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.

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Otherwise the fire is foraging widely across Tonto National Forest and the Mazatzal Mountains, through wilderness and scattered inholdings alike. At the moment it’s 90,000 acres and 5% contained. If it can’t be stopped at Highway 188 and Lake Roosevelt, it will burn until the monsoon rains arrive. But this is not what I find interesting.

What is interesting is that a year ago I watched, through the same window, the 126,000-acre Woodbury fire boil out of the Superstitions. In 2004 I watched the 119,000-acre Willow fire shut down Highway 87. Meanwhile, the smoke from the Bighorn fire is lighting up the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. This is beginning to look like a pattern.

Which it is. What people had taken as a normal for fire in the West is in truth a historical anomaly.

What we are seeing is an old normal, like seasonal flu, that has mutated into a meaner variant. Most of the West is built to burn. But for a few decades after the Second World War, climate was mild, landscapes were still

recovering from the havoc of axe, pick, and plow during settlement, fire agencies aggressively suppressed any starts, and an industrial economy stripped away open fire from homes and cities. Fire had become increasingly missing from agriculture, and astonishingly, even from wildlands.

Fifty years after the Big Blowup of 1910 burned 3 million acres to announce an American way of fire, the United States, led by the Forest Service, had effectively contained landscape fire. The largest category of wild fire (Class G) applied to fires that exceeded 5,000 acres. Fire control accounted for 13% of the Forest Service’s budget. The militarization of suppression through war-surplus equipment managed to sustain a cold war on fire.

But by then the folly of this strategy, both economic and ecologic, was becoming more apparent. Between 1968 and 1978 new policies were promulgated to restore good fire and shrink the prospects for bad fire. Results have been mixed.

Florida burns 2.5 million acres a year while the entire western United States burns only about 3 million. In the West, it has proved a lot easier to take fire out than to put it back. Still, most of the fire community appreciated that we were facing a fire crisis and that, when the weather veered into less benevolent forms, big fires would return.

By the time the fires of Yellowstone (1988) and Oakland (1991) burned, the contours of the new old normal were

apparent. A long drought foreshadowed outright climate change. Fuels stockpiled. Landscapes degraded. Exurbs recolonized formerly rural lands with urbanites. Megafires blasted unchecked.

Fifty years after the federal agencies thought fire a menace of the past, like polio or smallpox, monsters romped over the mountains like a returned plague. A few killed crews. Some burned into and through towns. Fire suppression consumed over 50% of the Forest Service’s budget.

A fire crisis was evolving into a fire epoch as the sum of humanity’s combustion practices, including fossil fuels, were creating the fire equivalent of an ice age.

What we can say about fire in the West has been said, over and again, notching every contributing cause, every rerun of tragedy, until it seems a white-noise hum like cicadas in the summer.

But covid-19, now complicating the maturing fire season, suggests an analogy because fire is also a contagion phenomenon. We protect communities by hardening against embers — wearing masks to protect against aerial droplets — and by social distancing — aka defensible space. We rely on herd immunity — the good fires help check the spread of bad ones. We flatten the curve. We prepare to live with coronavirus until a vaccine can be created.

Here, the analogy cracks. There is no vaccine for fire. It’s not only omnipresent; it’s necessary. We have some say over what kinds of fire happen and what damages they might inflict. But we will have to live with fire and air filled with its smoke. Forever.

Stephen Pyne is a contributor to Writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. His most recent books on fire include Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, and To the Last Smoke, a series of nine regional fire surveys.

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