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[Valorie Carlee]

The tone, the visuals, the meticulous attention to the detail of the game world is a far cry from some other adaptations-which-will-not-be-named that try to completely blaze their own path. This is extraordinarily faithful to the games while not being a straight adaptation of any one game in particular, even if it shares at least one central baseline: A vault dweller must head to the surface and find their father.

S1: But another crucial cause of these mega-fires , a lack of proper force management. Coming up this hour , an investigation into a town the U.S. Forest Service long knew could burn but fell short of completing the work to protect it before it was nearly destroyed.

S1: You're listening to Burned. A special investigation from the California newsroom. I'm Vicki Gonzalez with CAP Radio in Sacramento. Stay with us. This is Bert , a special investigation from the California newsroom , a collaboration of public radio stations throughout the state. I'm Vicki Gonzalez with CCAP Radio in Sacramento. The U.S. Forest Service manages 20 million acres of national forest land here in California. That's roughly a fifth of the state. A big part of its job is to keep those forests healthy and to keep nearby communities safe from wildfire. After a year long investigation , we found the U.S. Forest Service is struggling to complete the work it knows it must do to keep Californians safe. One devastating example is Grizzly Flatts , a Sierra Nevada town of 1400 people that borders the Eldorado National Forest in between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe Last year , a majority of the community was reduced to ashes by the Caldera fire. Our investigation found for two decades , the Forest Service warned that grizzly flats face serious risk of burning in a wildfire. But the agency completed only a fraction of the work it had planned. The reason why that is a big question. My cap radio colleague Scott Rod went to answer.

S4: Hinton took videos of the fire as it illuminated the night sky. He checked on it over and over that night. Hiking down steep trails into Forest Service land. The next morning , Leoni Meadows sent the campers home as a precaution. But Hinton's brother in law , Forrest Hasso , he remained optimistic. He also works at the camp and was previously a firefighter.

S4: Two days after the fire ignited as the blaze tore across the landscape toward Grizzly Flats , Victor Diaz stepped outside of his home on the east side of town. It was dark out and something in the air just didn't feel right.

S4: Eventually , the camera crews packed up their gear and headed off to the next wildfire. But I couldn't let this story go over the last year. I returned to Grizzly Flats half a dozen times. I interviewed residents and wildfire experts and pored over government databases with my colleagues. I wanted to understand what happened here before the caldera fire. I wanted to learn what the Forest Service did and didn't do to protect this town. And I wanted to figure out if the devastation in Grizzly Flats was preventable.

S4: On a cold afternoon back in January. Eric Hinton and Forest Hasso lead me to the top of a creaky metal fire tower at Leoni Meadows. We throw open the hatch. Climb onto the platform and take a moment to catch our breath. Like we've never exercised. I know the view is stunning for all the wrong reasons. Trees like blackened skeletons cast long shadows across the barren forest floor. The burn scar stretches to grizzly flats , where just about everything on the east side of town is gone. The main gathering places the school , the post office , the community church all turned to ash. And then there's this house in the middle of the devastation. It's Robin's egg blue and looks untouched like the calendar fires. Flames just skirted past. It's even surrounded by a cluster of green trees.

S4: Yeah. 60 year old Mark Almer lives here. He stands in his garage , gazing at the hollowed out neighborhood. Almer spent more than a decade trying to protect his neighborhood and the entire town from wildfire , starting with fireproofing his own home.

S7: Once they got a hold of it. I wouldn't let go of it until the problem was fixed. Well , one of the captains called me Bulldog once , and eventually everyone in the entire department started calling me that.

S4: Years into retirement , he still has that tenacity. Just one example. Almer was determined to figure out who fed the fish in his pond after he evacuated during the Kelder Fire. He spent hours and hours reviewing security camera footage.

S4: He added the mystery fish feeder as an emergency responder and then tracked him down , all just to say thanks. But where the bulldog has really lived up to his name in recent years , tirelessly working to protect grizzly flats from wildfire.

S4: To understand Alma's commitment to protecting the town from wildfire and to understand the true tragedy of grizzly flats , we have to go back to a community meeting organized by the Forest Service. 20 years ago.

S4: Kathy Hardy worked as a district ranger with the Forest Service back then. She's now retired. Hardy and others from the agency gathered residents at the only church in town and offered a dire warning. Grizzly flats could be wiped off the map by wildfire.

S7: They showed a fire that could start down at the bottom of the middle fork of the chasm , this river canyon , not unlike what happened in the caldera fire , and that it could potentially wipe out our community within 24 hours.

S4: In other words , the Forest Service predicted with chilling accuracy what would happen in the Calder Fire again. This was two decades ago. And here in our story is where the people of grizzly flats take one path , wasting no time after the community meeting , getting organized and taking action , and the Forest Service takes another path , spinning its wheels for years , trying to find a plan to protect the town.

S2: If all this work was done by 2020 , grizzly flats might still be there. They left that part of the town on the southwest side of the community , above a deep river canyon. I mean , that is by far the most risky part of that whole landscape.

S1: This is burned. A special investigation from the California newsroom , a collaboration of public radio stations throughout the state. I'm Vicki Gonzalez with CAP Radio in Sacramento. You just heard from my colleague Scott Rod about the caldera fire , which sparked last August in the Sierra Nevada foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. A wildfire that leveled the town of Grizzly Flats. Scott and his colleagues spent a year uncovering how the Forest Service knew about the risk of wildfire to grizzly flats. How the agency warned the community decades ago. But the Forest Service still fell short in its efforts to protect the town. Scott Rod picks up the story from here.

S4: The council scaled up its efforts from there. Led by Mark Elmer , the Bulldog. They plan to remove overgrown brush from more than a thousand acres in grizzly flats. The work would create a buffer around the community and clear the sides of roads so people could safely evacuate in a wildfire. This work wouldn't be easy and it wouldn't be cheap. We're talking a few million dollars for a community of modest means and fixed incomes. So the Fire Safe Council raised money however it could. They held annual barbecues.

S4: And it paid off. They cleared brush throughout the town and improved evacuation routes. But as the fire safe Council hustled , the Forest Service idled. The agency did tackle some smaller projects , But a lot of that work was miles away from grizzly flats. Most of the federal land near the town's border , thousands of acres remained dense and overgrown , primed for a catastrophic wildfire. The agency's plan to manage the forest around grizzly flats was still years away. Before we go any further , though , it's important to know what we're talking about when we say forest management.

S4: That's Susie Kolker. She's with the University of California's Cooperative Extension in the central Sierra Nevada. She says forest management has been happening for thousands of years. For example , Native American communities intentionally set fires for hunting and cultural purposes , which also prevented forests from getting too congested. But over the last century , agencies like the Forest Service have focused mostly on putting fires out. That's led to a buildup of brush and vegetation that can easily ignite.

S4: Sometimes trees are cut down and sold for timber. A process called commercial thinning. And then there's prescribed burning. When you set a controlled fire to burn the understory of a forest , it's a practice similar to the fires set by indigenous communities.

S4: He wanted to manage the forest across his district in a big part of his vision aimed to protect grizzly flats from wildfire In 2013 , about a decade after that initial meeting in the church , the Forest Service announced plans for 15,000 acres of commercial tree thinning brush removal and lots of prescribed burning. They called it the trestle project , and Nelson was a key architect.

S4: The trestle project would complement the efforts of the Grizzly Flats Fire Safe Council. It was supposed to tackle much needed work on the south side of town. That south side was the most fire prone part of the community. The agency originally said it would complete the trestle project by 2020 , but most of it was ultimately left unfinished based on months of reporting. It's clear there wasn't one big reason the TRESTLE project languished. It was a whole bunch of things , Nelson says. The project hit pushback almost immediately.

S4: Responding to these comments and objections took a long time. The Forest Service put out over a thousand pages of environmental reviews , alternate maps and reports by specialists. By the time the agency actually approved the project , it was years behind schedule. Scott Rogers took over as District Ranger after Nelson retired in 2017.

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