We move now, though, to the Wildfire Recovery and Resilience Summit taking place at Encore.

Its organizer, Desert Research Institute, describes the event as a, quote, call to action for the urgent need to accelerate the transformation toward resiliency.

Here now to elaborate on that need as well as the summit itself is Tamara Wall, Deputy Director of the Western Regional Climate Center at DRI; and Marybel Batjer, Former President of the California Public Utilities Commission and a DRI Foundation Trustee.

Thank you both for joining Nevada Week.

And I want to start out by trying to localize this.

Tamara, if Nevada were to accelerate its efforts for wildfire protection, where should it start?

(Tamara Wall) I think we've spent a lot of time and effort and resources historically focusing on wildfire suppression and fuel mitigation.

But I think as we move into a hotter, drier climate, we really need to also focus very much on community resiliency.

And so I think for Northern Nevada, we have a lot of communities in Northern Nevada where we have undeveloped ravines that go deep into urban core.

And so we have a lot of risk to homes and often very high-density homes in those areas.

So I think our low-hanging fruit, so to speak, is really about ember intrusion and trying to make those homes more resilient to ember intrusion.

-Ember intrusion is?

-Ember intrusion is-- so what we have, what we often have in Northern Nevada because we have a grassland fuel complex is we get a lot of embers in the air, and so they can all be whirling maelstroms of embers.

And so if you get an ember into a dwelling, it is-- that is usually how the dwelling burns down.

And so attic vents, soffit vents, getting into insulation is one of the more common pathways.

Even simple things like sofa cushions on your outdoor patio furniture can ignite and then ignite the outside of the house and then cause the house to burn down.

-I'm going to ask you about where Southern Nevadans should start in that area ahead, so think of that.

But first, Marybel, there is an NPR article from March of this year.

In it, Michael Wara of Stanford says his research shows too few utilities in the West are adopting simple solutions that greatly reduce the chance of igniting a wildfire.

Do you agree?

(Marybel Batjer) Not entirely, although Dr. Wara is a very dear friend and is extremely wise.

But I think it's a combination of things and what the mitigation costs where the different utilities are.

There's some things that are less expensive to the rate payer, which is all of us, that are approved by the different public utilities commissions throughout the West, such things as weather stations and sensors.

There's reclosers that can turn off the electricity very quickly.

Those things have been utilized by the utilities for, oh, probably about '08, '07-'08 when the San Diego area experienced terrible fires, and they have progressed.

We've progressed into more expensive type of mitigation efforts, such as undergrounding the electrical wires, such as what we call hardening or covered conductors.

That's literally covering the electrical lines.

And then also, very expensive but very important, vegetation management that goes to some of the things that Tamara just mentioned.

-So those are all, would you say, simple in your opinion, except-- -Those are-- some of the earlier ones I mentioned, the weather stations and some of the sensors, those are, those are less expensive.

Vegetation management, covered conductors, and undergrounding, much more expensive.

I'll give you an example.

In California when I was president the California Public Utilities Commission, the first wildfire mitigation plans, which is a three-year cycle, was for the three major investor-owned utilities, IOUs, it was a total of $5 billion.

Now, for the most part, that's ratepayer money.

The next three-year cycle, 25 billion.

I asked just this week what it was at now.

It's 28 billion.

That's unsustainable.

We have to find new economics.

But then there's also other things that are really expensive to the public health and to the communities, and that's like power shutoffs, PSPS.

And, here in Nevada, they call it Public Safety Outage Management, and that's when the utility cuts off the electricity due to red flag warnings and other weather events that could ignite a fire.

Those are expensive.

Public health is at stake, both if the fire is to spread and whether you have a medical necessity to have electricity.

Things like that have to be seriously considered.

-And we saw that with the Gold Ranch Fire recently, up north.

Anything you want to add to that, because you are in the social science.

And so, impacts of something like that?

-Well, evacuations are really very hard on people.

We lost one house.

We were very fortunate to only lose one house in that event.

I think the other is air quality, and that's important for Southern Nevada as well, and for people to think about how they can manage the indoor air quality during wildfire events, particularly when it combines in Southern Nevada with other air quality issues, like ozone and, you know, having air filters, making sure seals on windows and doors are good, knowing how to put--if you have an HVAC system--knowing how to put the fan on circulation mode.

Those can all really help improve indoor air quality during these events.

-I think our viewers, our Southern Nevada viewers, are probably saying, Well, most of the fires happen in Northern Nevada, so why should I be concerned?

But will you explain why they should be.

-Smoke travels.

It can go very far, and it can still have huge impacts.

-Do you think people are well aware of the health impacts that air quality due to wildfire can have?

-I don't think so.

I think we're becoming more aware of the dangers of poor quality of air.

I think some of that awareness came when the Eastern United States was covered in smoke last summer from the terrible Canadian fires.

And there was an awareness of how-- that fires are burning thousands of miles from here--hundreds of miles, maybe thousands--and why are we experiencing this terrible air pollution?

And I think a lot of-- at the time, it was the first time I really thought there was a more larger population awareness of how dangerous the air quality can be.

-Is there something when you tell people about air quality and how dangerous it can be that surprises them?

Perhaps a certain population that is impacted?

-I think it's very dangerous for the elderly and children, right, for the pediatric population.

I don't think we have a good handle on how repeated high-level particulate counts, poor air quality, impacts children over successive years as they develop, as we have-- increasingly, we're having poor air quality events time after time, and these are often very, very high particulate counts.

-And are these children who already have respiratory issues?

-It's not my area of expertise, but I would say yes.

You know, particularly when you get into areas like the Central Valley of California or areas like Southern Nevada where we're already struggling with air quality, I think adding this type of particulate load on top of that can be very-- could be very high risk.

-Okay.

The description of this summit says that it will, quote, challenge delegates to confront barriers to change.

Are those barriers money-based?

-Not all.

Some are scientific.

Some are money-based.

I feel very strongly that we have to deal with the economics of wildfire mitigation, in particular, and the impacts it has on the cost, impacts it has on the general public throughout the country, but, yes, here in Nevada as well as in California and the Western United States that are all dealing with very difficult wildfire risks.

But I think that there are conversations that the different communities that deal with wildfire prevention, wildfire mitigation, resiliency, post-fire, that we want to have some cross-pollination, if you will, and have those discussions take place in an atmosphere where you can also think of and maybe realize some goals, some objectives, some things that have not been, maybe not quite the third rail, but have not been thoroughly discussed in an open forum where you can develop those kind of solutions.

-When you say "economics," are you talking about how efforts are funded by taxpayers, or are you talking about the economic impacts post-wildfire?

-Well, both.

And in terms of the wildfire mitigation efforts, those are ratepayers.

And, yes, ratepayers are taxpayers, too, for the most part.

So these are just terribly difficult costs, as I mentioned earlier, but the resiliency and the recovery-- I mean, look at Maui.

Lahaina will never be fully rebuilt.

Look at the displacement of people and community and things like that.

How do you put a value on that?

How do you put a price tag on that?

-Can an area be prepared for that, though?

-We're getting smarter.

Unfortunately, we're getting smarter because we're getting experience, and that's a real problem.

-When you think of the biggest barriers to change in this wildfire space, what do you think of?

-There are really big barriers with, of course, economics, with funding these things, but I think one of our biggest barriers is just we, you know, human beings have a tendency to do as we do.

We have, you know, our ways of doing business and we have these patterns, and they've become habits.

And that's just how we do things.

When you build houses in a subdivision, you connect them all with a wooden fence, right?

And that wooden fence, how that connectivity between your house, which may catch on fire in a wildfire, and my house, it actually creates a pathway for that fire.

So there's lots of opportunities here, and there's lots of ways that we could just build differently that I don't think would cost huge amounts of money but would make, would potentially have impact at scale.

And really, that's the challenge.

As we go back, trying to retrofit existing homes and building new homes is, you know, how do we have impact at scale so that when wildfire comes into a community, it moves through the community, but the damage is recoverable and not insurmountable.

I think the idea that we can keep wildfire out of our communities is that's a fading hope.

So we have to decide how we're going to live with wildfire moving through our communities periodically.

-Okay.

I want to talk about insurance rates for the state of Nevada and Nevada homeowners.

The Insurance Commissioner for the state recently told the interim legislature that there has been a, quote, rapid escalation, end quote, of insurance companies in the state canceling home insurance policies because of wildfire risk.

What should the state be doing?

-Well, there are some examples that they could utilize.

None of them are easy, and they're all expensive.

In California, Fair Share was created.

It's essentially a government funded--not entirely, but partially--fund that in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 areas, which are the highest fire danger areas as mapped by California CAL FIRE, the California fire agency.

So going by those maps, Tier 3 and Tier 2 areas are almost uninsurable now.

And there have been many, and I won't name names, but many of the largest insurance companies have pulled out.

And there's been legislation in this last year to incentivize those companies being back in California.

The Insurance Commissioner has been at the forefront of that, as well as the governor.

I think Nevada could maybe go to school on California in terms of-- and I know they are looking at a fund, as you mentioned, but it's a tough one.

It's a tough one, and we all need to be concerned about it.

But we also need to be concerned about how we build communities in these very high-risk areas and how we allow building to be done in those high-risk areas and how we permit it.

All of those things.

And we hope to be addressing some of them in this conference that DRI is wisely putting on.

And those are some of those tough things that we need to talk about.

We need to try and find resolution.

-When we talk about delegates in that description, who are these delegates that you think should be at this summit, and are they, in fact, attending?

-I think they are attending.

And unlike a lot of wildfire summits, I don't think the people that need to come are necessarily fire practitioners.

Our fire managers, our, you know, our land use managers on public lands.

I think the people who need to be at this summit are landscape designers, urban planners.

To Marybel's point, we really need to think how, not only how do we design new parts of our communities, but how do we retrofit the existing parts.

Because that is the huge behemoth task in front of us.

It's how do we retrofit existing homes, existing properties, and infrastructure.

You know, our roadways, our water supply system, our schools, our municipalities, our buildings, how do we protect those from wildfire events?

-How easy is that to get done?

-Really, really difficult.

It's extraordinarily challenging.

And that's one of the things I hope we can start to talk about, because often I don't think the right-- there's not this-- insurance people have insurance conferences, right?

Utilities people have utilities conferences.

And what we're trying to do here-- you know, fire people have fire conferences.

-Water people have water conferences.

-Right.

So we're trying to create a convening space that allows all of these different people to come together and really talk about the synergies between these different tasks.

Where are there co-benefits to retrofitting that would ripple across all of these different sectors that will help perhaps then begin to justify the cost?

-Are you happy with who is attending this conference?

-Yeah, we are.

And this is, this is our first out of the box.

And I'm very excited about the many speakers that we have and the delegates that have come.

We'll be here.

So, yes, I think it's terrific.

And I'm very proud of DRI for putting this on.

And DRI is renowned, and it was wonderful for me to make calls out to people and hear how many people were excited because it was DRI.

-I want to wrap up about the Extreme Heat and Wildfire Smoke in Nevada project.

So that's combining wildfires and extreme heat.

How do they go together?

What are the concerns there?

-So the project is starting in Northern Nevada, and we hope to extend it into Northern California as well, and then to Central Nevada.

And so it's looking at-- so it's what we call a compounding hazard.

So oftentimes in these regions we have extreme heat--not as hot as it gets in Las Vegas, but it's still very hot--combined with wildfire smoke.

And many people in Northern Nevada and Northern California do not have HVAC systems.

They rely on swamp coolers, which I know everybody here is familiar with.

Unfortunately, unlike an HVAC system, swamp coolers are terrible at filtering particulate.

They're just awful.

So in Northern Nevada, you often have people who have to make these trade-offs between cooling their home to livable levels or filling it with wildfire smoke.

And so we don't really understand the trade-off decisions that people are making and what those decision pathways look like.

So this project is an effort to take biophysical measurements, to take in situ, in-home measurements both inside and outside of air quality and temperature and then do surveys with the residents that have volunteered to be a part of the study to understand how they make those trade-offs and what are the relevant barriers for them.

-Thank you both so much.

-Thank you for having us.

-Thank you.