Quagga and zebra mussels could cost tribes millions
Story by Heather Fraley | Senior Editor
Illustration by Mollie Lemm | Web Editor
THE RUMBLE of the turbines inside the inner workings of Séliš Ksanka Ql’ispé (SKQ) Dam is so loud, it’s hard to hear anyone speak. Brian Lipscomb raises his voice above the clamor to explain how the dam’s turbines are cleaned and maintained.
Acquiring the SKQ Dam, formerly Kerr Dam, in 2015 was an important step forward for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). With the acquisition, it became the first tribal government in the U.S. to own a major hydroelectric facility. However, the CSKT still faces challenges.
The most recent threats to this facility are aquatic invasive zebra and quagga mussels. The seemingly inevitable westward march of these invaders is a source of financial concern for Energy Keepers, the tribally-owned company that operates the dam, which is located on the Flathead River. The mussels could cost the company $8 million a year, according to Brian Lipscomb, CEO of Energy Keepers and a CSKT member. Any financial loss incurred could significantly impact tribal social support programs that many members rely on.
Although no invasive mussels have been found in the Columbia River Basin, which includes the Flathead River, they have been detected as close as the Tiber Reservoir in north-central Montana. Once the mussels get into a body of water, they multiply rapidly and coat any submerged structures, such as hydroelectric turbines. Montana conservation groups and agencies spent about $9 million in prevention in 2017.
In fiscal year 2017, the dam earned $27 million in total funds for the tribal government. After operating costs are subtracted, the dam generates about $18 million a year in profit. According to Lipscomb, the dam is one of six for-profit CSKT companies. The money goes directly to the tribes.
“We have zero retained earnings,” Lipscomb said. “The tribes use those dollars to provide services to the tribal membership, and that, of course, benefits the entire community as well.”
Energy Keepers follows a specific for-profit business plan: it sells its energy on the open market. If Energy Keepers makes less energy, it makes less money. It doesn’t have customers who could share the higher operation costs mussels would bring. If the turbines are stopped, no energy is generated, and the dam loses money.
If mussels make it to the Flathead River, dam operators plan to shut down the turbines and physically remove the mussels. Lipscomb estimates $8 million a year would be lost, based on how long the turbines would be stopped.
“So that $8 million, if we suffered that as an impact, that would be a direct impact to the revenue that we provide back to the tribes,” Lipscomb said.
According to Lipscomb, some of the revenue from the dam goes toward tribal social support programs, including elderly assistance programs. The services include snowplowing to provide better winter access for elderly people and supplying firewood to heat houses. There are also programs that help tribal members who need assistance after a death in the family.
The dam generates an additional $2 million a year for the tribal natural resources department as mitigation for the loss of wildlife habitat caused by the dam.
If invasive mussels get into to the Flathead River, the mitigation funds won’t stop coming in. Mitigation payments are required in the dam’s operating license. However, invasive species impact these funds in a different way.
According to Tom McDonald, manager of the CSKT Division of Fish, Wildlife, Recreation and Conservation, the funds are flexible and protect the native fishery in multiple ways.
The natural resources department has already redirected some of its mitigation funds from other planned projects to invasive mussel prevention.
This reduces the funding to provide fishing opportunities for some tribal members who rely on fish for food. It also reduces the ability to improve the fishery for the native bull trout, a threatened species of high cultural significance to members of the CSKT.
Release of convicted murderer shocks victim’s family
Story by Maggie Dresser | Staff Writer
When Kari Covers Up learned from a passerby in Crow Agency, Montana, that her brother’s killer was going to be released early from prison, she felt old wounds reopening. Not only was Quinton Birdinground Jr., 38, supposed to serve nine more years for murder and assault, authorities were supposed to notify Covers Up, a Crow tribal member and former tribal judge, and her family of his whereabouts when he was released.
So she and her 72-year-old aunt, Myra Lefthand, were shocked when they heard rumors on the reservation of his impending release. “Nobody knows what’s going on,” Lefthand said. “That’s the same thing we’ve experienced. Somebody need[ed] to come tell us what’s going on.”
The lack of communication frustrated Lefthand, who feels her family is being ignored. “They do it for white victims,” Lefthand said. “We’re almost like second-class citizens.”
Fifteen years ago, at a house party, Birdinground shot his uncle (who was also Kari Covers Up’s brother), Emerson Pickett, as well as Birdinground’s estranged girlfriend. He killed Pickett and grazed his ex-girlfriend’s hand.
In 2003, a jury convicted Birdinground of three counts—second-degree murder, assault resulting in serious bodily injury, and using a firearm during a violent crime—and a federal judge sentenced him to 24 years in prison. But on Aug. 23, 2018, U.S. District Judge Susan Watters re-examined his sentence in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the violent crime law was unconstitutional. This meant she had to throw out his conviction on the violent crime count, which carried a 10-year sentence. This meant Birdinground had already served his sentence for the other two counts, and had to be released.
Before Birdinground was released, Covers Up and Lefthand were working with Rhonda Myron, a victim witness coordinator for the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s Office in Billings. Lefthand said Myron was supposed to notify the family about Birdinground’s upcoming court dates and prison release, but they received no notification (Myron didn’t respond to emails sent to her work account).
According to the Associated Press, Judge Watters expressed unease at releasing Birdinground, but said she had no choice. “How in the world could second-degree murder not be a crime of violence?” Watters told Pickett’s family during the August 2018 hearing. “I get that. I have to follow the law.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the “residual clause” of the Armed Career Criminal Act, which had been enacted as part of an effort to impose tougher sentences on defendants with three prior convictions for a violent felony, was unconstitutionally vague and “so standardless it invites arbitrary enforcement.” The Court held that increasing sentences under ACCA’s residual clause violated due process.
Birdinground’s prosecutor, Lori Suek, began an appeal after his release, and said she thinks they may be able to reinstate the original sentence. But it could take years to complete. Meanwhile, Birdinground remains free in Billings and Pickett’s family wants justice. “For someone to take my brother’s life and just be able to walk out, that hurts,” Covers Up said.
Opinion | Montana’s legislature must restore funding so FWP can protect our natural resources
By Jenny Gessaman | Staff Writer
MONTANA’S landscape is inseparable from its identity. Mountain ranges young and old texture the state’s prairie, while rivers and creeks wind their way into three different watersheds.
This is our amazing Big Sky State. This is our almost 147,000 square miles of outside, and it’s suffering because the state can’t protect it. The law enforcement division of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) is legally barred from doing most of its job.
FWP enforcement officers, better known as game wardens, administer Montana’s wildlife management laws. They “make sure people aren’t breaking the law when they are out there hunting, fishing and trapping,” Chief of Law Enforcement Dave Loewen said.
Right now, the terms of the wardens’ funding require them to do something other than that for 14 hours of their workweek. Unless, of course, they’re willing to break federal law to do their jobs.
It’s a dramatic statement, to be sure, but dramatic fits. Not only is the problem real, it originated with the equally dramatic state budget negotiations of 2017.
That whole partisan kerfuffle surrounded a budget shortfall and ended with significant budget cuts. Some fell below the public’s radar, and those cuts became insidious: hidden in the state’s core infrastructure, they internally nibbled away at our government.
Enter the FWP and its law enforcement division. The legislature’s budget changed how Montana funded the division’s salaries. To save money, the state increased the amount of federal funding used in those wages. A good chunk of that funding was Wildlife Restoration Program grants, informally known as PR funding, for the Pittman-Robertson Act that created it, and it comes with tight strings: the funds cannot be used for law enforcement. The money is meant to fund wildlife management “exclusive of law enforcement and
public relations” (16 USC § 669g, if you’re interested).
So how big was that increase in PR funding for law enforcement salaries? One thousand percent. That means almost a third of each officer’s salary bans them from doing law enforcement.
It’s problematic, according to Loewen. The division now has a list of PR activities: wildlife management tasks staff can do instead of law enforcement.
This means Loewen’s staff focuses on conservation management instead of conservation enforcement, and the change is impacting resources Montanans love.
Fish are one example. The summer of 2017 was hot and dry and full of fire. The conditions prompted fishing restrictions across Montana, but those limitations weren’t effective.
“We were unable to have an enforcement presence at those fishing restrictions,” Loewen said. “We were unable to do basic compliance checks.”
The lack of enforcement is a tricky change, and it’s hitting the state on several levels. Resident reports are now a major factor in FWP’s attempts to stop misbehavior. Loewen’s division lost an investigator to early retirement, a decision prompted by the funding change.
And, worst of all, one mistake could cost a state department’s budget. The entirety of FWP’s annual PR award, roughly $30 million, could be at risk if Loewen’s division makes one wrong move, like working too many enforcement hours. This budget cut is altering more than a budget; it’s altering an essential division of our government.
But the wardens are studiously logging their hours and activities. FWP is noting the side effects. Maybe during the next budget negotiations, the wardens will incite some change. Maybe they won’t have to choose between their job descriptions and federal law. Maybe, as FWP’s law enforcement, game wardens will be able to go back to enforcing the law.
50%Caucasian36%American Indian/Alaskan Native7%More than one ethnicity/undertermined6%Hispanic1%Black
In January 2018, Montana’s Department of Public Heath and Human Services launched the First Years Initiative to reduce child abuse and neglect in Montana. Although Montana’s foster care population only increased 1.4 percent in the first half of 2018, Montana still boasts one of the worst foster care records in the country. “Montana is still the child removal capital of America, tearing apart proportionately more families than any other state,” posted Richard Wexler, former journalist and executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, in response to a 2018 report from Montana DPHHS.
Montana is the third least populous state, but it has the third most children in foster care. Idaho is the seventh least populous state and has the fewest children in foster care.
Between 2008 and 2018, Montana’s population of children under 18 increased less than 3 percent, but Montana’s foster care population increased 250 percent.
Native Americans are 7 percent of the Montana population, but account for 36 percent of children in foster care.
At least two-thirds of the state’s foster care cases are related to drugs, and most are from methamphetamine.
The number of children in foster care because of parental substance use disorder has doubled since 2010.
Montana’s rate-of-removal per thousand impoverished children, which the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform says is a more accurate measure of a state’s propensity to remove children, was 68.11 in 2017, the highest in the U.S.
From 2010 to 2017, methamphetamine use has increased 415 percent in controlled substance cases.
Approximately 7,200 Montana grandparents had primary responsibility for their grandchildren in 2016.
Heroin has increased 1,234 percent in controlled substance cases from 2010 to 2017.
The number of children living apart from their families in out-of-home care increased by 19.9 percent from 2015 to 2016.
Of the 3,366 children in out-of-home care in 2016, 633, or 18.81 percent, were waiting to be adopted.
There were 260 children legally adopted through a public child welfare agency in Montana in 2016, a decrease of 16.1 percent from 2015.
In Montana, nearly 60 percent of foster homes are placements with relatives.
IMERYS TALC AMERICA INC. locked its doors to 35 International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union employees in Three Forks, Montana, on August 2, 2018. Randy Tocci, the talc mill’s lead warehouse worker, stood next to the mill’s entrance gate on that hot summer evening. He watched his fellow union workers be escorted off the property in the middle of the afternoon shift. A picket line formed immediately.
Imerys Talc America Inc. and the union workers began negotiating a new contract in May 2018. The company issued a series of final offers to the workers. These terms were rejected four times, leading to one of the most prominent labor disputes in Montana in the last three decades.
The picketing workers stood outside the gates fighting for fair contract terms. Their protest was met with widespread support from the community and local government officials. Government pressure does little more than encourage negotiations with the company and its workers. But Tocci saw the support as a morale booster on the line, and as a way to reach national news outlets.
The locked-out workers sacrificed some of their original terms in search for a compromise so they could return to work. Imerys Talc America Inc. wasn’t as willing to bargain.
“We offered up some supposals and moved from our position to try and get the company to move at all, and really, they showed no movement,” Gary Powers said. Powers was the union representative leading the negotiations.
Tocci has worked at the talc mill for 38 years. He’s seen several changes in ownership during his time and was part of a strike in the 1980s that led to an agreement in only three weeks.
Imerys swept into Montana talc operations in 2011, buying another mill in Sappington, Montana. They also purchased the nation’s biggest talc mine, the Yellowstone Mine, near Ennis, Montana.
The company says its desire to make changes is based on the uncertain future of the talc industry. However, the union found that the company’s books show little to no evidence of future financial problems.
The strike ended after three months, with the company and the union workers reaching an agreement for three-year contracts. The new contracts give the workers some of their terms, with a seniority system, overtime and health insurance coverage after retirement. Union workers returned to work November 5.
Bluebird Incident
June 18, 1887
Bluebird Mine workers were the last holdouts to join a union in Butte, Montana. Butte was the origin of much of Montana’s early labor movement. It was known as the “Gibraltar of Unionism.” On June 13, the Bluebird workers shut down mining operations and marched to the union hall to be initiated into the Butte Miners’ Union. This created a “closed shop” in Butte’s mines that lasted 27 years.
The IWW Timber Strike in the Kootenai Valley
April 12, 1917
Industrial Workers of the World, also known as “Wobblies,” organized loggers who were fed up with low wages and poor living conditions. The strike started in northwest Montana’s Kootenai Valley, six days after the U.S. officially entered World War I. The strike eventually spread to include Washington, Idaho and Oregon. At the height of the dissent, approximately 50,000 men refused to work and almost half of them stood in picket lines. The federal government sent troops to run the timber mills and arrest Industrial Workers of the World leaders. The arrests effectively ended unionization in the West’s timber industry for more than 10 years.
“Bloody Wednesday”
April 21, 1920
At around 4 p.m., hundreds of picketers staged a strike on Anaconda Road in Butte, Montana. They were protesting the poor working conditions in the Neversweat Mine. This protest followed several days of unrest. The Industrial Workers of the World led the strike. Law enforcement persuaded picketers to start leaving, but they later returned. Shots were fired into the crowd, injuring 16 and killing at least one person.
Copper Mining and Refining Strike
July 1, 1977
Montana copper mining and refining workers joined workers from eight other states and more than 10 different unions in a strike lasting 68 days. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a total of 23,000 workers joined the strike nationally. It ended when workers entered into a three-year agreement giving them incremental wage increases of 85 cents per year. The agreements also guaranteed increased pension, life, medical and accidental death insurance.
Mining Strike in Three Forks
August 2, 2018
Imerys Talc America Inc. locked out 35 International Brotherhood of Boilermakers union workers at a talc mill in Three Forks, Montana. The workers wanted a seniority system that requires pay and personnel decisions to be made based on how long the employee has been with the company. A compromise was reached after three months. Union workers returned to work November 5.
DENICE RICE endured sexual assault from a supervisor when she worked in California’s Eldorado National Forest as a United States Forest Service (USFS) firefighter in 2009. His abuse, which lasted almost two years, included circling one of her nipples with the pointed end of a letter opener. The supervisor retired with full benefits before an investigation into his abuse finished. The USFS suppressed and retaliated against sexual harassment and abuse survivors, according to investigations conducted by Outside Online and PBS in 2018. Now, almost eight years after Rice filed her first Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint, she’s testified in front of Congress and had her story splashed across multiple publications. I spoke with Rice in fall 2018, a few months after she was reassigned as forest fire prevention battalion chief. This is the job she was removed from by her harasser and supervisor.
Do you feel like the USFS and your co-workers want you to succeed in keeping your job?
Some people support me, but not everyone. I fought so hard to get my job back. They just want to see me fail because I made them look bad. The upper management did everything within their power to keep me from getting the job, and I still got the job.
Do you feel like you have won some of this battle against the retaliation you faced for coming out publicly?
I don’t look at it as a winning thing. It cost me an awful lot. The last eight years destroyed me. It’s taken a long time. I kept fighting because I didn’t want them to win.
Can you describe what you faced after coming forward about the sexual harassment you endured while in the Forest Service and why?
I lost my dignity, my respect and my reputation because of coming forward and fighting. The publicity was embarrassing. I don’t let people talk to me about the articles or the PBS NewsHour. I’ve never seen or read an article that I have been interviewed for. I just don’t watch it because it’s embarrassing, because I am that person. I never wanted to be that person.
Has the #MeToo movement changed anything in the USFS?
I know that a lot of people are coming forward now. It’s gone from nothing to an inundation. I don’t think there is a woman out there, or man, that goes through this if it didn’t happen because people are always like, “she asked for it,” or, “they’re making it up,” or “making a bigger deal out of it.” I’m not making a bigger deal out of it. I never did.
Has anything improved since the Outside Online or PBS investigations?
I’ve seen that people are standing up more for each other and supporting each other more. They’re not tolerating the abuse. I have not seen any structural changes within the USFS. I have to support people, because nobody does this, not even our union.
Have you received any forms of compensation or any recognition or apology for what happened?
I never got anything. Not even, “I’m sorry this happened to you.”
Why does this issue of women or men facing sexual harassment in the USFS matter?
It matters because it is not acceptable. It is about accountability. It’s always been about accountability, to me. There is no accountability. The Forest Service still hasn’t admitted there is a problem. They did not even admit it when the PBS investigation came out. The chief of the Forest Service sent out an email regarding these “alleged” incidents —never once addressing the potential that they could possibly, maybe, be true. How would that make you feel? Nobody in upper management has ever reached out to any of the victims.
Why does acknowledgment matter? What would an apology mean to you?
I was told that the [USFS] will never admit guilt. And I have yet to see it. I couldn’t even imagine an apology. It would validify what happened, that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t making it up. It would be everything. But it won’t happen. I would never expect it to happen.
What do you hope for in the future?
To be honest with you, I want to get my program reestablished, and I just want out. I am done fighting. I hope that things change. I’ll try to get something started, and then have somebody younger and smarter and stronger come in and take it from there.
Do you mean someone like who you were before the harassment began?
I am not that person. That person doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately. Unfortunately, I will never be that person again.
From Mexico to Missoula, Nereyda Calero’s journey
led her to help fellow immigrants.
STORY BY SAMANTHA WEBER | MANAGING EDITOR
WHEN FORMER U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would be rescinded in September 2017, 30-year-old Nereyda Calero, a Mexican immigrant and DACA recipient, was sitting in her Missoula home. When she heard the news, tears streamed down her face.
“I remember being there on the couch and I thought, ‘God, help me,’” Calero said. “I’ve got to do something. Help me fight for this.”
Three months later, Calero was chatting about immigration policy in Sen. Jon Tester’s Washington, D.C. office.
I first saw Calero at the Missoula Women’s March in January 2018. She spoke to a crowd packed shoulder-to-shoulder about her experience as an immigrant and a woman of color, and many people, including myself, were moved to tears by her passion. When I met her during the summer, I was surprised. During her January speech, she seemed larger than life. In reality, she speaks softly and exudes a quiet humility. Freckles splash across her round face beneath perfectly groomed eyebrows. She looks put together, and her appearance is always completed by a delicate, gold crucifix necklace. She didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would be comfortable giving ardent speeches, but she is when she’s talking about something for which she cares deeply.
At just eight years old, Calero crossed the Mexican border into Arizona with some relatives in the midst of blazing July heat. It was their fifth attempt. They made their way to Las Vegas, where she lived with family for years. In 2012, she came to Missoula for better work opportunities.
Before DACA became available in 2012, Calero dropped out of school to begin a long string of cleaning jobs. She’d been on the honor roll and dreamed of becoming a doctor or lawyer, but she always knew that, as an undocumented immigrant, there were few options for her future.
“That was very difficult, growing up knowing that time is passing by, you’re not going to become legal, you’re not going to be able to do what you want,” Calero said. “It’s very frustrating. It’s like you’re trying to walk and something’s pulling you back, you know?”
She applied for DACA immediately. She said she felt like she finally existed. DACA grants immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. as children, renewable two-year permits that protect recipients from deportation and allow them to get U.S. work permits.
After Calero received her DACA status, she enrolled in an emergency medical technician course and got a job at a local hospital and a driver’s license. She could finally drive to work and take her two young sons around town without a police car in her rearview mirror sending her heart racing.
“I was starving for this,” Calero said. “To be what I wanted to be.”
Calero carries herself quietly and she accepts praise with bashful smiles. She’s quick to give credit to other people. It appears she spent most of her life trying to blend into the crowd undetected.
Now she stands out. Since she began speaking up for better immigration policy, she’s become a leader for the immigrant community in Missoula. She speaks, fights and marches for those who can’t risk exposing themselves in the current fraught political climate, one riddled with anti-immigrant sentiment.
“They can’t put their voice out there because they’re afraid,” Calero said. “And I can do it for them because I don’t want them to go through this.”
Since President Donald Trump took office, Calero said the immigrant community has been increasingly frightened. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only had a small presence in Montana before the Trump administration took over. In 2018, ICE raided a commercial morel mushroom picking camp in Mineral County, arresting 10 people on immigration-related charges. A Mexican man and longtime resident of Hamilton was sentenced to deportation in September 2018 after ICE agents and U.S. Border Patrol agents showed up at his home early one March morning. Today, workplaces around Missoula are littered with racist graffiti. Calero has the evidence, photos and videos, on her cell phone.
She said some of the patients she cares for as an EMT at the hospital tell her Mexicans are terrorists, that she needs to go back to Mexico when her DACA status expires, if the program isn’t protected in the future. Her older son’s classmates have told him to leave, to just wait until Trump builds a wall. Both of her children were born in the U.S. She speaks to her kids in a mix of English and Spanish, but she said she hesitates to call out to them in Spanish in public now.
Calero feels especially motivated to act when racism and hate affect her children, or any children for that matter. Her younger son’s father was apprehended on his way to work four years ago in Missoula and immediately deported. Now, instead of looking to police to protect him, her son thinks of them as the bad people who took his father away. Those scars are permanent, Calero said, and no child deserves to live with them.
“This will affect kids present and future,” she said. “These are kids that we are making. We’re making them grow like this, with fear in their hearts.”
Though Calero has watched people grow more confident in spewing racism aloud, she said she can feel society changing for the better. She thinks a lot of people are as sick of injustice toward immigrants as she is.
“I think everybody wants to have a change after all that’s been happening,” Calero said. “We all want a change. And we’re not going to have a change while we have this administration.”
Year six of Missoula’s 10-year plan to house its homeless.
STORY BY KEITH SZUDARSKI | STAFF WRITER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HALISIA HUBBARD
On a brisk November morning in 2017, the Missoula Fire Department, paramedics and law enforcement responded to an unresponsive male near the 600 block of Owen Street. Responders began CPR on Timothy Lloyd, a homeless 61-year-old, then transported him to Providence St. Patrick Hospital. After failed rescue efforts, he died from hypothermia.
In 2018, the Montana Point in Time Survey, conducted by local homeless service providers and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, reported that Missoula has 293 homeless people, 23 percent of the statewide homeless population, and the highest percentage of any place in Montana. Missoula began working toward ending homelessness in 2012, when Mayor John Engen and Missoula County Commissioner Jean Curtiss signed into effect Reaching Home, a 10-year plan to house Missoula’s homeless.
A 2018 Missoula housing report states the homeless population in January of 2017 was 344. The report blamed Missoula’s housing boom and a limited rental market. It called 2017 the third consecutive year of high lot sales, citing an 8.1 percent increase in the average price per lot.
In June 2017, Reaching Home introduced its Coordinated Entry System (CES). Its mission is “to rapidly respond to people experiencing literal homelessness” through collaborative efforts to ensure the experience is brief and nonrecurring.
The Poverello Center is one of four entry points for Reaching Home’s CES. Elise Watts, the Poverello’s shelter manager, said the biggest hurdle for Missoula’s homeless is still affordable housing.
“Some of our temporary tenants have multiple jobs,” Watts said.
Median gross rent for Missoula in 2016 was $818 per month, a 3 percent increase from 2010. Watts said she believes a lot of the shelter’s patrons experience homelessness as the result of “one missed incident that leads to them being displaced.” Missing one month’s rent or losing a job can lead people to the shelter.
Some patrons faced additional obstacles. According to Watts, mental health and substance abuse can hinder attempts toward housing. The Poverello Center has a zero-tolerance policy for alcohol. The shelter has a Homeless Outreach Team that assists those who do not go to their facility, sometimes due to alcohol consumption.
Dean Littlelight, 40, is one of Missoula’s displaced. “I’ve been homeless on and off for years,” he said.
Littlelight and his friend “Griz” hang out on the Missoula County Courthouse lawn. It’s neutral ground for the city’s homeless. Both men said they appreciate the Poverello Center’s efforts, especially its outreach team. Littlelight said the team helped him find Section 8 housing. However, he’s still waiting for that to be processed.
The Union Gospel Mission (UGM) of Missoula offers a day center on the city’s north side, seven miles from the site of Timothy Lloyd’s death. UGM of Missoula helped eight people find permanent housing as of September 2017. Since Lloyd’s death, UGM of Missoula opens its doors overnight whenever the temperature drops below 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We’re trying to fill in the gaps,” April Seat, 39, said. Seat, UGM of Missoula’s director of outreach and volunteers, said the day center created new hours to offer services when the Poverello Center locks its doors.
Reaching Home is in its sixth year. Despite Missoula’s recent growth spurt and the increased cost of housing — the median sale price of homes has been on the rise since 2010 — Reaching Home’s collaborative effort continues to roll on. Other CES entry points for the program’s latest phase include the YWCA, Montana 2-1-1 and the Salvation Army. There are also grassroots efforts to help homeless in Missoula.
Terri “Tuner” Wood, 58, founded Set Free Street Ministry after UGM of Missoula stopped serving full meals in April 2018. “At first, I thought that I would just visit downtown, then decided to serve what food I could,” Wood said. “Everything that is served has been bought with donations.”
The Missoula County Health Department recently shut her down for lack of licensure. Wood is working on building a food truck that meets standards.
Wood sets up a small table of clothes three days a week in the spring to help those in need. When she comes across food that would otherwise be wasted, Wood said she prepares and hands it out despite the Missoula County Health Department’s order.
On a weekday in September 2018, Wood left her table in front of the courthouse to bring sandwiches in bread bags to Littlelight and Griz.
“Providing love and acceptance to faceless people is the most gratifying aspect of my work,” Wood said. “Feeding them is not the only way to help them.”
When it comes to higher education, geographic isolation and inadequate internet access have left millions of Americans at a disadvantage. Here’s what one high school is doing about it.
Story by Hannah Kearse | Staff Writer
STUDENTS pour into the halls of Thompson Falls High School every 45 minutes, seven times a day, five days a week. Through a gauntlet of blue lockers, slow streams of teenagers flow in opposite directions as they navigate toward class. Several of these students find their way to the Learning Center, the only place in town where high-speed internet is reliable enough to take online courses.
Inside, Erik Melendez, a senior, balances a pile of loose papers on his lap as he hunches over a computer keyboard. Melendez rests a Birkenstock sandal and wool-covered foot on one knee, which bounces up and down as he considers his prospects. He says his parents expect him to go to college, and he wants to major in comparative literature, preferably in New York City.
Thompson Falls, located in Sanders County, Montana, is a long way from NYC. It is a small town tucked into a narrow valley between the Cabinet and Coeur d’Alene mountains. There are at least a dozen churches, and the nearest Starbucks is 90 miles away. The Clark Fork River flows gently by, and alfalfa fields cover patches of undeveloped land. A two-lane highway, MT 200, runs right through downtown, where the traffic slows to a trickle and the 1,400 residents know it as Main Street.
For all its small-town charm, one thing Thompson Falls lacks is a college. It is about a two-hour drive on a winding, mountain highway to the nearest institutions of higher education. This makes it too far to commute for students who want to study close to family and community, which is especially important for nontraditional students, those who are older, have children or work full-time.
This makes Thompson Falls part of something you’ve probably never heard of: an education desert. According to 2016 research from The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, 38 percent of first-time, full-time freshman choose to attend a college within a 50-minute drive from their home, a statistic that has held true for almost four decades. Areas more than an hour drive from a public college or university are considered physical education deserts, because it puts those people who want a post-secondary education, but can’t commute or move, at a distinct disadvantage.
According to an analysis by The Chronicle for Higher Education, more than 11 million adults in the United States live more than a 60-minute drive from a college, mostly in rural parts of the country and in the West. Not surprisingly, the states with the greatest percentage of adults living in education deserts are Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana. This means one in three Montanans, about 350,000 people, live too far from a college or university to easily commute.
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Sixteen of those people are the Thompson Falls High School students enrolled in the Running Start Program, which allows Melendez and his fellow students to take up to two online college courses a semester through Flathead Valley Community College.
Melendez wants to study world literature but Thompson Falls High School doesn’t offer it, so he turns to online courses to fill the gap. “That’s what’s exciting for me,” he said. “Just learning about things that I’m really passionate about, plus the freedom that comes with it. I’m just tired of being restrained all the time.”
But this is a relatively new option for Thompson Falls High School students, one that millions of Americans don’t have.
While the geographical layout of post-secondary institutions has changed little in four decades, technological improvements—namely computers and high-speed internet—have altered the impact of education deserts. Opportunities to take courses online allow students who live too far from a college to begin the long journey toward earning a degree. High-speed internet enables students to video chat with distant classmates and teachers and to stream instructional videos.
But this digital panacea is not available everywhere. Surprisingly, the U.S. is ranked only tenth among developed nations in its broadband coverage, and lack of access to online learning opportunities continues to impact rural and impoverished inner-city communities. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in 2018, 24 million Americans lacked access to broadband internet at home (which the FCC defines as 25 megabits per second or faster). Millions more rely on slower and less reliable DSL services.
The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, looked at how slow internet speeds impact education deserts. Researchers Victoria Rosenboom and Kristin Blagg mapped those places without access to internet speeds of 25 MBps against physical education deserts. They found that about 3.1 million Americans live in both a physical and online education desert, limiting their options and access to the technological and educational advantages that larger communities thrive on.
In Montana, 290,000 people live in an online education desert, mostly in small towns in the Northern Rocky Mountains and large swaths of prairie in the eastern part of the state. Thompson Falls is the 297th most connected town in Montana, with an average download speed of just 4.28 MBps—a whopping 852 percent slower than the national average.
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In 2000, the Thompson Falls Public Library was the first place in town to get internet, and it was dial-up. It now has two DSL lines at 15 MBps each, but internet speed is often slow and inconsistent, even though it costs $400 a month. Library Director Lynn Kersten still jokes about the conversations she’s had with business owners about internet speed. When speeds drop to a frustrating crawl on Main Street, work stops and people step out of their businesses to check in with each other.
The high school, though, is in the fast lane, thanks to the hard work of Doree Thilmony. For the past seven years, Thilmony, Thompson Falls High School’s technological coordinator and science teacher, has applied for grants from the FCC to improve the school’s internet infrastructure. The U.S. government invests $10 billion a year on subsidies for broadband infrastructure. E-rate, an FCC program, provides grants to eligible schools and libraries across the country. Thilmony has brought about $250,000 to the school over the years, and it now has fiber optic cables and an internet speed of 100 MBps for about 50 users at once.
“I am a personal user and there is no way I could get that speed without paying quite a bit of money,” said Thilmony. “E-rate is definitely a program that helps us give the type of quality to our students.”
Faster internet speeds allowed Thilmony’s science class to take tests online this year for the first time. The program does all the grading, which saves her time. There’s an option to submit homework assignments as well, but Thilmony doesn’t use it because some students don’t have computers and most don’t have reliable internet at home.
“I told my [online] teacher about my situation,” Melendez said. “A lot of the time I feel like they don’t believe me. I’m not trying to get out of doing my work. I enjoy doing it. It’s just circumstances are against me sometimes.”
The rest of Thompson Falls didn’t qualify for a federal grant, which leaves older, nontraditional students at a disadvantage. Online courses just don’t work if you don’t have ready access to high-speed internet, and DSL and satellite just won’t cut it. “If you were talking about a local community member who wanted to take classes,” said Jodi Morgan, the high school’s counselor. “I would say that’s where there is a need in the community. If you’re older, a nontraditional student, then you’re kind of on your own to find internet access.”
Morgan estimates 20 to 30 percent of the high school students considered attending college when she first started 10 years ago. Last year, almost 80 percent of the graduating class left Thompson Falls to attend two and four-year colleges. But there are still plenty of Thompson Falls residents who would be unable to move to the Big City for college.
Wildland firefighters learn to survive in the era of megafires
Story by Keith Szudarski | Staff Writer
Photos by Reed Klass | Staff Photographer
ON JULY 18, 2017, a storm rolled through Seeley Lake, Montana. The clouds churned and lightning flashed, momentarily illuminating the peaks of the scenic Swan Mountains east of Highway 83. The valley had experienced an early, hot summer, and when a lightning bolt struck Rice Ridge, it sparked a forest fire Bob Vanden Heuvel will never forget.
First-year firefighter Trenton Johnson, 19, was part of an initial attack team sent to begin the difficult task of putting out a forest fire. When they arrived on the west side of Florence Lake, six miles north of the town of Seeley Lake, they found the fire burning in a thick stand of lodgepole pine and subalpine fir, the ground littered with downed trees. They watched as the smoking bulk of a burned tree toppled into the fire.
As the team lined up behind the sawyers, they heard a crack overhead. The top of a snag broke off and sent the top third of a 70-foot tree crashing down toward them. According to the official report of the incident, the broken tree “whizzed by like a fastball” and “firefighters fell like bowling pins.” The tree brushed one firefighter’s shoulder as it struck Johnson’s helmet, knocking him unconscious and pinning his legs.
Bob Vanden Heuvel, paramedic and former acting chief of Seeley Lake Rural Fire Department, was part of the emergency response crew that was called in when Trenton Johnson, a 19-year-old wildland firefighter, was pinned by a falling snag during the Florence fire in July 2017.
Vanden Heuvel, paramedic and former chief of the Seeley Lake Rural Fire Department (SLRFD), waited at the Seeley Lake airport for the helicopter that transported Johnson. He knew there had been an accident in his district, but he had no idea how bad it was. When the helicopter landed, its manager waved his crew and Life Flight over. “The first thing I saw was the white feet sticking out,” Vanden Heuvel said. It was his first inkling that something serious had occurred on the hill that afternoon.
Johnson died in the Life Flight helicopter on the way to the hospital in Missoula. It was his first season as a wildland firefighter.
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The fire that set the stage for the era of megafires happened in Yellowstone National Park in 1988. An unusually dry spring led to 1.2 million acres being burned.
Standing dead trees, also known as snags, pose great risk to wildland fighters. A gust of wind in the wrong direction can bring them down and cause serious injury or death.
Thousands of firefighters fought the fires with the assistance of dozens of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. With fires raging throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and other areas in the western United States, staffing levels of the National Park Service and other land management agencies were inadequate, and more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel were brought in to assist in wildfire suppression efforts. The firefighting effort cost $120 million ($250 million in 2018 dollars).
The epic Yellowstone fire was once thought to be an anomaly, but this is no longer the case. Intense, resource-draining fire seasons have been on the rise since Yellowstone. The Union of Concerned Scientists has shown the number of fires larger than 1,000 acres has increased from 140 between 1980 and 1989 to 250 between 2000 and 2012. The study also indicates that the average length of wildfire seasons in the western United States grew from five months in the 1970s to over seven months in 2012. In a Guardian article published in 2018, Alissa Greenberg wrote that California’s fire seasons last 78 days longer than they did 50 years ago.
Data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) indicates that three million acres burned in the U.S. between 1985 and 1994. Between 2005 and 2014, NIFC showed almost seven million acres burned, more than twice as much as the previous decade. In 2015, 10.1 million acres burned in a single year, making it the largest fire season in recorded history. In 2018, more than 37,000 fires burned a whopping 4.25 million acres in the first seven months.
The reason? Decades of fire suppression and an increase of average temperature in the western U.S. by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit. The National Research Council suggests as average global temperatures increase, the total number of acres scorched each year will quadruple per degree of increase.
This puts wildland firefighters at increased risk of injury and death, as they push themselves to their physical and emotional limits, awake for days and sleeping on the ground, even as they deal with their grief and loss at their comrades’ deaths. Twenty-nine wildland firefighters died the year Yellowstone burned, but in 2017, national fatalities dropped to 14.
These numbers, however, do not reflect the growing trend in fatalities per year. Between 1960 and 1989, there were 10.2 wildfire-related deaths per year. From 1990 to 2015, that number was 17, a 67 percent increase.
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Part of the problem is more people are building more structures in fire-prone areas, especially in the American West. In 2007, landscape ecologist David Theobald and Colorado State University research scientist William Romme published an important paper in “Landscape and Urban Planning.” They recognized that “over the past several decades, the western U.S. has observed increased temperature, increased wildfire activity, and expansion of the wildland-urban interface,” and, as a result, they projected the longer fire seasons and higher fire frequencies we are seeing today.
Members of the Helena Hotshots haul and chip green timber cut from the edges of a Forest Service road in Kootenai National Forest north of Libby, Montana in September 2018. Wildland firefighters often fell living trees in order to eliminate fuel that allows wildfires to spread. Standing dead trees pose more of a risk than green trees.
A 2018 article by 11 research scientists, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates the wildland-urban interface in the U.S. “grew rapidly from 1990 to 2010 in terms of both number of new houses (from 30.8 to 43.4 million, 41 percent growth), and land area (33 percent growth), making it the fastest-growing land use type in the conterminous United States.”
This increase puts billions of dollars worth of property at risk. Just ask the residents of Paradise, California. In early November, the Camp fire burned more than 180,000 acres and 7,000 buildings, virtually incinerating Paradise, a town of 26,000 people, 170 miles north of San Francisco. Farther south, the Woolsey and Hill fires burned more than 90,000 acres near Los Angeles and forced the evacuation of Malibu. These statistics make it the most deadly and destructive fire in California’s history. According to Fortune Magazine, the estimated cost of the conflagration is expected to top $19 billion.
This probably comes as no surprise to Casey Grant, writer for the National Fire Protocol Association (NFPA). Grant wrote that nine of the top 10 most expensive wildland-urban interface incidents ever recorded have occurred since 1990. “This includes the October [2017] fires in Northern California, where cumulative property losses are expected to exceed $3 billion, and where 42 people died. In 2016, the Fort McMurray fire in Western Canada also resulted in direct property losses over $3 billion, with more than 3,000 structures lost and two fatalities, firefighters and civilians.”
The Rice Ridge fire, a few miles from the fire Trenton Johnson died fighting, eventually threatened 1,719 structures and burned 150,000 acres, an area the size of Chicago. At its peak, it was at the top of the nation’s wildfire priority list and cost more than $30 million to put out.
The Gold Hill fire burns in Kootenai National Forest in September 2018.
But what is rarely mentioned in the media is the increased risk to the wildland firefighters on the line. Not only is climate change making fires bigger, more frequent and more intense, but there are more buildings to protect from the flames. And on wildland-urban interface-intensive assignments, the instinctual drive to protect people’s homes and the pressure from homeowners to save what is likely their most prized possession can force firefighters to work themselves and their crews almost to exhaustion.
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Josh Starbuck is a barrel-chested ex-smoke jumper who fought wildfires in Canada and the United States. Today he is a realtor in California, a state that seems to be on fire all the time. He’ll never forget arriving at the Esperanza fire in the fall of 2006 to learn that five firefighters had died.
Starbuck, who spent years fighting wildfires all over North America, said decision making can play a big role in determining the outcome of fires. As an example, Engine 57 was part of the initial attack on the Esperanza fire. The bulky Type III engine arrived at the fire around 5 a.m. and navigated unpaved roads toward homes in the fire’s path. Roughly two hours later, the fire exploded, and the firefighters sought refuge in their engine. By 8 a.m., the fire had engulfed Engine 57 and killed five firefighters, three on scene and two in the hospital. They shouldn’t have risked their lives to protect homes.
One of the most striking differences Starbuck noticed between firefighting in Canada and the U.S. was enforcement of work-to-rest ratios, a set number of hours of sleep required between hours on shift. When homes and property are in a fire’s path, like those on the Camp and Rice Ridge fires, firefighters may work up to 20 hours a day. It’s not uncommon in the U.S. for firefighters to be working and on shift for more than 24 consecutive hours.
“There’s no breaking work-to-rest without full crew consent in Canada,” Starbuck said. In the U.S. it can be as simple as a crew boss or superintendent telling crew members when they’ll get to sleep. When firefighters are pushed to their limits and sacrifice sleep for hours and suppression demands, the imbalance can lead to poor judgment and complacency, which can lead to injury and death, both on and off the fireline.
According to a 2016 article on the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) website, “Being awake for at least 24 hours is equal to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10%. This is higher than the legal limit (0.08% BAC) in all states.” This means wildland firefighters with mental states that would make it unlawful to drive are asked to do the dangerous work of fighting increasingly large and intense forest fires.
Burned out lodgepole pines stand in Kootenai National Forest in the waning days of active burning from the Gold Hill fire that took place from August to mid-October 2018. After a wildland fire is controlled, firefighters often patrol stands, looking for residual burns.
But such dangers are rarely considered. Frequent exposure to the dangers of wildland firefighting numbs firefighters. A 2010 article published by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned
Center started with the quote, “No problem, I’ve done this before.” And then, in a blink of an eye, it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.
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A Facilitated Learning Analysis (FLA) released following Johnson’s death on the Florence Fire echoes a similar mentality. The word “snag” appears in the report 16 times. An example: “Yeah, there were snags. It was kind of another day on the job.”
The casual iteration of “snag” speaks to the desensitization referred to by the Lessons Learned Center. Johnson had just arrived on the Florence fire. He and his crew were still charting the lay of the land. The tree that took his life wasn’t one he was cutting. The incident that took his life was simply the nexus of time and chance.
Another Lessons Learned article said not every mishap results from complacency: there are things outside of our control, but we ought to take “the few extra minutes to be thorough in our responsibilities.”
Wildland firefighters have little control over gravity or climate. They cannot control climate change to reduce the size and intensity of wildfires, and have little control over where people are allowed to build their homes. Those responsibilities are usually larger and more complex for even the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management.
The only thing firefighters can control is themselves.
What firefighters and their agencies can do is reconfigure their tactics and keep bravado in check. “Canada has stricter travel guidelines,” Starbuck offered as an example. “Don’t push it, stick with the work-to-rest ratio and rethink mentality.”
Vanden Heuvel resigned from the Seeley Lake Rural Fire Department after the Florence fire and took a job as a paramedic in Missoula. He still thinks about Johnson’s accident. He often wonders what could have been done differently to prevent the untimely death of a 19-year-old firefighter who was helping him protect his district and the homes of thousands of people in Seeley Lake.
Almost every day, he wonders if it was really worth it.
Making Montana FireSmart
THE MONTANA DEPARTMENT of Natural Resources and Conservation’s Prevention and Preparedness Program was created to educate Montana homeowners living in the wildland-urban interface on how they can help to reduce the number of wildfires, and to protect their properties when they occur. But there is some concern that the message isn’t getting out and property owners aren’t doing all they can to make their communities fire proof.
Dave Aicher, 67, spent 38 years working for the Forest Service, and battled numerous blazes on the prairies of Eastern Montana. Now, Aicher lives near Seeley Lake, south of Lake Inez and west of Highway 83, not far from the Florence fire that claimed Trenton Johnson’s life. Aicher and his family have had to evacuate their home twice during wildfires.
From above, Aicher’s neighborhood is dotted with green, and trees obstruct clear views into his neighbors’ properties. Aicher cleared the forest surrounding his house to reduce the likelihood a wildfire could ignite it, and some of his neighbors have as well. But there is still ample fuel in the neighborhood, because creating defensible space isn’t as comprehensive as it needs to be.
“If I do mine [and] my next-door neighbor doesn’t do theirs, what’s the point of doing mine?” Aicher said. “I’m going to lose my house.”
This combination of inadequate defensible space and an overabundance of combustible materials means firefighters are put at risk while protecting homes and barns.
Aicher said reducing these risks involves more than just cleaning up individual properties. He recommends a more unified approach, where entire communities work together to make themselves FireSmart. Otherwise, he said, houses will continue to burn.
