California Gave Cal Fire $1.5 Billion for Wildfire Prevention. How is that Effort Going?

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

California allocated a record $1.5 billion for wildfire prevention and forest health in 2021. Yet Cal Fire, the agency largely in charge of prevention efforts, is struggling to track and implement projects and took years to authorize to establish a prescribed-burn workforce certification program, as required by state law. At the same time, its firefighting staff has increased substantially — demonstrating what experts have characterized as an internal prioritization of suppression over mitigation. That’s all according to a monthslong investigation by California Newsroom reporters, who join us to talk about their findings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.
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0:58.0	From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum.
1:18.6	I'm Mina Kim.
1:20.0	Wildfires burned nearly 7 million acres in California in the past two years alone.
1:25.1	Cal fire has been crucial in the effort to fight those fires, but when it comes to the effort
1:29.7	to prevent fires from becoming as destructive as they've been, the agency has struggled.
1:35.4	Months of reporting by the California Newsroom show that despite being given a record $1.5
1:40.6	billion from the state last year for wildfire prevention and forest health,
1:45.7	calfire has not made key hires or met important deadlines. We learn more after this news. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
2:06.2	Californians have come to accept that addressing our worsening wildfire situation will mean more
2:11.3	than aggressively putting out fast-moving wildfires. It will also mean working hard to prevent
2:17.0	them from burning out of control
2:18.5	in the first place. In other words, we've become familiar with the need for what summed up in the
	...

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