The Show for Aug. 12, 2026: Disaster on Apache Lake, effectiveness of peptides and more

In 2020, two people died when a monsoon storm hit a wildfire burn scar and debris rained down on boaters on Apache Lake. One of the survivors tells his story. Plus, do peptides live up to the hype?

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona.BannerHealth.com/NonprofitForAZ.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, a cautionary tale of fire and flood on Apache Lake. And what’s the real deal with the gray market selling peptides?

But first, Arizona’s state Legislature will look different next year no matter who wins the elections this fall as a wave of lawmakers are leaving office. From Lela Alston, who has served in the Legislature for 34 years, to Senate President Warren Petersen, who’s leaving to run for attorney general. Several others are simply stepping down, not seeking reelection, calling it quits.

And it turns out they’re not the only ones. Across the country, there is an exodus of legislative leaders. From Wisconsin’s most powerful lawmaker to more in North Carolina and Utah, both top lawmakers in Vermont are retiring. So what’s behind this trend, and how does the timing of this year’s midterm elections play in?

Reid Wilson is founder and editor of Pluribus News, and he’s been reporting on this phenomenon across the country. Thanks for coming back on The Show, Reid.

REID WILSON: Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: So how widespread is this? You’re calling it an exodus of legislative leaders, as I quoted there. Tell us about how many examples of this you were able to track down.

REID WILSON: Right, so there are 99 legislative chambers in America. Every state has two except for Nebraska, which only has one. Of those 99, obviously there are 99 leaders, 99 minority leaders. And of that population, almost a third are doing something different next year. They’re either retiring, running for other office, or they’ve lost primaries. As you mentioned, those legislative leaders in North Carolina and Utah, both very powerful Senate president Republicans, lost their primary elections earlier this year.

And this has been a phenomenon that we’re seeing sort of across the nation. One of the great things for me about reporting on state legislatures across the country is that the partisanship of Washington really hasn’t trickled down to state legislative chambers. That’s changing. In conversations with a lot of the lawmakers who are leaving, they’re just saying that the job has changed. It’s a lot less fun, and the partisanship that so infects Washington, D.C., is now creeping into state capitals.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, there’s this phenomenon we saw here as well, of sort of the president, the sort of MAGA wing of the Republican Party, primarying people who voted for something they didn’t like.

REID WILSON: Right, and that happened — that’s happened in a number of states this year, most prominently in Indiana, one of the states where President Trump wanted the state Legislature to redraw congressional district maps in this unprecedented wave of mid-decade redistricting. Senate Republicans there defied President Trump, refused to go along with the plan to redraw map lines. And as a consequence, he targeted a number of incumbents who voted against him. Seven of those incumbents have lost, and now the state Senate president, who was one of those against redistricting, he won his primary election, but he has since stepped down as the Senate president under pressure.

LAUREN GILGER: There’s also this kind of anti-incumbent feeling, I think is how someone described it to you, among the electorate. This idea that every election is about change. People are angry with people who have been in office already; they want change. That seems to be kind of a long-term trend at this point.

REID WILSON: It has been basically a trend since I’d say 2006, 2008. We’ve seen successive wave elections in midterms at an unprecedented scale in the last decade and a half, really. And now these state legislative incumbents are the ones who are bearing the brunt of this. In a lot of states, a lawmaker who’s around for 10, 20, 30 years really learns the levers of government and learns how to manipulate things in a way that can make them more powerful than, say, a governor. Well, when these legislative leaders start to become the insiders that American voters hate so much, they lose their position. And that can have the effect of bleeding power back to the executive. So I think the longer-term trend here is we’re seeing more powerful governors and less powerful legislatures, which mirrors what we’re seeing at the federal level, where we’ve got a more powerful presidential executive and a Congress that isn’t doing much.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s interesting. You have this quote in there, someone saying the idea of longtime legislators is going away. But what’s lost in that? There is this phrase, "institutional knowledge," that is coming to mind for me as you talk.

REID WILSON: Yeah, and I’ll give you an example from Arizona. When Gov. Hobbs ran the first time four years ago, I talked to a senior Republican strategist, and I said, "What’s really at stake here in this race?" At the time, Katie Hobbs and Kari Lake were talking about the issues that might matter to Arizonans. But this Republican insider told me, "The thing that they don’t realize is just how much the Colorado River and the negotiations over the river are going to play in their terms because these negotiations are so delicate."

The issues that aren’t necessarily top-of-mind to voters are actually top-of-mind to legislators, governors, the people who have the power. So not a lot of voters four years ago voted for Katie Hobbs or Kari Lake because of their positions or proposals on the Colorado River, but of course that has become such a massive part of Gov. Hobbs’ first term. That’s the kind of institutional knowledge that you lose when some of these longtime lawmakers get ousted.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it definitely came to fruition there. Last minute for you, Reid. There is this idea of new blood, right? Like getting new ideas in there, younger people, maybe a new generation to represent us in our state legislatures. Is that happening in lieu of institutional knowledge and these long-term lawmakers?

REID WILSON: Yeah, I think it is. And I think that’s what the sort of longtime lawmakers who have been around forever, who see this brain drain of institutional knowledge, want to see. They want to see a healthy mix of veterans who understand the levers of power and people who are coming in with new ideas to sort of shake up the place and begin new relationships. Because, you serve with somebody for 10 or 20 years, they might get on your nerves a little bit. Maybe it’s time for some new blood sometimes.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. Well, lots to watch for as the midterms come about as well. Reid Wilson, founder-editor of Pluribus News, joining us to talk more about this national phenomenon we’re seeing right here in Arizona. Reid, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

REID WILSON: Thanks again.

LAUREN GILGER: Flagstaff, like many cities, has a housing problem. It’s long ranked alongside cities like Sedona for the most expensive places to live in Arizona, and the city faces particular challenges that get in the way of building affordable housing.

That’s where our next guest this morning comes in. Devonna McLaughlin is the CEO of Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona. They have been strategizing ways to work around those barriers since 1990. Now they’re out with a new report that found a 198% increase in the median home sale price since 2011 in Flagstaff. McLaughlin is on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Devonna.

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. OK, so tell us what you found in this new report about just how unaffordable Flagstaff housing has become. What does a nearly 200% increase in the median home sale price mean for folks?

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I think the housing needs assessment that we put out really just puts numbers to what folks who live in Flagstaff know in their gut because they’re challenged to find affordable rental units or buy a first home. And so the data comes from publicly sourced areas like fair market rents or area median income increases or sales data from the Association of Realtors, and it just shows that working families in our community struggle with the high housing costs. And that provides an ongoing burden to families to be able to be healthy and secure and safe and stable in their environments here in town.

LAUREN GILGER: So folks living in Flagstaff, what does this mean? They’re spending most of their money, more of their money than they should be on rent, essentially?

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: For a lot of folks, yeah. I mean, if you were lucky enough to buy your first home 10-15 years ago and you had a fixed-rate mortgage, things look pretty good for you, right? Housing costs for your principal and interest are stable, your home has appreciated over time, you’re doing well.

But if you’re entering into the housing market, if you’re a younger buyer or first-time homebuyer, you’re likely challenged to find something in your price range because prices are 1) high, and 2) borrowing costs are high. So when interest rates went up over the last several years, buying power went down, but prices didn’t decrease substantially. And so we’re seeing first-time homebuyers have a pretty significant payment that they’re walking into.

And the same is true for renters, right? It’s not like just buying a house is expensive. Fair market rents have also gone up over the same period, about 70%. So everything’s a little bit more expensive when it comes to housing. And when that’s such a big portion of your monthly budget, when that’s out of whack, it does make it harder for families to budget for other needed expenses.

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s talk about what’s led to this. We are looking at housing prices that have gone up all over the place, including here in the Valley, but these numbers in Flagstaff seem more extreme.

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I think we’ve always been top of our class in this area in the state. Flagstaff is known for, unfortunately, “poverty with a view,” and it’s a great place to live. So you have external demand. People want to retire here, or they perhaps have a second home here. We have a robust secondary education environment with NAU and CCC, and so students come here to go to school. And so when the supply is limited and the demand is not, then you see pressures on prices.

And I would say our supply is limited. We are an island on a hill. We’re surrounded by state trust land and national forest land, and we can’t sprawl the way Phoenix has done over time, which limits the ability to build.

It’s also volcanic rock, so it’s more expensive to dig your foundation and to get your utilities in the ground. Labor prices are higher up here. So it’s just kind of a perfect storm that we’ve lived with and we’ve known for decades, but these kind of put the numbers to the reality that we all face.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, you’re getting at some of the specific, particular-to-Flagstaff challenges to creating affordable housing solutions, which is what your organization works to do. I want to talk a little bit more about some of those things you just brought up, like the idea that you can’t really build out. You can’t really build up either, right, because of city code?

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I mean, I think every city has codes that restrict building height, and Flagstaff is no different than that. So the city and City Council are working on trying to update building code and building guidelines to see about creating more density, maybe reducing some parking standards, trying to look at other communities and strategies for how do we get more units in the space that we do have. And I think they’ve made some great progress in having consultants come in and getting buy-in from the builder community or the community in general about how we can implement those development guidelines.

I mean, hands are tied a little bit, too, in regulation for cities and counties. We can’t restrict ... vacation rentals, for example, which takes some of our housing inventory and converts it to a commercial use. We can’t do like a real estate transfer tax. So some of those strategies that work in other states aren’t open to our municipalities.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you more about that because there is also this unique pressure in Flagstaff from outsiders, right? From people from the Valley often coming in with a lot of money, buying vacation homes. That impacts the housing market there, right?

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: It does. I mean, when you look at our residential inventory, how much is available for folks who live and work here? And when you’ve got second homeowners, when you’ve got vacation rentals, the percentage of residential units that someone could go buy or go rent and live here and work here is just reduced. And that’s already reduced because we’re not sprawling out, and we’re not building in the national forest. And so all of that just kind of combines.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, last minute for you. Let’s talk about some solutions on the table. I know Flagstaff recently passed a housing bond that could provide some funding to assist in this. What are the solutions on the table that you think are viable?

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah, I think that bond was a great first step, and I’m excited to see that financial investment of $20 million start to pay off. Specifically, those dollars went to adaptive reuse strategies. So organizations like ours are converting hotels into residential use to try and build more residential inventory for our workforce.

There’s down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers who can otherwise qualify for a mortgage, have good credit, but can’t get to those purchase prices without some help. That’s been really effective over time, and then the bond added quite a bit of money to that strategy. So I think that’s great.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, lots on the table. Devonna McLaughlin, CEO of Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona, joining us. Devonna, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it.

DEVONNA MCLAUGHLIN: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I am Lauren Gilger. Coming up, an alternative way to power data centers may lie in cow manure. We’ll hear more about how to harness manure lagoons for good.

But first, peptides are everywhere right now, especially in the wellness world. How does 54-year-old Jennifer Aniston still look like she’s 30? Peptides. How does Joe Rogan heal his muscles fast? A Wolverine stack, as he calls it, of peptides.

But most peptides are not FDA-approved. They’re being sold in what’s called a gray market, but that could be changing under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s federal Health Department. So are the peptides here the future of aging, or is there more we should know about them? Here to tell us more is Will Humble, president of the Arizona Public Health Association. Good morning, Will.

WILL HUMBLE: Morning. How you doing?

LAUREN GILGER: I’m great. Thanks for coming on. So you really see these peptides everywhere right now, especially in the wellness world, especially on social media. Where can you get them though right now?

WILL HUMBLE: So people are getting them in different places. A lot of people are going online and just getting a quick online assessment and then having the drugs delivered to them. The drugs will say "for experimental use only," so that’s one mechanism. People are getting them from their friends in the gym. They’re going to wellness clinics. Medspas is another place people are getting these things. And some people are actually going to their real-life doctor, who gives them a prescription that they take to a compounding pharmacy. And some people just go to Mexico.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, so there’s the description pretty well of the gray market we referred to, right? Well, what are peptides? Are they a supplement? Are they a vitamin? Are they something else?

WILL HUMBLE: Yeah, so most people should remember them from their high school biology class. They’re just —

LAUREN GILGER: I did not.

WILL HUMBLE: You didn’t? So amino acids are like the basic building block for proteins and a lot of the things that you need to have to work so your body can work. When you have a chain of amino acids together, that’s a peptide. If you have a bunch of those together, that’s a polypeptide. Eventually you get long ones are proteins.

So peptides are chains of about between, say, 10 and 50 amino acids, so they’re short chain. But they don’t actually take part in the cell; they’re really signaling your cell. So you can think of peptides as like a text message to your cells to say, "Hey, do this."

LAUREN GILGER: Do this. Are they taken as serums, injections, a pill? What is this?

WILL HUMBLE: Almost all of them are injections. Some people squirt nasal spray, but if you take a peptide and swallow it, like in a shake or a smoothie or something like that, your stomach acid just breaks it down. So for it to actually do whatever people think it’s going to do, it needs to be injected or inhaled.

LAUREN GILGER: There is some crossover here, Will, with the very well-known and much talked about GLP-1 drugs right now?

WILL HUMBLE: Yeah, so those are peptides, but they’re actually licensed. So the GLP-1 drugs that you see on television for weight loss and stuff like that, those are legitimate peptides that are shown to work, been through the FDA trials. There’s dose responses, they’re tested for safety and effectiveness. So those, you know, work, what doses are there.

But all these things that Rogan and stuff are push, those are not licensed, they’re not regulated. And for the most part, there’s no clinical trials on them. There’s some animal studies on one of them, but like, this is really unregulated stuff.

LAUREN GILGER: What are they purported to do exactly? It seems like just a whole host of things.

WILL HUMBLE: You name it. So some people say it makes their skin look better, they’re more attentive and alert, claims that if you’re injured at the gym lifting weights that you recover more quickly, and just general wellness. So that’s a very nebulous word on purpose, I think.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, but what does the research here actually show? You said there just isn’t a lot, basically?

WILL HUMBLE: No, if you look at — there’s no research on it. There’s a few animal studies on mice on one or two of these things, but for the most part, we’re in a giant, grand, uncontrolled experiment with the American people, and we’re not collecting the data even.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so where does the FDA come in then, right? Like we talked about this gray market, the fact that you can still get these things basically wherever you feel like it and in wellness clinics, etc. But they are not tested for safety, they have not been tested for efficacy or effectiveness. What’s the federal government’s role here?

WILL HUMBLE: So the federal government’s big role is licensing drugs. Like the GLP-1 drugs, they went through the clinical trials, they licensed them. These peptides drugs are not licensed in any way that way.

But they still get away with it because there’s a loophole in federal law that says you can have experimental-use drugs that you can actually be a — it can be sold and mixed by these — they’re called compounding pharmacies, which have like jars of bulk materials that they then mix in a custom blend for people. And so it’s in this gray area. Is it legal? Is it not legal? For the most part, this stuff isn’t licensed, but it’s not an enforcement priority. And so it just has spread.

LAUREN GILGER: But the FDA and, you know, the Health Department under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be making some changes to that.

WILL HUMBLE: Right, so they had an FDA advisory committee that met last week. First of all, I don’t know how much more time we have, but —

LAUREN GILGER: About a minute.

WILL HUMBLE: Kennedy got rid of the old people on the committee, put his people on the committee, then put up in front of the committee: Should we completely deregulate these things, move them from the gray market to an unlicensed OK market?

The committee disregarded the FDA staff, who said, "Don’t approve this, don’t — not an approval — don’t list this on the bulk drug list. It’s not tested." They disregarded that, and Kennedy still hasn’t made a final decision about what they’re going to do, but he’s made lots of statements that he loves this stuff. So I think we can expect in the next few months this’ll move from a gray market to a whiter market, I guess, but they’re still not going to be licensed.

LAUREN GILGER: A whiter market, OK. That is Will Humble, president of the Arizona Public Health Association, joining us to tell us a little bit more about the peptide trend. Will, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

LAUREN GILGER: In 2020, the Arizona monsoon season turned deadly when a powerful storm hit Apache Lake. The monsoon hit the burn scar from the Woodbury Fire the year before and created an avalanche of debris that rushed down on a group of boaters who had sheltered in a cove from the storm below.

The deluge took two lives that day: Deanna Peterson and Rick Le Grand. Our next guest this morning was there when it happened and is out now with a new book about the tragedy. It’s called "Follow the Noise: A Saga of Fire and Flood in the Arizona Desert and the Scars Left Behind."

And in it, Ryan Schuster grapples with not just the flood that took his friends, but his family story of legacy and loss on Apache Lake. They owned the Apache Lake Marina and Resort for more than 40 years, but they had to sell it in the aftermath of the Woodbury Fire. Schuster came into our studios recently to tell me more about it, and it’s today’s deep dive.

LAUREN GILGER: You start the book with Rick Le Grand and what happened to him in the summer of 2020. So I want to start the conversation there. Tell us first just like a little bit about him. Like this was a guy who loved Apache Lake, who was part of that community.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Rick was really larger than life at Apache Lake. I mean, he was born a boater. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and started visiting Apache Lake in the early ’70s and really never stopped coming. And really just kind of built that reputation of being a boater, but I’d say more importantly like an appreciator. He appreciated the good times, whether it was hanging out with all of his friends or parking his boat beneath some towering monolith of rock and just admiring the beauty of it all. So he was a really great appreciator of the world.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and he loved that place. So on August 22, 2020, this flash flood hits the lake. There’s only kind of one way in and out. And you recreate this: Rick and his girlfriend going there that day, being excited, having fun. They’re in their swimsuits. And then this flood happens. Tell us about that. You were there too that day. What do you remember about that flood?

RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, well, before the flood, I mean, I think it’s really important just to remember the day in its entirety, and it was just denoted by beauty and great memories. I mean, we had just a wonderful day out on the water. It had been so long since all of us friends were able to hang out with each other. The road to Apache Lake had been closed for quite some time, so we had just recently kind of regained partial access to the lake and enjoyed everything from having just amazing meals out on the water and going wakeboarding and admiring the sunset together as well.

But what had happened was we saw a monsoon gathering steam out towards the east, which was back towards the resort where we needed to go back that night. And it came barreling down the lake, and ultimately we had to seek shelter in the nearest cove and just wait for the storm to pass us by.

LAUREN GILGER: While you were still on the water, yeah.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, so we’re still on the water, we’re on the boat, and we duck into this cove and it’s perfect. The wind dies down, it’s no longer raining, it’s just absolutely beautiful outside. But what we didn’t realize was the storm was gathering up in the mountains above us, and these are the mountains of Four Peaks, so 4,000 feet above lake level is where the storm was really drawn into. And it was centering over a burn scar of the latest wildfire that had ripped through, the Bush Fire in 2020.

So as these storms are centering over this region, it’s raining down a historic amount of water just in this one specific spot. And when wildfires burn through any sort of terrain, it’s really common for high-temperature burning fires to turn the soil actually hydrophobic. ... So the soil, when it’s getting rained on, it’s actually repelling the water. And the water collectively gathered up in these mountains and basically just shot straight down this mountain, kind of like a bullet train.

And it was over a burn scar, so it’s collecting all this debris, ash, mud, everything like that, all the way down. So ultimately what was occurring was a debris flow. The difference between a debris flow and a flash flood is debris flows are just liquefied enough to flow. They’re almost more solid than liquid. So they move with incredibly fast speeds.

So as we think we’re shielding ourselves away from the storm in the cove, but then ultimately what happens is this debris flow comes barreling out of the mountains, catches us dead in the water, the boat won’t start, and ultimately we had to face this flood head on.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And that’s where you lost Rick.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, so what had happened is, as this flood comes into our boats, the debris, the muck is pouring over the boat, over our heads. I mean, it’s complete chaos in the boats. And during that time, Rick had really just prioritized getting out life jackets to everyone that was on the boat and kind of directing them out towards safety.

And I had escaped off the side, following Rick’s directions, into this cove that was just filled with debris. So you’re crawling over the top of the water, out away from the boat. And when I looked back, I saw that the boat was capsized, it’s completely turned over, and all of our friends on board were missing.

LAUREN GILGER: I mean, so this was like an incredibly traumatic moment for you, I’m sure, and for everyone there. What do you — when you think back to that day, like what do you wish you had known?

RYAN SCHUSTER: I think that’s a really important question. We were all aware of the dangers of flash flooding. We’ve all grown up in Arizona and have heard countless stories of the wash that can turn into a river in a few moments’ time. But I don’t think we ever really appreciated or respected the scale of what the world can really bring down on you in a moment’s instant.

We all grew up on the water together, and over time you build this confidence where you’ve made it through storms together, you’ve made it through boats breaking down, everything like that, so you build this confidence that makes you feel like kind of like a professional of the waterway or just the outdoors in general. But you’re never really truly tested, and the moment that it tested all of us was something that we can never get back.

So I wish that we had just appreciated the gravity of what was happening around us, and it’s hard to say be better prepared because I’m not really sure how we could have prepared for it. But I think the ultimate answer is to not immerse yourself in these really fragile environments.

LAUREN GILGER: I think that’s interesting you call it a fragile environment, right? Because you talked about the reason that flash flood turned into such a dangerous moment, and it was because of this wildfire that had come before. And you talk in the book about the way that the lake and the region in general is really being shaped by flood and fire, right? Like this almost like biblical thing. And it’s increasing with climate change, right?

RYAN SCHUSTER: That’s right. I would argue the entire world is increasingly being shaped by fire and flood. This was just one particular moment in time, but as we’ve seen, we’re entering monsoon season, we’re also entering wildfire season as well. And sometimes those two might help cancel each other out, or sometimes they might combine to really unleash more devastation than they could individually.

So it’s something that I think all of our communities have had to grapple with more so over the years. In this instance, in Apache Lake, I characterize it as being encircled by fires. We had the fifth-largest wildfire in Arizona history that reached the southern border of the lake, then we had the Bush Fire the next year, which had come in on the northern boundaries of the lake.

But in other parts of the world, they don’t have the choice of being able to visit or not visit one of these places. Their entire communities or villages at the foothills of mountains that burn and then flood, where they really have no other option, nowhere else to go.

So this story impacted our small little local community, but I think we see these everyone’s different stories coming up over the years as this proliferation of wildfires continue that I think is reshaping how everyone’s viewing the world and its fragility that’s coming as an outcome of climate change.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning and welcome to The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Lauren Gilger. Let’s return now to my deep dive conversation with Ryan Schuster. He’s the author of the new book, "Follow the Noise: A Saga of Fire and Flood in the Arizona Desert and the Scars Left Behind." It documents a deadly flood on Apache Lake in 2020.

Yeah. OK, so I want to back up and talk about what this place means to you personally and to your family. The marina at Apache Lake your family owned and operated for more than four decades.

When this happened, it was up for sale because the fire had hit the region so hard that the road was closed for a long time, your family said we can’t do it anymore. You put it up for sale and eventually have sold it since then. But talk a little bit about growing up there. What do you remember about this place before all of this tragedy?

RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, I have the fondest memories of Apache Lake. Our family’s connection to that place runs so deep. Our grandparents purchased the resort in 1974, and during that time, my mom and her siblings were teenagers, so they came into it really without a choice, but they had already kind of been set in their ways and raised very differently.

My cousins and I, so I’m one of five cousins that all grew up at the lake, we were born and raised at Apache Lake, and all of our life’s core memories are based there. We learned to swim there in the water, we all had our first jobs there as early as 5 years old, and —

LAUREN GILGER: You started helping out, yeah.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Yeah, selling bags of ice at the ice house when I was around 5 years old, and we continued working there through college. So we’ve spent countless hours there, and I think we were really fortunate on the surface level, so lucky being raised in this incredible place on a lake in the beautiful Tonto National Forest, in the desert that surrounds.

But also just so fortunate to have the opportunity to start working and kind of learn the values of hard work and also of community at a really young age as well, that I don’t think we would have been exposed to in what we would call town life.

LAUREN GILGER: Town life, I like that. You must have been — you’re selling bags of ice, but you grew up on boats out there then, like swimming in the water. I mean, this was — how different is it now that you go up there than it was when you were growing up there?

RYAN SCHUSTER: It’s completely different for all of our family. My mom, for example, hasn’t returned there for leisure, to have fun, really. The rest of us cousins do still like to get up there and go boating and try and rekindle the magic of the place.

It just lives in different forms now. I think what we’ve all tried to be really cognizant about is be more of an appreciator, like Rick, and appreciate a lot of the really small things that we didn’t really pick up on when we were younger and kind of just barreling down the lake loud and fast. Now it’s a lot more slower speeds, appreciating rock formations and special little secret coves that can only fit one boat at a time.

LAUREN GILGER: Is it therapeutic to go out on a boat on that lake now after this tragedy happened, after you were there in this really terrible moment?

RYAN SCHUSTER: It is therapeutic. What I think has really helped me following this incident was immersion in the waters of Apache Lake. We always like to joke that it has healing waters whenever we had a cut or something like that, which I’m sure is definitely not the case.

But a couple days after the incident, we were all just really hanging around in this fog, and there was still smoke in the area from another fire that lingered off in the distance, kind of wallowing in our sadness. And my mom instructed us to go down to the beach, so that’s what we did, and kind of slowly lowered ourselves back into the lake that had taken our friends, that still held them as search and rescue efforts were ongoing.

And it felt right, and it still feels right to get back in that water. And I think it’s helped me to trust the natural world again and to reconcile with the fact that what the world brought down on us was so violent and powerful and terrifying, but at the same time it can offer peace, serenity, healing. And I think that’s really important to keep in mind when you want to become distrustful of the world, and you want to find a root cause to blame.

And in the end, it just all goes back to respecting the world and the powers that it’s capable of and ultimately what can happen as mankind continues to attempt to bend it and shape it to its will. And ultimately there’s no machine that can outlast the powers that the world can unleash on us.

LAUREN GILGER: So why did you write this book?

RYAN SCHUSTER: Well, I wrote this book really because I had all of these thoughts swirling around in my head years after the event. I felt my memories and the facts and order of events slowly start to fade away, and that really scared me. I’ve never been much of a storyteller, to be honest, at least not verbally in person, and it was always such a drain to find that space to tell this story to people that wanted to know. And rightfully so, a lot of people wanted to understand what had happened.

So I set out to really just capture all of the facts and talk with everyone else involved in order to ensure my memories were even correct and that our order of events was accurate. That’s what it started with.

As I found myself progressing, I found myself wanting to pull in the history of the Superstition Mountains and the Apache Trail and the damming of the Salt River to create the Salt River chain of lakes, because it’s all connected, it all works together. Damming this river is ultimately why a flood like this had nowhere to go because it met this static force at the bottom of this flume that it was traveling down.

I wanted to chronicle my family’s history with the region as well, especially since the resort had to sell. It was just such a crucial part of our life that I wanted it to live on, most importantly in some sort of physical form, so that’s why it was really important to bring this book to life in the real world.

LAUREN GILGER: You can hold it in your hands now, OK.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Very powerful.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it is. All right, we’ll leave it there. Ryan Schuster, author of the new book, "Follow the Noise." Ryan, thank you very much for coming in. Thanks for telling us your story.

RYAN SCHUSTER: Thank you, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

Seventy percent of Americans oppose building data centers in their communities, according to a Gallup survey from earlier this year. Nearly half of respondents cited environmental concerns in their opposition, from the potential energy and water use to noise pollution to the use of the land itself.

But as our next guest reports, there may be a new option when it comes to how to power data centers. Marin Scotten is a freelance climate journalist and recently wrote a piece headlined, "Cow manure could be the next data center fuel." Scotten spoke with my co-host Mark Brodie more about this, and they started with how prevalent it is that manure is being used to create energy.

MARIN SCOTTEN: So to create energy specifically, manure digesters have been around for a while, and manure has been converted into renewable natural gas and biogas. And typically that’s used then to heat homes or fuel transportation. And that’s pretty common; that’s kind of going on all over the country and is pretty prevalent.

In terms of it being used specifically to power data centers and AI, that’s very new. It’s sort of unclear how much that is happening, and if it’s happening yet. A lot of industry groups seem to be sort of like touting it as a possible solution, but we’re at the very beginning of that sort of being a thing, if you will.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, well is there a reason why this particular, I guess we’ll call it a resource, would be good for data centers as opposed to anything else?

MARIN SCOTTEN: It’s hard to say without speculating too much what the motivation behind using manure is. A lot of groups say that this can be a way to reduce waste and can be a sustainable fuel for data centers. So we’re taking waste from factory farms and using it to power these really energy-hungry data centers.

And then on the other side, a lot of environmental groups and critics say that this will actually incentivize more manure production. There’s a lot of money to be made from manure being turned into renewable natural gas, a lot of government subsidies. Those subsidies would then pay farmers to produce manure and digest it into renewable natural gas. So there’s kind of two conflicting narratives.

MARK BRODIE: What is the process like for turning manure into renewable natural gas? Is it, for example, a clean process?

MARIN SCOTTEN: So the process is — on a dairy farm, for example, you would have a manure — we call them a co-digester — installed. To make renewable natural gas specifically, the manure is actually blended with local food waste, so food waste would be trucked into that dairy. So the manure and food waste is digested, and then turned — that’s processed into renewable natural gas.

And "clean" is kind of a tough word. It kind of depends what side of the coin you ask. There’s a lot of people that would say renewable natural gas is not ever clean, and then others are sort of saying this is the best we’ve got, it’s better than traditional natural gas.

MARK BRODIE: At the risk of asking a really dumb question, what are farmers doing with the manure if they’re not turning it into energy?

MARIN SCOTTEN: Yeah, so I mean, that’s the whole — from one side, people say that is the reason why this is such a big solution because these farms are producing like a crazy amount of manure. A digester is not going to be on a small-scale family farm. These are going to industrial-sized farms with animal units or herd sizes of up to 4,000 or more.

So there’s a lot of manure being produced, and typically that manure will either be held in a manure lagoon or it’s spread on surrounding fields as fertilizer, which if you have a regular amount of manure that is not being produced at an industrial-sized facility, that process is really regenerative. Manure acts as a fertilizer. But when you have so much waste on an industrial-sized farm and it’s spread on fields, it’s just too much, and that can cause like groundwater contamination and a lot of other public health or environmental concerns. So there is this huge question of like, what do we do with manure?

MARK BRODIE: So for folks who are touting this, what do they say is the potential? Could this really power data centers around the country?

MARIN SCOTTEN: So it’s really unlikely that RNG, which comes from manure, would ever be used as a primary data center fuel. There’s just not enough of it; it won’t be the go-to fuel. What people are kind of looking at it for is, because renewable natural gas is a gas, it can drop into existing fossil fuel infrastructure like pipelines and kind of be transported really easily. So it’s what’s known as like a drop-in energy solution, which means it could make a really good — some groups think it could make a really good backup fuel, or it can also be blended with other fuels that are more of a go-to data center fuel, like natural gas.

And so if it was blended with natural gas, those data centers could then claim that they are fueling their data center sustainably, and that could come with financial credits, or it’s kind of just like — they’re basically saying this is a way that you can decarbonize your data center.

MARK BRODIE: So it’s more of a part of the potential solution as opposed to the potential solution?

MARIN SCOTTEN: Yeah, definitely. And I think just — I mean, groups that are critical of it sort of frame it as this is a way for data centers to claim they are fueling themselves sustainably.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I can imagine groups that don’t like this saying this is really nothing more than greenwashing.

MARIN SCOTTEN: Exactly. That’s exactly it. And I think the main concern is that there’s already a lot of criticism of digesters before this was being looked at as a solution in that they just incentivize farmers to produce as much manure as possible. And in that way, the manure becomes the primary financial incentive for having a farm over producing milk. So people call it like the gold rush for manure. And I think this would just kind of open up an entirely new market for digesters, and kind of like explode that opportunity, which then critics say will kind of further incentivize larger herd sizes and just kind of entrench us deeper and deeper in the factory farm system.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting because it sounds like this could potentially have implications not just for the energy sector, but also for the agriculture, the farming sector.

MARIN SCOTTEN: For sure. And that’s what I think is really interesting about this story and why I was kind of drawn to it. It’s like a merging of all these different really powerful industries. You’ve got agriculture, fossil fuels, energy, utility companies, recycling companies, and waste management companies that are trucking the food waste in. It’s just like all these different industries working together, and I just — yeah, it’s sort of all these different sectors coming together to — it’s kind of hard whether to say that’s a good thing or bad thing, depending on your opinion, but it’s definitely a lot of powerful industries coming together.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Marin Scotten, a freelance climate journalist. Marin, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

MARIN SCOTTEN: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great to talk to you.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.