It’s fire season across the West. 

Well, it’s actually always fire season here now, thanks to climate change. And as massive conflagrations spread across California and the Western United States, this week’s Reveal episode digs into the ways we are – and aren’t – adapting to this new reality. 

The episode features three stories: 

• First, we investigate how government officials in California’s wine and dairy country have allowed agriculture businesses to bring workers back into evacuation zones, with little training or oversight. This segment is a partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network and the podcast and radio show World Affairs.


• Second, we meet Bill Tripp, that fellow in the yellow jacket and white hard hat in the above photo. As a member of the Karuk Tribe, Tripp has built a career around trying to get agencies to carefully set controlled burns, like his grandmother taught him when he was 4 years old. But in the 1800s, authorities outlawed traditional burning practices. Today, the impact of that policy is clear: The land is overgrown, and there has been a major fire in the region every year for the past decade, including one that destroyed half the homes in the Karuk’s largest town, Happy Camp, and killed two people. Tripp has spent 30 years trying to restore “good fire” to the region but still faces resistance from the U.S. Forest Service and others. This story comes from our partners at public radio station KQED in San Francisco.


• Lastly, Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren examines why the Forest Service hasn’t fully embraced using prescribed burns, even though it changed its policy to expand their use a dozen years ago. 

Listen to the episode: Fighting Fire With Fire

The truth won’t reveal itself. Help us deliver the stories that make a difference. Donate today. 

The Secret Bias Behind Mortgages

In 2018, our groundbreaking investigation, Kept Out, showed that modern-day redlining persisted in more than 60 metropolitan areas across the country. Our data analysis was clear: People of color were being denied loans, even when we controlled for applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood. 

Now, Emmanuel Martinez, one of the reporters on that project, is out with a new story that examines one of the central explanations that the mortgage industry gave for the disparities. 

He’s now at the nonprofit newsroom The Markup, and he teamed up with reporter Lauren Kirchner. Newly available data they analyzed not only failed to eliminate racial disparities in loan denials, it highlighted new devastating ones.

Here’s what they found: 

• Across the country, mortgage lenders were 40% more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50% more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, 70% more likely to deny Native American applicants and 80% more likely to deny Black applicants than similar White applicants. 


• Lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high – $100,000 a year or more – and had the same debt ratios. 


• The racial disparities existed across many cities. For example, Black applicants in Chicago were 150% more likely to be denied by financial institutions than similar White applicants there. Native American applicants in Minneapolis were 100% more likely to be denied by financial institutions than similar White applicants there.

Read the story: Denied: The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms 

Read the 2018 investigation: Kept Out: For People of Color, Banks Are Shutting the Door to Homeownership 

This newsletter was written by Sarah Mirk. Drop her a line with feedback and ideas.