 Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. My name is Kit Rackles, and I'm a senior editor at ProPublica. Earlier this month, ProPublica, an outside magazine co-published a story by Abe Streep about the numerous challenges YLAN firefighters face, from low pay to mounting health risks that are contributing toward the exodus of YLAN firefighters from the Forest Service, and thinning out America's last line of defense against YLAN fires. And this is happening at a moment when every fire season seems to bring record-setting blazes. Today, we're going to first discuss the Forest Service's retention problem with current and former YLAN firefighters. And then in the second half of the conversation, we're going to examine New Mexico's slow recovery from its biggest ever wildfire, the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon fire in 2022. We have a lot of ground to cover, but we'll do our best to address audience questions. To send us one, just click the Q&A button or icon at the bottom of your Zoom screen and type it there. Now allow me to introduce some of today's speakers. Abe Streep reported the story and is the author of the book Brothers on Three, a true story of family resistance at hope at a reservation in Montana. Ben Elkind is a federal YLAN firefighter entering his 17th season and is a prominent figure in Abe's story. George Broyles is a former YLAN firefighter who led the Forest Service's smoke research program between 2008 and 2014. Ben, I'd like to begin with you first. Can you describe the challenges you face as you enter your 17th season in fire? Yeah, thanks. This will be my 17th year in fire. And I know from the story, my injury was a big prominent part of that. This year, I took a job that's three hours away from where I've been working for the last 10 years. So I left smoke jumping. And I guess the first thing I think about is I've got a family in Redmond and we're actually lucky we don't own a house there. We were just renting because now I've got to move. It's a big move with kids and everything. And the first thing I think about is just a few years ago, the Forest Service, they had a program where they would have bought your house from you and they would have helped you with moving costs. So that's something that employees face now where that's all gone. It's a big benefit. If I owned a medium priced home in Redmond where I live, I mean the fees, just the realtor fees would be upwards of $30,000 plus moving costs. So that's a big barrier that employees face now that wasn't a barrier in years past. And then getting to work, my new position is an assistant crew boss job on a local forest. And so there's a whole crew of people that you're one of the leaders on. And so getting them to come together and ask them to take on dangerous roles throughout the fire season is, it kind of weighs on you. Personally for me and the family, it's a year round job that I have now. So it's 2,000 hour of base work year. Plus if I go on fires, potentially it's, I think the crew average is around 900 hours of overtime. So throwing that out there, it's 2,900 to 3,000 hours or more of work a year where I'm not around my family. That's difficult, childcare is difficult. That's one of the reasons we're moving actually is because I'm from Portland. So it's actually closer to home where my mom could help out with childcare. But yeah, those are all the things I'm thinking of. I know the injury was prominent and we talked a lot about hazard pay and things like that in the way the forest or the way that yeah, the forest service pays people for the work. So it's difficult for me also as a leader on a crew, asking people to do these dangerous roles of cutting trees down or breathing smoke or mopping up with a lot of particulate matter going in their lungs. When I know that there isn't really a system in place to really help them out if they were to get injured on the job, a lot of these people are still temporary employees and they don't even have health insurance if they get laid off or anything. So there's a lot of challenges and I'm happy that I found a good place to go that's closer to home and I'm really lucky to be on the force that I'm at and I was very selective in picking that but there's still a lot of challenges that everybody faces. How much of what Ben just described reflects the overall situation facing wildland firefighters that you discovered and reported on in your story. Yeah, thanks and thanks to everyone for being here. In reporting in the last two years I've talked to a lot of wildland firefighters from all over and people who have struggled with physical injury, struggled with low pay, people who have at times lived in vehicles or camps to do this work as housing prizes in the places where wildland firefighters live have skyrocketed and also the mental health effects of this work, the burdens of this work. So I think that Ben touched on some of those things and a lot of those are some of the prominent storylines in the piece we worked on along with the risk of cancer. And so I think that Ben's story is quite powerful and it's also reflective of a lot of issues that a lot of people are facing in their lives. And one thing that did stand out about in reporting this piece was a fear of talking openly about this, that there's a history of federal wildland firefighters, especially in forest service feeling like they can't, that the agency has earned a reputation for dissuading internal criticism and dissuading people from sharing these things. So as we're at this inflection moment where there's what multiple people refer to as an exodus, I think that that's one of the issues that the agency has to grapple with going forward is how to deal with that and how to deal with, you know, people being wanting to talk openly about it. Kate, you're muted. I apologize. George, I wanted to talk about two things. One is something that you've done a lot of research on and have devoted a lot of time to, which is the health effects of fighting wildfire. But there's a second aspect which also appears in the piece in that Abe just touched on, which is the forest service is extraordinarily slow response to the issue of health effects on wildland firefighters, but slow response on a variety of other things. And curious about sort of why you think they've been so slow. So if you could, it's a two-part question and you can answer it in any order you would like. So... Well, that's good because I already forgot the first part, Kate. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I appreciate being here, the opportunity to be here. And it was wonderful to work with Abe as well. So I appreciate that. And I want to just adjust that question just a bit because the forest service, as far as your slowness to research, and that dates back to 1989, when the National Wildfire Coordinating Group came together and recommended at that time with a bunch of experts that research needed to be done because they understood those experts understood there was an issue there, a concern for cancer and respiratory disease for men and women like Ben that spent their career in the smoke. And they were really slow to pick up on that for a variety of reasons. And Abe asked me, people ask me all the time, how come they haven't done more? And I don't have an answer for that, but let me tell you something. And I'm a proponent of research. I collected over 7,500 hours of exposure data in 17 different states. So that's a critically important, but to a large degree, we're past the point of needing research. There are some valuable research that's being done that we need to do, but the jury is already in, all right? It's absolutely clear that wildland firefighting is a cancer-causing occupation, okay? The data that we collected, the data that prior researchers and academics collected have made that abundantly clear. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. So the international agency for research on cancer, it is the go-to place that determines what occupations cause cancer. And they made that absolutely clear just a couple of years ago. They came out with their determination that occupation exposure as a firefighter causes cancer. Okay, I mean, that's the gold standard, all right? So I think that question has been answered, all right? And another excellent paper, I was actually a part of, but it's the Navarra et al from 2019. I looked at the exposure data we collected, other folks, and there was quite a, there were experts involved in that paper. And I'll just read you some of that, all right? And the abstract, across all exposure scenarios, whether it's a 49 or 98 fire days per year, and Ben does the 98 per year, right? In his previous work, for a career duration of between five and 25 years, we estimated that wildland firefighters were at an increased risk for lung cancer, and that's from 8 to 43% above the general population, and cardiovascular disease from 16 to 30% above the general population. So although there's a place of research, and I'm involved in some of that, the answer is there. We know that this is extremely hazardous occupation. The concern with why the agencies, and not just the Forest Service, but all federal agencies, I think, for most of them, what needed now is action, okay? We have the answer and what they need to take. Am I, okay, this is my opinion, my personal opinion, obviously, but it's based on years of research, and 37 years of working in that environment, is to take some definitive action. And back in 2012, NWCG, that's the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, and they have a risk-managed committee. They asked a group of experts, medical doctors, industrial hygienists, academics, researchers, to provide them with the appropriate exposure limits. In order to keep firefighters safe, what should we be looking at the maximum exposure for their shifts? And that group came together, and I was part of that group, and we came back to the risk management committee, and we said, here are the leverage you need to be monitoring. And that was in 2012. The committee sent out a memo, and that was the end of that, okay? No one has done any more looking. Are we meeting those limits? And I can tell you we're not, based on the research that we've done. Okay, the trend is actually for more exposure, not less exposure. So I think that's really the crux of the issue. Why hasn't anybody, other federal agencies, risk management committees, looked at that and say, we know this is a safe level. That's what we have to try to reach. And without monitoring it, that can't be done, right? And one more note, it's the same risk management committee in January of this year, January of 24. There is a note at their meeting that they're going to, let's say if I find that exactly, they're working on a smoke exposure monitoring study. So this is 12 years later. And my sense from that is that we'll just tell people we're working on it, right? And that's not doing anything. And Ben knows, we in a fire community tend to be action oriented. We want to do something. We want to take action. We want to get things accomplished. And by saying we're going to start monitoring it now, 12 years later, I think it's a disservice to the men and women that are still out there on the fire line. Ben, two questions. One is from an audience member, which is, can respirators be used in fighting wildland fires? And two, which is a broader question coming off what George just talked about, which is why do you think the Forest Service is so slow and has been so slow in responding to the health concerns, in responding to something that we barely touched on, the mental health concerns that numerous wildland firefighters have raised. And of course, this is very complicated and we don't have time to go into bizarre pay structure that you guys have to deal with. But first, let's ask, if you can answer the audience participant's question first, which is about respirators, and then if you could turn to the broader question. Yeah, I'll try to be quick here. Respirators, everybody talks about those. The issue that I see when I was on a hotshot crew or in smoke jumping as well, you're carrying a chainsaw, extra fuel for the saw, your own personal stuff, an extra meal. It ends up being, you can be carrying 70 pounds or more. And so a respirator, even for a structured firefighter with a truck just outside of a building waiting with more air, those things weigh 25 or more pounds, 50 pounds, and they only last 20 minutes, typically. So I would say, on average, a wildland firefighter is probably gonna use that air faster because you're probably breathing heavier, hiking up a hill with all the weight. It's just not practical. If you could do it potentially on a prescribed burn where there's an engine on a dirt road next to you and you could swap out, maybe, but I guess that's how firefighters look at it. It doesn't seem that practical to be doing that outdoors with all the extra weight and the limited time. Thanks for that. Could you go to the larger question, which is why is the fire service been so slow, so unresponsive to these larger concerns? You know, I couldn't answer that. I think if they were, you know, I'm just giving my opinion and I certainly don't have any insights to the bigger policy issues at those levels. I would just guess it's funding. I mean, and we have a diminishing workforce where there's fewer and fewer people with the skills we need and it's costing more and more every year to keep people employed. So I think when you're talking about implementing these programs, it comes at a cost of probably cutting jobs. You know, and even though we have a pretty big churn in the Forest Service where people typically quit within the first three years, I think, especially when a lot of them are attempts. I think that a big issue is just cost, you know, because I've seen other agencies like Cal Fire, they'll have a crew work a shift and they'll take the next shift in a hotel to get clean air and get good rest. But that requires, you know, they have to fill a 20-person hand crew, Cal Fire sending 40 people so they can do A and B shifts on a fire and swapping out. And the Forest Service is sending 20 people to do a 20-person hand crew and you're working every day. So I guess that's how I would, that was my guess, is just simply cost up. Abe, you have some thoughts about the why of this, why the Forest Service has historically been so slow and, you know, in dealing with the kind of things that George talked about and you write about? Yeah, thanks. I mean, I don't think I, I think that's a question I asked a lot of people in the piece. I don't have a clean, simple answer. You know, Tom Harbor in the piece is saying, wondering why it should take, why it would take so long to address the, specifically, some of the, you know, some of the mental health struggles that come with this work. And, and, but I think that like, yeah, I, you know, when it comes to, in 1997, there was a conference in Montana and Missoula, Montana were there talking about the risks of smoke and the long-term health risks of smoke. And as George said, we're sort of, that, so we're at this moment where we're talking about this as a crisis now. And what remains to be seen is if this will, will in fact be a inflection point and there will be change or it will be of a piece with the recent history of, and with the history of the agency, which is a slow moving and a reactive history. So that remains to be seen when I spoke with Jayleth Hall Rivera in the reporting of the piece, the deputy chief for the state, private and travel forestry, she, she talked about the importance of this moment and talked about that this is a chance to address some of these issues. Now, whether that, not that happens remains to be, let's see. And I think that also falls on the public too, to increase all of our understanding about wildfire and to sort of stay on it, you know, to, to, to not let this, these issues become forgotten and invisible again. George, in addition to, you know, the forest service moving now kind of quickly and immediately toward dealing with the health issues, what other changes would you like to see in the agency? I think they really need to be transparent with their employees, okay? I mean, the health obviously the exposure to smoke, exposure to noise is another topic. I spent years researching on wildland firefighters and it's extremely, extremely hazardous. The noise exposure that they're exposed to, I mean, it causes hearing loss, it causes mental decomposition, if you will, on the line. It literally makes it harder to comprehend speech and to think clearly, which is actually critical when you're in that environment. The law, which is very, very clear on what the agencies or employees have to do when folks are exposed to noise and it's not happening. So I think I would like to see the agency, you know, be really, really transparent. They had a small publication, I believe, put out a few years ago talking to people that wanted to become firefighters and what the risks are, what the dangers are, right? And you're gonna be traveling away from family, but the word cancer was not in that, okay? The word noise induced hearing loss was not in that. These are really, really dangerous and critical health issues that our firefighters face on a daily basis. And the agency continues to, I think, bury their head in the sand, hoping maybe they'll go away and they're not gonna go away, all right? Cause there's a lot of men and women out there in my age, you know, cause I've had cancer and I've got hearing loss and things like that. So I think for the young men and women that are coming in, they absolutely need to know what they're facing and the agency has to say, this is what we're gonna do to protect you because when you retire, we want you to be healthy. We want you to be able to go home every day and spend time with your family and friends. And when you retire, we want the same thing for you. So I think they really need to be more proactive in those things. And Ben, what would you say? What kind of immediate changes would you like to see in the Forest Service? Well, there's a lot of things I'd like to see changed. You know, I think when I think about the PSA, bro, and in my experience, you know, the way that we pay people with hazard pay is probably one of my top issues. If you talk to George, you know, what are the big issues you face on a fire line, the hazards you face, right? It's some kind of a traumatic injury or it's some kind of lifelong illness like cancer or hearing loss and these things. And what hazard pay does is like in my situation, while my situation, it was a practice jump and I broke my pelvis. So it wasn't even considered hazardous. So I didn't get hazard pay for that day. Obviously for me, it was hazardous. And then, you know, so if you get a traumatic injury on the fire line, you immediately lose your hazard pay. If you're not on a fire, you don't get hazard pay. So there's an incentive. The way the system works is you're actively incentivized to take on more risk. You will do these hazardous things to increase your pay for the day. And then when you walk away from the job, you may have cancer like what I had or some other, I had a pretty, I got lucky there, but you may have a lifelong illness, cancer, hearing issues and all these things, you don't get hazard pay for it, even though it was from the work you did. And when you retire, your hazard pay doesn't count for your retirement pension. And also, like in my case, if you get injured, your hazard pay doesn't count for your workers' compensation if you go that route, if you can't work. So it's this pretty significant part of our income we rely on. I mean, people are getting 2,000 hours of hazard pay a year and it's 25% of your base pay. So it's a significant amount of your income and it doesn't count for your retirement. It doesn't count for your injury compensation and it doesn't help you when you have a lifelong illness. So I think the incentives that we put in front of firefighters really need to be looked at in a holistic way because I think things have changed so much. And I don't think we've looked at how we're paying people in a long, long time. But that's how I would change things. Thank you. So Abe, do you see any of immediate solutions on the horizon that the FARC service is considering? Well, I think that, I mean, there's, I don't know about just immediate solutions, but I think that there is legislation which is in front of Congress that could, the Wild Land Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act that the federal wildland firefighters have a temporary pay raise now. And so there's this legislative effort to protect that and to also have that payment go toward retirement, which that raise currently does not. So that's one issue. I also, but I think that, I think that it's not so simple as necessarily being one immediate solution. I think that this is in a piece of accountability journalism that in my opinion rightly tries to, looks hard at the agencies that we entrust with employing these essential public servants. But I also think that there's the historian Stephen Pine talks and writes about just understanding wildfire more broadly as a public. And I think that's really important. And so for me, I was glad to have this piece come out in conjunction with outside. I learned a lot about wildfire from Kyle Dickman, who's a great journalist. And I think that so that it's not an immediate solution, but just not having it be a moment of outrage as there's this exodus, but keeping the impetus to understand more broadly is I think is an important thing. Well, and to be fair, I think it is worth crediting that the pay supplement is still in effect even after it technically expired in the infrastructure law. I think the agencies, the Department of Interior and Forest Service have really been a proponent of keeping that going and Congress has kept it going, even though it's still not permanent. And that's one of the things I'm worried about is it's gonna go away and then I'm not sure what is it gonna happen. The EAP program, the employee assistance program that I called in 2020, that's been expanded nationally, the region I'm in, they went from three visits, I think to six or more. And so, and then having access to people like George Broiles, like when I was a few years ago, I'd never heard of George Broiles and he'd been doing a lot of research. So now I think having forums like this is really beneficial for firefighters to learn about this stuff. I think also just technology and the internet, firefighters are able to talk to each other now and communicate together in a way that we never did when I was a hot shot or on a type two crew. So I'm hopeful for a lot of stuff, but immediately I think there's some things that are happening, it feels slow, but there's some positive stuff. Well, I think that's a good place for us to wrap things up, so I really appreciate it. Thank you George, thank you Ben, thank you Abe and we're gonna transfer to the other half of our conversation. So if Pat, Yolanda and Antonia, if you can join us, that would be great. So we're now gonna look at the devastating aftermath of the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire. Through ProPublica's local reporting network, we worked with Source New Mexico to examine the grinding machinery of recovery under FEMA. And joining us today is the lead reporter behind this series, a community member affected by the fire and the attorney who represented her. Let me introduce you to them. Pat Lohman is a reporter for Source New Mexico and a member of ProPublica's local reporting network to build trust with people affected by the fire he left Albuquerque and moved to an apartment in the town of Las Vegas just outside the burn scar. Yolanda Cruz is a New Mexico resident who spent months helping her elderly parents navigate FEMA's claims process. And Antonia Roybal Mack is an attorney who has assisted hundreds of victims in filing administrative claims for damage with the federal government. So Pat, let me begin with you. Can you provide some context about the fire and summarize the aftermath, the devastating aftermath? Yeah, thanks for having me. So I started covering the Hermits Peak fire when it was one of 20 wildfires burning in a single day in April of 2022 here in New Mexico. New Mexico was the national epicenter for wildfire throughout the summer of 2022 where we had not only the biggest wildfire in our history, but the second biggest in Southern New Mexico called the Black Fire. And what makes the Hermits Peak and the Caffe Canyon fire different from the other 20 that were burning simultaneously in New Mexico is that both of them were the result of botched prescribed burns ignited by the Forest Service on federal forest land. The Hermits Peak fire was a broadcast burn that escapes containment lines. Caffe Canyon was a pile burn that smoldered from January of 2022 for several months until a massive wind event kind of made it roar back to life. And then ultimately those two fires merged and became what we know is the Hermits Peak Caffe Canyon fire, which over the course of several months burned more than 530 square miles of land in a section of the Songray to Crystal Mountains taking with it several hundred homes, acres and acres of trees on federal land and private and continuing to just wreak havoc. One of the things that was sort of unique and I think is a harbinger for the way these disasters will play out is that it wasn't just the fire itself that burned and caused all this devastation. The way it burned at such high intensity throughout much of the burn scar that the soils became hydrophobic and there was less vegetation to hold back the reflow. So for several years now, we are expecting and this is probably expected for several years into the future, the reflows and floods that continue to be a result of this fire two years ago. So I know up in Rosillada, there's like 17 inches of snow on the ground right now and people appreciate the moisture as we tend to do in New Mexico amid the multi-year drought. But it also just carries a lot of hazards that if all that snow melts, suddenly we're gonna have more floods. Those floods also and the reflows contaminated the city of Las Vegas's water supply and they're working on spending $140 million to basically revamp their entire water system. And that whole area was kind of an epicarius place and it just kind of takes one big fire to really raise a lot of doubt about being able to make life sustainable out there, especially if you're in Las Vegas or you're expecting these cascading events to continue to complicate your life. So for the beginning of it, I was mostly just covering the fire itself and obviously asking questions when I could about the fact that these were escaped prescribed burns. But in late 2020 to Congress approved nearly $4 billion to fully compensate victims of this fire. So I think beginning in January of last year when I started working with ProPublica's local reporting network, the question really became, when the government makes a mistake this massive, what is it really going to do to fully compensate the victims of that mistake? So that was kind of the question that undercourts most of our reporting from examining the Stafford Act programs, which are the way FEMA handles every disaster that occurs to the establishment of the claims office and this $4 billion fund and also some of the disputes that happened along the way about, what really does FEMA owe these people for what the Forest Service put them through and what is really going to help this unique and long-standing community or this group of communities continue their long history in this area. So... Thanks for that. That's a really helpful summary. Yolanda, can you tell us about the losses you and your family have endured in the fire and then the status of your claims? Sure. So personally, my family and I have 10 acres of property between Sape and Resiada and the fire completely can't cross over the entire 10 acres. We were very fortunate in that it did not take our home. We had a little bit of time to rake and wet around the home and the high severity burn was about 40 or 50 feet from the home itself. So it came right up to where we had raked and watered. We did lose about half of the trees and on the property with the high severity burn. And so we do have some losses there as well as a lot of personal items that we had vehicles and other items in our yard. My parents live in Las Vegas and they had to leave because of medical reasons. And so their losses were more along the smoke damage and evacuation. And then I have extended family all around the Las Vegas and water area who lost in various ways. The status of my claim, Antonio Rebal Mac is my attorney and I have a few proofs of loss with FEMA right now. I have received a, I guess a settlement offer, I forget what they call it, on one of those claims on the smaller one and I have not heard anything on the other ones. The larger one was lost by FEMA. And I found that out about a week ago. And then on my parents' claims, I was able to help them get the one settled for their evacuation, but it did take about nine months for the whole process. So Antonio, that series of stories is really about, this promise made by the federal government, $4 billion and how FEMA has been, I think it's fair to say horrendously unresponsive to the families that have been devastated by this fire who sustained terrible losses. You have, as the attorney for many of those families, kind of a broad view, can you describe, for most of our listeners and viewers, how FEMA has handled this or not handled this and what you're trying to do to rectify the situation? Certainly, well, FEMA was not designed to do a recovery process like the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Act. They were designed for the Stafford Act. So the difficulty here is FEMA's not set up to handle large volumes of claims and that's what these are. These are victims of the same as a plaintiff and any other lawsuit, any other fire. And FEMA does not have the legal resources, the experts or the personnel to do this. So they're still trying to get people hired. They're still trying to build the ship and they have been very stubborn to not seek any outside help. There's companies around the country that could come in and set up a large claims process like this and bring in the resources that are necessary and FEMA has refused to do that. What we're trying to do is really get transparency for the families, get speed and make sure that the recovery, the families receive 100% of what they lost because this was the fault of the federal government. This fire was caused and was not necessary. So that's what we're moving forward with. I represent hundreds of families at this point, thousands. And we just want FEMA to do their job and get people paid and get people back in homes with as little litigation as necessary. I believe there's 13 separate lawsuits pending right now related to forcing FEMA to do everything from stop violating people's due process right to counsel to providing transparency in the appellate process that they intend to utilize and suits on non-economic damages and so forth. So that's what we're working on all day, every day for the past two years. And Pat, I'm aware that the $4 billion fund was pushed by two prominent New Mexican congressmen or is there been any political help for the families in trying to navigate this situation? Yes, I think that the Congresswoman Teresa Legger-Fernandez, she's actually from Las Vegas put this on as a real priority of her term in Congress. And there have been some legislation introduced since the Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act was enacted to potentially make it a little bit easier on claimants. At the moment, the deadline to file any claim is November of this year. There's legislation pending that would extend that deadline to, I believe, 2027 or at least for the next few years. They've also been sending letters. And I know that Senator Benjamin Lujan handed President Biden the letter when he visited for a campaign event last year that just outlined a lot of concerns. They have called on FEMA to bring in more claims adjusters and to stop treating these claims like insurance claims where maybe the entity involved in spending the money is treating them a little bit more like they're trying to commit fraud and actually be more generous. So there has been public pressure, but I know that when we did our story about non-economic damages, which I believe we can discuss a bit later, that question is ultimately about what lawmaker's intent was when they enacted this law. And the New Mexico delegation was sort of unwilling to explain what their intent was. And that might not have been totally dispositive in a legal sense, but at least a public message saying, we want the claimants of this fire to have access to this entire other category of payment that FEMA has so far interpreted the law to exclude. So there's a number of different areas in which they have exerted public pressure. There's other ways in which they're kind of leading it up to FEMA to interpret the law they sign. And that has prompted, as Antonio mentioned, some additional litigation. So Yolanda, it's been nearly two years since the fire. What do you and your neighbors need the most right now? We need this to be done so that we can move forward with our lives. There are still many people who have not been able to rebuild. As I've said, we were very fortunate that our home was still there, but we did have substantial damage to our well, to our septic system, to our road. And it's really been difficult for people to move forward. There's been so much anger and mistrust, but then also a lack of resources. There are still people who are living with family, with friends. There are people who've had to relocate, who've been displaced. And the longer this takes to get settled, the longer it takes for people to be able to heal and move forward. You know, there's been so much trauma. There continue to be fires that happen and that just re-traumatizes people. So we can't really begin to heal until we are able to at least deal with the damages. Antonio, the communities that were affected by the fire have a kind of long and sort of strained relationship to the Forest Service. Can you walk us through a bit about that relationship in the historical context for it? I certainly will, and I won't go back all the way to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which is where it started. And it really started when Article 10 of that treaty was removed, which concerned how the treatment of the Spanish land grants would be held in the United States. After that, the land grant adjudication, in land grant adjudication, people lost millions of acres of land to the United States, which was then utilized by the Forest Service. So in a traditional context, these families, and not that long ago, 1848 is not that long ago, my family's land that burned in this fire was from, we got in 1875. So in context, families would use this to harvest timber, to do grazing, and they would run their entire families out of these forests and their subsistence was out of the forest. Well, when the Forest Service started managing the forests and essentially putting up gates and fences and requiring a fee permit system to utilize the forest, that's when you started to get this tremendous overgrowth and the need to start clearing that overgrowth with fire. So I think in a historical context, it has been really difficult with the longstanding prejudice against local communities and local communities longstanding wariness of the federal government. So I think when this fire occurred, it has been, it has made the recovery that much more difficult because land and water rights in Northern New Mexico are largely housed on an oral tradition and not traditional paper records. So it has just been really difficult. And I think some things that could happen is bringing more local and indigenous voices into forest conservation and how the Forest Service conserves New Mexico forests now and in the future. Thank you. There's a question from a New Mexico resident who wrote saying she hasn't received much help because she's considered a renter. Antonio, can you explain this gap and what advice would you offer in cases such as these? Well, it is very difficult for renters and it also goes back to that oral tradition that many renters in the current context of legal terminology were not actually renters. They lived on that land for a long time and treated it as owned, but that's one of the main lawsuits we have going for the non-economic damages is so people like a renter can be paid for trespass nuisance and the real harm that this has caused to their lives just beyond their evacuation expenses. So Pat, maybe you can take this a little bit further. Can you talk about the kind of non-economic damages that Antonio just raised? So I think that's an idea that some viewers will wanna know more about and won't fully perhaps grasp. Yeah, so basically FEMA determined somewhat early on that the law has written only allowed them to pay for economic losses, which are things that have a price tag, can be measured in dollars and cents, that are easily easier to quantify and present as a claim. But in doing so, they kind of might have put some people who are already in tenuous economic or living situations in a much more precarious position because everybody you talk to there has kind of a common experience. These are all very different claims for damages, but one thing that is very unique is that this fire was a very traumatic event. Most of them were displaced for at least a little bit. There was some inconvenience and annoyance and frustration and FEMA is basically saying that the way that they say that the law does not allow them to pay for this entire category of losses, which in one lawsuit is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars. And the law firms who filed this lawsuit said it's not just about maximizing payment to everybody. It's also an equity issue because there are people like the renter we're discussing who might not have sufficient documentation to show that she lived in this property for a long time. Or it's also very common that there isn't clear title among a lot of these communities that properties are still held in the name of the grandparents or great grandparents who's long past. So this is a category of loss that those people would be eligible for and people at the lowering of the income spectrum commonly that they are not being paid for. The other potential benefit to paying non-economic damages at least as we saw in a big wildfire in California is that when it took a while for a bankruptcy proceeding to play out, but by the time it was done the first payment that the Fire Victims Trust paid to victims was for non-economic damages. And the reason that they told me they felt that that was a way to get money out the door quickly is because they could just say everybody who lives in this area had this common experience of being in a zone of danger or the nuisance of the event. And then they can make payments very quickly as a result, kind of standard payments just to give people some walking around money as the spokesperson of the Fire Victims Trust will be while they're processing the more complex claims. And at this point, FEMA has paid out about 12% of the $4 billion payment. And I think some people are just sort of clamoring for can we just get any money out quickly just to help us kind of get stable? And non-economic damages could be in the views of some lawyers that spoke with a vehicle to getting quick payments out to people. Antonia, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I'd like to come back to it, which is how does this fire differ or FEMA's response to this fire differ from other natural disasters? You said that they're not suited for this kind of disaster. Can you delve into that a little bit more deeply? Sure, FEMA's established under the Stafford Act and when there's a disaster, there's a couple of pieces of that first. To even get a Stafford Act National Disaster Declaration, you need a certain population threshold. All of Northern New Mexico does not meet that population threshold of impacted victims. Then FEMA comes in and their job under the Mandate of Stafford Act is minimally viable housing. So their job is to get the lights back on and get a basic roof and minimally viable housing can include a bed on somebody's couch. It can be very, very basic. So it's really designed to bring in immediate assistance after a disaster to then turn it over to long-term recovery groups and long-term recovery pieces like insurance companies. Well, in this particular disaster, they have become a judge and a jury and an insurance company to pay the federal government's debt to the people that burn down their homes. So they just were not prepared for this. So one of the things, they put a usual bureaucrat at the head of the program at the start of this and they created it as a bureaucracy as opposed to an agile legal payment program, which that's how it should have been structured at the get-go. We have an audience question, which I'm going to read because I think I understand it, but let me read it and any of you can answer, which is the state of New Mexico sits on around a $24 billion in our, quote, rainy day fund. Why not use that to start paying legitimate claims to get reimbursed by FEMA or takeover altogether using one of the services Mrs. Roybal Mack has suggested. Is that a practical solution or does that have all sorts of political hurdles? A practical solution would be for FEMA to hire a company like Brown and Greer to come in and administer these claims. Every dollar that is spent on FEMA's ramping up of this program is a dollar taken out of the victim's money. So getting a company that already has a system would be highly valuable. Two hurdles to the suggestion of the state of New Mexico paying the damages. One of those would be the Anti-Assignment Act. The Federal Anti-Assignment Act says that you cannot give your claim to somebody else. So a victim could not assign their claim to the state of New Mexico for the state of New Mexico to then pursue that claim. The other issue we have would be the New Mexico Constitution with the anti-donation clause that says public monies cannot go to private benefit. So I think that that would be a really good thing to consider, but then you would also have the logistical issue that the state of New Mexico would have to do what FEMA's doing, which is figure out who has title and build a system of their own, which the state is not capable of doing that. The real solution here is companies that do this every day. So I think this is a question that I'd love for each of you to answer and you guys can flip a coin about who goes first, which is can each of you share what lessons are to be taken away from these experiences? And those lessons can be aimed at FEMA. They can be aimed at the federal government. They can be aimed at the Congresspeople who created and got past the $4 billion fund. It can be aimed at the Forest Service, but what lessons can all of us learn and should be taken away from this? And I'll let anybody go first. I'm happy to go first. First off, I wanna thank the firefighters that were on this call, but because but for the firefighters, this would have been much more difficult and much more catastrophic. But I think what we learned is that rural America is not prepared for disaster. What we also learned is on a national level, FEMA, the agency that as Americans, we think is gonna show up in help when there's a disaster is not well prepared to do so. So I think as a country, we really need to look at the role of FEMA and put resources in our Department of Homeland Security because the fact that when this fire started evacuees, we're running the evacuation centers was we should not ever have that. So I think governments need good emergency management plans that are updated annually and people need to just really be prepared for disaster for themselves and for their families because FEMA's not up to the task. Thank you. Yolanda? And I agree with that completely. When President Biden came and visited the area and said everyone would be compensated and we heard that as well from all of our elected officials. The private philanthropy dollars began to slow down because everyone thought the government had this and they were going to take care of their responsibility. And when that didn't happen, the local community continued to care for the people who were impacted. And now still, things finally seem to be moving slowly with FEMA, but it's not enough. There is so much bureaucracy and red tape that really one of the only ways to get things through there is through an advocate. Why are they having so much staff if we really have to go through an advocate's office to get some assistance and to find out what's going on? And it just really shouldn't take so long. You go through a navigator that goes through there, supervisors, it goes through like three or four levels up and then comes through four levels down. In that process, paperwork gets lost, it gets misplaced, people are being asked to do things over and over and over again. And a lot of people are just giving up with the whole process. So there just needs to be a better way. And the government just needs to figure out a better way to get resources on the ground. It doesn't need to be so bureaucratic and so full of red tape. Thank you. And Pat, what lessons did you take away from all of this? Yeah, well, that was kind of a focus of one of our stories where we just sort of got out of the way and let survivors of this terrible event speak directly to the rest of the country about a disaster that could visit them soon. As we know, we're expecting wildfires to burn in parts of the country that have been kind of spared from wildfires historically. The number of acreages is expected to increase and simultaneously to prevent these fires from burning at such high intensity, there's a expected huge increase in the number of treated acres. So it does seem possible. I hope it doesn't happen again, but this seemed possible that there could be another escape prescribed burn for which the federal government is man liable for fully compensating people. So I would just encourage everybody across the country, even if you think you might be spared from wildfires, you might not be and just pay close attention to what's happening here because this could be the first of many of these types of events. Thank you. And thank you, everyone. That's our time for today. I'm gonna thank the reporters, Pat and Abe. And thank you, Ben and George, for your service and for trusting Abe to tell your story. And thank you, Dilya Yolanda and Antonia for sharing your experiences with us and sharing them with Pat. And lastly, thank you for everyone who tuned in for this timely conversation. We hope to see you next time and thank you again and have a great day. Bye-bye.