uh so since you guys all know about fire i thought i'd just give a quick introduction background on to how it relates to water resources so when fires burn in watersheds particularly ones that people rely on for drinking water resources you can have some pretty significant impacts and they can be both physical and chemical so when vegetation burns it uh changes um our ability for soil to retain and mitigate um precipitation events so water flow and systems which ultimately lead to changes in hydro uh oh sorry post lunch brain for it there um changes to our stream flow records and events it also leads to mass soil loss in some cases some occasions with soil not being held down by vegetation and with chemical changes happening to soil to make it more hydrophobic so you get physical changes to water you get a lot of water quality changes so soil erodes off into water bodies you can experience pretty high levels of turbidity or suspended solids carbon nitrogen and phosphorus loads which can in turn impact dissolve oxygen levels which in some of these watersheds they manage not only for water supply or source water protection but also for um maintaining endangered aquatic species habitat and then finally just commenting on you know when fires do come through watersheds used for water resources purposes you can have other implications for human infrastructure and so you can have large debris washed down into reservoirs or block streams or intakes you can have large volumes of sediment runoff potentially filling smaller or even larger sized water supply reservoirs clogging water intakes etc and the problem here in the pacific northwest that we're trying to address is the fact that especially west of the cascades there hasn't been a you know frequent fire history for these water managers to look back on to understand how their water quality and quantity might change um with an increase in fire frequency or severity in their source watersheds and so this needs assessment is really focused on trying to help them um develop better data and tools to make some of these decisions so what we have been doing prior to this needs assessment was working with a nsf-funded project let out of university of idaho but in collaboration with university of nevada wsu uw and uc santa barbara this is the fire earth project it is essentially a modeling framework project that couples an ecohydrologic biogeochemical model rhesus with a water and soil erosion model wep and a fire spread in effects model to better understand how at the watershed scale fire impacts not only the environment or the the watershed characteristics but also uh what types of impacts these might have on the communities that rely on them and so this modeling framework that encompasses a lot of different aspects about what we care about water quality runoff soil erosion phosphorus carbon and nitrogen this project has been wrapping up it's in its final stages and we had the opportunity to chat with them about you know where they might want to take this modeling work that they've done uh after the project ends and one of the directions was to potentially help these water utility managers who manage uh forested resources and drinking water for millions of people in the pacific northwest and so uh for our small needs assessment right we are interested in just working with water managers to understand what types of data output or tools they need to help them more effectively manage fire and fire risk in their watersheds and in doing so we're really hoping to better understand um how we can potentially move some of the awesome work being done by the fire earth project into a domain where water utility managers or other water resource managers can actually use that information to make better decisions and so this project has four components i'm only going to talk about the focus group sessions since that's uh the majority of the work that we've done to date here and so our focus group um was essentially meeting with 12 different water providers across british columbia washington and oregon 12 providers had customer bases that totaled to about 6 million people and so that's that's directly talking with people who manage water supplies for about six million people in the pacific northwest so with each of these water providers we sat down and we discussed what their current concerns are regarding wildfire we talked about what type of management strategies they're using to predict or prevent wildfire events or respond to fire events and then we also tried to have a detailed conversation about what type of management needs they had particularly related to whatever types of data or information or resources would be most valuable to them when they try to make decisions about wildfire risk or response and whether or not a decision support tool that could kind of pull together various types of information and help them play around with different burn severity scenarios and different examine the impacts of different pre-fire management actions how valuable that would be to them and so i'm just going to step through sort of a synthesis of each one of those um questions that we tackled with these these 12 providers with the first one being their concerns and this is just well the the questions i have listed up on this slide are representative across all 12 of those water providers and i think they really reflect not only that information deficit these managers are operating within but the diversity of issues that they're also trying to grapple with so not only where are fires most likely to occur in their watershed how can they detect them earlier or faster what types of pre-emitted pre-fire mitigation actions would be most effective for them since they can be costly um and what kind of water quality changes could they expect um from low or high severity burns or burns in different areas and what i did was kind of group some of these concerns into what i consider biophysical concerns or institutional concerns and uh just starting with the biophysical some water providers were really concerned about forest health and post-fire recovery um they were really interested in how their forest ecosystems would change after fires especially given climate change impacts you know would they see the same species return would they see invasives return would they lose diversity what would this mean for water retention and water quality all utilities were concerned about water quality parameters in particular turbidity but also nitrogen phosphorus and total organic carbon and then we had many of these participants these water utilities talking about concerns over infrastructure production reservoirs being filled with sediment intakes being clogged or completely buried and the fact that some of the watersheds that they're managing are really quite large and so how do you deal with some of these concerns given the size and relative lack of access into these watersheds that they um that they have from an institutional perspective there is a lot of talk about how uh in many cases these watersheds weren't owned solely by the water provider and so what it means to have to manage for fire with other state private or federal agencies there's a lot of interesting talk about the risks of not just natural ignitions but human human ignitions particularly since a fair number of these watersheds were not closed to the public but open for recreation so camping hiking etc not that this wasn't a concern in basins that were closed and had illegal trespassers too and then they commented about how it can be difficult to try and address wildfire issues if you don't have strong public and political support behind you especially given that some of these are public entities in that this lack of information in general makes it really hard to determine what they are going to do in the short and long term particularly with regards to spending money on capital investments or other expensive management options so when we talked about what types of management they were actively doing around wildfire and water quantity or quality you know we had 12 different utilities and so we had a lot of variability in their responses but i kind of took all of those comments and tried to come up with some i guess commonalities between them and uh basically what i could parse out is that your management response was in some way related to these sort of four categories your constitute your amount of constituent support the capital you have available your system knowledge and the degree of ownership that you have within a watershed and so constituent support as i was saying before um you know having the public and your politicians behind your efforts to uh help think about and manage for wildfire were critically important so those that did have support um were able to make more clear management decisions or or at least be thinking about how to deal with wildfire those that were larger so that served more people and had more income also had the human and capital human and financial capital to think about wildfire more concretely so these are utilities that have you know forest or watershed managers that have the capacity to collect data and install better monitoring you know stream uh water quality monitoring throughout their basin collect soil samples monitor forest health uh check on fuel loads more regularly than smaller utilities or ones that don't have the that capital and that in turn really um impacted the system knowledge that these different utilities had so those that had more capital and more support generally had better system knowledge so a better understanding of their watershed and the dynamics within it which also impacted what types of management responses they were able to enact um but then i think degree of ownership was one of the more interesting things that we um discovered in these focus groups and i'm showing the clackamas river watershed here as an example um it's a watershed that supplies thousands of people and it's owned by at least five major different entities ranging from tribal to federal to private to state and the degree to which you can make a decision when a fire occurs in one portion of the watershed is dependent on who is making that decision and so for a water utility who is drawing water from the upper portions of the watershed they talked a lot about how they either have to coordinate or make sure that water quality is a priority when fire when um the land management entity is responding to fire in that area and so from these you know wide and very different management strategies uh i just put up a couple that i thought were interesting that um participants noted so all of them seem to be interested in actively pursuing some way to draft language about fire risk and resilience into their operating or um management plans and so sometimes this was pretty vague just to kind of acknowledge that it happens but sometimes it's trying to be more specific some that had more uh capital to burn uh had already invested in modeling projects some one in particular had already had um interactions with the watershed erosion prediction project model the one that uh fireeth was already using to look at various impacts that fire might have on water quality or forest health for those that owned large portions of their watershed they were already talking about what they're doing to invest in fuel management or fire detection whether it's with new technology infrared cameras or drones to detect fires or how they're planning um to implement thinning or gut blocks within their watersheds to help prevent the spread of fire uh but then for the ones that didn't own large portions of their watersheds they were really working to or were interested in building partnerships with those other land management entities particularly to get source water protection higher up on a priority list in some cases when fires do occur and then to also better participate in the network or chain of command that happens when people decide make decisions about pre or current or post-fire management and so for the third part when we talk to them about what you know information or data they would need to make better decisions unilaterally they all said that they would love to have more information on how to monitor climatic and biophysical conditions at their specific watershed scale that could help inform fire risk and monitoring and this was important both to folks who did own large portions of their watershed and folks who didn't so they're really interested in being able to dig down and look at where in their watershed areas might be more at risk for fire and how to look for early fire detection um again it was kind of split between those who owned portions of their watershed and those who didn't really own best portions but in general again all water utilities that we talked to agreed that both um having data that could help with pre-fire mitigation or post-fire understanding post-fire impacts would be important and so you know that's again understanding what portions of the watershed are at risk where different management strategies pre-fire could be most effective based on modeling scenarios and then post-fire what parts of the watershed they should really be concerned about or what levels of water quality um would be impacted based on different types of fire or burn scenarios and so this is my last slide and it's just to say you know we're not done with this needs assessment but hopefully what we're going to be able to do is help these utilities produce better information not only for themselves but for communicating risks to the public and politicians which in turn can help them develop these short and long-term goals that can better incorporate fire and fire impacts and help them coordinate with the other entities that they need to to to respond to fires and manage forests in a way that meets all of their their goals so i'll stop there and open up for questions thank you very much julie uh i think one of the the goals of this is to um identify some topics that maybe are not as heavily covered in some of the other uh wildfire discussions that have been going on in the pacific northwest i think several of you had mentioned over the last six months that the interactions between fires and water management were an area of opportunity so julie thanks for laying out uh several aspects of that that space are there some questions that anybody has any of this yeah this is uh joe here um so julie we i think we're all used to seeing like in your last slide i think i see a a helicopter with a bucket of something yeah um fire retardants um they are i guess found to be useful uh maybe there's debate about how useful they are in forest fires but what are the environmental fates and specifically about uh water quality issues with use of fire retardants in this is there any uh in in fire fighting strategy is there any uh information systems that affect how and where they use those yeah that's super interesting so i didn't put it up there and i realized as i was going through that that i didn't put retardance on there but that was an issue a water quality indicator of concern for a lot of utilities and especially those that don't own their source watersheds so you know other entities might be um have the highest priority of just you know getting that fire out and they'll use retardants to do so but you know being in communication to you know at least to make the the responding entity aware of you know well you know it's it's really near our drinking water reservoir or our water intake and can we be strategic about how we do this so i mean i think there's a lot of issues with that and i know that they'd be very interested in that being a topic of con of um investigation and where they're studying and i mean i don't know anything about what they use and where it goes i would think that there's some potential that when you dump this stuff on a fire that a certain amount of it goes into the air which you know an air quality perspective i don't know that that's significant but it might be interesting yeah i never thought of that i don't i don't know what they use yeah yeah okay thanks yup thanks uh katie any questions yeah yeah i just wanted to one point out the hand raised feature with a big group like this it might be helpful um if if the either the julie or jonathan wants to you know proctor it or whatever but those of you if you need help finding it um let me know you click on participants and bring up the participant page and then you see a little raised hand but anyways um i could say a few things about fire retardant it's um i believe ammonia phosphate it used to be at least ammonium phosphate and so it's a it's got a high nitrogen level in it and um a lot of the forest systems that it gets put on are very low in nitrogen and phosphorus and so they tend to take it up pretty quickly once the system kind of revives but if it's put directly in the water it's really toxic to fish so that's what i know thanks for those people in here probably no more the joys of a large group are there some others who have been looking at water issues i know andres is going to talk a little bit about something he also has his hand raised yeah hi julie had a question um about the clackamas we have a a project that is wrapping up in that area and here's what the larger fire earth project findings were related to the biophysical side of the project as well as with the management we are in touch with many of the managers there and we are conducting a simulation under of fire spread on their future climate scenarios there and i was again wondering if there was info to read about the other sides of the project in that particular watershed that's awesome and i think some of the providers i talked to had mentioned the project that you're working on um and we're very excited about it uh i you know went through these really fast and one thing i did not clarify was that the fire earth project isn't directly involved with this um so they are focused on a couple watersheds in i think idaho and then also with seattle public utilities so they're not they're not actually exploring all of these different watersheds um but the idea is that you know perhaps they can make their modeling tool available to help these other places and so this needs assessment is trying to identify what it would need to potentially incorporate or focus on to do that so they haven't focused on the clackamas um but i'm sure they'd be interested in knowing what you guys are doing julie do you know are there some public health people that are looking at the water quality issues associated with fire in terms of ways to to measure health impacts or alert people to them um you know that might be a better question for the group one of my in co-investigators amanda hohner is she is a faculty in civil and environmental engineering and her expertise is on drinking water quality uh post-fire for water utilities but she addresses it more from like a treatment and chemical perspective and not so much from a health perspective but if anybody you know does focus on that that would be awesome to know maybe not other other questions for julie or other issues that uh this presentation brings up that that you'd like to raise with the group i see christopher bone has a hand up yeah hi julie thanks for your presentation um quick question about you were talking about the different management strategies i think you had there in brackets of um you know thinning fire breaks was there uh much variability amongst the utilities with what they were talking about as useful potential strategies and specifically is you know did you get a sense that when you were talking about government and public support were certain types of strategies receiving more like you know prescribed burn for example yeah you're so i mean was there was there something that came up in conversation around what was you know sort of oh you know being accepted more by government and the public yeah that's an interesting question so prescribe burns definitely off the table um uh you know it could be helpful in some cases but um generally people don't like seeing the smoke um i think some people did talk about uh slash pile burning um but i don't remember that that was something that a lot of utilities mentioned they more mentioned um fire breaks and and thinning as potential options but again they just you know they talked about how those could potentially help but again they it's really hard to get into some of these watersheds and so and expensive to do so and so where you choose to do that you have to be really strategic especially if you're spending uh taxpayer dollars to do so um so you know i we didn't we didn't go into too much depth on that but um definitely things that didn't involve burning things were there better options i think or the ones that they were considering more heavily thank you yep uh werner you have a question you know just following up on that i mean one of the concerns we have is that these treatments are um possible but it's a probabilistic outcome right you can implement the treatment and your watershed can still burn down or you can do nothing and the watershed doesn't burn down so are there any examples of where treatments have been applied in these watersheds and have actually say reduce the fire risk or at least the burn severity is are there any documented examples of this having been successful that you are aware of oh boy um that's getting into the nitty gritties and i don't 100 remember but i can dig through our report out on that and um if i do find something i can share it with you if that would be helpful that would be very helpful because i mean where this wildfire and carbon project that we're just starting in british columbia this is one of the big issues right you're you're trying to convince the taxpayer to invest heavily into fuel reduction strategies whether that's in watersheds or elsewhere to protect communities and values at risk but there isn't a one-to-one correlation between investment and and outcome because it's all about probabilities right so that's that's and that causes a huge communication challenge as well to the public and to the decision makers i know uh werner there was one example that we talked about a lot in the nature conservancy in arizona in uh the town of sholo which it had uh their forest service and nature conservancy have done a lot of thinning around the city around the town i think it's about 10 000 people and then a big fire came through about four or five years later and went completely around the city and left it alone so something like that you could put a financial value on and certainly a human value on there may be some other cases that's the one i'm most familiar with i'll follow up with you jonathan on that that would be great thank you and thanks for the nice presentation julie yeah thank you guys great okay uh so uh and again this this will be available online uh all these presentations will once i figure out how to do that