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Wildfire Recovery: ‘When the Smoke Clears’ Thursday Talk

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Ignited by a car that caught fire along the Beeline Highway on June 13, the Bush Fire spread across 193,455 acres over the following two weeks - forcing evacuations here in Gila County, and growing to become one of Arizona’s five largest wildfires on record.

Now what?

Join an online webinar Thursday at 11 a.m. when Carol Ekarius, of Coalitions & Collaboratives, addresses the topic: ‘When the Smoke Clears—The Road to Recovery Following Large-Scale Wildfire.’ Thursday online presentations are hosted by University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Gila County; webinars that last about an hour, featuring a variety of horticultural and natural resource topics. Last week’s topic was container gardening, and ‘pest control’ was the prior Thursday. Mark your calendar for Aug. 6 and ‘Restoration approaches to manage buffelgrass and other invasives.’

Carol Ekarius is CEO of Coalitions & Collaboratives (COCO), a nonprofit that supports place-based groups working in the natural resource realm, and in the emergency response realm to natural disasters. She has extensive experience around wildland fire recovery, working with federal agencies, state agencies, local governments, and community members on fires across the West over the last 20 years. Recognizing a lack of shared learning on post-fire response and recovery, COCO sponsored the first national conference on post-fire recovery in 2019, After the Flames. The 2020 conference was canceled due to COVID19, but COCO is continuing the dialog through a series of webinars, and also provides a post-fire resource page at the website www.aftertheflames.com. During her talk Carol will discuss the first-steps toward recovery, such as anticipating flood conditions and debris flows, working collaboratively on response by forming a recovery committee, figuring out how to pay for it, and thinking about long-term recovery.

Link to the free online webinar is   arizona.zoom.us/j/95879141421

Or find easy, convenient and direct hotlinks at  facebook.com/gilaextension,  and also 

extension.arizona.edu/gila

Weekly gardening-horticulture webinars are arranged and moderated by Chris Jones, Extension Agent for University of Arizona Gila County Cooperative Extension. Want to be added to his invite list for future gardening and horticulture workshops? Call Chris at (928) 402-8586  or email    ckjones@email.arizona.edu