In recent years, Rhode Island has experienced, on average, about 70 wildfires annually. Ecosystem disruption fueled by climate change is only going to make the state more susceptible to such fires. ecoRI News reporters Rob Smith and Colleen Cronin tackle this hot topic with director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, Terry Gray, and his colleague Tee Jay Boudreau.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Rob Smith 

This year the United States started off with a different kind of disaster. For most of January, a series of wildfires tore through Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, killing 29 people, forcing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and ultimately destroying or damaging 18,000 homes and structures. Today on Blab Lab, we’re going to be talking about wildfires. Could they happen here? And what are we doing to prepare for that possibility?

Terry, Tee Jay, thanks for joining me today on the podcast.

Terry Gray

Good to see you, Rob.

Tee Jay Boudreau

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Rob Smith

Thanks, guys, for coming on the show. We’re an ocean state. We don’t have a ton of forest land. Well, we have some, but people probably don’t think of us as a big forest state because we’re so heavily dense and urbanized. How is climate change impacting the conditions in Rhode Island? Could we have a wildfire event?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

I’ll start off. So essentially, you know, Rhode Island is the Ocean State, but we’re about 54% forested, so that’s a big chunk of forest land. When you turn your back to the ocean and you look inward, there’s a lot of trees, and there’s a lot of forests in Rhode Island, but looking at climate change and how it’s affecting us, our natural ecosystems rely on our existing conditions to survive and to thrive. But what we’re seeing are things that we’re tracking, you know, more extreme temperatures, drier springs, that we don’t get as much rain as we typically do, and when we do get rain, people have noticed that we’re getting these more frequent flooding events. We’re getting really, really dry summers, extreme temperatures there. And then our falls are kind of extending the summer season. You know, the falls are getting hotter, and then all of a sudden it drops off to really cold winters. And basically, what we’re seeing is four seasons are kind of melding into something a little more static, and we’re not getting those four distinct seasons which change the kind natural ecosystems and what they’ve been used to relying on for growing. And what that does is create situations where they’re more susceptible to diseases, to infestations, through invasive plants and species, insects and things like that, and all of those things kind of make our forests weaker and more susceptible to things like wildfires and other types of disasters that we are always looking at, kind of tracking and figuring out how we can help lessen the effects of those.

Rob Smith

Can you talk more about the invasive species? Because I know, and this is a little selfish of me, but my father lives in Coventry, and about a decade ago, maybe more, they had the spongy moth infestation, which felled so many trees in the town on my father’s property. He’s still complaining about it about once a year now; there’ll be a dead tree from it that will fall over somewhere. How exactly do invasive species like the spongy moth and plants actually impact wildfire conditions in our forests?

Tee Jay Boudreau

So, yeah, it has been about a decade since we had the spongy moth infestation now, and actually the U.S. Forest Service claims that that was, in New England, probably the greatest forest health issue in the last 50 years, and Rhode Island was the epicenter for that. So it was no small thing that happened.

Rob Smith

Thank you for validating his complaints to me.

Colleen Cronin 

It’s so Rhode Island, it’s like where the trees used to be before the spongy moth.

Rob Smith 

No, I mean, you would be surprised when he moved into his house in 2008, you couldn’t see his neighbors; now you can, because so many trees fell.

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah, those repeated defoliation events that happened with the spongy moth really created a situation where what we saw was around 45,000 acres of dead or dying trees in Rhode Island. About 12% of our forests were affected through that, and that’s, you know, nothing small. So, you know, spongy moth comes in and creates a situation where the trees are weak, and then a weaker tree will be more susceptible to a fungal attack or a bacterial infection, things like that. And then you couple that with a changing climate where they’re not getting enough water, and the summers are really hot, and that just creates more standing dead trees that can’t come back from those events.

Rob Smith

What about overgrown vegetation? Because I took a tour of a new purchase by the Westerly Land Trust that they just bought, and the land was mostly unmanaged. It didn’t really have a strict management plan, and there was a lot of vegetative undergrowth under the trees. How can that contribute to wildfires?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah, it can. So actually, that’s a kind of a direct result of the spongy moth. So what happens is, you know, when those trees don’t have the leaves on them, what’s happening is you’re allowing more sunlight to come into the understory, which then allows plants that normally would lay dormant to grow. And a lot of that is invasive species that would have been kept dormant through a healthy overstory.

Rob Smith 

Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah. So, when we’re allowing a lot more sunlight to come in, what that’s doing is creating a situation where we’re getting a lot more understory growth, so there’s more fuels on the ground. There’s more things that can burn when there’s a fire. Normally it’s invasive species that take advantage of those opportunistic, you know, situations with more sunlight, so they’re undesirable plant species that are then creating more risk for us when there is potential for wildfire.

Colleen Cronin 

My question is, so when I think of the deluges that we’re getting with these huge rainstorms, I’m like, “Oh, well, then that, like, probably solves the problem, right?” But that’s not the case, is it?

Tee Jay Boudreau

No, it solves the immediate problem. So if there’s an issue happening and then all of a sudden it starts raining, people like, “Thank God it’s raining. You don’t have to worry about this right now…”

Colleen Cronin 

“Give me all the rain I can take!”

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah, exactly what happens is that rain quickly disappears and will go back to dry conditions. What we need is a deep soaking, you know, frequent rainfall that we are used to. Having a quick rainfall of, you know, one to two inches is a problem. It’s creating flooding. It’s creating, you know, havoc in that moment. But it’s not really creating a situation that is desirable for plants to be able to grow and to actually have what they need in terms of the amount of water.

Colleen Cronin 

Is there any sort of thing too, where it’s like, if it’s a lot of rain, does that ever cause rot with trees or then kind of also cause problems for them?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Not really in a forested environment, but what it’ll cause is it can cause localized erosion and things like that. So, if we repeatedly see that happen, trails, roads, hillsides, things that normally would not be affected by that, if they continuously get flooding rains, it’ll create erosion, which then, over time, will create these issues that we see.

Rob Smith 

So, Tee Jay, over the last couple of years, you guys have been doing prescribed burnings throughout the year on state lands. Can you talk a little bit about what prescribed burns are and how they help curb wildfires?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah, so actually, this has been something that we’ve been ramping up in the last few years, but prescribed burning is essentially a scenario where we create a safe and secure area where we are physically burning our properties, and mostly it’s meadows and forest lands that we’re burning. And we do those for a couple of reasons. One, whenever we do anything in forestry, what we’re trying to do is get the most bang for our buck. So, what we’re doing is we’re creating habitat diversity. A lot of these habitats require burning for them to become successful. So, what we do is we identify areas where we see an overgrowth of invasives or lack of biodiversity, and we can go in and we burn these, and then what happens is undesirable species will be burned, and then the desirable species will come back.

Colleen Cronin 

Are there examples of certain species of plants or animals that really like fire?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So, there’s certain things. Rhode Island has a very limited amount of pitch pine forests. If you’re familiar with the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, you know they require fire for those to flourish. They need the cones to open up to reproduce.

Colleen Cronin 

I always thought that that was like a myth growing up where the pine cone needs fire.

Tee Jay Boudreau 

No, they really do. But then in like, our meadows, one of the big things is, you know, we’re seeing a lack of occurrences of monarch butterflies. So, burning these meadows will help us bring back milkweed plants, which is necessary for the monarch butterfly to habitat.

Rob Smith 

What makes a place an ideal location for a prescribed burn? What are you looking for when you make the list? I know there’s a list of about 15 for this year, but what are you looking for?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So, we look for areas that are safe for us to do this. Obviously, it’s something that is dangerous, but we’re qualified, and we take great measures when we’re doing this, but we’re looking at areas like I said, that we know that need a little bit of assistance. So this is a training exercise for us to be able to allow our team, local fire departments and other first responders that we work with to be able to understand what it’s like to be in and close to a fire. So, areas that will allow us to do that safely, but then also habitat that could rely on us doing this kind of work for it. So, both meadows and forested areas that have an overgrowth of understory plants that we know, if removed, would help us in the event of a wildfire.

Colleen Cronin 

And is it only on state property? If the Nature Conservancy has a big plot of land that they’re kind of concerned about, do they ever ask for help? Or can they do their own prescribed burns?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So right now, we’re doing these mainly on state property. It’s easy for us, it’s our property, but there could be opportunities for other things like that. But right now, we have a lot of property in a lot of areas where we can do this kind of work.

Rob Smith 

And then what other stuff are you doing to help?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So, we recently, in the 2022 Green Bond, received $3 million for forest management activities. And what we did was we took that money and we divided it up into sizable chunks for us, into things that we could manage. So, removing dead and dying trees, mainly from the spongy moth infestations, things like that. We did a series of shaded fuel breaks, which are firefighting tactics, where we are looking at our existing roadways and our access points into management areas, and then creating essentially a fuel break. So when there is a fire, it would be stopped when it hits these roadways. And we call them shaded field breaks because we’re not removing all of the trees. We’re just removing a certain number of them based on a prescription so that we can still maintain a healthy canopy. We’re increasing access into these areas, replacing old and worn gates for first responders, things like that. You know, physically, actual gates to go in and out of the management areas, repairing our roadways and those sorts of activities.

Rob Smith 

And then I remember, a couple years ago, you guys had, I guess I’d call it a “wildfire school,” where you invited a bunch of firefighters to practice the techniques needed to combat wildfires. Are you still doing stuff like that with local fire departments?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So, we have a team of fire control officers that work with DEM. They’re in our forestry office, and their full-time job is wildfire management. A big part of that is training for themselves, but then also training for first responders. And it’s mostly fire departments, you know, volunteer and full-time staff that we help train on wildfire mitigation. So that’s something we’re doing all the time. When we do those prescribed burns, we’re inviting local fire departments and working side-by-side with them, so that they can see the firefighting tactics that we do when we’re doing them. But those trainings are happening all the time. Big trainings that happen, you know, once a year, but then also smaller trainings where we’ll go to a fire department and just do an evening training on one particular thing.

Colleen Cronin 

Can I ask a question? And this might seem a little bit obvious, what is it like when a forest fire happens here?

Tee Jay Boudreau

It’s scary, it’s hot and it’s a situation that needs to be kept under control. So when fires do happen here, typically, people might not realize this, but we deal with between 60 and 80 wildfires a year. They’re really small. A lot of them are a quarter-acre to an acre in size, which is, you know, a typical-backyard- in-a-neighborhood size.

Colleen Cronin

Feels big for Rhode Island.

Tee Jay Boudreau

Oh, yeah. I mean, like I said, anytime you see smoke or fire, it’s scary, but we are dealing with these all the time. Like I said, between 60 and 80 of them a year. Every once in a while we get big ones. There’ll be 20 acres or 50 acres. And a couple of years ago, we dealt with some really big ones. But that’s why we have staff that are always training and looking out for how to deal with these situations. And you deal with them a lot differently than you would a structure fire. You’re not just standing there with a fire hose next to a fire hydrant putting them out. There’s tactics that we use to fight these fires.

Colleen Cronin 

I had gone to a forest fire in Burrillville when I first started at ecoRI, and I was really surprised. I mean, it was hot out because it was the summer, but it was also just a different kind of heat coming out of the ground, kind of, and some of the firefighters were telling me that, oh, yeah, there  can be root fires underneath. There’s some of it you’re not even necessarily seeing.

Tee Jay Boudreau 

So that’s one of the big things that we’re always doing when there’s a fire, you know, we’ll go through and they call it a mop-up. We’ll make sure that everything is taken care of, and the fire is extinguished, and then you go back the next day and you check for hot spots, because what will happen is the fire will go underground, and then it’ll spread, you know, 50, 70 feet away, and it’ll pop back up, and a second fire will start. Things like that happen frequently. So that’s one of those detection methods that we use to make sure that those fires are extinguished completely.

Rob Smith 

So, after a wildfire has burned through a piece of land like Exeter two years ago with the Queens River Preserve, what does land management look like after the fire is done?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

The biggest thing is safety. So if it’s a piece of property that you’re going to actively still recreate in, invite people onto, you have trails through things like that, the biggest thing is to look up and check and make sure that whatever has happened through that fire is not going to create a hazard for people that are going to go into those areas after the fact. So, removing trees that are hazardous after a fire, you know, would be number one. Second, is to make sure that if anything has happened through that fire in terms of erosion or any other like ground-level disturbances, those get taken care of. For us, replanting and things like that aren’t really something that we do. We really just have the natural processes take over. We saw that even weeks after those big fires, people went back in, we went back in, and we could see small plants growing and things like that flourishing. So it’s not an event that creates a kind of a barren environment.

Rob Smith

So, after the wildfire in Exeter, there was a big legislative study commission. It said in its report that only 1% of state forests are being managed. DEM wasn’t really mapping a lot of the fire roads, and the commission also recommended more funding and staffing for the department’s forestry program. So since that commission, what’s changed in the forestry departments in the last year?

Tee Jay Boudreau 

Yeah, so I actually took part in that commission. So it was great to be a witness to that and to take part in that to speak to that 1% number that really is the amount of land that we are harvesting or actively managing in terms of cutting down trees.

Colleen Cronin

Like logging?

Tee Jay Boudreau

Like logging, yeah, exactly. So, essentially, 1% of all of our land holdings, we are actively doing some sort of management on. We’re not converting that land. What we’re doing is we’re removing trees for a forest health issue or habitat issue. So, you know, we are looking at all of our properties. You know, all the time, it’s just that we only have so much work that we can do each year. But out of that commission, there were a lot of good suggestions and opportunities for us to work with legislators and other folks throughout the state to figure out what we could be doing differently or better at DEM and in forestry in particular. And one of those things we really heard about was access into the management areas. Some of those things that we had had trails and access points that we had blocked off, and one of the things was, I had talked about earlier, about gates, you know, looking at all of our gated structures and making sure that we have emergency access into those areas reliable for first responders. So, that’s something that we did right away, is we looked at areas where we had cordoned those off and put in new gates and things like that. Another thing we looked at was our roadway structure. So we have in probably all of our management areas, probably 80 to 100 miles of unpaved roadways. That’s a lot, so looking at where are our opportunities for remediation, and where are our most important roads that we need to remediate and make sure that they have access into our management areas. And what we did after that was we did a full report on the George Washington Management Area, which is in the northwest part of the state. So we looked at that. Our fire team actually did that. And this year we’re moving down into Arcadia, which is in the southern part of the state, to do the same thing, to look for, you know, where are important access points and where are the highest risks that we have for fire. And then a big thing was, you know, staffing, you know, DEM and Forestry, historically, we’ve had a staff of about 14 for a long time. After that commission came out, we were given the opportunity to hire two new people. What we did was we hired a new fire control officer to go on our fire program, and we hired a new state lands officer, so that position is working with our state lands division to do those missions, to figure out where we need to do more active management, where we have pests and diseases affecting our forest canopy and things like that. So, we can do a lot of this work and maybe do more than 1% a year, things like that. And we’re actually in the middle of hiring two additional people as well. So, in two years, you know, we’ll have four new people working at DEM and Forestry.

Colleen Cronin 

I’m wondering if, and maybe, Terry, this is a question for you, but that is definitely a lot of progress. Are there other things? And I know it’s hard in this legislative session this year, with budget stuff, the way that it is. But what else would you like to do? Or what else would you want to see to try to, you know, keep up this land maintenance and beef up the program in the future?

Terry Gray 

Colleen, I want to go back to what Tee Jay said and just look at the investments that have been made in this program over the past two or three years. And we’re really thankful that we’ve been able to get investments from two Green Bonds that really allow us to do the work that Tee Jay mentioned. And there’s still a lot of work to be done, and there’s still a lot of funding left to really make that happen. So we’re in good shape on that side. It really kind of upped our game significantly, and that really put us in a much better position to accomplish that mission.

Colleen Cronin 

Yeah, and it also kind of seemed like investing in DEM in general could be good for preventing fires and forest management, because it’s like so many different things that go into forest management. You know, it’s a whole system, from the spongy moss to the fighting climate change.

Terry Gray 

Well, if you look at land use patterns across the state, a lot of people are moving closer and closer to our forests, so the risk of a forest fire, then extending into personal property damage, is pretty high. We need to be extra diligent on how we manage our holdings, so that we’re not we’re not faced with that eventuality.

Colleen Cronin 

Thank you, guys, so much for coming on the show.