What is also in that tableau — but hardly noticed — are trees. A few are killed and many are scorched, but most are alive and green. The house vaporized because it could not cope with fire; the forest survived because it could. And paradoxically, it was the house fire that killed the trees.

 Those early-kindled houses then cast fire to neighbors. What began as a wildland fire amplified into an urban conflagration. It’s the sort of scene that was common in the American frontier over a century ago.  Watching it burn through Paradise or Berry Creek, California, today is like watching smallpox or polio return.

 Before-and-after photos of a devastated neighborhood reinforce the sense that a tsunami of fire rushed through and crushed the community. Images of soaring flame-fronts ahead of the town pair with post-burn moonscapes of ruin after the fire has passed. Our desire for a narrative fills in the storyline with a moving line of flame, telling us to attack the wildfire before it can breach the perimeter.

 Yet detailed studies, over and over, move the primary problem from the source, where the fire comes from, to the “sink,” where the flames go. A tidal wave of fire we can’t stop. But the threatening fire actually moves into and through the town more like a blizzard of sparks: If there are places of vulnerability, embers will find them. 

 That is why the best defense is to harden our houses. Surviving fires depends on what fire researchers call the “home ignition zone” (HIZ).  Flammable roofs, close vegetation next to wood siding or porches, open eaves, cracks in paneling, vent meshing too large to stop sparks, ground cover that can carry fire along the surrounding surface or radiate heat sufficient to crack single-pane window glass –- all are chinks that fire can exploit. 

 Since structures typically occupy a setting with other structures, the vulnerability of each depends on the vulnerability of its neighbors, and a town itself might be likened to a rambling structure that also needs defensible space.

 Zoning, greenbelts, and codes regulating the relative risk of collective housing won’t halt embers, but they can make protecting hardened structures easier and safer.  Call that expanded site the ”housing environmental risk zone” (HERZ).

 Because the reality is, we can’t abolish fire in the countryside and shouldn’t want to. A century of trying has taught us we can’t muster a counterforce to halt the conflagrations that cause most of the damage.  Even attempting to eliminate all fires only disrupts ecological benefits and lets fuels build up that create the conditions for even worse fires.  So while the fire source does matter, the fire sink matters more.

 We’ve lived through waves of fire like this before, twice. The country endured a horrific chronicle of conflagrations with agricultural settlement through the 19th and early 20th centuries.  And it suffered through routine city infernos that burned like their surrounding landscapes since they were made of the same materials.  Both faded away a century ago. 

 The last big urban outbreak occurred when San Francisco burned in 1906.  The last big rural community that burned during the 1918 fires occurred outside the town of Cloquet, Minnesota. It killed 435 people, some while fleeing in their automobiles. 

 In recent decades the country has recolonized formerly rural lands with an urban outmigration.  Most are exurbs that don’t rely on a rural economy or use fire in traditional ways. The fire susceptibility that resulted, however, was identified by the wildland fire community as houses crowding into wildlands.  More accurately, the scene could just as easily be characterized as bits of cities with peculiar landscaping.

 Do that, and it is clear what measures must be taken to protect them from fire.  You apply the same strategies and techniques that earlier removed fire from cityscapes.  Meanwhile, the wildland-urban fire problem has been unnecessarily complicated because it got mis-defined.

 It will prove tricky to unwind, because so many communities built in the flush times will have to be retrofitted to accommodate the current conditions.  The good news is that HIZ, HERZ, and history show us where to concentrate the effort. The bad news is that there isn’t much time to dawdle.

The post Houses Must be Built to Withstand Wildfire appeared first on Writers On The Range.

 The downwind consequences shouldn’t come as a shock, either: Toxic plumes have darkened the skies of the small Oregon town of Sisters as well as the metropolitan areas of Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

 The least surprising thing about this summer’s conflagrations is that we have done this to ourselves. We are the architects of the world that is now going up in smoke.

 Picture this Los Angeles Times photograph: a paint-stripped car resting on its buckled roof, its tires and hubcaps incinerated, windows shattered, and wheels weirdly melted. Framing the backdrop are the ash-white remains of a Sierran forest.

 The photograph was snapped in the furious aftermath of the Bear Fire, since subsumed into the North Complex Fire, which has burned 250,000 acres in California’s Plumas National Forest. But it could have been taken at any of this summer’s infernos, because its symbolism is impossible to ignore.

 Even as we fear for the owners of these abandoned automobiles, and are astounded at the intensity of heat that could turn tempered steel molten, we can’t miss how burned-out cars explain our fiery circumstances. After all, no sooner had this four-wheeled, fossil-fueled, late-19th-century technology been invented, than it became one of the icons of the Industrial Revolution, a sign of economic prosperity.

 But the greenhouse gases spewing from these vehicles’ tailpipes have contributed to the profound change in the Earth’s climate. As a result of planetary warming, large swaths of the West have been drying out. Since the 1980s, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California have borne the brunt of this process, according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index; and the pace has quickened over the past two decades.

 Other EPA data indicates that warmer and drier conditions will persist for the rest of the century, altering vegetation cover, endangering wildlife and sparking a significant increase in intense fire activity. The result is anthropogenic, meaning “we did it.”

Less well understood is that this rapidly evolving human geography has forged a close link between sprawl and wildland fire. Consider that booming Clackamas County near Portland and fast-growing Deschutes County in eastern Oregon are both under a fire-siege.

Los Angeles is the poster-child for the history of this larger western experience. Between the 1950s and 1970s, for example, its elite began to build mansions in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills. No sooner had celebrities set up house there than devastating fires ripped through the neighborhoods. In 1961, a tie-wearing Richard Nixon was photographed atop his Bel Air home, hose in hand, wetting down its shake-shingled roof.

Since then, a migratory surge has flowed out on a dense freeway network, whose every exit contains an interlocking set of subdivisions, gas stations, restaurants and big-box centers. Fire mitigation has not been high on residents’ agenda, and these insta-towns, some with low-income residents, have generated the same smoke-filled results. Fires have swept through the town of Sylmar, located in northern Los Angeles County, four times since 2008.

This pattern of build-and-burn will continue in Southern California and elsewhere because city representatives and county commissioners, along with those developers who underwrite their political campaigns, green light housing projects. This includes some that are slotted into high-severity fire zones. One example is the gargantuan 12,000-acre planned community called Centennial that is being built in the flammable foothills of the Sierra Pelona and Tehachapi mountains. When completed, it will be home to 60,000 people, many of whom will commute into Los Angeles on an already gridlocked I-5.

 What could halt this suburbanizing march into the woods throughout the West? Stronger local control over new development with a hand from insurance companies, weary from shelling out money to subsidize building again and again in fire zones.

 Everything else seems to have failed.

 Meanwhile, a bit of unsolicited advice to residents of California, Oregon and Washington: Better keep a go-bag handy so you’re ready when told to evacuate.

The post These Fires will Happen Again and Again appeared first on Writers On The Range.