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Predicting the location and severity of thunderstorms is at the cutting edge of weather science. Now funding for that science is at risk.

Tropical Storm Barry was, by all measures, a boring storm. “Blink and you missed it,” as a piece in Yale Climate Connections put it after Barry formed, then dissipated over 24 hours in late June, having never sustained wind speeds higher than 45 miles per hour. The tropical storm’s main impact, it seemed at the time, was “heavy rains of three to six inches, which likely caused minor flooding” in Tampico, Mexico, where it made landfall.
But a few days later, U.S. meteorologists started to get concerned. The remnants of Barry had swirled northward, pooling wet Gulf air over southern and central Texas and elevating the atmospheric moisture to reach or exceed record levels for July. “Like a waterlogged sponge perched precariously overhead, all the atmosphere needed was a catalyst to wring out the extreme levels of water vapor,” meteorologist Mike Lowry wrote.
More than 100 people — many of them children — ultimately died as extreme rainfall caused the Guadalupe River to rise 34 feet in 90 minutes. But the tragedy was “not really a failure of meteorology,” UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain said during a public “Office Hours” review of the disaster on Monday. The National Weather Service in San Antonio and Austin first warned the public of the potential for heavy rain on Sunday, June 29 — five days before the floods crested. The agency followed that with a flood watch warning for the Kerrville area on Thursday, July 3, then issued an additional 21 warnings, culminating just after 1 a.m. on Friday, July 4, with a wireless emergency alert sent to the phones of residents, campers, and RVers along the Guadalupe River.
The NWS alerts were both timely and accurate, and even correctly predicted an expected rainfall rate of 2 to 3 inches per hour. If it were possible to consider the science alone, the official response might have been deemed a success.
Of all the storm systems, convective storms — like thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes, and extreme rainstorms — are some of the most difficult to forecast. “We don’t have very good observations of some of these fine-scale weather extremes,” Swain told me after office hours were over, in reference to severe meteorological events that are often relatively short-lived and occur in small geographic areas. “We only know a tornado occurred, for example, if people report it and the Weather Service meteorologists go out afterward and look to see if there’s a circular, radial damage pattern.” A hurricane, by contrast, spans hundreds of miles and is visible from space.
Global weather models, which predict conditions at a planetary scale, are relatively coarse in their spatial resolution and “did not do the best job with this event,” Swain said during his office hours. “They predicted some rain, locally heavy, but nothing anywhere near what transpired.” (And before you ask — artificial intelligence-powered weather models were among the worst at predicting the Texas floods.)
Over the past decade or so, however, due to the unique convective storm risks in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other meteorological agencies have developed specialized high resolution convection-resolving models to better represent and forecast extreme thunderstorms and rainstorms.
NOAA’s cutting-edge specialized models “got this right,” Swain told me of the Texas storms. “Those were the models that alerted the local weather service and the NOAA Weather Prediction Center of the potential for an extreme rain event. That is why the flash flood watches were issued so early, and why there was so much advanced knowledge.”
Writing for The Eyewall, meteorologist Matt Lanza concurred with Swain’s assessment: “By Thursday morning, the [high resolution] model showed as much as 10 to 13 inches in parts of Texas,” he wrote. “By Thursday evening, that was as much as 20 inches. So the [high resolution] model upped the ante all day.”
Most models initialized at 00Z last night indicated the potential for localized excessive rainfall over portions of south-central Texas that led to the tragic and deadly flash flood early this morning. pic.twitter.com/t3DpCfc7dX
— Jeff Frame (@VORTEXJeff) July 4, 2025
To be any more accurate than they ultimately were on the Texas floods, meteorologists would have needed the ability to predict the precise location and volume of rainfall of an individual thunderstorm cell. Although models can provide a fairly accurate picture of the general area where a storm will form, the best current science still can’t achieve that level of precision more than a few hours in advance of a given event.
Climate change itself is another factor making storm behavior even less predictable. “If it weren’t so hot outside, if it wasn’t so humid, if the atmosphere wasn’t holding all that water, then [the system] would have rained and marched along as the storm drifted,” Claudia Benitez-Nelson, an expert on flooding at the University of South Carolina, told me. Instead, slow and low prevailing winds caused the system to stall, pinning it over the same worst-case-scenario location at the confluence of the Hill Country rivers for hours and challenging the limits of science and forecasting.
Though it’s tempting to blame the Trump administration cuts to the staff and budget of the NWS for the tragedy, the local NWS actually had more forecasters on hand than usual in its local field office ahead of the storm, in anticipation of potential disaster. Any budget cuts to the NWS, while potentially disastrous, would not go into effect until fiscal year 2026.
The proposed 2026 budget for NOAA, however, would zero out the upkeep of the models, as well as shutter the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, which studies thunderstorms and rainstorms, such as the one in Texas. And due to the proprietary, U.S.-specific nature of the high-resolution models, there is no one coming to our rescue if they’re eliminated or degraded by the cuts.
The impending cuts are alarming to the scientists charged with maintaining and adjusting the models to ensure maximum accuracy, too. Computationally, it’s no small task to keep them running 24 hours a day, every day of the year. A weather model doesn’t simply run on its own indefinitely, but rather requires large data transfers as well as intakes of new conditions from its network of observation stations to remain reliable. Although the NOAA high-resolution models have been in use for about a decade, yearly updates keep the programs on the cutting edge of weather science; without constant tweaks, the models’ accuracy slowly degrades as the atmosphere changes and information and technologies become outdated.
It’s difficult to imagine that the Texas floods could have been more catastrophic, and yet the NOAA models and NWS warnings and alerts undoubtedly saved lives. Still, local Texas authorities have attempted to pass the blame, claiming they weren’t adequately informed of the dangers by forecasters. The picture will become clearer as reporting continues to probe why the flood-prone region did not have warning sirens, why camp counselors did not have their phones to receive overnight NWS alarms, why there were not more flood gauges on the rivers, and what, if anything, local officials could have done to save more people. Still, given what is scientifically possible at this stage of modeling, “This was not a forecast failure relative to scientific or weather prediction best practices. That much is clear,” Swain said.
As the climate warms and extreme rainfall events increase as a result, however, it will become ever more crucial to have access to cutting-edge weather models. “What I want to bring attention to is that this is not a one-off,” Benitez-Nelson, the flood expert at the University of South Carolina, told me. “There’s this temptation to say, ‘Oh, it’s a 100-year storm, it’s a 1,000-year storm.’”
“No,” she went on. “This is a growing pattern.”
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More than two years later, hundreds of people in eastern Washington are still struggling to recover.
On the day of the wildfire, Kaye Peterson witnessed three miracles.
The first miracle was that the campers were late. On a normal Friday, caravans of cars would wind the 40 miles west from Spokane, Washington, to Silver Lake Camp, following a one-way-in, one-way-out road from nearby Medical Lake. Each previous week’s 300 or so campers typically departed by 11 a.m., which gave staff like Peterson — who had left her job as a teacher in a Seattle suburb three years earlier to work as the guest services manager and community chaplain at the historic Bible camp — just a handful of hours to turn over the beds, the lodge, and the cafeteria for the next group of campers to arrive around 2 p.m.
But on August 18, 2023, for the first time in all of Peterson’s years of working at Silver Lake, the incoming group had requested a 3 p.m. check-in time.
Peterson arrived early, nevertheless. “We saw some smoke, but we’re kind of used to seeing smoke,” she told me. “We didn’t pay any attention. We were cleaning up and getting ready — there’s so much to do to get ready for the next camp.” The power went out as the kitchen staff prepped pizzas for the night’s dinner, but the backup generator kicked on and the bustle continued. “But then we could start to see the smoke plume,” on the far side of the lake, Peterson said.
There are thousands of acres of ponderosa pine forests in Spokane County, which are meant to burn at a low intensity every five to 25 years, meaning that smoky skies in August aren’t necessarily cause for alarm. But the region has also been getting drier and hotter by the year; summers in the county are now almost 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were in the pre-industrial era, heating up at a rate that far outpaces the 0.8 degrees Celsius average in the rest of the country. That rise has led to more intense and more frequent wildfires; Spokane County consistently has the highest number of fires of any region in Washington.
By early afternoon, Silver Lake staffers were complaining about the air quality. One colleague stopped by to let Peterson know that she was leaving early to check on her kid. Meanwhile, the temperature was climbing toward 93 degrees Fahrenheit; the Wednesday prior, it had reached 100 degrees, one degree short of the daily temperature record for Spokane and 14 degrees above average for eastern Washington.
But Peterson, more than anything, noticed the wind, which was blowing in gusts as strong as 20 or 30 miles per hour. As the air quality continued to deteriorate, Terry Andrews, the executive director of Silver Lake Camp and Peterson’s supervisor, told the rest of his staff and volunteers to head home.
“And just about the time he said that, the sheriff came through with the sirens blaring, saying, ‘Leave now, leave now, leave now,’” Peterson said.
The second miracle was the safe. Peterson had moved from Spokane to Silver Lake Camp’s staff housing just two months prior, and she still kept an overnight bag in her car for nights when she visited a friend back in the city and was too tired to make the return trip. But earlier Friday, while helping search the grounds for a missing wallet, she’d decided on a whim to walk back to her house and throw her lock-box with her ID, passport, and other important documents into her car, as well.
Looking back, she isn’t sure what compelled her to do it. Though the sky was just starting to get hazy, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the season, much less cause for alarm. Still, maybe some unconscious part of her picked up on the danger — the smell of nearby smoke; the direction of the wind, which would blow embers across the lake; the preceding week of dry heat.
Peterson, though, calls it God’s wisdom — when she went to evacuate her house after the sheriff’s alert, she already had a de facto go-bag in her car. With just minutes to decide what else to take with her, she had only to reach for her pillow, Bible, and laptop. She never suspected it’d be the last time she’d see her house and the rest of her things.
Peterson began her evacuation, bumping across the two cattle guards leading out of the camp and onto the only road out of the neighborhood. The smoke grew even thicker, reducing her visibility to nearly nothing. Traffic choked the winding S-curves leading back to downtown Medical Lake. Peterson shudders now to think about how much worse the chaos would have been if hundreds of Spokane campers had arrived at the usual check-in time.
By the time she finally made it out of town, Peterson was praying, tears streaming down her face. She passed a vantage point where she could look out to the south and take in the scope of the fire. Although she didn’t know it at the time, she was witnessing the third miracle.
The Gray Fire would ultimately take one life and consume over 10,000 acres and 259 buildings. Only about half a dozen houses on the west side of Silver Lake would make it through the fire, and each of them suffered severe smoke damage. But at Silver Lake Camp, the fire only reached the upper campus, where it destroyed five cabins, two shops, and five staff homes, including Peterson’s and Andrews’. And despite the lower campus cabin windows having been left open during the hasty evacuation, “not one of them had any smoke damage on the inside,” Peterson told me. “No way to explain that.”
About the time Peterson was fleeing the wildfire in Medical Lake, a pile of dried grasses under a tarp spontaneously combusted on a rural gravel lane called East Oregon Road, some 40 miles to the northeast.
While Medical Lake is small, with a population of around 5,000, it is home to a major state psychiatric hospital and an Air Force base, and is a classic example of the wildland-urban interface, attracting Spokanites who want to live closer to nature. But no one would describe Elk, an unincorporated neighborhood along the Little Spokane River, in the foothills of northern Spokane County, as anything other than rural.
“Elk used to be a thriving timber town. There were hotels, bars, brothels — this, that, and the other thing,” Rick Knapp, who’s lived in the community for six years, told me. These days, Elk is “just a white spot on the road.”
Like the Gray Fire in Medical Lake, the Oregon Fire — referred to locally as the Oregon Road Fire — burned hot and fast, fanned by the week’s dry air and the same high winds that billowed the flames on the shores of Silver Lake. Within two hours of the property owner’s reporting the tarp ignition, the fire had already raced through 2,000 acres of surrounding cropland and timber forest. “Leave now” evacuation notices went out to some 8,000 people across the region; over the weekend, the fire would consume almost 11,000 acres, 384 structures, and — like the Gray Fire in Medical Lake — take one life.
The Spokane County fires on August 18 were just two of the 56,580 wildfires that ignited in the U.S. in 2023. You never hear anything about the vast majority of those fires, though. Many burn in remote areas, far from property or infrastructure that can be tallied up in headline-making damages. Most are also small and extinguished quickly; last year, for example, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that “large wildfires” that burned a minimum of 100 acres in timber or 300 acres in grass represented less than 2% of total wildfires in the country.
When it comes to wildfires that impact communities, though, the Gray and Oregon Fires can serve as instructive case studies. Though they were neither small nor insignificant, they failed to garner the kind of national attention — or the outpouring of funding and support — of the fires that haunt the national consciousness, like the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018 or the 2023 wildfire in Maui, which ignited 10 days before the Spokane County fires. Most national news outlets ran a single story on the two fires, if they covered them at all; ultimately, most of the coverage came from reporters writing for the region’s local newspaper, The Spokesman-Review.
Initially, the Gray and Oregon fires were too small even to qualify for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forcing many people in Elk and Medical Lake to navigate the recovery without a guide. Terri Cooper, Medical Lake’s mayor, told me that in the absence of an obvious roadmap to follow, she reached out to fellow mayors like Dan Harwood of Malden, Washington, a town that lost 80% of its homes in a 2020 wildfire but had to make do without much help from the federal government.
That is the case for many smaller communities that are affected by wildfires each year. The federal government typically steps in only when fires overwhelm state resources; between 2019 and 2023, Presidents Trump and Biden designated just 13 wildfires as major disasters, limiting access to funding in locales that sustained more minor damage. In 2021, FEMA denied roughly 70% of wildfire survivors’ claims, not counting those it suspected of being fraudulent.
Major catastrophes like the megafire in Paradise and wildfires in densely populated locations such as Lahaina and Los Angeles have taught us much in recent years about how to live with fire. And yet most wildfire-impacted communities will find more in common with the stories of the people of Medical Lake and Elk. It’s for this reason that we’ve decided to highlight the communities as an example of how other neighborhoods and towns can recover from a wildfire — from the initial response by aid groups and local leaders, to the long-term fight for federal funding and insurance payouts, to the look ahead at how to rebuild and prepare for a future that is all but guaranteed to see fire again.
Despite the distance between Medical Lake and Elk, media write-ups almost immediately treated the Gray and Oregon fires as a single event. It’s easy to see why: The fires ignited within hours of each other under the same extreme conditions (Medical Lake was in fact under a critical fire danger warning, and local fire chief Cody Rohrbach had told the city council that the 18th would see “the worst fire weather of the year”), and pulled on the same strained firefighting resources.
More critically, though, when Spokane County commissioners declared a state of emergency on Saturday, August 19, they sought funding resources to address both fires together. “It was to everyone’s benefit to count the two fires as one,” Jeanna Swanson, the director of New Hope Resource Center, a faith-based nonprofit and food pantry that serves northern Spokane County, told me. Although each was severe on its own, together the Gray and Oregon fires destroyed 366 homes and 710 structures, resulting in an assessed property value loss of $166 million, making them the worst fire event in Washington State’s history. “We probably wouldn’t have gotten FEMA money, or some of those other dollars” if officials hadn’t treated the fires as a single event, Swanson told me.
The day after she evacuated the Silver Lake camp, Peterson learned from her boss, Andrews, that the fire had destroyed her house. “When it was finally safe to return to the area about five or six days later, Peterson felt an odd sort of lightness. “I was like, ‘Wow, yeah, it did burn to the ground,” she said. “I mean, everything was gone.” She’d lost her entire wardrobe, aside from what she’d packed in her overnight bag, including all her teacher clothes from her previous life. When Samaritan’s Purse reached out to her to offer to sift through the remains of her house, and was there anything she wanted them to look for?, Peterson asked only for her father’s camp whistle from his days working in the Black Hills of South Dakota and a piece of rose quartz from the same region.
As a chaplain, she took naturally — and immediately — to directing community members to available resources, and Silver Lake Camp became a hub for organizing the recovery effort. The local Lowe’s hardware store donated pallets of Gatorade and water, which the camp staff left in the driveway for anyone to take. Silver Lake Camp also opened up its bathrooms to anyone who needed them while sifting through the remains of their homes.
Perhaps most important, though, was the mobile internet that Cooper, Medical Lake’s mayor, brought to the camp. Access to Wi-Fi enabled residents to begin to fill out the necessary forms for insurance and recovery. “You can’t do it on your phone,” Peterson said. “We had a space at the camp if you needed to hop on a laptop, and opened up the property for people to come in and have meetings with, say, their demo guy.”
By the Sunday following the fires, Washington’s then-governor Jay Inslee had issued an emergency proclamation to coordinate the state-level response and mobilize the National Guard. Inslee also treated the fires in Medical Lake and Elk as a single event. But for all the fires’ technical similarities, the circumstances and responses to them couldn’t have been more different.
“We out here in Elk are a different lot,” Knapp told me when I asked him to describe the differences between Elk and Medical Lake. “I won’t say we’re hillbillies, but I will say that we enjoy and cherish our freedoms, and don’t like to be bothered by governmental agencies, because there’s not a lot of trust in those agencies.”
Many of the people who lost their homes in the Oregon Fire earned below 80% of the median family income for Spokane County. “You’ve got people out here — I’m not saying they’re squatters, I’m just saying they’re living on Grandpa’s property and Grandpa may or may not be still alive,” Knapp went on. “They don’t have a deed that says they are the owners of the property. They never had insurance.”
Even if the residents of Elk had been receptive to outside help, the community is unincorporated, meaning there was no mayor or local government to advocate on its behalf or to coordinate the immediate fire recovery.
But it did have Pastor Jose of the Country Church of the Open Bible.
August 18 was Jose Ng’s wife’s birthday. As Ng recalled to me, he learned about the Oregon Fire from their friends, who left her celebration early to check on their home. “I said, ‘Well, hey, why don’t you bring your stuff down to the church?” Ng said. “That’s kind of how it initially started.”
By Friday evening, as the Oregon Fire grew increasingly severe, more people from Elk began gathering at the church, awaiting news about their homes. Ng invited anyone who’d evacuated to stay the night, and “a handful of people just kind of camped here,” he said. “The next morning, you wake up and you realize that a bunch of these people had lost everything.”
Ng described the population of Elk to me as close-knit, independent, and deeply attached to their land — skeptical of handouts, maybe, but loyal to one another. When people in “rows and rows of cars coming from Spokane” eventually filled the church’s foyer with donations, fire victims felt more comfortable accepting assistance from the church than from an outside group like the Red Cross or Salvation Army. Local restaurants began to reach out to Ng about donating food, and soon larger organizations from across the region began contacting Country Church to offer their assistance.
Unlike wildland-urban interface communities like Medical Lake, which benefit from proximity to major population areas, media attention, and politicians who can advocate on their behalf, rural communities like Elk face unique challenges after wildfires. They have more limited access to disaster and emergency resources, meaning community members must lean even harder on each other.
As is the case with other climate disasters, wildfires disproportionately affect low-income and disenfranchised populations. Shasta County in California has a poverty rate of over 17% — and a FEMA wildfire risk score of more than 99 out of 100. Nearby Lake County and Mendocino County, where the poverty rate exceeds 20%, also have risk scores above 97. (Around half of the people exposed to wildfires in Washington State are also considered socially vulnerable.)
Over half the people who lost their homes in Elk were uninsured, and almost everyone else was underinsured. “Everybody has big chunks of property, but nobody wants to leave their land,” Ng told me. “And so people were staying in their cars or their tents or whatever they could find on their property.” Others moved into RVs and campers that “had mold, and some of them leaked,” Swanson told me.
Despite the entrenched suspicion of outside help, it was clear to community leaders in Elk, including Ng and Knapp, that they’d benefit from the disaster falling under the same umbrella as Medical Lake’s. Elk Strong, a loosely organized community resilience group, soon joined forces with ReImagine Medical Lake, a civic revitalization group that Mayor Terri Cooper had launched 10 years prior with her sister, to create a joint long-term recovery group that would allow both communities access to more funding due to their combined losses.
The first month and a half after a fire are the most critical and intense, Cooper told me. But the true heavy lifting was still ahead. “After about that five-week initial period,” Cooper said, “is when the recovery really begins.”
Medical Lake and Elk had another good reason for teaming up: They’d seen what happened in Malden.
On Labor Day in 2020, a windstorm knocked a tree branch onto a power line 40 minutes south of Spokane, sparking the 15,000-acre Babb Road Fire. Though nobody died in the fire, between 80% and 85% of the buildings in the small towns of Malden and Pine City burned to the ground.
FEMA funds are contingent upon the president approving a disaster declaration. But despite the near-complete devastation, President Donald Trump allegedly foot-dragged on approving the disaster request from Inslee, a Democrat, due to “personal animosity” between the two, The Spokesman-Review reported at the time. (Trump won Washington’s 5th Congressional District, which includes both Malden and Medical Lake, by 9 points. Inslee did not return a request for comment.) Two weeks after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he finally approved Inslee’s request for the disaster declaration — but denied an individual request for funding for Malden and Pine City after FEMA determined the damage “was not of such severity and magnitude to warrant the designation.”
FEMA offers both public and individual disaster assistance. Even considered together, the fires in Elk and Medical Lake did not meet FEMA’s $13 million threshold for damages to public infrastructure to qualify for public assistance funding, since most of the damage occurred on individual properties rather than downtown. FEMA’s individual assistance fund, meanwhile, is designed for uninsured and underinsured households, and approval is contingent on the county arduously tallying the number of victims who would qualify. By late September, Spokane County commissioners had managed to identify just 40 damaged homes without insurance — it generally takes several hundred to earn the approval of FEMA — with 200 homes still waiting to be assessed.
Though it doesn’t seem like it should take so long to gather evidence proving the extent of a fire’s damage, survivors have to report their own losses, a daunting, complicated, paperwork-laden process that is often far from mind while someone is reeling from the aftermath of losing everything they owned. Cooper later told Spokane’s KREM2 News that she believed it was a mistake “going to the government first” in pursuit of aid, rather than leaning into the grassroots support that was more immediately available to the towns. (Earlier that August, FEMA approved funds to help Washington specifically with associated firefighting costs.)
In October, about a month and a half after the Oregon fires, Inslee appealed directly to Biden, estimating that it would take $5 billion to address all the damage and seeking the presidential disaster declaration that would free up FEMA funds. Even then, community members had serious doubts about the federal government’s willingness to help. Malden’s experience aside, FEMA’s depleted coffers were a national news story by the fall of 2023. After the fire in Lahaina and Hurricane Idalia, which by September had already run the federal government $325 million in cleanup costs, there were legitimate concerns as to whether there would be enough money left to address the recovery efforts in Elk and Medical Lake, which remained off most Americans’ radars.
It took six months after the fire, until January 2024, for Biden to finally grant Inslee’s disaster request. In response to questions about the long delay, a FEMA spokesperson told me in a statement that “unlike the last administration, [the Department of Homeland Security] and FEMA remain focused on effective, non-political disaster response,” and that the agency will “continue to support Americans impacted by disasters no matter the size or scope of the disaster, or the state or jurisdiction they live in, allowing local governments to lead the response managed by their states.”
The community leaders in Medical Lake and Elk were not the sort to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for the feds to step in. ReImagine Medical Lake — Cooper’s organization — and Elk Strong swiftly formed the Spokane Regional Long Term Recovery Group, a nonprofit that aimed to coordinate recovery efforts across the two communities. “We went through the whole nine yards to make it official, and we tried to be extremely transparent,” Knapp told me. “We didn’t want to play favorites between Medical Lake and Elk.”
With Cooper as president of the SRLTRG, the group decided that no member of the 12-person board could have lost their home in the fire — a stipulation aimed at ensuring the group’s decisions were unbiased and even-handed. Similarly, the group maintained separate committees — Elk Strong and ReImagine Medical Lake — to ensure both communities received equal attention. Almost immediately, the SRLTRG also began working with the Innovia Foundation, a local community need organization, to distribute financial donations through nonprofits like the Country Church.
One of the highest priorities from the outset was providing housing to survivors, particularly in Elk. Even months after the fire, many were still living in inadequate shelters, potentially exposing themselves to toxins in the rubble of their former homes. But there was an even more immediate concern: the onset of winter.
“RVs are fun in the summertime, but in the wintertime, they’re cold,” Knapp said. “We set up an initiative to help winterize the RVs by putting skirting around them and insulating the water pipes underneath so that they wouldn’t freeze.” The recovery group also worked to restore power to the properties, purchasing meter boxes and digging ditches for the cables.
But much of the work of wildfire recovery happens on paper. “It’s a lot of tracking and helping people get back all their documents,” Cooper told me. “And then, ‘What’s your income status?’ Every funding mechanism has its parameters.”
Insurance, in particular, has presented a significant and persistent challenge for victims, as policyholders are required to supply an itemized list of lost items with details as specific as the size and make of, say, individual sweaters. “It’s so infuriating,” Peterson told me. “In some states, they don’t have to do the list, they just look at the house and go, ‘Yes, total loss.’” California, for instance, is pushing insurers in this direction. Peterson said that putting together her own list was a major stressor because “none of us thought, ‘Oh, I’ll go videotape or take pictures’” when evacuating their homes.
One of the most challenging long-term projects, though, is still the cleanup. In a wildfire, trees don’t necessarily burn entirely to ash; most remain as blackened, standing snags that are susceptible to toppling. (Falling snags are one of the leading causes of fire responder deaths, too, with burned-out trees accounting for as much as 30% of wildland firefighter deaths in a given year.) While the local utility, Avista, removed 5,000 at-risk trees in the Medical Lake area in the months following the Gray Fire, many of the properties in Elk are 20 acres or more, meaning there could be hundreds or thousands of dead snags on one piece of land.
Ng told me there’s an emotional element to the tree removal problem, too. Elk is home to a number of properties that have belonged to families for generations, and while mowing down acres and acres of dead trees is, in many cases, prohibitively expensive, it’s also “almost saying goodbye to a past chapter.” He likened it to deleting a voicemail from a loved one who’s since passed away.
Some people in Elk received new seedlings through a state-run reforestation program, but the funding has since run out. And the state never offered assistance planting the trees, even though many of the recipients were seniors or people who had lost all their tools and equipment in the fire.
Asbestos testing has been another hassle. “You have to get it if you’re going to get any kind of permits to rebuild,” Knapp told me. “You have to verify that you’ve tested and remediated any asbestos that may have been in play when the fire came through, and that’s very expensive.” Costs run between $1,000 and $3,000 for an inspection, and some owners haven’t yet gone to the trouble, meaning there are still toxic piles of rubble that are potentially leaching into Medical Lake’s shallow aquifer.
While Spokane County offers financial support for asbestos testing, Peterson — who struggled to get her own samples run because the local labs were too busy — said the program works on a reimbursement basis. “It’s frustrating to have someone look you in the eye and go ‘You have to get the asbestos testing’ when I just lost everything,” she said. “Now I need to put out how many thousands of dollars to get tested for asbestos? And then wait for reimbursement?” And while Cooper told me that only a small percentage of homes, perhaps 10%, actually tested positive for asbestos in Medical Lake, remediation is “astronomically expensive” — $60,000 to $80,000, in some cases.
Knapp also cited Washington State’s progressive building codes as an obstacle to people returning to their homes. “Out here in Elk, when you build a new house, you’re technically supposed to have an EV charging station,” he told me. “And you can’t use propane for heat anymore, because the tree-huggers say that it’s terrible. Well, that’s what they’ve been heating this house with for the past 50 to 100 years, and now you’re saying if I rebuild, I can’t use propane?” (In 2022, Washington passed a law requiring all new single-family homes to be “electric vehicle ready.” While propane isn’t outright banned, the state raised its building efficiency standards in 2023 so that “only heat pumps can satisfy them” — though, as we’ve covered here at Heatmap, a ban of that law is now being considered by the state’s supreme court.)
Sixteen months after the fire, in January 2025, Washington Senator Patty Murray helped to at last secure $44 million in disaster funds for Spokane County from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The hope is that the HUD money will fill in the gaps left by other federal and state grant programs, as well as continue to help the under- and uninsured. But it’s also difficult for fire victims to see the county, nonprofits, and long-term recovery group receive millions in allocations while they themselves haven’t received any direct payments. “People go, ‘Oh, you just raised $100,000, where’s my check?’” Knapp said. “It doesn’t work that way. We don’t write checks to people. There has got to be a need, and we have to actually pay for that need.”
For others, recovery has meant pursuing some form of justice. On September 27, just weeks after the fire, Singleton Schreiber, a national firm specializing in wildfire litigation, filed a lawsuit accusing local utility Inland Power & Light Company of negligence over failing to repair a faulty security light that started the Gray Fire. (A lawyer for Inland Power & Light did not return a request for comment.)
Dan Fruchter, a partner at Singleton Schreiber’s Spokane office, told me that the firm is now representing “hundreds of clients” as part of the Gray Fire litigation. “It’s critically important to represent the individual clients and to make sure that they’re able to recover for the full extent of the harm done by the fire,” he told me. But he sees his role as an attorney as having a second function, too: “Preventing or mitigating the next fire through changes to infrastructure and vegetation management.”
Investigators have traced some of the most devastating fires in the country back to utilities, including the fire in Lahaina, the million-acre Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas, and the Camp Fire in Paradise. (Utility-caused wildfires are not a problem exclusive to the U.S., either; the Black Saturday bush fires in Australia in 2009, which killed over 170 people, were started by a power line.) “The bigger the entity — a utility, a local government, a railroad — the more responsibility they have to protect the communities that they serve,” Fruchter went on. Though the Gray Fire lawsuit is still in its discovery phase, the court has set the current trial date for next January.
In the meantime, now two years after the fires, Elk and Medical Lake continue to rebuild slowly. Cooper received mentorship from other mayors who’d faced fires in their communities and hopes she can give back in the same way to anyone who endures a similar disaster in the future. Since the fires, she’s learned to navigate funding challenges and the importance of organizing a long-term recovery group. “There’s this world of disaster recovery nonprofits and volunteers that you don’t even know are there until it happens to you,” she said.
Cooper also helped Republican State Representative Mike Volz introduce a bipartisan bill during Washington’s 2023-2024 legislative session that would have formalized a long-term recovery program statewide, providing everything from grant assistance to a resource directory for communities to refer to after disasters. In particular, the bill aimed to facilitate a process for long-term recovery groups, such as SRLTRG, to receive government funding. In Cooper’s view, it’s these local recovery groups that have the best success in getting money to the people and causes that need it, but the groups often struggle for grant money because the government doesn’t consider them legitimate. But the bill ultimately died in Washington’s House Rules Committee before it could be put to a vote.
Something has to change, though. There is no standard timeline for wildfire recovery, as every community rebuild is unique; yet, more often than not, the timeline spans years. The Urban Institute found that the average HUD Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery grant, which helps address long-term recovery needs following presidentially declared disasters, takes more than 20 months even to start distributing funds. Paradise, California — which burned six years ago — was still only 33% rebuilt, with less than half the population it had pre-fire, as of March 2025, and its mayor has called its recovery “a 20-year rebuild.”
In the words of a U.S. Forest Service analysis of community recoveries after wildfires, “a few studies indicate that distress can continue several years after wildfires have occurred” — with rates of depression among survivors potentially exceeding 50% and lasting for more than a decade. Ecological recovery can last even longer: In the case of Medical Lake, which was mostly made up of old-growth ponderosa pines, Washington Department of Natural Resources manager Steve Harris has said he expects it to take “at least a century” for a fully developed forest to grow back.
Any way you look at it, it’s a long road ahead. While the Spokane Long Term Recovery Group has helped rebuild eight houses — two in Medical Lake and six in Elk — for people who could not have otherwise returned to their homes, there are at least a dozen others who are still waiting on similar assistance. Insurance remains a persistent problem, too. Per The Seattle Times, insurance companies have declined to renew 161 of the 484 policies in Medical Lake and Elk with payouts exceeding $30,000, and local premiums have also increased. Two years on, there are still 102 open claims of 658 filed.
These, however, are not front-page problems, and it’s easy for the attention of state and federal officials — much less the public — to move on to the next catastrophe. “At first, after a disaster, you have a bunch of resources, a bunch of manpower, a bunch of volunteers,” Ng, the pastor in Elk, told me. “But as it goes on — six months, one year, a year and a half — everybody kind of goes back to doing what they were doing before.”
But fire weather isn’t going away. Washington state is at risk of a “mammoth fire” due to climate change, The New York Times recently reported, and Spokane County remains especially at risk. “You have the fuel load. You have to be ready,” Cooper said of the potential for future fires in Medical Lake. “Because it’s likely going to come again.”
Three former hotshots talk about getting up close to the flames, how it changed them, and what could actually prevent future fires.
It’s every author’s worst fear: Your book is one of three coming out on the subject in a single season.
But Kelly Ramsey, Jordan Thomas, and River Selby’s first-person narratives about fighting fires in the American West could not be more different or more complementary to each other. While all three worked as hotshots — the U.S. Forest Service’s elite wildland firefighting division — their different experiences, approaches, and perspectives offer a multi-faceted (and rarely overlapping) look at the state of fire management in the U.S.
Ramsey’s memoir, Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, is a narrative of self-discovery chronicling her time with the pseudonymous Rowdy River Hotshots during the historic 2020 and 2021 seasons. As the only woman on the 20-person crew — and the first woman the crew had brought on in 10 years — Ramsey faced all the normal pressures of being a rookie firefighter while also having to prove her mettle to be on the fireline in her colleagues’ eyes.
Thomas, an anthropologist by training, spent the 2021 season with the Los Padres Hotshots to learn more about “the cultural currents that stoked this new era of fire.”
“I wanted to get close to the flames,” he writes, “to understand how people navigate new scales of destruction — emotionally, physically, and tactically.” The resulting book, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, is a first-person account of Thomas’ time on the hotshot crew, interwoven with his research into how forest mismanagement long predates the common narrative tying today’s megafires to the creation of the U.S. Forest Service at the start of the 20th Century. (It was also recently named as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award.)
Finally, Selby’s Hotshot: A Life on Fire, is a braided memoir that follows the author’s tumultuous upbringing and relationship with their mother to their escape into the unforgiving world of wildland firefighting. Having started out on a contract fire crew based out of Oregon, Selby joined the Solar Hotshot crew in 2002, setting off a career in elite firefighting that would take them from California to Nebraska to Alaska. As the only woman on the crew (Selby now identifies as nonbinary), Selby faced marginalization similar to what Ramsey experienced; read together, the two memoirs offer a discouraging portrait of how little the hypermasculine culture of hotshot crews has changed, even over the course of decades.
Their books arrive at a moment when federal firefighting crews are receiving more public attention than at any point in recent memory — both because of the prevalence of fire in our climate changed world, and due to mounting concerns about the health effects and treatment of the workers on hotshot crews. The Trump administration has also pushed to consolidate fire programs under a single federal agency, ostensibly to address cost inefficiencies and improve the coordination of operations, which are currently spread across five agencies.
I spoke to Ramsey, Thomas, and Selby separately about their books. Common themes emerged, including the urgency of wildfire narratives, the importance of prescribed burning, and their views on resiliency and rebuilding. The interviews have been condensed, lightly edited, and arranged in conversation with each other, below.
Wildfire recovery interests me so much, and from multiple perspectives, because I think this is a space where you find the recovery of people’s emotional trauma from wildfires is closely related to the recovery of landscapes from fires.
Prescribed burns are often where you find people trying to implement wildfire recovery. In Northern California, in a national forest up there where I was working, 98% of that forest burned. Part of the recovery plan process involves using intentional fires to foster the kinds of ecosystems that reemerge alongside them. They’re trying to plan this around climate change as well, thinking about what sorts of plants and trees will survive in the new climate. It also means working with communities like the tribal people in the region, who — for a very long time — weren’t allowed to use fire, and who saw a lot of species that were important to them disappear because of the lack of fire.
As you’re doing that, you’re encouraging fires that aren’t so destructive and aren’t so scary. So for people who’ve lost homes or had emotionally distressful experiences with wildfire, these prescribed fires are also an opportunity to rebuild an emotional connection to fire in the land as well — one that’s not traumatic, but in which fire is a useful, beneficial thing within your community and within your landscape. — Thomas
Communities that build back successfully do not build back the same. There are two parts to it: One is making your actual home more defensible and more fire-resistant. But there’s also building back the landscape around a community better.
The places I’ve seen that look the most fire resilient have done massive landscape-size treatments around the community. They’ve removed hazard trees following the fire, and they’ve stayed on top of the brush — because what happens, especially after a catastrophic wildfire, is you get huge regrowth of brush, and a lot of times you’ll see another fire in that same scar within a few years because brush carries fire so readily.
They’re also doing a lot of prescribed burning. Ideally, if you have a community that’s been hit by a fire, you also want to be on top of intentionally burning in the five to 10 years right after. You have to be aggressive about that; otherwise, you’re just going to get another fire pretty soon. — Ramsey
I’ve been thinking about rebuilding a lot after we had those fires in Los Angeles over the winter. There seem to be two camps: one camp of people who want to rebuild immediately, and another camp of people saying, “I think we should consider what we’re doing.” It’s challenging because a lot of population centers, especially in the West, are in the wildland-urban interface. So, yes, rebuild, but rebuild with safety in mind and ensure that everyone in the community, regardless of their economic status, has access to the resources necessary to rebuild in a way that protects them.
There’s a huge public lack of education and understandable fear when it comes to wildfire, but there are so many things that can be done as far as how houses are built, enforcing defensible space around houses, encouraging the growth of more fire-resistant native plants, making sure that you’re tending the land in a way that is keeping out the more volatile invasive grasses that are actually increasing the number of fires. But I think our national mindset has always been that we want to find one solution for everything, and that just doesn’t work in fire-prone areas. There have to be multiple solutions and multiple agencies and nonprofits and states and cities and counties all working together and supporting each other in having these goals of building fire-resilient communities. — Selby
I think a lot of people have this indignation every season, where when a fire approaches a town, they’re like, “How could this happen?” But in certain places — like Redding, California, where I live — people are no longer shocked. They’re always ready. And I have landed in that extreme of being always ready; I’m not surprised.
When you decide to live in certain places— almost anywhere in California, but in certain places in the West — you have signed on an invisible dotted line and said, “I agree that my house may be burned, and I accept this.” Obviously, I will still grieve and be sad if I lose my home at some point. But I also just feel like, with what I’ve seen as a hotshot, I acknowledge that it could happen almost anywhere out here. It’s more likely than not that at some point, in the next 25 years, if I can continue to live in California for that long.
My partner and I talk a lot about this, how after being a hotshot, you have a switch in your brain where you’re constantly aware of what could burn and how it could burn. I look at a certain hillside, and if it’s a really dense forest, I’ll have two thoughts: I’ll think, “Oh, how pretty.” And then I’ll think, “Oh, that would burn really hot.” — Ramsey
There were very few instances on the fire line where the firefighters I was working with questioned or talked about or discussed how that fire started. There is a real immediacy to the work and an understanding that you would do your best to try to put the fire out, and you would work for 14 days, and if the fire was still going, then you’d come back after your days off. But the task didn’t hinge on how the fire started.
What interests me the most is why fires get as big as they do once they start. That’s what shines the light on climate change and the way that the capitalist management of our lands has made our forests so unhealthy, and how the genocide and colonialism of Indigenous people were the foundation of that. If you go back just a couple of hundred years, there were far more ignitions in California before Europeans arrived because Indigenous people were igniting around 10% of California every year. But those fires were not going out of control.
Every fire that’s not a prescribed burn — is it a success or a failure? I think it depends on the fire history in the area recently, and if there has been a prescribed burn there recently, or if there’s even been a lightning burn that occurred in conditions that were conducive to forest health. Then another ignition there probably won’t be as bad. But of course, climate change is shifting all of that. — Thomas
It became a conscious decision to write about the experience of being a female hotshot. In the first draft, there were a couple of moments where I was like, “Oh, I had my period,” that were a bit throw-away. Like, I’d mention that it was happening, or I’d say that I had trouble finding a place to pee. But one of my dear, dear friends, who is a professor of Victorian literature, read the first draft, and she was like, “MORE OF THIS” in all caps. My editor pushed for it as well. He said, “We need as much of your physical experience as possible.” He didn’t really say, “your physical experience as a woman,” but he asked at one point, “Could you do a catalog of the damage to your body?”
It was really other people being like, “Okay, so what about your body, though?” because my tendency — and I think this happens in books by authors in male-dominated fields, there’s an abnegation of the body. You’re not supposed to think too much about the pain you’re dealing with. You necessarily compartmentalize and tune out your physical experience because a lot of times it’s painful, and to keep going through a 24-hour shift, you can’t think, “Oh, my shoulder hurts.” So I think the culture — and it’s also hyper-masculine culture, is “Don’t complain, don’t say what you’re going through at all.” — Ramsey
I was very aware when writing that there are better voices to be commenting on masculinity in this context than mine, necessarily. But, in my analysis, I never wanted to punch down or punch up; I wanted to think about the way that these cultures function. One of the things that masculinity does on the crew is it makes people hyper-aware of all of the small details of their actions, whether you’re taking care of your boots or keeping your chain sharp on your chainsaw, or whether you’re drinking enough water. All of these things that are enforced through masculine bullying are actually things that, if you’re not paying attention to them, can slow you down, or put you in a life-or-death situation, or put 20 other people at risk.
Masculinity also has a way of reframing the physical discomfort and suffering and the grind of getting kicked awake before sunrise and working until sunset in extreme heat for 14 days with two days off and doing that over and over and over for six months as your body breaks down, too. It blunts or numbs parts of it, because you’re not going to escape it by talking about it. But on the flip side of that, what does masculinity do within the system of fire suppression? One thing that these ethics do outside of the crew is create a system where suffering — “rubbing some dirt on it,” or not talking about your ailments, illnesses, or documenting your exposure to chemicals — becomes glorified and valorized so people are not advocating for themselves.
The ethic of masculinity on a hotshot crew also becomes a subsidy for the wealthy people who would otherwise be paying higher taxes to take care of these same people’s bodies. Who are you actually helping by “rubbing some dirt on it,” or by working a little bit harder, or by not reporting your torn meniscus? You’re serving the people who’d be paying for it, and the people who should be paying for it are the wealthiest strata of society whose properties you’re often protecting. There’s a perverse way in which this ethic of masculinity — while I think there’s a certain instrumentality to it within the crew — there’s also a real exploitative element to it within the role that it plays in the fire suppression system overall. — Thomas
A huge aspect of the culture on a hotshot crew was how they were performing masculinity for each other. They were very focused on performing a specific kind of masculinity, though, that was tough, invulnerable, doesn’t feel pain. The only emotion that is really okay is anger; even joy is not necessarily accepted. There was a strong undercurrent of competition — who is the toughest, who is the hardest.
Not everyone participated fully in this. I worked with a lot of different men, and all men are different. Some were sensitive or very artistic, and they experienced marginalization because they weren’t willing to opt into the hypermasculinity. But it does have physical repercussions because you’re not allowed to complain. You end up working through injuries. You end up hurting yourself. And if someone got injured — unless it was very obviously almost a deadly injury — then they were shamed for getting help.
I have gotten messages from people — even before my book came out, people of all genders, but a lot of women — talking about current experiences they’ve had that were similar to my own. In the epilogue, I wrote a little bit about some of the current lawsuits that are happening, and it’s something I would like to write more about. I hope that more folks come to me and talk about their experiences. But from what I’ve heard, the culture has not changed that much since I was a hotshot. — Selby
I definitely didn’t take the job thinking I would write about it. I had kind of — not given up on writing, — but I had definitely turned my attention away. Going to work for the Forest Service was me being like, ‘This writing thing doesn’t seem to be panning out.” I needed something else that felt meaningful to me, and I loved the outdoors so much, so I was like, “I’ll just do outside for a living.”
There was a moment in August of my first season when I started taking notes in my Notes app. I had this sense of, “This job is absolutely extraordinary, and all these crazy things are always happening, and these people I work with are such characters and they’re always saying the wildest stuff.” In the off-season, between my two seasons, I began trying to fill in some scenes based on the notes I had taken at the time. I was like, “Maybe I will write a novel when this job is done.” I really thought it was a novel!
After the two seasons, I started writing, and when I finished it, I was like, “Okay, this would make a great novel — except everything in here really happened.” So then I was like, I guess we’re working with a memoir! And that was when I decided to find an agent. — Ramsey
I won’t speculate about why other people are publishing [hotshot narratives], but I think there’s a real attempt to try to make sense of what’s happening. The baseline physical conditions are outpacing our abilities to comprehend them — around the planet, with climate change in general, but also with the wildfires. Fires are a concrete case study for the ways that environments are galloping beyond our comprehension.
So for me personally, this was an attempt to try to gain some mooring in this unmoored reality that we’re entering. There are a lot of abstract ideas about what it means to “navigate the climate crisis,” but working with hotshots gave me an anchor that I could use to make this real and ask, “How are people actually physically navigating the climate crisis on the fire line?” — Thomas
I started writing a proposal [for Hotshot] in January 2019. I thought that it was really important back then, though — due to a bunch of factors, some of them having to do with things out of my control — the book took a while to finish. I had honestly wanted this book to be out in 2022, and that was the expectation when I sold it.
In some ways, I’m glad it took so long, because that allowed me the space to do really thorough research and also a really thorough personal examination. I was working through my own emotional material, and I think I needed that distance, and that it’s made a better book. But I have thought that this has been important for a long time, and I hope that there are many more books about this subject. — Selby
Our news cycle is built on sensationalism; that’s just a fundamental problem with the media. I have noticed a shift in the past few years where reports of fires will mention the importance of fire [recurrence to the health of the ecosystem] as a kind of side note, but who’s gonna read a side note? It is a problem of education, and that is one of the main reasons I wrote my book: I wanted to create something accessible that could provide a comprehensive education to the reader about why fires are a natural thing that happens and why they should be reintroduced. I do think that one solution might be for outlets to take more time to conduct in-depth analyses of very regional fire regimes, how they function, and possibly even partner with some nonprofits.
The way we deal with fire right now, on a large scale in the U.S., is reactive. Even in the marketing of my book, people are like, “Why would you want to write something about fire when there aren’t active wildfires threatening a community or something?” They want to leverage the threat in order to bring attention to this. And it’s like, “Well, actually, maybe you don’t want to try and educate people about this when they’re feeling actively scared.” — Selby
When people talk about forest management — or forest mismanagement — they often refer to “a century of forest mismanagement by the federal government and the U.S. Forest Service.” The reality is that most of the fires that were lit in California, and many across the American West, were lit by Indigenous people, and by the time the Forest Service was founded in 1905, most of the fires in the American West had already been extinguished [by the Spanish missionaries, who, beginning in the 18th century, had criminalized Indigenous burning as “childish” and damaging,] and orchestrated a systematic genocide against those communities. I think current dominant narratives that place forest mismanagement just a century ago do a real injustice to Indigenous people and to our ability to grasp the depth of this crisis. — Thomas
Hotshots are not looking for fame or glory or a pat on the back. Even in the way that you walk, there’s an ethic about not trying to be flashy — you have your shoulders hunched, you look down. But I think that there is a general appreciation in the hotshot community of the attempts to advocate for their general working conditions because the conditions have gotten so dire. While hotshots themselves are not the sort of people who will stand up on stage and clamor for better health care or higher pay, a lot of people who used to be hotshots are doing that work to try to uplift them.
The complicated part of this is, it’s easy to rally around hotshots as a group of people who are experiencing and suffering from the effects of climate change. It’s very hard to argue that they should be enduring that, or that they’re not skilled labor. Everybody wants to support the firefighters, right? But it provides an opportunity to highlight the needs of frontline communities; to expand universal healthcare coverage, for example. The danger, though, is it can easily become a competition — like, is this community of essential workers sufficiently skilled or sufficiently badass enough to deserve health care?
While advocating for hotshots can be really helpful in aiding people’s understanding of the increasing zones of violence that climate change is inflicting, it can also create a ridiculous standard for who should be considered an essential worker. Farm workers in California, people working in factories — people all over face similar categories of danger without having a flashy rallying point. I think that’s the danger, that you have a real opportunity with this sort of advocacy work for hotshots that is paired with that peril. — Thomas
The Forest Service should not be defunded and understaffed further than it already is. We’ve been in a staffing crisis for at least the last five years before the catastrophe that is the current administration. They’re absolutely going in the wrong direction by cutting any staff because so many of those people that they cut — while they may not be primarily firefighters, they’re all red-carded, qualified firefighters [meaning that they’re licensed and certified to respond to a fire], and they serve support functions during major incidents.
Regarding the creation of centralized fire management, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think that could be really good because fires are managed through three different agencies in the federal government and that can cause problems. But I have also heard my friend Amanda Monthei, who’s a fire writer and podcaster, point out that firefighters also do a lot of prescribed burning and fuels management. Separate them out and create one federal fire agency, are they also going to do that preventative work?
The advocacy organization Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has a lot of good ideas about how [a centralized agency] could be done, but when it comes to the prescribed burning and intentional fire scene, there are a lot of concerns. To me, the biggest thing we need to focus on is more intentional fire and fuel reduction, and figuring out what best enables that. If the creation of a centralized fire service is going to help us do more intentional fire, then great. If it’s going to make that even harder, then no. — Ramsey
My book is clearly critical of federal agencies, but they are so important when it comes to fire management. I do think that if federal agencies could take more of a support role when it comes to local action — like with nonprofits, tribes, and Indigenous nations — that would be very helpful. But it’s hard to imagine with our current administration.
Say what you will about the Biden administration, but they made a lot of progress with some of their policies, and [former Secretary of the Interior] Deb Haaland did so much work to bring traditional ecological knowledge into the fray when it came to policy. I do have hope that, regardless of what happens with the administration, if it’s not federal agencies, then state agencies can play support roles for nonprofits, tribes, and burning networks to start implementing these things. I don’t know if it’s possible to implement such focused, specific ecological tending on a national level. It needs to be on a local level, with people who know their ecosystems. — Selby
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is gathering enough strength to potentially reach Category 5 status as the cyclone tracks northward toward Florida and the Bahamas • Up to six storms are barreling toward the Pacific Northwest, threatening flooding from up to six inches of rain on Saturday • Parts of South Africa’s coast are roasting in temperatures above 109 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Department of the Interior unveiled a package of executive actions opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and mining exploration, a controversial move that fulfills a decades-long ambition for industry. The decision marks what The New York Times described as “the latest twist in a long-running fight over the fate of the refuge’s coastal plain, an unspoiled expanse of 1.56 million acres that is believed to sit atop billions of barrels of oil but is also a critical habitat for polar bears, caribou, migratory birds, and other wildlife.” During his first term, in 2017, President Donald Trump signed a tax bill that required two oil and gas leases in the area, but the Biden administration later blocked those leases. “From day one, President Trump directed us to unlock Alaska’s energy and resource potential while honoring commitments to the state and local communities,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. “By reopening the Coastal Plain and advancing key infrastructure, we are strengthening energy independence, creating jobs and supporting Alaska’s communities while driving economic growth across the state.”
The Trump administration has made industrializing the northernmost frontier state a key priority, approving a mining road though pristine forested lands and taking an equity stake for the federal government in the company aiming to extract minerals in the region. But the Environmental Protection Agency also yanked funding meant to help reinforce infrastructure in Alaska Native villages against warming-fueled floods, dismissing the money as left-wing ideologically driven “diversity, equity, and inclusion” spending, as I wrote in this newsletter. Those very communities were devastated by a typhoon earlier this month, displacing residents, with evacuees struggling to adjust to life in Alaska’s “concrete jungles,” the Northern Journal reported.
Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer has a big scoop this morning: Geoengineering startup Stardust Solutions is set to announce that it has raised $60 million in venture capital to develop the tools needed to artificially cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from Earth. The company, led by a team of Israeli physicists, aims to spray aerosols into the atmosphere that will bounce energy from the sun back into space to balance out the effects of greenhouse gases. The technology is on track to be ready by the end of the decade. Lowercarbon Capital led the funding round, which is the company’s second, following a $15 million seed round in 2024. Rob’s story offers a measured assessment of the dangers of potentially geoengineering the atmosphere — and the threat of failing to do so when efforts to mitigate emissions are so far from where they need to be to preserve the climate norms in which humans evolved as a species. In a line that harkens to one of my favorite books, journalist Charles C. Mann’s environmental history of the global trade network that developed after Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas called 1493, Rob notes that “the Earth has not been free of human influence for millennia,” and that “the world has over and over again been remade by human hands.”
“Stardust may not play the Prometheus here and bring this particular capability into humanity’s hands,” Rob writes. “But I have never been so certain that someone will try in our lifetimes. We find ourselves, once again, in the middle of things.”
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Rivian, the maker of luxury electric trucks and SUVs, slashed more than 600 employees, representing nearly 4.5% of its roughly 15,000-person workforce, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. “These are not changes that were made lightly,” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said in an email to staff. “With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions.” The cuts were meant to help “profitably scale” the business as it prepares to launch its new R2 midsize SUV.
The move comes as electric automakers reel from the Trump administration’s elimination of the federal electric vehicle tax credit. Tesla, as I reported here yesterday, posted a nearly 40% drop in profits on Wednesday afternoon as the company lowered prices to keep costs to customers in line with what federal write-offs previously made possible. But as Andrew Moseman wrote in Heatmap, the lower prices came with stripped-down features.
The U.S. government has backed a new billion-dollar fund to invest in critical minerals along with the New York-based Orion Resource Partners and Abu Dhabi’s ADQ. The investment vehicle, dubbed the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, was announced Thursday with support from the federal International Development Finance Corp. The funding totals more than $1.8 billion, Bloomberg reported.
This is just the Trump administration’s latest foray into mining. The Department of Defense took the largest stake earlier this year in MP Materials, the only active rare earths producer in the U.S. Since then, the administration has taken stakes in other critical minerals projects, and considered similar ownership positions in companies developing rare earths in Greenland.
VC Summer, the project to build Westinghouse’s state-of-the-art AP1000 reactor in South Carolina, became such a financial boondoggle, utility executives went to jail; The final defendant was sentenced just last year. Yet the project — widely mocked as a billion-dollar hole in the ground — may end up built after all. Utility Santee Cooper officially notified regulators this week that it plans to execute a contract to restart the project.
The announcement, part of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear dealmaking boom,” came the same day Canada’s government put up $2 billion to back a small modular reactor project in Bowmanville, Ontario. The progress north of America’s border on new reactor technologies has drawn attention from potential Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S. When New York City mayoral contender Zohran Mamdani expressed support for building new reactors in the state during this week’s debate, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego — widely discussed as a possible White House seeker — responded to the news in a post on X: “I am all for Nuclear power in this country but it would be quicker and cheaper to buy into the Ontario plant being built and coming online by 2030.”
Mining giant Fortescue has made a breakthrough. In its latest earnings call with investors Thursday, the Australian giant said it planned to replace the trucks that carry its ore with electric alternatives. “We’re not doing this because we don’t think our total cost of ownership is going to be less,” Fortescue CEO Dino Otranto said in a statement. “Of course, we’re doing it because of that.”