California's last working nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, sits in a landscape that would worry any firefighter when the wind picks up. The Pacific Ocean and its perpetual fog lick the western edge of the coastal bluffs, while the Irish Hills rise steeply to the east, rugged and dark with scrub and oak. Difficult to access and full of fuel. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.

"Any fire within the Diablo power plant area could be catastrophic," said Dave Erickson, a division chief and forester with the Cal Fire San Luis Obispo unit. The property, he said, is in a very high fire severity zone. "So we just take precautions."

It's one of the many places where California is now stepping into federal gaps created by Congress's long-term underinvestment in fuels management on federal lands, the Trump administration's cuts, and firefighters stretched thin by blazes raging across the West.

A local organization with state funding, the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, started carving a fuel break into the surrounding ridgelines. And Erickson put his crews to work closing the gaps, to create a critical toehold for firefighters to get ahead of flames.

In the past, the patchwork of landowners around the power plant — which includes the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — could have derailed Erickson's plans. But a 2023 agreement Cal Fire signed with the bureau enabled Erickson to use state resources on federal land to complete the fuel break earlier this year. The bureau managed key environmental surveys, planning and approvals.

"The project was designed from the beginning as an interagency effort," said Philip Oviatt, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management California in an email to CalMatters. "No single agency could have achieved this outcome independently."

The stakes are high for California, where wildfires have burned through millions of acres in the last decade — killing more than 220 people, hastening the deaths of tens of thousands more, and racking up tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

But the costs are high, too. California has spent nearly half a billion dollars in grants for wildfire resilience and forest health projects on federal lands since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, according to the California Natural Resources Agency.

Jonathan Fitch, manager of Cal Fire's vegetation management program, spearheaded three new agreements Cal Fire reached last year with the U.S. Forest Service. The deals allow California to clear fuels, collect cones for seed banks, replant burned lands, manage timber and more on California's national forests, according to Fitch.

The Forest Service kicked in $4 million for the agreements across the state, some of which will go toward fuels-reduction projects, Fitch said. But the overall need far exceeds the federal funds.

"The true value is unlocking the state's potential and resources on the federal landscape," Fitch said.

It's a question Fitch says he hears often: why should California put its money, people and equipment to work on federally-managed lands?

"My response is, well, wildfires don't stop at boundaries," Fitch said. "We cannot disregard what happens in the federal space, because we're one state. We're one landscape."

Ever since President Donald Trump accused California of failing to adequately rake its forests — more than half of which the federal government manages — Sacramento and Washington have been feuding over fuels management and federal funds.

Gov. Gavin Newsom taunted Trump with a "Make America Rake Again" model executive order last year, and blasted him for withholding roughly $1.5 billion in federal aid following the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025.

But for all the fighting, California frequently crosses federal borders to manage land and fire. As the Timber Fire kicked off in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur — burning nearly 6,000 acres — it was another example of this cooperation.

This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.