Despite more than five requests, the Forest Service failed to provide complete data on its national wildland fire management budget, citing a recent data transfer in which it lost some information from the past two decades.Instead, the agency prioritized removing trees - often far from the town’s borders and not a part of the “first priority” area - that generate revenue. The Forest Service failed to complete sections of the Trestle Project along the southern border of Grizzly Flats, identified as “first priority” due to the area’s susceptibility to wildfire.Furthermore, the majority of that work occurred several miles from the town’s border. However, the actual coverage of that work was limited to 5,800 acres because of the agency’s decades-long and highly criticized practice of counting repeat treatments on the same parcel. The corrected data also suggests that in the decade-and-a-half leading up to the Caldor Fire, the Forest Service completed 15,000 acres of fuel reduction work within a five-mile buffer around Grizzly Flats - coincidentally, the same number of planned acres in the Trestle Project.The agency confirmed the inaccurate information had been online for more than a month it updated its database less than a week before publication of this story. Original analysis of corrected Forest Service data provided by the agency shows only 14% completion. The Forest Service’s data overstated Trestle Project accomplishments, claiming the agency completed work on at least 24% of the project before the Caldor Fire.
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Due to a complex web of regulatory delays, logistical challenges and resource shortages, the agency pushed back the completion date to as late as 2032 - three decades after its initial warning to Grizzly Flats.
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Before the official evacuation order came, Almer called his next door neighbor, Victor Diaz. He was more concerned about making sure everyone else in the community got out safely. Their six cats, corralled into six crates, took up most of the car space. On August 16, 2021, two days after the fire ignited, gusty winds pushed the flames out like billowing sails, spreading across thousands of acres overloaded with shrubs and trees in the neighboring Eldorado National Forest.Īlmer and his wife didn’t grab much on their way out the door. Mark Almer poses outside his Grizzly Flats home on Thursday, Aug. The Caldor Fire would be the council’s ultimate test. “But it’s just one piece of the puzzle.”Īlmer had an even bigger plan to protect his community.įor more than a decade, he’s led the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council, a group of two-dozen volunteers that raised money for wildfire mitigation projects, educated the town’s roughly 1,400 residents about defensible space and regularly gathered local, state and federal fire officials to help improve their fire response plan. The 60-year-old retired fire inspector had spent over a decade fireproofing his Grizzly Flats home, trading wood deck boards for composite material and replacing traditional siding with a protective cement shell. Before the Caldor Fire sparked one year ago this week - before its 150-foot flames devoured century-old ponderosa pines in California’s Sierra Nevada, and before it destroyed more than 400 of the 600 homes in Grizzly Flats - Mark Almer had a plan.