EL DORADO COUNTY, Calif. – After burning for 60 days and dropping into the Tahoe Basin within that time, the Caldor Fire reached 100% containment on Oct. 21, 2021, yet work related to the over 220,000 acre fire was far from over.

As a fire consumes a landscape, the events that unfold are often nail-biting as those affected shuffle through news outlets for the latest updates on acres burned, containment numbers and evacuation zones. A larger breath and possibly a sigh of relief follow at the news of 100% containment, and even more when it is controlled.

But what happens to that landscape after the fire is put out?

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Immediately following a fire

There are multiples layers, aspects, and agencies involved in post fire efforts on both private and public lands. Some of the first actions are repairing the damage firefighting efforts do to the land. One example of this is CAL FIRE’s fire suppression repair work after the Caldor Fire. Suppression damage during Caldor included the fire lines that over 60 bulldozers and numerous hand crews placed.

“If you’re at all familiar with the Tahoe Basin that’s not a normal thing to just take heavy equipment and start mowing over vegetation,” CAL FIRE’s Megan Scheeline explained, “but it was for a good cause to try to protect those neighborhoods from something worse that could happen.”

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Scheeline is the Amador-El Dorado unit forester for CAL FIRE and led the agency’s portion of fire suppression repair in the Tahoe Basin after the Caldor Fire. She explained post fire suppression repair as part of a tour during the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force’s Sierra Nevada Regional Meeting in October 2024.

“When a fire’s happening it’s definitely an emergency situation and often, it’s at night,” Scheeline told the Tribune. The Caldor Fire was no exception.

“If you can imagine being an equipment operator, trying to put in a fire line at night while the fire is approaching and you can’t see as well as you could during the day…,” Scheeline said, painting a picture of the environment crews operate in. As a result of the nature of the emergency, sometimes streams are unavoidable and get disrupted by a dozer’s path. This occurred in Caldor Fire suppression efforts at a shallow stream near Mewuk Dr.

Repair efforts used an excavator to clear the sediment out of the stream and reshape the channel so the flow aligned with its original path. Crews also planted riparian vegetation cuttings to promote revegetation and keyed logs into the slope to slow runoff and capture sediment.

On the areas of dozer lines that didn’t involve streams, crews minimized the visual impact by topping those areas with pinecones and branches.

Repair efforts also distributed mulch in areas at risk of erosion. Further erosion mitigations involved installing roughly six inch deep berms, called waterbars, to intercept and slow runoff.

These fire suppression repair efforts focused on protecting water quality, controlling erosion and protecting cultural resources.

While these objectives focus specifically on fixing human caused damage to the land as a result of firefighting efforts, another first step post-fire is mitigating fire caused safety hazards to humans.

On federal lands, Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams do that initial life and safety check.

On the Caldor Fire, this began as early as Sept. 8, 2021 before the entire fire was fully contained. Teams started on the western portion of the fire that had low or no fire activity.

Their assessment included determining areas at risk of erosion and flooding, implementing closures, placing warning signs, felling fire weakened trees, burning stump holes, taking care of damaged utilities and stabilizing recreation facilities, and mopping up hazmat concerns.

Similar steps occur on private lands with the assistance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) removing hazard trees and other hazardous materials. Utility companies also address downed utilities, trees and work to re-establish utilities.

Restoration efforts then build on those efforts, but for the Caldor Fire, there were a couple high priority focus areas immediately following the fire. Those included the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort and the community of Grizzly flats where the Forest Service conducted fuel reduction and hazard tree removal.

Long term restoration with a corrective vision

The charred damage in high severity areas can jar minds to envision a once again green forest. Yet, that long term result of restoration and reforestation is something those alive today may never see.

“In our lifetime, we will have [an] infantile forest out there at best,” USDA Forest Service’s Dana Walsh told the Tribune, “But the hope would be that by the end of our lifetime and really into our grandchildren’s lifetimes that we have established what is becoming a resilient forest.”

The program manager said reforestation efforts target establishing a forest that is resistant to being lost again in a fire.

“A resilient forest would be able to have fire go through it and be able to maintain that canopy cover, be able to maintain seed sources,” she said.

These longer term restoration efforts start by taking in the good with the bad and assessing areas where the fire had beneficial impacts and where it had negative impacts.

“So even a fire like Caldor, where there are some very large tens-of-thousands of acres of high severity patches where all of the trees have been killed,” Walsh said, “there’s also thousands of acres that the fire just creeped through the understory and recycled some nutrients and reduced some fuels.”

According to a rapid resource assessment, the fire burned at a high severity level on approximately 76,000 acres. The total acres burned according to the Forest Service is 221,835.

After making these assessments, the work then turns to determining which areas on these high severity acres align well with re-establishing a forest. Considerations for this include accessibility, whether the area provides important forest habitat and whether a forest can re-establish there.

“There’s also other places that we need to evaluate and potentially change our desired future conditions for,” Walsh explained, “because the fire may have created conditions where we’re just not able to re-establish a forest or that it just doesn’t make sense to, especially given the hotter, drier climate projections that we’re anticipating.”

Along with reforestation success assessments, the service also determines potential areas for watershed restoration.

Another part of the planning is assessing how to manage future fires, which they typically see returning every 10 years.

“And so this re-burn interval is something that we really need to set ourselves up for,” said Walsh.

For the Caldor Fire specifically, recovery efforts have been broken up into two decisions. The first involves reforestation and fuels reduction. The other decision surrounds watershed recovery actions and longer term recovery processes.

The Forest Service is currently working through public comments on a draft environmental document for the project, while providing initial implementation in some areas. The Caldor Fire Restoration Project overview and details are available on the Forest Service’s website.

A new wave of restoration on private lands

The Caldor Fire along with the Tamarack and Dixie Fires brought in a new wave of recovery efforts.

Resource conservation districts found many small private forestland owners were often uncertain how to manage their lands after wildfire, lacking expertise, contractors and funds to rehabilitate their lands.

These private non-industrial landowners own 7 of 32 million acres, just over 20% of forestland in California. Further, 90% own 50 acres or less and 75,000 own 10 acres or more.

So, in stepped a pilot program of Emergency Forest Restoration Teams (EFRTs) to help address these landowners’ needs. Regional resource conservation districts initiate these teams after receiving funds and do the work on behalf of the private landowners.

The work involves rapidly assessing and implementing post-wildfire restoration on these private lands similar to the post-fire work done on public lands.

“It entails removing all the hazardous trees,” Bennett Quidachay, El Dorado County RCD Project Manager-Forestry, explained to the Task Force’s tour group, “all the standing snags, hazards, processing those, piling and burning all the non-merchantable material, processing all the trees and brush that may be coming up or that are left over, and then doing the associated site prep on their parcels.”

This site prep paves the way for planting and includes subsoiling or soil ripping for optimal growing conditions for the seeds and doing vegetative competition control.

Once the seeds are planted, teams then monitor how the seeds are growing.

EFRT work can be seen at a well know local ski resort, Sierra-at-Tahoe. Quidachay explained even though this isn’t technically non-industrial private forested land as it’s federal land under a special use permit, it has a lot of private land and community-level implications.

“I learned to ski there,” Quidachay said. “Many people I know learned to ski there. I’ve worked there. So, you can see it’s a big source for the community as an economic driver, as well as just a place for the community to go ski, go recreate.”

The EFRT there harvested 20 million board feet from the mountain, thanks to a new mill, Tahoe Forest Products, and chipped another two million on the mountain. A reforestation plan is also in the works there.

Although these projects can be a tremendous expense, Jim Davies, another forester explaining EFRTs to the Task Force tour group, said. “We owe it to the land, we owe it to the future, and so, this was one way to get that done.”

The innovative strategy has seen numerous successes and numerous other EFRTs have popped up around the state since the pilots.

The three 2021 pilot EFRTs removed dead trees on over 2,500 aces and reforested about 1,400 acres in under three years. But that’s not the only success.

“The timeline is a huge victory,” Susie Kocher told the Tribune, who is forestry advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension and applies research and outreach for private forest landowners.

The EFRTs’ ability to move quickly added to the success. “Because after a fire, time is really of the essence,” Kocher said. The longer the wait, the more time competitive shrubs have to grow back and create more work to prepare the site. “So you have much more success if you’re able to respond quickly.”

EFRTs were negotiated with the Forest Service’s state and private forestry disaster funding and the money moved within three months.

Kocher studied the EFRT model and co-authored a report on their findings, called Emergency Forest Restoration Teams: Lessons From the First Two Years.

A factor that may limit future EFRT responses is funding. They currently don’t have a dedicated and sustained funding source. However, certain block grants may show promise in the future, a future fire has made clear it will be a part of.

“It’s not a mystery that it’s going to happen,” Kocher said.

“It’s been a nice couple of summers where we didn’t have huge fires in our area,” she expressed, “but we do need to continue to think that we have to be ready for future fires.”

One way the cooperative extension is helping landowners prepare for that future is by hosting regional workshops covering post-fire concepts, and resources to restore their lands after wildfires.

Forest and community recovery go hand-in-hand

Often media attention stops after a fire is over, but the story doesn’t end there, something all these land managers, foresters and individuals impacted know.

“It’s still decades later that there’s still recovery going on,” Walsh said. “The forest recovery and community recovery following wildfires is not instant.”

One of the areas hit hardest by the Caldor Fire was Grizzly Flats where a reported two-thirds of the community was destroyed.

That’s where currently both forest recovery and community recovery are happening simultaneously. Walsh told the Tribune the synchronous nature of these recovery efforts are key.

“The community as they start to see trees planted and trees growing in their community, and they start to get to go out and recreate again,” she said, “that’s when those communities start feeling connected and like communities again.”