NFPA Journal - January/February 2018 - 33

me, 'Haven't you heard?
The fire department
isn't going to save your
house if you don't clean
up,'" Marshall said.
PERHAPS THE closest
historical comparison
to today's wildfires in
terms of destruction
and frequency are
the large urban conflagrations of the late
19th and early 20th
centuries, which routinely destroyed cities
like Boston, Chicago,
London, and many
others. The Great Chicago Fire in 1871, for
instance, resulted in
$3.3 billion in losses in
2015 dollars, according to NFPA's research
department. By comparison, total insured
losses from the Northern California fires last
October now stands at
more than $9 billion,
according to the California Department of
Insurance. The urban
fire problem was solved
incrementally through
research, public education, smart regulation,
and our ability to adapt to new ways of
doing things. Advocates hope we can
follow a similar path with wildfire.
Viewed that way, we seem to be
making progress. Wildfire scientists
are confident that we already have
the knowledge needed to make new
homes fire resistant and dramatically
reduce the destruction wildfires cause.
Advocates like Marshall and Rasker,
and organizations ranging from local
fire departments to NFPA, are working
across the country to educate homeowners and lawmakers on how to build
safer communities.
The big unknown, however, and
perhaps the most critical component
of change, is whether society itself will
be able and willing to adapt-namely,
whether it can accept wildfire as an

inevitable feature of the landscape, and
if it can focus on hardening structures
to resist wildfire rather than on policies
and practices to suppress it.
Cohen has long advocated for this
perspective shift and thinks it is
ultimately the most important step
in eventually reducing wildfire loss.
Achieving such a cultural shift, however, will involve more than reason and
will, he said. It will involve conquering
what he calls a "social psychological"
fear of wildfire itself.

a daunting task. People expect the government to do everything it can to put
the fires out, no matter what.
"We know we can't control hurricanes or tornados, but we have this
false mindset that we can and should
control wildfires," Cohen says. "The
perspective is that if firefighters or the
government were just doing their jobs
and using tax money appropriately,
they could've stopped a wildfire right
after the lightning strike that started
it-it doesn't matter where or how

"Wildfires are inevitable...
That does not mean that
destruction is inevitable.
That premise is completely
absent from almost all of
our policies and activities
around wildfire."
"We absolutely abhor free-burning
landscape fires-we just can't deal with
that," Cohen said. "When you look at
extreme fire behavior conditions, the
scale and size of the flames, the breadth
of the flame front, the height of the
smoke column, and growth rate of the
fire, it is just emotionally destabilizing
to people."
As a result, for decades the country's
dominant wildfire policy was to extinguish wildfires as fast as they sparked,
disregarding the fact that wildfire
had been a necessary component of a
healthy and natural eco-system for millions of years. Cohen and others see that
policy as an unmitigated failure. The
statistics, which show sizable increases
in both property loss and suppression
costs over the last decade, make it hard
to argue the point. While the suppression-at-all-costs approach has waned
somewhat in recent years, the strategy
remains ingrained in the psyches of
both institutions and citizens, Cohen
argues, and rooting it out to pursue
other, possibly better strategies can be

many lightning strikes there were, the
feeling is always 'they should have
stopped it.' There is absolutely no recognition for the natural realities."
For Cohen and others, wildfire is not
a problem to conquer, but a natural
element we must accept and adapt to.
Viewing the issue through that prism
is essential if we hope to get over our
obsession with suppression and begin
building smartly to withstand an inevitable natural event. For centuries we
have viewed wildfire as the problem,
when really the problem has been ours.
"Wildfires are inevitable. Wildfires under extreme conditions are
inevitable. That does not mean that
destruction is inevitable," Cohen said.
"That premise is completely absent
from almost all of our policies and
activities around wildfire. Instead, we
focus on the thing that we have little
control over, and it completely distracts
us from being able to do something
productive."
JESSE ROMAN is associate editor of NFPA Journal.

N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - January/February 2018
