Latest news with #DixieFire
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Rebuilding made easier: Butte County releases free ADU and small home plans
( — Years after devastating wildfires tore through Butte County, many families are still struggling to rebuild. However, a new initiative launched by the county aims to make that process easier and more affordable. Butte County has introduced a set of free, pre-approved building plans for small homes and accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The plans are part of a broader effort to support wildfire survivors and address the region's ongoing affordable housing crisis. 'We have had numerous wildfires here. We've had layered disasters for years,' said Paula Daneluk, the county's Director of Development Services. It's been nearly six years since the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, four years since the North Complex Fire and three years since the Dixie Fire. Combined, the fires destroyed more than 23,000 structures across the county, leaving a long and difficult path to recovery. 'Affordable housing is an issue not just in Butte County, but across the state,' Daneluk said. According to the 2024 Affordable Housing Needs Report, more than 8,000 low-income renter households in Butte County lack access to affordable housing. Repeated wildfires have only made the crisis worse by driving up housing costs and reducing supply. 'Obviously, we do not have enough affordable housing, and the goal is that we have a house for everybody who needs one,' Daneluk said. To help meet that goal, the county made three free building plans available for small homes and ADUs, which are secondary units that can be built on the same lot as an existing single-family home. 'These plans were designed specifically to be affordable,' said Daneluk. 'They are an opportunity for us to get sticks out of the ground and have units built.' The plans meet all applicable building codes, accessibility requirements, and zoning standards. They were created with input from local designers and are built to allow the use of locally sourced materials. 'When we worked with the designer, that was the direction that was given. That the buildings themselves had to be designed in such a way that all the materials could be locally sourced here in Butte County,' Daneluk said. By offering these plans at no cost, the county estimates residents could save thousands of dollars in architectural and design fees, and potentially months in permitting and planning. 'People don't have to go out and hire an architect and spend all that money,' Daneluk said. 'These are free, ready-to-go-off-the-shelf building plans.' After years of destruction, county officials hope the initiative offers residents a practical path forward. Additional resources for wildfire recovery and rebuilding are available through the Butte County Department of Development Services. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Fired US Forest Service and National Park Service workers say cuts will be felt on fire lines
When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger's station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist. When he wasn't researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a "red-card" carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation. In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures. 'I'm so proud of everything I've done," Flaherty told ABC News. "Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, 'Oh, this fits. I'm running with it. This is me.'" But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end. As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration's sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). "It's absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what's obviously a politically motivated illegal termination," said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn't scheduled to end until November of this year. "I mean, I've got 13 years' worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions." The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS "probationary, non-firefighting employees" were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters. "To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters," USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement. Rollins, according to the USDA statement, "fully supports the President's directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA's many services to the American people." MORE: Here are all the agencies federal workers are being fired from "We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people's hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy," the USDA statement reads. While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is "committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland." But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency's ability to respond to wildfires. Steve Gutierrez, NFFE's national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400. Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as "militias" comprised of trained secondary firefighters. "When a fire breaks out, we're out there like everybody else getting into the fray," Flaherty said. Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service's total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country. 'When I say 'non-fire personnel,' we can't totally think that they don't ever touch fire, that they're not important," Gutierrez said. "They're all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They're either ecologists, they're mechanics, they're pilots, they're water systems operators, they're grants and agreements folks, they're land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire." He added, "They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire." Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago. 'They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA's most devastating wildfires that we've ever had and now they're terminated because they have 'poor performance,'" Gutierrez said. "It's just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it's a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public." MORE: Fired federal workers decry 'arbitrary,' 'haphazard' terminations Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of "fuels management," which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush. "If we're not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that's what's going to happen," Gutierrez said. "It's not going to be just a California problem. It's going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It's not going to stop. It's a national issue." Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he'd have to get his own transportation back to Oregon. "He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it," Flaherty said. Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon. "It's just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn't understand the impacts of what they're doing when they swipe their pen," said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. "They don't understand the complexities of the entirety of the government." Flaherty said the "insult still rings true even though I am back home." 'To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is," Flaherty said. "I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It's harming people's physical and mental well-being, and it's criminal." Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee. 'I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position." Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, "the Valentine's Day massacre." 'You finally get your dream job that you've been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics," said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met. "The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department's current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor)," reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News. "This is a lie. This says I'm fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I'm no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I'm crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function," Anderson said. "It's a bit maddening." MORE: IRS layoffs underway around the country as millions prepare to file taxes A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee. "My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren't getting fired," Anderson said. In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land. "When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river," Anderson said. "By mid-August or so, we're pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires," Anderson said. "A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters." In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California's Siskiyou County. He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades. 'Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that's just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it's important," Anderson said. "I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they're just slashed without any real cause." Fired US Forest Service and National Park Service workers say cuts will be felt on fire lines originally appeared on
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Family-owned company shares secret to multi-generational success: 'You come to some grim realities quickly'
Collins Pine Co., a family-owned timber company based in Chester, California, has operated for over 80 years using an approach that keeps forests healthy for generations, reported the Plumas Sun. The secret? "Live on the interest, don't dip into the principal," says Eric O'Kelley, forest manager for Collins Pine. The company selectively removes weaker trees from its 135,000 acres, giving stronger ones room to grow. It returns to the same areas every 15-20 years, maintaining a natural balance. This method, called uneven-aged management, earned Collins the first Forest Stewardship Council certification in North America. The company's founder, Truman W. Collins, pioneered this approach in 1942 after seeing other timber companies run out of trees. The Chester facility produces 80-100 million board feet of lumber yearly and employs 122 people. "There are always opportunities to walk in off the street and have a career," says former operations manager Murray Caton. These jobs support the local economy while maintaining sustainable forest practices. The company adapted quickly when the 2021 Dixie Fire burned 60,000 acres of its land. "You come to some grim realities quickly," Caton says. Collins is now planting over 1 million trees annually, up from its usual 30,000. It focuses on drought-resistant species, such as ponderosa pine, planted at lower densities to create more resilient forests. "The forest will tell you what will grow," O'Kelley explains. The company stays current with technology too. Modern equipment makes logging safer: the Chester facility recently celebrated its first year without workplace accidents. Its mill uses artificial intelligence to grade lumber quality, boosting efficiency while maintaining its commitment to sustainable practices. Should the government be able to control how we heat our homes? Definitely Only if it saves money I'm not sure No way Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. Collins manages 95,000 acres in its Almanor Forest and 40,000 acres near Westwood. Its lumber reaches markets worldwide, including Japan, though locals can still buy directly from its Chester builder supply store. This mix of global reach and local presence helps maintain a stable business model. The company's success demonstrates smart forest management can build strong local economies. The approach creates jobs, maintains healthy forests, and supplies sustainable wood products. It's showing how businesses can thrive by taking care of natural resources. As O'Kelley puts it, "The best feeling is when you're taking out trees that are weak, giving the mill a good product, but still improving the stand." Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Old picture of burnt cat falsely linked to Los Angeles fires
"Amidst the intense flames, although its eyes and fur burned by the heat of the flames, the cat survived," read part of a Burmese-language Facebook post on January 28, 2025. "Los Angeles fires continue to rage. A cat escaped from flames. Dead animals found in LA park. It's sad to see them like this," the post added. It included two similar pictures of a cat with visible burn injuries sitting on the ground alongside images of a hillside in flames. Similar claims also surfaced in other Burmese-language Facebook posts as massive fires broke out across the United States' second largest city, killing 29 people and destroying more than 10,000 homes (archived link). But a reverse image search on Google, followed by keyword searches, found the photo of the burnt cat earlier published on the Getty Images agency website on November 11, 2018 (archived link). "PARADISE, CA - NOVEMBER 11: A burned cat waits for animal control to arrive after they were called by responders who discovered it near Bille Road in Paradise, Calif., on Sunday, Nov. 11, 2018. Twenty-three people have died so far in the destructive Camp Fire," its caption read. AFP reached out to the photographer Jane Tyska who was credited with taking the picture (archived link). "That is my picture that I shot at the campfire in Paradise, California," she said on January 27. "It is definitely not from the recent Los Angeles fires." The so-called Camp Fire spread quickly and left the northern California town of Paradise choking on floating ash and thick smoke, AFP reported at the time (archived link). A further reverse image search found one of the wildfire pictures shared alongside the burnt cat was also misrepresented. It was a cropped version of a picture published on The Associated Press website on August 18, 2021 (archived link). "In this Aug. 17, 2021, file photo, seen in a long exposure photograph, embers light up hillsides as the Dixie Fire burns near Milford in Lassen County," part of its caption read. The monstrous Dixie Fire, also in northern California, was considered at the time one of the worst in the history of the state (archived link). The last picture in the posts was genuinely taken during the Los Angeles wildfires. It was published in a report from the AP on January 13, 2025 (archived link). AFP has debunked other misrepresented images linked to the recent wildfires.
