Dave Karlsgodt 0:00
Welcome to the campus energy and sustainability podcast. In each episode, we'll talk with leading campus professionals thought leaders, engineers and innovators addressing the unique challenges and opportunities facing higher ed and corporate campuses. Our discussions will range from energy conservation and efficiency to planning and finance, for building science to social science, from energy systems to food systems. We hope you're ready to learn, share and ultimately accelerate your institution toward solutions. I'm your host, Dave Karlsgodt, I'm a director of energy and utility advisory services at Brailsford & Dunlavey.

Cheri Chastain 0:33
There is physically no other space in our community to gather 300 people and have a community meeting other than our campus like that just doesn't exist. And so

Ben Newton 0:45
I bring up the analogy of it's the climate on steroids. So it's not a one time event where you know, a baseball player they hit a home run once in, you know, a season or something like that, you know, it's a player that could date seven The home runs in a season which is unnatural. The climate on steroids is that increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

Dave Karlsgodt 1:07
I hope you were all staying safe and healthy as the world grapples with the effects of the novel Coronavirus, and COVID-19. Today's episode was recorded just prior to our current global pandemic. This episode deals with a different type of global threat. Unfortunately, the effects of climate change spare no state no city, no person nor any campus. Yet some campuses have experienced more than their fair share of climate catastrophes in the past few years. In this episode, I talk with Cheri Chastain, sustainability programs manager at California State University Chico and Ben Newton, environmental sustainability Director of Central Community College in Nebraska. Cheri and Ben have faced fires, floods, and even truck-sized icebergs during their times as sustainability managers. In this interview, we discussed the responses to these unnatural disasters and their goals for rebuilding with resiliency in mind. We discussed them campuses roles as community leaders, their plans for future climate crises, and of course, the impacts of these disasters on their student bodies. I do have to say I struggled a little bit on whether to release this episode now, since the full effects of the current crisis are still unknown. However, after relisting to this conversation, I found comfort and wisdom and learning how these campuses dealt with their own local crises. This interview also includes a special appearance by Chico State President Gayle Hutchinson. I hope you enjoy this February 25 interview recorded at the second nature climate summit in Atlanta, Georgia.

So Cheri and Ben, it's great to have you on the podcast.

Ben Newton 2:37
It's great to be here.

Cheri Chastain 2:38
Thanks for having us.

Dave Karlsgodt 2:39
Yeah, well, let's just start out with the pro forma stuff. So tell us who you are, where you're from, and then we'll get into some of the more interesting questions. Go ahead, Ben.

Ben Newton 2:50
I'm Benjamin Newton, I'm the environmental sustainability director at Central Community College which is in central Nebraska and we have three campuses in Grand Island, Columbus abd Hastings, and I'm the director of all three.

Dave Karlsgodt 3:04
Right, where are we right now? I guess we should say that too.

Ben Newton 3:07
Oh, we're in Atlanta right now at the Second Nature Climate Summit.

Dave Karlsgodt 3:11
Very good. Cheri?

Cheri Chastain 3:14
Yes. I am the campus sustainability manager at California State University, Chico. We're at the north end of the Sacramento Valley in Northern California.

Dave Karlsgodt 3:23
All right. Well, I thought we'd start off with our first question being just to give me a bit of background on some of the events that you've experienced on your campuses that led to the session that I attended at the AASHE conference, which led to this conversation today. Cheri, do you want to give us a little background on disasters or weather events or whatever, that you've kind of brought you closer to thinking about climate resilience on your campus?

Cheri Chastain 3:47
Yes, we've experienced a lot in the north end of California. And I'll preface that too, with the city of Chico adopted a climate vulnerability assessment in In 2018, it was done by a civic spark fellow as part of the city of Chico sustainability taskforce. And it used the Cal adapt tool to predict out what climate vulnerabilities we can expect to experience in Chico specifically, and that includes extreme heat days and waves, droughts, heavy precipitation, and wildfires. And we've experienced all of those over the last few years. So

Dave Karlsgodt 4:29
Did you finish the plan before you'd experienced them all

Cheri Chastain 4:32
in the plan came and are in the midst of all of it. So you know, California and more so Southern California, but definitely Northern California, started experiencing extreme drought in 2013, the tail end of 2013 and that lasted for a few years. Extraordinary drought situation, and then that moved into a whole lot of rain, extraordinary precipitation which filled our reservoirs and lead to the Oroville Dam spillway evacuation which was about 20 minutes south from Chico. So the town of Oroville was evacuated upstream to Chico. Following on the heels of that we had the car fire, which was in Redding, which is in our service territory. It's about 100 miles north from Chico not destroyed about 1000 homes and a few lives were lost in that fire. And then a few months after that, the campfire hit and that destroyed the entire town of Paradise, which is about 15 minutes from Chico. So we had about 20,000 new inhabitants to the city of Chico literally overnight. And then after that, we had another supercell downpour that parked itself on downtown Chico for 15 minutes and flooded campus and caused millions of dollars in damage. So it just kind of keeps coming. You know?

Dave Karlsgodt 5:53
well with that Armageddon sort of theme has been Why don't you tell us what's going on in Nebraska.

Ben Newton 5:57
So last year We had one of the coldest February's that we've had in a long time. And we had also quite a bit of snowfall in central Nebraska as well. So with those cold temperatures in February, the ground was frozen two feet down in March. So that led up to a series of events that took place in mid March. And with the combination of the bomb cyclone on my birthday, so with those cold temperatures, there was also with the ground being frozen two feet there. There was also ice that was two feet thick on the rivers. And so when we had this storm of in mid March, there was some warm temperatures, which we don't really experience in mid March. So in the 60s, so that broke up a lot of those ice jams in the rivers. And then we had something called a bomb cyclone, which is a cold hurricane, come up through the central United States that had 70 mile an hour winds and we go from those 60 degree days to a blizzard, and 20 degree temperatures, I think we had up to we had a rainfall event before the blizzard as well. So when those ice jams broke up, you can imagine trucks or your pickup truck floating in the river. It was a three ton icebergs floating in rivers, which led to a bunch of those ice chunks hit a dam or a bridge, it takes out that structure. So one of the dams in our district, it was actually the first recorded event in history that a dam was taken out by ice chunks. And so that when that dam collapsed that sent an 11 foot wave of water downstream, which affected everybody downstream from that dam, and so in our district alone, we lost 20 bridges in that area. Then. And then we also had, you know, severe flooding events because those ice jams they create dams on their own. Yeah. And so then that led to flooding in our entire district, which 24 of the 25 counties in our district were declared natural disaster areas by FEMA.

Dave Karlsgodt 8:22
Before I went to your session at the AASHE conference, I remember talking to you guys, and like, I don't know, I think I'm gonna go to this other one. And then you sort of talked me into coming and I was like, Yeah, what are these guys gonna talk about? And then I got in there, and I heard these stories. I'm like, holy cow. So tell me a little bit of a story of what happened on the campus as these events unfolded.

Ben Newton 8:43
And I guess for our events, it did leave, you know, there was spring break that week. So a lot of the students weren't there, which was fortunate. But then we have had it affected the campus. With all those bridges being washed out Our college president reached out to a lot of the staff members and said, You don't have to come in to work in the office, you can work remotely, which some of them had to for quite a while until they rerouted around those areas that were either flooded or the bridge was actually out. So those are some of the responses to that.

Dave Karlsgodt 9:22
Okay, so you went from yeah, becoming more of a FEMA site than a campus at that point?

Ben Newton 9:28
Yeah. In a couple of our communities in Columbus. We did for sure, but not Grand Island wasn't as effective. As you know, we had discussed earlier.

Dave Karlsgodt 9:37
Right. Cheri?

Cheri Chastain 9:39
our campus was an initial signatory of the the Climate Commitment and the resilience commitment included. We did our initial resilience indicators report in 2015. And the indicators that were chosen, you know, were things that we thought could be measured. For our campus and for the city of Chico with regard to resilience, since all of these natural disasters that has completely changed how we're viewing resilience, things that we didn't even know we needed to think about are now front and center for us. You know, we have an entire community that was completely devastated. And so we're looking not just at physical rebuilding and infrastructure resilience, but we're looking at human resilience and community resilience. So we know this word resilience, and this idea of resilience is taking on a completely new feel for our community. And it means different things to every person. Planning for that, however, becomes incredibly difficult, right? And how you select your resilience metrics and how you start looking at this idea. It becomes a big challenge and it kind of feels a bit overwhelming at times. You know, I'm focusing on how can our campus respond to these events that continue to happen in our community? What role does our campus play? You know, there are some really interesting things that we never would have thought about. Such as you know, an entire town is completely destroyed. Researchers from across the world want to study that. So how do we as a higher education institution, kind of protect our population and essentially, not run interference, but serve in more of a liaison role so that we can connect researchers with other researchers doing similar work, or you know, not not having our community feel like they're in a fishbowl? You know, that they're, they're already going through something completely life altering. So let's make this mentally and spiritually as easy as possible for them. There's no playbook for the high right for higher education. So there's a lot of those type of things that have arisen that we're just kind of slowly working our way through as they come up.

Dave Karlsgodt 12:05
Yeah, cuz it's also really important work, right. Like everybody wants to know, what does what does a community do when a town next to you gets burned down? Right. What does the community do when all your bridges get taken out by crazy icebergs like that? I don't think the engineers thought about that. Wow. I wonder if this can handle a truck size iceberg.

Cheri Chastain 12:25
Do you stress test for that?

Dave Karlsgodt 12:28
Yeah, these are totally out of the playbook, which is the problem, right?

Ben Newton 12:32
Yeah, you can't engineer for that.

Dave Karlsgodt 12:35
So well, let's talk about you said you're serving as a liaison to try to funnel the research and how has that worked? And how have you gathered the researchers but also protected citizens? Like what what does that look like?

Cheri Chastain 12:49
Well, we we've actually created a position on our campus within our president's office and that's the Wildcats rise community liaison. And so she is The point of contact for outside researchers coming in, she's doing her best to collect information on who's doing what, but that's a really, really tall task. And you know, it's taking some time, but she's done an incredible job being in the community being present in the community, letting the community know that she's there for them and anything that they need. But then also, you know, connecting with other universities and institutions to start to build those relationships,

Dave Karlsgodt 13:30
right, just to funnel the energy going into that. Okay. And is Wildcats rise, is that a is that a community wide?

Cheri Chastain 13:37
That's our kind of our campus branding for how we're responding. It's our mascot.

Dave Karlsgodt 13:43
Very cool. Yeah. How about you Ben?

Ben Newton 13:47
Well, I guess our emergency management office in particular in contrast to urban areas, in rural areas, they're similar to our sustainability offices. So they have maybe one staff member, maybe two. So then when there is this unnatural disaster responding to those events becomes really challenging, because they're working 80 hours a week and or they're, you know, up in the middle of the night, the Emergency Management Office reached out to us through our resiliency committee, and said, we really need citizens or students that, you know, want to help out in these situations. And so they offered possibly doing a training at the campus. So we had some internal grant funding that we did use for that training. And so we offered a certified emergency response team training, it's a national certification and they do have a campus response team training as well. And so it's a 24 hour training. We did four sessions, six hours. sessions during the summertime when students are not in session and you know, staff may have a little bit less on their plate of course the sustainability office is always going full steam. So we did have things going on, but we set aside that time to also for our, for my interns and staff to take part in that training. And so that training resulted in some of our students being able to be called upon if these events happen in the future,

Dave Karlsgodt 15:31
okay, that that this happened after those events, though, so the training It was like, Oh, we don't want that to happen again, because we're Have you had events have occurred after the training.

Ben Newton 15:41
We have had events unfortunately happened after the chain they I mean, the flooding continued, you know, with those high groundwater levels, it continued throughout the summer. We had a really, really wet summer you know, there was even highway or interstate 29 on the island. Nebraska border it didn't open until July. And you know it closed in March. So yeah, and that's an interstate. So we have had those events throughout the summer and we had some you know, high windstorm events which are happening more frequently now. Yeah. Isn't the normal I guess for the summertime,

Dave Karlsgodt 16:23
right? Yeah, that's, that's Yeah, we're in Seattle. We had our rainiest January ever and, you know, it's a little annoying, it's wet, whatever, hasn't really affected our house directly, but just heard from some friends who live just outside of the city and their road is probably cut off for, as you know, a year maybe it's like this massive, massive construction project. So it's amazing how quickly those things change.

Cheri Chastain 16:46
But the Oroville Dam spillway. similar situation. Entire roads were completely gone for a year.

Dave Karlsgodt 16:54
Yeah. Tell tell more of the background story on that because when I was at this conference, I think two years ago was When that was going on, and one of your colleagues, Jim Pushnik was here and then he's like, I have to go because my wife said we've got 20 people coming to stay at our house because they were refugees from Oroville just south of you. Yeah. So tell us tell the story of what happened there.

Cheri Chastain 17:14
Yeah, that was an interesting one. I was actually attempting to go snowshoeing that day. And I had driven around Lake Oroville and my husband and I were looking at it like, Wow, that's really full. And the road that we were on, because we had had so much rain for weeks. We didn't realize it, but the road that we were on, we got to a point where it just it was gone. It had washed away. just completely gone. So we thought well, we're not going to get through this road, you know, and so we turned around and I think it had washed away a few weeks before and it took months for that road to be repaired. So we turned around, found another place to go snowshoeing and got home that evening and that's the I'm getting texts for my mom. Like Are you guys okay? We know what's happening. Yeah, the town of Oroville was evacuated to Chico. So we had, you know, 100,000 people coming into Chico because it's upstream from the dam. Yeah. And it you know, there. I think there was a lot of misinformation around that event. That is, you know, folks were afraid that the actual dam itself, the integrity of the dam was in jeopardy. It's one of the largest earthen dams in the country. It's holding a great deal of water. The dam itself the integrity of the dam was fine. It was the spillway the emergency spillway because we've had so much water about the level of the reservoir rose so high and so they activated the emergency spillway. And the integrity of the emergency spillway was greatly undermine and that's that's what led to massive amounts of flooding downstream. So it was a scary event. It was a wake up call very extensive, you know, but I think that was the first major you know, where we're trying To figure out how do we house a whole bunch of people,

Dave Karlsgodt 19:05
Yeah, overnight,

Cheri Chastain 19:06
Literally within hours.

Dave Karlsgodt 19:07
Well, let's maybe switch to you've both told me stories in the past about ways that you've dealt with these situations in the moment. And, you know, you've talked a little bit about the training, but what are some of the things that you found that were assets that you weren't expecting, or that you were expecting to help in these situations? Like, basically, how is your campus been the beacon of hope and this Armageddon that we've just talked through?

Ben Newton 19:32
Well, I know that, you know, our board in our college president, they did really reduce the property tax levy. So you know, that saved the taxpayers in central Nebraska, you know, $2 million, that were devastated by these events. So that has alleviated some of that burden. But, of course, we're still not fully recovered. We're still recovering. You know, I think, maybe as opposed to other colleges. At center Central, we have, you know, 70% of our students are below the poverty level. And we also have a lot of migrants from different countries. And so there's over 50 languages spoken. So one thing that we did do is create communication with the emergency management office in multiple languages and offer, you know where those shelters are, and how to get there, you know, where those supplies are for those that are displaced. So that is one beacon of hope, I guess, that I can bring to the table and we keep this planning going. We don't end with that one event, right. We're still planning for our next event, unfortunately, but it's better to be prepared. And one thing that our Emergency Management Director did mention is a lot of times in your community, people don't talk to your neighbors anymore and in rural communities that's, I guess, more common than Urban that you do talk to your neighbors. So, you know, get to know your neighbors and they're there. You know, as a team, you can work together when some of these events occur,

Dave Karlsgodt 21:10
right? I my neighborhood, my neighbor is a fireman. And we have a event in the summer like at night out. And he actually gets us to pick people up in stretchers like made out of tarps and sticks and stuff like that. It's kind of fun.

Ben Newton 21:24
Yeah, that was part of our training. We learned how to do all the carries, you know, to carry people out of a disaster event.

Dave Karlsgodt 21:31
Yeah, that's great. How about you Cheri?

Cheri Chastain 21:32
I think that's really important. And that's something is this idea of communication. And that's something that our campus certainly found ourselves serving for the community was the point of communication on what's happening. And you know, I've been thinking a lot about this and ever since we had the initial conversation about the he presentation and the idea of rural campus and really, how does that differ from an urban campus and it greatly differs dramatically. You know, a rural community is different than an urban community. We found ourselves after the campfire, our campus and the campus website, I think was the most visited, most trusted resource of full scale information on what was going on and what to do. So the In fact, the FAQ page is still alive, but it's an exhaustive list on what's happening, what to do, where to go in, you know that that was real time posted live as we had information, you know, our campus and our community that was served a really important community function during those events like hosting community events. There is physically no other space in our community to gather 300 people and have a community meeting other than our campus like that just doesn't exist and so that's something that you would find in an urban setting with different recital halls and different event venues. But, you know, that just was not something that existed. And so, you know, our campus hosted community meetings provided information out back out to the community. Our campus has the tallest buildings in our county and probably surrounding for 100 miles. So there are repeaters on the top of our buildings for first responder communication.

Dave Karlsgodt 23:24
So physically your

Cheri Chastain 23:26
Our physical infrastructure, yeah, is allowing first responders to communicate with one another in our campus as a shelter for first responders and that type of infrastructure typically exists in other settings in an urban situation, or in other buildings and infrastructure,

Ben Newton 23:44
Yeah, typically on all in all of our communities. We're one of the largest meeting places like Cheri mentioned in that community. So we serve as that community meeting place when the when these events occur.

Dave Karlsgodt 24:00
So Cheri, you mentioned the dam, which was crazy, but maybe not as bad as we thought it was a little scarier than then. But some of the other disasters you've experienced in your community have been just completely unbelievably horrible. So can you tell us maybe start with a car fire and then the camp fire just just a little bit of the background for people that aren't familiar with what happened?

Cheri Chastain 24:20
Yes. And I will clarify that the dam, the dam was very scary. And it did cause a lot of damage and a lot of destruction and I think, really opened a lot of people's eyes to maintaining our infrastructure, but also preparing for these crazy okay. But there weren't any lives lost, you know? Yeah, there, you know, there weren't many we didn't wipe out a whole community or anything. So that was that happened in gosh, it must have been that same year in January. And then that following August I technically I think it was the last few days of July of 2018 that the car fire hit the Redding area and that was sparked by vehicle chain dragging off of a vehicle and sparked a fire.

Dave Karlsgodt 25:10
Is that why it's called the car fire? Okay It's named after the source of the fire not like some guy named Carr or something like that.

Cheri Chastain 25:17
And not just because we'd had all this heavy precipitation but then no rain right so all at every all of the vegetation that had kind of slowly died off during the drought we had this super wet winter lots of precipitation all of this fuel grows and normal Northern California summers I mean it's dry. Right we get our which most people in Northern California think that that's totally normal across the country not realizing that most people get rain throughout the year. It usually stops raining around April in Northern California and then usually picks back up again October November. But you know that obvious is changing now. It's kind of nice to be here in Atlanta in the rain. Yeah, I haven't been in the rain in like two months. So it's nice to know that it's still raining somewhere. Anyway, back to 2018. So we had all this precipitation, all of this vegetation grows and then really hot summer and all that vegetation dies off. And this is combined with years of drought vegetation that had died off and so the car fire burned so hot and so rapidly. It actually created I think it might have been the first instance where the fire tornado fire-nado was actually seen where you have a fire that creates its own weather system because it was so hot, creating its own winds making it really difficult to fight, but fueling itself, basically and so that fire moves really rapidly. You know, my best friend's family lost their home several homes, her in laws and Her sister, and you know, I know lots of people in our community that have lost homes in that fire. There were a few lives lost and it was it was really devastating for a lot of people. And then when the campfire came just a few months later that that brought a whole new level of devastation that I don't think anybody ever anticipated ever. And that fire was caused by the utilities infrastructure. PG&E is the utility provider in that region. And there was an ignition along their transmission line,

Dave Karlsgodt 27:38
Basically a tree falling on the lines sparking or something.

Cheri Chastain 27:42
I can't remember exactly what the final cause was. I don't think it was a tree. I think it was just a loose wire, but it was their infrastructure that ultimately was the source of ignition. And then again, because everything was so dry, this is November 8 of 2018. And we hadn't had any rain since the previous Spring, so everything was super dry. And then that, you know, again, we have all this fuel, and the fire just it moved so quickly, again creating its own weather system that people couldn't react. And so there were 85 lives lost in that fire, mostly from people who either couldn't evacuate their homes, a lot of elderly folks, a lot of people who don't have transportation. The paradise community, you know, was a small community. And there were a lot of low income folks who lived in paradise. It was a retirement community, a lot of people living on fixed incomes, a lot of people living in mobile, home parks without transportation. And those are most of the lives who are lost or people who just couldn't get out quickly enough, right. I remember that morning. You know, I was live in Chico and I looked out my window, and I was like, Wow, that's really dark rain cloud. And then I go on Inside we got it that's definitely not a raincoat. It was black. And you know what sticks out to me is that this fire was not just wildland fire was not just a forest fire this was a town that burned down so that comes with buildings and cars and mattresses and tires and everything else that's in people's homes. So this was not a normal fire. And you know, the black smoke was just incredible. It was just really, really scary. And the fire it kind of continued to spread and it got within about a mile and a half of my house and so you know, I was prepared to hit the road as I have a house full of evacuees who had just lost everything lucky to get out had to drive through flames to get out of the fire. And then here we are. We're gonna have to go again guys, you know, that's that that mentally takes its toll. Yeah, that's, that's Yeah.

Dave Karlsgodt 30:00
I mean, the town is still I mean, there's not much of a town there left, right?

Cheri Chastain 30:04
No, it's completely gone. And there were a handful of structures that survived, but about 95% of the town has gone. Wow. Yeah. Okay, I guess, which comes with other ripple effects, right. So it's not just homes and lives that were lost its businesses and livelihoods that were lost and so many businesses are gone, right, just because they financially can't support themselves. So how and they were small businesses to begin with, you know, they're not large chains. A lot of them were small, locally owned shops. You know, my sister in law lost her job. She works for the waste hauler, and when you work for the waste hauler and 92% of your customers are gone. You can't survive that. Wow. Right. So, you know, there's this other financial resilience idea of how do you financially rebound?

Dave Karlsgodt 30:52
Right? Yeah. Now that's again, it's not the kind of thing just like you don't plan for giant ice buckets coming or ice You don't really plan for the town just not being there at all right. Wow. All right. Well, anything else you want to add to that?

Ben Newton 31:09
Oh, yeah. Well, I, you know, I think I bring up the analogy of it's the climate on steroids. So it's not a one time event where you know, a baseball player, they hit a home run once in, you know, a season or something like that, you know, it's a player that could hit 70 home runs in a season, which is unnatural. And that's due to, particularly in the central United States, the climate on steroids is that increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere because of the higher temperatures and then we see these huge fluctuations now in temperatures because there's no stability with the ice. That's the sea ice that's typically up in the North Pole. Now, when those fronts come in from the Gulf of Mexico, there's nothing to keep them south and they just keep Going up through the central United States, because we don't have the mountain ranges that you have in California. Right. But, you know, so that cold hurricane just kept going up. And, you know, a hurricane in the middle of Nebraska. People wouldn't think about that in March, you know, you don't prepare for that.

Dave Karlsgodt 32:18
Right, man? Well, so one question before I want to get to students here in a second, but one question or so it's something you said earlier, Ben, is that you don't stop planning like this is continual process. This is not like write a plan, put it on, on big document and put it on your shelf kind of thing. Like, can you talk maybe both of you talk a little bit about what does that even mean? What does planning mean?

Ben Newton 32:41
Yeah, so through our resiliency committee, you know, we we go beyond our campus and we're working with the community. So we've formed a lot of these partnerships with the emergency management office with the parks department. So the it is resulted in some of these partnerships that the college didn't Have the floor because of this event. And so we've planned to do things proactively as a college and community. So some of the things that we're doing are we increased the bike trail connections in the community. So more people are biking and walking to work or to campus. So that's one thing that we've done. It resulted in inner city bus transit study. So there's three communities, Grand Island, Kearney, and Hastings, and they're all about 30 minutes apart, and a lot of people traveled between those three communities. Well, now they're planning a bus route, a fixed bus route that we didn't have before. I don't know it is a plan, like you mentioned, but I'm hoping that it comes to fruition in the next few years. So that's one thing and then students and staff are now more aware of these events. And so we talk about them like Our Earth month this year, we're gonna show the end the floods came documentary, which is about this whole event. Okay. It's a PBS documentary, and we're gonna show that to our entire campus.

Dave Karlsgodt 34:11
Nice. Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes. That'd be cool to check out.

Ben Newton 34:15
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Dave Karlsgodt 34:16
Maybe a little depressing. But, how about you Cheri. What does planning look like?

Cheri Chastain 34:24
You are absolutely right. That it's not a plan that goes on a shelf and is forgotten about. I mean, it's an iterative process, right. If we just keep, keep plugging away, keep making progress. The Chico State President, President Gayle Hutchinson has released her strategic priorities. And one of those three strategic priorities is resilient, sustainable systems. And so there's a handful of us on campus that have been tasked with developing those plans. What does that mean to be a resilient and sustainable campus? We have committed to being carbon neutral for scopes, one, two and three by 2030. So that's part of our strategy, but building resilience into the curriculum into our infrastructure into business continuity. You know, when the campfire hit we closed campus for more than a week. And that was right before Thanksgiving break. So how do you continue instruction when you lose a week of class time, so you know, looking at these types of things, but then also looking again at our role as a community member, and so we're looking at establishing a resilience Collaboratory, where people can come, where people can come to a physical space for people to connect and talk about the work that they're doing, meet other people in the community that are doing similar work. You know, that networking that inspiration the resource sharing, we are rural. area. So resources are always the number one thing that everybody needs to get their work done. So we're in the process right now of building those plans and what that looks like for our campus.

Dave Karlsgodt 36:10
it's a lot more facilitation of different things that are already going on rather than like trying to dream up the perfect solution to these things you can't anticipate.

Cheri Chastain 36:19
there's no perfect solution. That's not a thing. I mean, it's probably hanging out somewhere with the unicorns.

Dave Karlsgodt 36:25
Very good. Very good. Well, one more question before we get to students, then you'd mentioned the term unnatural disaster and how how does that term go over in your community because a lot of places we can even say climate change still in this country,

Ben Newton 36:39
Right. And I think it resonates with our district, they get it. Farmers, they're always planning ahead. They're planning for the next weather event. They're watching the weather. When they get up at five in the morning, you notice they see what it's going to be like. So when they have to prepare for these events, which is their livelihood. You know, they want to know when these next events are coming, but they're not predictable anymore. So a lot of the farmers get it. They don't want to call it climate change. They're calling it a natural disaster. I call it unnatural because the climate on steroids that I already mentioned, but so they're they're trying to prepare for these things. And it devastates you know, our whole district when we have one of these events, and there's a billion dollars lost in ranching and farming, because that's a big property tax base. So, you know, those are things that it does resonate with our board, it resonates with the utility companies. You know, I'm not afraid to use the term climate change. But, you know, if I don't want to turn off a certain community, or certain district, I'd much rather focus on the severe weather events that are occurring more often.

Dave Karlsgodt 37:59
Call it late to dinner if you want, but yeah, they make a tweak your head a little bit to hear it. But you know what they mean? That's great. All right, students. That's why universities exist, first and foremost, to educate students and conduct research. How has this connected to your student population? I mean, you've mentioned a few things already, like with the trainings and things, but those are more kind of like using student labor. I suppose it has its own kind of morality around it. But anyway, but how, as in the main mission of the university, how is this intersected.

Cheri Chastain 38:29
so many ways, It's impacted our students and, like, I guess, kind of layers and levels I guess, there's the physical impact where, you know, we had I don't even know how many I think it was more than 100 students who lost their homes in the in the campfire, you know, students whose families lost their homes in the car fire. So there's the physical loss that has impacted our students and you know, we the campus, the Wildcats rise and created a fund where people could donate in Those funds were then redistributed to our staff and students and faculty who lost their homes and lost things to kind of get them physically back on their feet. But there's a research side to it where our students are now having you know, hands on research opportunities in studying things like erosion in a burn scar. And so, you know, our students working with faculty are able to go out and do environmental measurements and actually study erosion impacts and water quality impacts and things like that. We have you know, architecture and engineering students who are getting involved in the rebuild process and learning but also lending their expertise and knowledge to rebuilding structures to redesigning things. So there's kind of this hands on field service curriculum component that's, that's available for our students and faculty and staff as well. But then there's this broader higher level conversation about climate change. You know, I loved Gina McCarthy's chant yesterday. Climate change is real. Say it everybody, climate change is real. So it's a real thing. And I've heard, I heard it last year at the second nature summit. And I've heard it several times since that we are institutions of higher education. And we have an obligation to educate every single one of our students about climate change and the role that they play in addressing it mitigating it, planning for it changing, you know, building infrastructure around it. So we're working on a curriculum redesign to implement as making sure that climate change and resilience is part of every student's curriculum who graduates from Chico State.

Dave Karlsgodt 40:50
That's just your moral responsibilities.

Cheri Chastain 40:52
Yes, yeah, we need. We need our engineers to know that they play an important role in designing systems and infrastructure facilities. We need our social workers. We need our nurses, our public health people. Our geographers and planners are our history faculty and students to add continue to educate us about history

Dave Karlsgodt 41:16
touches every field. How do you make those connections ready? make it relevant. Right? Yeah. How about you Ben?

Ben Newton 41:24
Yeah, I guess there was, you know, we mentioned it was a more conservative area. And you know, I've been at the college for three years now. And, you know, I, I lived on the west coast, I lived in Chicago, you know, we're, I guess they like to call it more fiscally conservative. So there, and then now with this event, I had been pushing to get a renewable energy program since day one when I was on the job. And so we had the curriculum approved in you know, there was a whole Period. Like, is are there gonna be jobs? You know, is there enough equipment? So I say fiscally conservative. Yeah. They wanted to prove it for sure. Yeah, that we needed this program and why. And so that program did get pushed through, you know, I guess, the sense of urgency maybe after this event. That program was pushed through in July, we hired a energy technology faculty, and it's not only focused on, you know, the tech jobs or the tech jobs, wind turbine and solar tech jobs, but also the management so working with systems working with battery storage, so being really innovative in a fiscally conservative area. Sure. And those jobs are there. You know, in Nebraska, we have land an abundance of land. It's not farmland, so we do have a little windy too. Yeah, we have some. We have some big intervenes wind farm. solar farms. I mean, we Iowa was the start of that. And Nebraska is seeing those benefits but slower. And so now we're, you know, it's booming in central Nebraska. So we do have that energy tech program that's been a year in existence. And all of those students, you know, they all have summer internships, talk about jobs in central Nebraska. You didn't have those jobs before, right? And now we have those. And then also, besides that, we have something called an E badge. It's something on your transcript that you do outside of class or sustainability. And so those students are getting actual a certificate that's free to register for that they're doing something for sustainability and they can show to their potential employer. And then one other thing was sense of urgency. You know, we had an intro to sustainability course that was also Two years in the planning process well with this event, there was more of a sense of urgency. And now I can say that class will be offered next fall.

Dave Karlsgodt 44:08
the events had a way of focusing the efforts. It sounds like,

Ben Newton 44:11
yeah. And I'm going to be happy to be the instructor for that.

Dave Karlsgodt 44:17
Cheri, do you want to introduce our newest guest that just came into the middle of our recording?

Cheri Chastain 44:23
This is the president of California State University, Chico. Dr. Gayle Hutchinson.

Gayle Hutchinson 44:28
Great. Good morning.

Dave Karlsgodt 44:29
Good. Good to have you here. Thank you for taking some time out of the conference. Our first question is easy. How do you like the conference?

Gayle Hutchinson 44:34
I love this conference. This is my second time coming first time was last year when it was held in Phoenix. What I love about it is it's an opportunity to come together with other presidents and chancellors, sustainability officers, investors and start talking about what matters in life, which is the impact of climate change.

Dave Karlsgodt 44:53
Great to have you here. We've been talking for the last about 45 minutes about some of the what Ben's been calling unnatural disasters that you've experienced on your campus. So I know you're a couple of years into your job in Chico

Gayle Hutchinson 45:06
Finishing my fourth year, and I've been at Chico State a total of 27 years. Okay,

Dave Karlsgodt 45:10
so you're familiar with the community, but when you know when they I don't know how one applies to become a president of a university, but I assume that a lot of the things you've experienced over the last four years, we're probably not in the job description. So can you talk about what it's been like being the president through all these events that we've already heard about?

Gayle Hutchinson 45:28
When we start thinking about becoming a president, oftentimes, we'll go to professional development and we'll get a module on emergency preparedness. And I pay attention on those emergency preparedness, but I never expected a couple of months into my presidency, that we would be met with some of the disasters that we had. So we, if you're familiar, we had a spillway of a very large dam, threatened the community and had an evacuation of around 250,000 people and then we've Had the campfire, right? We had the evacuation of 52,000 people in a matter of hours, you know, 85 folks who lost their lives, and 52,000 displaced almost instantly. So yes, you're right. Preparing for those types of things. I think we've all have our emergency preparedness plans as as campuses and we all have our business continuity plans. But the real test comes when the emergency or disaster occurs. And I'm really pleased and honored and proud to say that when that happened, all of us at Chico State did with everyone in the community did which is rolled up our sleeves leaned in and figured out how we could help.

Dave Karlsgodt 46:39
What are what are some of the specific things that you think were in place that did prepare you for that? And maybe what are some of the things that you now if you have to go through it again, you'll be better prepared the next time around?

Gayle Hutchinson 46:50
I think for me, I you know, for me personally, I've always been trained in first aid and emergency and have always and have had an n number of persons experiences throughout my career where I've had to act and I tend to lean into emergencies. So that's on a personal note, I think. I think individuals taking kind of an inventory of how they respond in a moment of emergency is important. The other is surrounding yourself with good folks. And also making sure those folks are really well prepared and go through tabletop exercises, understand what the emergency plan is really literally talk about it in the event of do scenario planning. So we had done some of that. And I was surrounded by incredible professionals who then came into the emergency operation center. With the camp fire, we were in the emergency operation center for a period of 18 days, pretty much non stop. So we responded well, and then what did we do with the campfire? If you're familiar with the geography as a crow flies, I think the fires started probably within 20 miles of where we live in Chico, but it came through a video mountainous area, incredible steep canyons with a wind that was howling. It made the fire move at speeds we've never seen before. And as it kind of consumes mountain ridge after mountain ridge, it started consuming communities. And in a very fast period of time, communities were just pretty much gone, the largest being the town of paradise. And then as the fire came down the ridge and toward the valley, I would say, burn very close to Chico city, Chico proper and ultimately burn probably within five miles or so of the campus itself. We're a campus of 17,000 in a city of Chico which at the time was around 90,000. Since the fire We are now population of 112,000. And it was at a time where where many of our students were away for the weekend. And so it was relatively easy to cancel classes, as we saw the the extent of the emergency and it really backed right up to our Break we have over Thanksgiving. So ultimately we ended up closing campus for two weeks, which was perfect. They gave us plenty of time. And in that time, the campus stepped forward and we served as a place for first responders to stay first responders to shower. We were able to help those students who had no place to go in a residence halls are international students. We also created an opportunity for communities to come together in our large auditoria and have community meetings and really be able to get emergency information out. One of the things that I know works really well was we established a webpage where we had frequently asked questions, and not only was that a communication venue for campus people itself, but it became a really important communication bot for the community. So we were constantly posting questions giving up to date information, helping not only people know what's going on in campus, but what we resources were available for people in the community. And as we went, we began thinking about other ways we could help. A number of our campus folks volunteered. Our nursing students help set up shelters. Our forensic anthropologists were first on the scene with human identification, recovery, remain recovery. And we also, you know, and as the emergency keeps going, we had also started doing contingency planning, like how could we help with the 3000 5000 schoolchildren who were displaced, and how we might pull them into the campus and offer them classrooms, etc, and how we can be, you know, supportive. And then I think, once the acute period was over, I mean, the fire burn for what, 18 days or so. And then the acute period is over. People are still trying to figure out where they're going, and what resources were available as FEMA came in and as other support agencies came in We did our best to help people understand where those resources were. We also did our due diligence to find out where are people, our staff, and students and faculty who was burned out in the fire.

Dave Karlsgodt 51:11
because you're the first responder but you're also the people affected.

Gayle Hutchinson 51:14
Yeah, many of our staff folk lived up in Paradise and came to came to work. So as it went on, I appointed a university liaison for the camp fire that person remains. I mean, she's doing a great job. Her name is Megan Kurtz, and she's involved in all the leadership efforts in the community to rebuild the area. We continue, we got a faculty group together, that faculty group started looking at how they could engage our students in service learning projects, how we could have the curriculum really work to help out and I think our faculty are doing a fantastic job. Our students are incredibly involved, whether they're doing volunteerism up on the ridge, or helping to build sheds for people who need storage or helping to build a historic wooden bridge that is known as the honeymoon bridge. So our students and our faculty and our staff for that matter are involved. Every place possible. I've got a number of staff people. One is Mike Guzzi, who's really great with facilities and construction and he's an engineer by trade. He's doing some volunteer work with some projects that are going on. Cheri is heavily involved. So we've got people across the campus. And then there's the area of scholarship. So we're doing scholarship in water contaminants, fire mitigation, fire, education, other resiliency type of efforts, and recording all of that as well building an internal database that we hope to be able to share one day externally. So we we don't see this as it was an acute emergency and a disaster. Yeah, done. Yeah. Because we are a community and because Chico State is very much a part of the region and a leader region we see ourselves committed for the long haul.

Dave Karlsgodt 53:03
Yeah, yeah. I've got roots. My mom was actually born in Chico, California. Yeah, actually. Well, one of the, one of the questions that I always ask anytime I get a chance to talk to a president is the following. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna switch it up a little bit for you just because of this conversation. The question I ask is, how often or how much of your day do you get to think about, you know, sustainability, these topics, resiliency, you know, carbon mitigation, because my sense is normally mean, presidents generally have a lot on their plate. And this is like maybe one thing that they get to think about, you have probably a quite different perspective than the average president having lived through all these things. But maybe the question I would ask you would be, what advice would you give to folks like Cheri and Ben if they're talking to their president about how to be prepared for these things, how to get on their radar in their busy schedule, short of having these disasters which are you know, that's that's a way to do it, but probably not the recommended way to do

Gayle Hutchinson 54:01
I think that's a great question. For me personally, I'm looking at it in two ways, one through operations for the institution and the other through curriculum, which I would say would include teaching and service and scholarship. And I would provide that President or provide the department chair, the dean, the provost, the Vice President for business and finance, anyone who would listen the most up to date information. As presidents, we're hungry for information. We're constantly looking for the latest and most reliable data around higher education trends specifically, and climate impact and climate affect is something that we all need to be paying attention to. So if your President is aware, then feed them with the information as you get it, so they have it at their fingertips. If your president is not aware, then I would try to make that appointment and hopefully you get in to see them and if you don't Don't give up, I would just send them the information and send that information around what the institution can be doing to achieve climate neutrality, through operations, but also the importance of educating our students, because the power of our future, I believe lies with our students. And we also have the responsibility to make sure that we lead through our operations. So at Chico State, before all of these disasters, we started a very inclusive strategic planning process. And I was adamant in the process that it would be wonderfully inclusive. And at the end, we would end up with three strategic priorities that would drive us I was hopeful that folks would understand the importance of equity, diversity and inclusion, as well as resilient sustainable systems, and then also civic and global engagement and the campus and the community did not disappoint. So those are our three strategic priorities. And they're not rank ordered in any way but it's equity diversity inclusion, which we know related. specifically to sustainability, and then also resilient, sustainable systems. And we work with systems because we need to be taking a more systems approach to all of these challenges that we have and understand the intersections and the integration. And then, of course, the Civic and global engagement, which we always want our students to be involved on the ground floor, but we want to be involved as well. And I love the term I learned yesterday from our president, he was calling it I think he called it glocal, a combination of global and local, glocal. So everything he does is global, and I'm going to adopt that as everything at Chico State. We're gonna be moving in that direction in terms of everything being glocal.

Dave Karlsgodt 56:40
All right. That's our third mashup word of the podcast. I was there you had Collaboratory. And Ben Ben uses unnatural disaster as an alternative which is great. So glocal. Okay. All right. That's great. What what are you looking forward to and the next hopefully preparing for the future but as Chico looks forward. How do you feel prepared for the next time This comes around or sharing what you've learned or tell us? What's coming up?

Gayle Hutchinson 57:08
Yeah, I think so Chico State was one of the original signatories on the climate agreement with second nature. And we did. We've done extremely well, we've done really good foundational work. But over the last couple of years, I think we re examine what we were doing and understand that we need to wrap it up. So I'm really thankful that I have Cheri. And also Mike Guzzi and and wonderful faculty, wonderful staff who really embraced this. But we're going to be looking at how we ramp it up over the next couple of years. we're serious about achieving climate neutrality, but I won't understand that we have a challenge ahead of us. So as long as we're making better than progress, as long as we're making significant progress, I think we can achieve our goal. You know, hopefully within 10 years, I'd love for it to be sitting. Right so

Dave Karlsgodt 57:59
Very good. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us.

Gayle Hutchinson 58:01
Thanks for having me.

Dave Karlsgodt 58:02
Yeah, this was great. Yeah. Thanks for bringing your president that was kind of fun. Yeah. Just last question to wrap things up. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to get in touch? And and what what kind of ways would you want people to get in touch? What are the things that you would like them to reach out to you individually for versus, you know, things that you might point them to?

Ben Newton 58:23
Now, I think just getting the process started, like a lot of the campuses that I've been talking to at the summit, they don't know where to get started with resiliency planning. And, you know, we signed that commitment, we made that a priority. And you know, how I started that process was, you know, I guess in a rural area, it was reaching out to community members and, you know, inviting them to a lunch and all get together and share ideas. So just sharing how that process got started and how they can make it move forward. They can reach out to me for that.

Dave Karlsgodt 58:55
Okay, great. I will have contact info in the in the show notes and whatnot. So Okay.

Cheri Chastain 59:01
Yeah, um, anything? I mean, you know, I, I think it's important for all of us to stay in touch with each other. I mean, I've learned so much from Ben and what he's done and how he's done it. But also Black Hills State University, he was on a panel with us that he and all the universities that I've met here at second nature, keeping these conversations going, I think are really important, I guess, specific things for us. I mean, if anybody wants to know what happens when the town next door burns. Yeah, I think you know, we are like, like our president said, we were an initial founding signatory of the Climate Commitment. And as I've mentioned, that has changed and evolved over the years. And so I'm happy to share that evolution. And you know what that looks like? I guess now 13 years ago, versus now. And how things have changed.

Dave Karlsgodt 1:00:02
Okay, good. Well, I appreciate you guys taking time out of the conference. I know this is like a special time to get to meet folks but getting up early finding a room in the back of the conference center. pulling a president in for conversation has been a lot of fun.

Cheri Chastain 1:00:16
Thanks for having us. Thanks for inviting.

Dave Karlsgodt 1:00:18
That's it for this episode. Thanks to Kaia Findlay for her production assistance. You can find show notes, transcripts and contact details for our guests on our website at campusenergypodcast.com. If you'd like to follow our show on social media, our Twitter handle is @energypodcast. You can find us on LinkedIn by searching for campus energy and sustainability podcast. If you'd like to support the show, please consider leaving a rating a review on iTunes or just sending a link to a friend. As always, thanks for listening.