired and being out of it is better for me physically and mentally. But I do miss it every day. And doing the advocacy work and going out occasionally on these support assignments help keep me connected to the the sisterhood and the brotherhood and the culture and the people I love. And so right now, that's that's enough. I can I can have a better I can have better health. And I can also stay connected somewhat and still feel like I'm contributing.

That was Riva Duncan. She is the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Megan Fitzgerald McGowan. She's at the National Fire Prevention Association. They are both retired wildland firefighters. We also heard from climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain. And that's it for this episode of The Assignment. If you liked it, please share it with your friends. If you love it, write a review. Yes, it matters. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Jennifer Lai and Isoke Samuel. Our producers are Carla Javier, Lori Galarreta and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Mixing and Sound Design by David Schulman. And our technical director is Dan Dzula. Steve Lickteig is our executive producer. And we want to say a special thanks to Katrina Mohr, a wildland firefighter who helped us out with this episode. I'm Audie Cornish. And thank you for listening.