Crews clean up northern Arizona's Dude Fire site in Tonto National Forest
Several large corporations, a utility company and the U.S. Forest Service are teaming up to fix the forests of northern Arizona.
Wildfires not only threaten communities, but also the water supply that flows down to the Valley.
What do Pepsi, EdgeCore, Meta and Google all have in common? They’ve committed a million dollars to help treat 7,600 acres in the Tonto National Forest over the course of several years.
On Sept. 18, a demonstration on what the money is going toward was given.
‘It is a fire hazard to the communities’
A powerful machine with giant teeth forges the forest floor. It can chew up entire trees with one big gulp.
"It’s like an excavator with a grinding head on the top, and it’s going through that area, grinding up some of the smaller trees, all the brush," said Matthew Paciorek, district ranger in the Tonto National Forest.
They're focusing on where the devastating Dude Fire burned more than 30 years ago.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DEADLY DUDE FIRE BY CLICKING HERE
Arizona marks 33 years since deadly 'Dude Fire'
June 26, 2023 marks the 33rd anniversary of a deadly wildfire near Payson. The Dude Fire broke out in Walk Moore Canyon in 1990, and the fire destroyed 60 homes, and charred over 24,000 acres of land before it was contained. Six people died as a result of the blaze, including inmate firefighters and a guard from the State Prison in Perryville.
What’s grown up since then may look pretty, but there's an ugly side.
"The brush is really thick. It is a fire hazard to the communities. It’s also not necessarily good wildlife habitat," Paciorek said.
What's left behind after that giant machine comes through, is now basically wood chips.
The project targets old burn scars, sites near communities, and Arizona's water supply.
"Not only are you seeing post-wildfire flooding where you have huge fluxes of water coming down that’s filled with ash and sediment and debris. All that material kind of fills in some of our reservoirs, which hurts our long-term water storage supplies, but it also degrades our water quality," said Elvy Barton, Water and Forest Sustainability Senior Manager at SRP.
Major corporations are climbing onboard too. They’re added investment, which means double the money and finishing the job in half the time.
One of those corporations is EdgeCore, which operates its data center in Mesa.
"One of our core tenets is that we want to benefit the communities that we are a part of and so really focusing on how we can benefit the community of Phoenix and Mesa and as we expand doing that and other data center markets that we will be operating in," says Feather Bokker of EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure.
This phase of the project will be followed by prescribed burns and replanting – preventing wildfires and protecting water one bite at a time.