California’s last operating nuclear plant sits in a landscape that would make any firefighter nervous once the winds pick up.
At Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the Pacific Ocean and its near-constant fog blanket the western edge of the coastal bluffs. But just to the east, the Irish Hills rise sharply, their steep slopes thick with brush and oak trees — a combination that makes the site both hard to access and heavy with fuel for wildfire.
“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 property sits in a very-high fire hazard zone, he explained, “so we take precautions.”
It’s one of many places where California is now stepping in to fill gaps left by decades of underfunded federal wildfire management, deeper cuts under the Trump administration, and firefighting crews stretched thin battling blazes across the West.
A locally based, state-funded group — the San Luis Obispo County Fire Safe Council — began clearing fuel breaks along the ridgelines surrounding the plant. Erickson then put his crews to work closing the remaining gaps, creating a critical anchor point firefighters could use to hold a line against approaching flames.
In years past, the tangle of landowners surrounding the power plant — including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — might have slowed or blocked that kind of project.
But a 2023 agreement between Cal Fire and the bureau allowed Erickson to use state resources on federal land, letting crews finish the fuel break earlier this year. The bureau handled key environmental reviews, planning and approvals.
“The project was designed from the outset as an interagency effort,” said Philip Oviatt, a spokesperson for the California office of the Bureau of Land Management. “No single agency could have achieved this result alone.”
The stakes are high in California, where wildfires have burned through millions of acres over the past decade, killed more than 220 people, contributed to tens of thousands of additional deaths and caused tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
But the price tag for prevention work is steep too. California has spent nearly $500 million on grants for wildfire resilience and forest health projects on federal land since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, according to the California Natural Resources Agency.
Jonathan Fitch, who manages Cal Fire’s vegetation management program, helped negotiate three new agreements the agency struck last year with the U.S. Forest Service. Those deals let California clear brush, collect pine cones for seed banks, replant burned areas, manage timber and more inside the state’s national forests, Fitch said.
The Forest Service contributed $4 million toward those statewide agreements, some of which will go toward fuel-reduction projects, Fitch said. Still, the overall need dwarfs the available federal funding.
“The real value is unlocking the state’s potential and resources on the federal side,” Fitch said.
Fitch said he often hears the same question: Why should California spend its money, staff and equipment on land the federal government is supposed to manage?
“My answer is that wildfires don’t know boundaries,” Fitch said. “We can’t ignore what’s happening on the federal side, because we’re one state. We’re one landscape.”
A finite number of firefighters
Since President Donald Trump accused California of failing to properly clear its forests — more than half of which are federally managed — Sacramento and Washington have repeatedly clashed over fuel management and federal funding.
Newsom needled Trump last year with a mock executive order titled “Make America Rake Again,” and has since criticized the administration for withholding roughly $1.5 billion in federal aid following the devastating Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025.
Despite the political friction, California routinely crosses federal boundaries to manage land — and fires.
When the Timber Fire broke out in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur, tearing through nearly 6,000 acres of rugged terrain and forcing the closure of Highway 1, federal incident management teams were already stretched thin.
Some crews were tied up fighting other fires near Hoopa and across the Pacific Northwest. Others were on mandatory rest, according to Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service.
“So we were going to have to look at hiring a team from anywhere in the country, and even those are in short supply,” Freeman said.
Instead, the federal agency asked a Cal Fire incident management team to step in, coordinating the response and handling logistics — everything from meals and planning to finances, equipment repairs, showers and medical support.
Freeman, Cal Fire officials and others say the shrinking pool of federal incident teams reflects the sheer volume of wildfire activity across the West this year.
But Bobbie Scopa, a retired firefighter and vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said staffing cuts under the Trump administration have made long-standing shortages worse.
“When DOGE let everybody go, we lost people off the teams,” Scopa said, referring to Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency initiative. “We’ve had trouble filling out teams for the last 10 years.”
Freeman said having Cal Fire take the lead on the Timber Fire freed up federal resources to respond elsewhere.
“It’s not the first time we’ve done this, but it’s fairly unique to California,” Freeman 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.”
A federal blind spot
In other areas, California has found it far harder to compensate for federal shortfalls.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Forest Service lost at least 20% of its workforce last year amid cuts pushed by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
A federal reorganization — along with proposed closures of research facilities — has destabilized the agency and damaged morale. Two former Forest Service employees told CalMatters that key California scientists left the agency after Trump returned to office.
Alan Talhelm, deputy assistant director of climate and energy for Cal Fire, said the loss of federal staff and shifting job assignments have drained the expertise he and his colleagues rely on to fold federal data into the fuel-treatment dashboard maintained by the Governor’s Forest Management Task Force.
“That data still exists… but we don’t have anyone to help us interpret it,” Talhelm said. “If we see something that looks unusual, it’s harder to verify that it’s correct and that it’s accurate information.”
A Forest Service spokesperson said that because the agency tracks fuel treatments differently than state and local agencies, merging the datasets is “complicated.”
That data, which typically lags a couple of years behind, is essential for tracking California’s progress toward state and federal fuel-management goals.
The dashboard gives a statewide snapshot of where thinning or controlled burns are happening — information state agencies rely on when deciding where to direct funding and crews, and information that can shape decisions about where to send firefighters during an active blaze, Talhelm said.
“They can look at this database and say, ‘Oh, there was a prescribed burn here. Oh, there was a fuel break here,’” he said. “That’s a consequence. If we don’t have the right information, the data loses its usefulness.”
Talhelm said federal cuts are also slowing the surveys the Forest Service needs to complete to update the Forest Inventory and Analysis, essentially a census of the nation’s forests.
That data helps scientists and land managers understand how climate change, drought, wildfire, disease and pests are reshaping forests — and what that means for fuel loads, fire risk and even timber supplies in California.
“It’s literally the foundational information that then gets applied to everything from where factories are sited to what the carbon effects are and the benefits of wildfire mitigation measures,” said John Battles, a forest ecology professor at UC Berkeley.
But the data is slow to come out. California is tied with Alaska for having survey information that dates back to 2021.
Cal Fire has tried to speed things along by sending contractors to survey California’s forests. Still, Talhelm said, the federal government isn’t keeping pace with expectations.
“We’re still not there. And we’re not there in part because of the downsizing at the Forest Service,” Talhelm said. “I don’t know if they’ve scaled back their ambitions, but they’ve definitely scaled back their capacity to carry out that mission.”
A Forest Service spokesperson said the agency is conducting a final review of forest inventory data collected between 2022 and 2024 and expects to release it in the coming weeks.
“We share CAL FIRE’s interest in more plots being measured and more frequent updates,” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that several unspecified factors stretched California’s review cycle to seven years instead of the expected five.
That pace is a real problem, Battles said. “Think about how many fires there have been since 2021 that still aren’t reflected in the dataset,” he said.
“There’s always a lag in the data, because it takes time to update. But now we’re five years out… Decisions are being made using outdated, inaccurate information.”
Funding the fight against fire
California has managed to bridge many of these federal gaps thanks to its massive wildfire budget, which has climbed to roughly $4 billion a year. But money dedicated specifically to forest health and fuel management has always represented a relatively small slice of that spending — and now it’s under strain.
Changes the Newsom administration made to a key climate program have already reduced a major funding stream drawn from polluting industries that historically provided up to $200 million a year for wildfire prevention projects.
That figure is shrinking fast — down to $38 million, according to the latest Department of Finance numbers, though those figures won’t be finalized until next year. The Legislative Analyst’s Office warned this spring that the administration’s climate program overhaul risks eliminating that funding source altogether.
Talhelm said this fund has financed many of the grants Cal Fire has awarded for projects on federal land.
One July morning, Fitch hiked up to the ridge to see, for the first time, the fuel break made possible by his work brokering state and federal land agreements. Sunlight burned off the last wisps of fog clinging to the brush on either side of the cleared line.
Fitch called it proof of how strong these partnerships can be.
“The landscape is fragmented,” he said, the fuel break stretching along the ridge behind him. “For Cal Fire to succeed, we can’t do it alone.”
Original source: CalMatters
