Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Good evening and welcome to local news. Today is Monday, December 29th. I'm Gabriel Zucker reporting for KMUD. In tonight's news, New Earth system model collaborates with the Karuk tribe while researching the Mid Klamath River. The Klamath Indigenous Land Trust purchases land along the Klamath river from Pacific Corp. Stay tuned. Those stories and more. Coming up.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Redwood Community Radio acknowledges that its transmitter sites are located on the unceded territory of the Sinkhayon, Wailaki, Wiat, Wilkot and Kato people. We honor ancestors past, present and emerging and acknowledge the ongoing cultural, spiritual and physical connection that these tribes have to this region.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Last week, Khema did a story about Yifan Chen, a computational hydrologist who helped create Earth system models for research done in Alaska and the Mid Klamath River. He talked about the experience in the research being done today. Cleo Wolfley Hazard, the habitat restoration program manager for the Karuk tribe, shared on the ground experience with the project in the process of the time agreeing to this research. He is the principal investigator on the project and started the research through the University of Washington's Early Career Innovators program through the national center for Atmospheric Research.
He shared this is the first project of its kind integrating Earth system models and tribal knowledge together.
[00:01:21] Speaker D: As far as I know, this is the first project of its kind to actually build a model led by a local leader. And I should say that early on in the project, before even approaching Andrew Newman, you know, I reached out to a long term collaborator, Lee Hillman, who's a group ceremonial leader and cultural practitioner. And Leif and I have been working on these ideas for a while and he, you know, he had had some specific ideas about this question of fire in the landscape and how fire suppression and timber plantations had really reduced stream flow in the Klamath over the time since fire suppression began in the late 1800s. And so it's an idea that he and I had been kind of, I knew that it was an idea that was a priority to leaf and so before going to NCAR and kind of proposing this, I just came to LEAF and said, hey, would this be something that you would be interested in? Do you think this would help in the policy realm as far as, you know, helping water managers and water planners understand the role of fire at a landscape scale.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Cleo Wolfley Hazard Explain the process to.
[00:02:43] Speaker D: Get to this point, we had a few months of preliminary meetings with the modelers and our team trying to, for my part, it was just understanding a lot about the nuts and bolts of the Earth system model and what you could do and couldn't do. And there's a lot of constraints because of the scale and just the amount of time that it takes to actually do the coding to build the model. So a lot of things that I thought might be pretty straightforward are actually very labor and data and computing intensive. And so I was learning in that realm. And then from the modeler's perspective, they were really learning just more about the landscape itself. You know, they knew what it looked like as a grid of grid cells at a 250 square kilometer scale, because that's the size that they run these models at across the whole planet. But they were learning a lot about just the local landscape and then also, you know, fire behavior and aspects of fire behavior that really weren't captured by the model, but that were really important to these local partnerships as far as planning and fire operations and all.
So, yeah, definitely we had a kind of initial visit where we brought some of the Mahlers from Colorado out to the Klamath Basin. And I think one thing that's different about this project and how I work in generally in general is just we didn't assume that the community would want a model, even though, you know, Leaf has said, well, I think it would be a good idea, but let's ask everyone to make sure. And so we brought together probably 30 or so folks, tribal staff, nonprofit staff, other interested parties, and just said, hey, should we build this model? And if so, what are, you know, here's some different options and what matters to you all. And through that process got a lot of, you know, a lot of great feedback, including that, you know, we shouldn't use the fire model that was available, it wasn't meaningful, but that we should do the project overall.
And then a lot of other new that we ended up working into the process.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Cleo Wolfley Hazard also explains some of the different knowledge that the Kruk tribe shared during this research.
[00:05:00] Speaker D: The smoke effects on stream temperature is something that has been part of Kruk, you know, active management of the fishery since time immemorial. And so the different ceremonies that happen in the summer during the time of Picuawish involve lighting fires from different mountains along the river. And the traditional way that this was done and the way that people are really wanting it to be done in the future is that there would be a log that was laid on the top of these different mountains and then rolled down the mountain. And so the entire mountain would then, you know, catch on fire, bringing smoke and signaling, actually signaling to the salmon that it's time to come up river. And so people have actually gotten interested in this from a western science perspective. And then so it's time studies to confirm, like, first of all, does this trigger the salmon to come up river? And if so, why?
And there are some papers that Eli Sarian and others did a few years back showing that and using wildfire as a proxy, since this traditional burning practice is not currently allowed by the Forest Service.
So they use wildfires as a proxy and found that indeed, during the month of August or early September, when there is heavy smoke in the air, the river temperature drops by up to 3 degrees Celsius, which is significant, definitely something that a fish would notice.
And so, you know, it's likely that the fish and the Klamath river is in the summer is really at the extreme, like, warm limit of what salmon can tolerate. And so when Chinook salmon are swimming upstream at that time, they're really only able to move at night. And then they have to kind of hang out in the tributary mouse with cooler and kind of recalibrate their bodies. And so anyway, yeah, it's, it's, it's. It's one of those cool things that traditional science has always known about. Western science has been able to kind of validate, you know, triangulate through western science methods that this is something that is really important in this life history stage of migration. And then we saw, you know, this year with dam removal, we saw the river temperatures being so much lower because of the dams being gone. The fish that were coming up were in much better condition. They were able to move up river much faster. And so it's one of these, hopefully possibilities with climate change where, okay, we're losing our snow, but we also got rid of the dams. And if we can get more fire on the land, you know, at the right time, then these fish still have a chance.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: There are limitations to what the model could actually include with the time given for this project. The Earth system model is the simplified version of real life and does not include the exact flora and fauna of the area.
[00:08:02] Speaker D: Yeah, well, one example is the way that these climate models work is they, they grow trees and plants, and then in as those plants and tre growing through time in the model, they're doing everything that plants do. So they're taking in carbon dioxide, using it to, you know, build their blood and leaves. And then they're, they're dying and decomposing and burning up. And so there's carbon and water fluxes that Are, you know, dynamically happening in real time in the models.
And, but there's only, for the whole earth, there's only 17 of these kind of fake plants that you can use. So there's called plant functional types and, you know, there's two different grasses, there's three different shrubs, there's, you know, two or three different hardwood trees, two or three different conifers. And so that was, you know, bringing that model to folks in the Klamath where they're saying, well, hey, we have, you know, dozens of different hardwood species that are important. And the sugar pine is not the same as a Douglas fir plantation.
You know, that was one of the places where we said, okay, well, we hear that. But making that change in this Earth system model will take literally like years of development, you know, of multiple teams of people making that change. So if we want to do this at all, we're kind of stuck with this oversimplification.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: The next steps in this project are unknown at the moment. Cleo Wolfley Hazard shared that the model is now being used in local fire planning, but is also being used by researchers in other states too. The problem for future research in this project comes from the Trump administration's polling funding.
[00:09:47] Speaker D: I think that there's a lot of directions that this could go. You know, I think it would be, you know, we only did the mid Klamath, we did the Krupp ancestral territory, but we could now that we have.
So, excuse me. We built the model for the whole Klamath Basin and for kind of a large square around the Klamath Basin, so including parts of the Eel River, Smith river, parts of the upper basin. And so we have this model now that can be used to ask tons of questions, not only about water temperature, but about fire weather and about anything else about the climate that you wanted to ask. We now have this very high resolution climate model that, you know, it can be run using resources from ncar. You know, if there's. We have several faculty members, there's two different faculty members and three different staff at NCAR who, you know, worked on this and know how to run it and are interested in using it more.
There's also, there is a researcher from University of Texas, Danielle Tuma, who focuses on fire weather. And she's using the model to look at different seasonal to decadal changes in fire weather and how, you know, making almost like a more user friendly interface for the model where you could run the model, get all the results, and then have a tool that fire managers could actually query like at the beginning of the season when they're trying to allocate resources for the wildfire season or even in the middle of an incident while they're trying to decide, you know, whether to let a fire continue to burn or whether they need to put it out.
So that's one project that I'm really excited about.
And then, you know, there's obviously EFON has a lot of ideas about how to build on the hydrology piece and there's a lot more that we could do just with understanding, looking at specific tributaries and looking at the changes in stream flow and then going one step further and seeing how stream technology.
So I guess the main barrier to this going moving forward is that as you may have heard, the ancar, the national center for Atmospheric Research, which actually builds and houses all these climate models, has just been ordered to be broken up by the Trump administration. And so this is a huge blow to, not only to our work, but to any climate related work, you know, not only in the US but all around the world. So, you know, we can only hope that that won't happen or that, you know, a new and better institute will come out of the ashes. But you know, this project we actually, part of the reason we weren't able to finish all the last pieces that we wanted to is that our grant was canceled last February, you know, as part of the, the wasteful and radical DEI executive order, because it was led by a tribe and because it was, you know, focused on disadvantaged communities.
You know, we had to send back a chunk of change back to the federal government and weren't able to do a last round of work on the land cover layers and other kind of final outputs and reporting that we had wanted to do.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Even though the project was unable to be finished, the research is already being used in other locations. This type of Earth System model is possibly the first of its kind and shows different ways climate models can be used and approached in the future.
It was recently announced that the recently formed Klamath Indigenous Land Trust, or kilt, announced they had agreed to a milestone purchased with Pacific Corp. Of 10,000 acres in and around the former Pacific Corp. Reservoir in the Klamath River. Craig Tucker, a consultant with kilt, shared the importance of, of this land trust and how it went about making this deal happen.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Members of various tribes in the Klamath Basin who have been working on Klamath Dam removal for over 20 years.
And so you got folks like Frankie Myers, who's actually with me now, who's a member of the Yurok tribe. You got folks like Leif Hillman, who's a member of Karu, folks like Jeff Mitchell, who's a member of the Planet Tribes, Poppy George, the Hoopa Tribe, and Molly Myers, who's a member of Karuk. So while they're, you know, culturally identified and are enrolled members of these various tribes, these folks all got together and started a non profit organization called the Klamath Indigenous Land Trust to try to put these lands back into tribal hands. And these lands have been really underneath these stagnant, algae riddled reservoirs for a century. And so restoring these lands to make them compatible with salmon reintroduction and restoration is what Kilt's all about.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Bob Gravely, the spokesman for Pacific Corp, explained the background of the steel and why it was the right time to push forward with this deal. Because of the recent dam removals.
[00:15:02] Speaker E: This kind of follows completion of the dam removal agreement. So, you know, Pacific Corp has been talking with the tribes and the states and the federal government going all the way back until about 2005, 2006, to reach the settlement agreement to remove the dams. And, you know, during that process, when these agreements were being finalized and then being implemented, you know, it was clear that some of the lands that the company owned, kind of in the vicinity of the hydro project were of significance to some of the tribes in the area. We knew there were cultural sites on some of these lands. So it had been kind of the intent, as the agreement was moving through for quite some time now, that, you know, once the agreement was completed, the dams were removed and Pacific Corp. Was basically not generating power on the Klamath river anymore, that, you know, we would attempt to transfer these lands, you know, to tribal interests.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Gravely laid out how Pacific Corp. Was using this land and why it was not needed anymore.
[00:16:12] Speaker E: So this land was just, it was mostly, we called it the ranch land. So they were literally, most of it was used. There were working branches, so the.
There were leases to people who had ranches on the land.
And it was always just kind of being held in the vicinity of the hydro project. At one time there was thinking that there might be additional hydro developments on the Klamath River.
Those never happened, but the company still held the land and just leased it out, basically. So now that it's been conveyed to the tribes, you know, we, you know, it is in the hands of kilts. So it will ultimately be up to Kilt to decide, you know, the ultimate disposition of the land. But, you know, we assume that it will be used for tribal, you know, to help tribal communities kind of recover some of these historic lands and protect some of their cultural sites that we know are part of this. So we're very pleased that this can kind of be turned back into the hands of folks who will, you know, be stewards of it. On behalf of the tribes looking toward.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: The future, Tucker was honest about the time it would take to reach the end goal of this land.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: It's going to take years. I mean, it took a century to do the damage that's been done.
So we're immediately launching into a planning process.
We're going to work with other organizations. We're going to work with state and federal agencies.
We're going to work with the tribes of the region to develop restoration plans. We're going to work with tribes to make sure that tribal people can hunt and gather on these lands. And it's going to take years to get it all ironed out. But getting these lands back into tribal hands were certainly the first step.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: He ended the interview with excitement.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Well, I think this is a great way to end 2025 and start 2026.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Turning to Mendocino Thousands of households in Mendocino county spend Christmas without electricity. Elise Cox report for KMUD News and MendoLocal News.
[00:18:32] Speaker F: At the height of the storm, more than one in five homes lost power. By Friday evening, nearly 2,000 customers were still waiting to be reconnected to the grid.
Pacific gas and Electric Co. Says a combination of heavy rain and strong winds brought down trees across the county, triggering hundreds of small outages that quickly added up.
PGE spokesperson Tamar Sarkeesian said Mendocino county was among the hardest hit areas in Northern California at this time.
[00:19:02] Speaker D: Mendocino county is the fourth most impacted county throughout our service area, she said.
[00:19:10] Speaker F: PGE mobilized roughly 8,000 workers across Northern and central California, including contractors, many of them reassigned from less affected regions.
[00:19:20] Speaker D: But like I said, we're working. It's all hands on deck and we are seeing progress in the area and they have been working around the clock.
[00:19:29] Speaker F: We are restoring power as I'm looking.
[00:19:32] Speaker D: At the map, seeing restoration, so people will be getting their power back on.
[00:19:38] Speaker F: According to pge, the biggest challenge in Mendocino county has been access downed trees and debris, blocked roads and equipment, slowing repairs. PGE says restoration times vary widely because many of the outages affect small clusters of homes scattered across rural areas.
When estimates are unavailable online, Sarkeesian said it's often because crews are still assessing damage on the ground.
Hospitals, fire stations and other critical facilities are restored first, she said then crews move on to residential customers.
By Friday evening, PGE reported steady progress across the north coast, with outage numbers continuing to drop for residents without power. The Utility encourages calling 211 for updates and assistance.
For KMUN News and Mendo Local News, I'm Elise Cox.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: In State News California study sofa swaps slashed harmful chemical levels in your body Public News Service's Suzanne Potter reports if.
[00:20:41] Speaker G: You have a couch built before 2014, you might want to hit those after Christmas sales to look for a new one, because a new study shows that replacing that old sofa can lower the level of toxic chemicals in your body. In 2014, California changed the standards so flame retardants were no longer needed in the foam used in couches, torn toys and cars. Arlene Bloom with the Green Science Policy Institute says the data show that the concentration of flame retardant chemicals in people's blood dropped by half within 15 months after they got rid of the old furniture.
[00:21:13] Speaker D: There's been a lot of epidemiology studies finding that the average American child has lost an average of 4 IQ points because of one flame retardant that was used and that people with the highest levels of that flame retardant are four times as likely to die of cancer.
[00:21:32] Speaker G: Even though California made the change 11 years ago and the federal government followed suit in 2021, people are still exposed to harmful dust from the untold number of older sofas and chairs out there produced before the rules changed. Bloom says. If you can't afford to get rid of your furniture, you can swap out the foam or at least take extra care to limit toxic dust.
[00:21:54] Speaker D: You want to really keep down the dust in your house by vacuuming with a HEPA filter.
Wet mopping because dust is what really exposes the inhabitants to the harmful flame retardants from their furniture.
[00:22:08] Speaker G: The type of chemicals at issue in this study are called PBDEs, which stands for polybrominated diphenyl ethers. You can find a fact sheet on PBDES on the Biomonitoring California website for California News Service, I'm Suzanne Potter. Find our trust indicators at publicnewservice. Org.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: In National Native News, Antonia Gonzalez reads today's headlines.
[00:22:34] Speaker H: This is National Native News. I'm Antonia Gonzalez. Arizona tribal reservations were home to two of the nation's 10 internment camps during World War II. On the Western edge of the state, the Colorado River Indian Tribes welcomes visitors to see abandoned relics from that dark past. In fact, there's an annual pilgrimage, and this year KJZ's Gabriel Pietrazio went along.
[00:23:00] Speaker C: And one way to remember is by rebuilding with crit, entrusting the care of crumbling buildings to the nonprofit behind the pilgrimage.
[00:23:10] Speaker G: It's not Poston Community Alliance. It's not anybody that we work for. The building is our client.
[00:23:15] Speaker C: Barbara Darden is a preservation architect from Aurora, Colorado. She's been restoring Poston piece by piece piece since 2009, turning that camp into a construction zone this time along with Andrew Phillips, owner of a Durango, Colorado company called Natural Dwelling.
[00:23:39] Speaker D: The same mud, the same walls, same exact material being reworked a second time around.
[00:23:45] Speaker C: On this October Saturday, camp survivors and descendants are repairing a classroom wall internees made from adobe clay and mud.
[00:23:54] Speaker D: My first guess is they were able to find these little pockets of windblown clay in the foothills here. They used the few scant resources they had made. Great brick and their workmanship and their.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: Mix design and how they laid it.
[00:24:07] Speaker D: And stacked it and built it is all top drawer.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: For the restoration. New slabs were hauled out from a Phoenix brickyard to replace that broken wall. But the old material isn't going to waste. It's being blended into new mortar that'll fill in the cracks much like one the US army gifted to internees over eight decades ago.
Hard work also being done by CRIP member Adrian Antone Jr. To restore vandalized structures.
[00:24:39] Speaker D: I thought it was pretty disrespectful and so finally giving my part to help.
[00:24:44] Speaker C: Out, especially build a little wall, Darden dreamt of rebuilding a lot more.
[00:24:50] Speaker G: We would love to restore everything, but.
[00:24:53] Speaker C: That comes with a big price tag defrayed by National Park Service grants to preserve internment sites like this one. Now the Trump administration is eradicating signs marking the camps and other so called disparaging reminders of the country's history.
[00:25:10] Speaker G: We do not anticipate any more grants being more realistic. We're looking at maybe four buildings here and then the others will just have to let them go and watch them fall into ruin.
[00:25:20] Speaker C: Either way, CRIT will keep working to protect this history, one brick at a time.
For national Native news, I'm Gabriel Piatarazzio reporting from Poston.
[00:25:36] Speaker H: President Trump signed a bill into law Friday that will give Alaska Native veterans more time to file for their Native allotments. The deadline to apply was Monday, but legislation passed earlier this month to give veterans a five year extension. The Native allotment program was created more than 100 years ago to put more federal land into private ownership. It allowed individual Alaska natives to claim 160 acres. But when the federal program ended in 1971. Vietnam vets missed out because many were overseas fighting the war. As of mid December, only about 25% of eligible veterans had applied for their allotments. Many said the process was too difficult to navigate. Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of the main sponsors of the bill, said he will make staff available to assist veterans with their applications.
I'm Antonia Gonzalez.
[00:26:48] Speaker D: Native Voice one, the.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Native American Radio Network.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: That's all for tonight's broadcast. Thanks for listening. Thanks to our engineer, Javier Rodriguez, and thanks to our reporters Elise Cox, Suzanne Potter and Antonio Gonzalez. KMUD News is online. You can find us on kmud.org and now streaming on most podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, where you can download our stories and newscasts for offline listening during your rural commutes. You can also follow us on social media. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can give us a call at 707-923-2605 or send an email to news.org Redwood Community Radio, Inc. Is funded by Press 4, the National Movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news. Learn more at PressForward News. Reporting for KMUD, I'm Gabriel Zipper.
