Perched on the bluffs above the Pacific, California’s last operating nuclear power plant sits in a landscape that has long made local firefighters uneasy when the winds kick up.
Fog rolls in off the ocean along the western edge of the property, while the Irish Hills climb steeply to the east — steep, brush-choked terrain that’s difficult to reach and loaded with fuel for a fast-moving fire.
“Any fire within the Diablo power plant area could be catastrophic,” said Dave Erickson, a division chief and forester with Cal Fire’s San Luis Obispo unit. The surrounding land sits in a very high fire severity zone, he said, which is why crews have worked to get ahead of the danger.
Diablo Canyon is one of many places across California where the state has quietly stepped in to cover gaps left by chronic federal underfunding of vegetation management, deeper cuts under the Trump administration, and a wildland firefighting workforce spread thin by blazes burning across the West.
A local nonprofit, the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, began building a fuel break along the ridgelines surrounding the plant using state money. Erickson’s crews then finished the job, closing gaps in the line to give firefighters a fighting chance to stop flames before they reach the facility.
In years past, the mix of landowners around the plant — including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — might have slowed or blocked that kind of work. But a 2023 agreement between Cal Fire and the bureau allowed state crews to operate on federal land, while the bureau handled environmental reviews and permitting. The fuel break was completed earlier this year.
“The project was designed from the beginning as an interagency effort,” said Philip Oviatt, a Bureau of Land Management California spokesperson. “No single agency could have achieved this outcome independently.”
The urgency behind that kind of cooperation is easy to understand. Wildfires have scorched millions of acres across California over the past decade, killing more than 220 people directly, contributing to tens of thousands of additional deaths tied to smoke exposure, and causing tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
The cost of prevention isn’t cheap either. Since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, California has spent nearly half a billion dollars on grants for wildfire resilience and forest health work on federal land, according to the California Natural Resources Agency.
Jonathan Fitch, who manages Cal Fire’s vegetation management program, helped negotiate three new agreements last year with the U.S. Forest Service that allow the state to clear brush, gather pine cones for seed banks, replant burned areas and manage timber on national forest land within California. The Forest Service contributed $4 million toward those efforts statewide — a fraction of what’s actually needed.
“The true value is unlocking the state’s potential and resources on the federal landscape,” Fitch said.
He said he’s often asked why California should spend its own money and staff time working on land the federal government is supposed to manage.
“My response is, well, wildfires don’t stop at boundaries,” Fitch said. “We cannot disregard what happens in the federal space, because we’re one state. We’re one landscape.”
A shrinking pool of firefighters
Tension between Sacramento and Washington over forest management and wildfire funding has simmered since President Donald Trump first accused California of failing to properly manage its forests — more than half of which are actually under federal control.
Newsom mocked Trump last year with a mock “Make America Rake Again” executive order, and more recently criticized the administration for withholding roughly $1.5 billion in aid promised after the devastating Los Angeles firestorm in January 2025.
Yet despite the political sparring, California routinely crosses jurisdictional lines to help manage fires on federal land.
When the Timber Fire broke out in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur — eventually burning nearly 6,000 acres and forcing the closure of Highway 1 — federal incident management teams were tied up elsewhere, fighting fires in Hoopa and the Pacific Northwest, or resting under mandatory time-off rules, according to U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman.
“So we were going to be looking at ordering a team from across the country, and even those are few and far between,” Freeman said.
Instead, the Forest Service brought in a Cal Fire incident management team to run the response — handling logistics, food, planning, finances, equipment repairs and medical care for firefighters on the line.
Freeman and others say the shortage of federal incident teams reflects the sheer volume of fire activity burning across the West this year. But Bobbie Scopa, a retired firefighter and vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, argues that Trump administration staffing cuts have made a long-standing problem worse.
“When we DOGED everybody, we lost people from the teams,” Scopa said, referring to Elon Musk’s short-lived government efficiency initiative. “We’ve been having a hard time staffing the teams for the last 10 years.”
Freeman said turning to Cal Fire for the Timber Fire freed up federal resources to respond elsewhere.
“This is not the first time we’ve done this, but it’s something fairly unique to California,” she said. “There are a finite number of firefighters, but California is in a better position than some states — than most states — because of this relationship.”
Data gaps and disappearing expertise
In other areas, the state has had a harder time compensating for federal shortfalls.
As the Department of Government Efficiency slashed federal payrolls, the Forest Service lost at least 20% of its workforce last year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Reorganization efforts and proposed closures of research facilities have further destabilized the agency, and morale has suffered. Two former Forest Service employees told CalMatters that several key California scientists left the agency after Trump took office.
Alan Talhelm, assistant deputy director for climate and energy at Cal Fire, said the loss of federal staff and expertise has made it harder to keep the state’s fuels-treatment tracking system, used by the governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, accurate and up to date.
“Those data still exist… But we have nobody to help us interpret those data,” Talhelm said. “If we see something that looks unusual, it’s harder for us to verify that it is what it should be and that it’s accurate information.”
A Forest Service spokesperson said the agency tracks fuels treatments differently than the state does, which makes merging the two datasets “challenging.”
The tracking dashboard, which already runs a couple of years behind, gives state officials a broad view of where thinning and controlled burns have taken place — information that helps guide where to send grant money, crews and firefighting resources when a blaze breaks out.
“They can look at this database and say, ‘Oh, there was a prescribed burn here. Oh, there was a fuel break here,'” Talhelm said. “That’s a consequence right there. If we don’t have the correct information, it makes the data less useful.”
Federal staffing cuts have also slowed the Forest Service’s contribution to California’s Forest Inventory and Analysis, a nationwide census of forest conditions that helps scientists track how climate change, drought, disease and fire are reshaping the landscape.
“It’s literally the foundational information that then goes into everything from where you site your mills, to what carbon is doing, to the benefits of wildfire mitigations,” said John Battles, a forest ecology professor at UC Berkeley.
California’s survey data now lags as far back as 2021 — tied with Alaska for the oldest in the country. Cal Fire has hired contractors to speed up the surveys, but Talhelm said the federal side of the work hasn’t kept pace.
“We’re not there yet. And we’re not there in part because of the reduction in forest service staffing,” he said. “I don’t know that they have scaled back their ambition, but they’ve scaled back their ability to implement that mission.”
A Forest Service spokesperson said the agency is finishing a review of inventory data collected between 2022 and 2024 and expects to release it publicly within the next few weeks. “We share CAL FIRE’s interest in seeing more plots measured and more frequent update(s),” the spokesperson said, adding that unspecified factors had stretched California’s review cycle from a planned five years to seven.
Battles said the delay carries real consequences. “Think about how many fires there have been since 2021 that don’t show up yet in the dataset,” he said. “There’s always a lag in the data, because it takes awhile. But now it’s just getting to be five years … You’re making decisions with wrong, not up-to-date information.”
Money troubles ahead
California’s ability to step into federal gaps has been made possible in part by its heavy spending on wildfire, which now totals roughly $4 billion a year. But the share dedicated specifically to forest health and fuels reduction has always been comparatively small — and that funding stream is now shrinking further.
Changes the Newsom administration made to a major climate program have drained a fund fed by polluter fees that historically provided up to $200 million annually for wildfire resilience projects. That figure has already dropped to $38 million, according to preliminary Department of Finance estimates, and the Legislative Analyst’s Office has warned the fund could be zeroed out entirely.
That money has historically supported many of the Cal Fire grants used for projects on federal land, Talhelm said.
On a recent July morning, Fitch hiked up to see, for the first time, the completed fuel break near Diablo Canyon — the product of the state-federal partnerships he helped broker. Morning fog was just beginning to burn off, revealing coyote brush and scrub lining either side of the cleared ridge.
Fitch called it proof of what strong partnerships can accomplish.
“Land is fragmented,” he said, gesturing to the fuel break stretching along the ridgeline behind him. “For Cal Fire to be successful, we can’t do it alone.”
Original source: CalMatters
