NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 10

Dispatches

Four of the California wine country wildfires that erupted
October 8 have joined the list of the state's all-time most destructive
fires by number of structures burned, according to CalFire

TUBBS

NUNS

ATLAS

REDWOOD

STRUCTURES BURNED
2 DEATHS

STRUCTURES BURNED
6 DEATHS

STRUCTURES BURNED
8 DEATHS

5,300

STRUCTURES BURNED
22 DEATHS

1,200

recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times observed that many
of California's urban areas, including Coffey Park, were
not designated as high-risk wildfire zones by the state, and
thus not subject to new building requirements that include
fire-resistant materials such as tile roofs. "Nobody expected
a fire to sweep through a city," the Times' editors wrote. "The
fires around Santa Rosa must surely be a wake-up call that
suburbia has to be made more fire resistant." Land- and
fire-management practices are also under scrutiny, with calls
for more proactive thinning of fuels in fire-prone areas and for
investment in fire-resilient communications and alert systems.
But there are also prominent voices who would urge us not
to hold our breath in the hope of realizing visionary, largescale change. Stephen Pyne, a wildfire historian at Arizona
State University and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship,
sounded a note of dismay in a recent piece on newsweek.com,
where he lamented the impact that California has had on
wildfire policy nationwide. "The California model makes sense
if your primary land use is urban sprawl," he wrote. "If, however, you need to manage a fire-adapted land, it's a formula
for failure because ultimately you control fire by controlling
the countryside; even in cities, it's zoning and the welter of
codes that govern the built environment that allow firefighters
to be effective." In the wake of the recent California fires, we
can expect investigations and proposed technological fixes,
Pyne wrote, and we can hope for reform of the fundamentals
to help us better cope with the specific threats fire poses to
our communities. Most likely, though, he added-with an eye
toward more than a century's worth of wildfire policy in the
U.S.-we should "expect none."
This would seem to be the time to expect something. It can
be argued that, as a year-in, year-out threat, wildfire poses a
greater risk to life and property in the U.S. than all other natural hazards combined. Wildfires burn, on average, twice as
many acres per fire as they did in the 1990s, and burn twice
as long. The average number of structures burned per year has

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741

540

more than tripled since 1990. A third of all Americans live in
areas at risk of wildfire, and an estimated 60 percent of all new
homes constructed in the U.S. since 1990 have been built on
fire-prone land. Wildfire is not just a Western problem; communities from the Southeast to New England face significant
wildfire threats (albeit from fires that tend to be smaller than
those in the West), but few are developed with fire in mind.
Before the California fires struck, the season's leading wildfire headline was that the U.S. Forest Service's wildland fire
suppression costs for fiscal 2017 had topped $2 billion for the
first time, a milestone that prompted U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to renew his call for Congress to overhaul
the way the agency's fire suppression efforts are funded. Suppression costs account for well over half the agency's budget,
more than triple the percentage two decades ago. Overall
funding for the Forest Service remains relatively flat, Perdue
said, resulting in a hoarding of funds for anticipated suppression at the expense of preventive measures to reduce the fire
hazard. "It means we can't do the prescribed burning, harvesting, or insect control to prevent leaving a fuel load...for future
fires to feed on," Perdue said in September. "That's wrong."
As cities are threatened by more and larger wildfires,
though, the wildland mitigation efforts listed by Perdue will
need to be matched, if not exceeded, by urban preparation,
along with a comprehensive rethinking of what constitutes
fire-safe in urban and suburban settings. "Those houses are
like highly concentrated energy packages just waiting to
ignite," Donald Falk, a wildland fire researcher at the University of Arizona, told the Los Angeles Times, describing Coffey
Park. "In that wind-driven situation, I think the predictions of
what's fire-safe and what's not kind of go out the window."
Whatever policy changes may come out of the fires that
wreaked havoc in Santa Rosa and elsewhere, Falk said, he
hopes officials act quickly. "The shelf life of an event like this,
as devastating as it seems now, eventually will dissipate," he
said. "Now is the time to have that dialogue."

http://www.newsweek.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017