Controlled Bush Fire Burn | Rebuilding Paradise

ZEKE LUNDNER: One of the things that spread the Camp Fire through Paradise was all the spot fires. All those little baby trees are what carries the fire up into the crowns, and up in the crowns, when wind's blowing, that's how you get the one-mile to two-mile spots. What we want to do in here with our burn is, we want to get it hot enough to kill all these little baby green trees. People's fear of fire is preventing us from putting fire on the ground here in a good way, in a way that will make the people who live out here safer. But fire is not the enemy.

ZEKE LUNDNER: We're at like 58 and-- 58 and 43.

DANNY DAVIS: Yep. I'm there. 59 and 43.

ZEKE LUNDNER: OK. Danny's people have been burning here for thousands of years, and there's still forest, you know-- Well, in Hoopa, we actually do a lot of prescribed burns in a lot of our village sites. We don't want to kill all the trees and scorch the land. You just want to manage how many trees are growing. So we've been doing it for centuries.

ZEKE LUNDNER: The whole thing about living in the woods is figuring out a balance. We like to think that we can control nature. Fire doesn't care what we think, and whether it's the railroad or arson or PG&E or lightning, we will have fires. There's nothing we can do to keep that from happening.