top of page
Special Project - "Catastrophe: A Forest in Flames"
Click on link above to view the project in Adobe Spark

"Catastrophe: A Forest in Flames" is a 38-chapter investigative/narrative wildfire series published as a linked digital package. It was a six-month series examining how a century of land-use choices and fire-suppression doctrine helped create today’s megafire conditions — and what practical solutions exist for communities and agencies.

​

The series moves from major fire case studies and on-the-ground impacts to policy and preparedness gaps (including wildland-urban interface building codes, defensible space/Firewise approaches, and community mitigation planning) and then into restoration economics (thinning capacity, biomass utilization, and renewable-energy markets for forest “waste” material).

​

My contributions (4 chapters)

I reported and wrote four chapters within the 38-part package:

  • Chapter 8 — “In Summary”: A structured recap of key facts, sequence, and scale of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire and related impacts.

  • Chapter 10 — “Ushering in an era of fire suppression”: Historical accountability story linking the 1910 “Big Burn” to the rise of modern suppression doctrine and its long-term consequences.

  • Chapter 17 — “Navajo Hotshots trapped by wildfire”: Incident reconstruction and firefighter survival account involving a deployment during the Cedar Fire.

  • Chapter 35 — “To save the forest, we have to burn it”: Solutions/economics reporting on biomass-to-energy and the challenge of monetizing low-grade forest material to support fuels reduction.
     

Documented reuse/citation

  • The series is cited in a University of Idaho law review article via a Payson Roundup series landing-page reference.

  • A chapter from the series (Chapter 13) appears as a referenced media item in an academic CV hosted by a forestry/ecology research group site.
     

Selected links

​

bottom of page