NFPA Journal - Summer 2024 - 64

THE VIEW
Wildfire by Michele Steinberg
FROM NFPA'S
WILDFIRE DIVISION
Definition Problem
AFTER 50 YEARS, WE'RE STILL STRUGGLING TO PRECISELY DEFINE THE
WILDLAND/URBAN INTERFACE-A PROBLEM WITH WIDE-RANGING CONSEQUENCES
W
hat is the wildland/urban
interface? This question
has been asked in scholarly
documents since at
least the 1970s, starting
with C.P. Butler's pithy and observant
paper, " The Urban/Wildland Fire
Interface, " presented at a 1974 meeting
of the Western States Section of the
Combustion Institute. While the question
has been asked repeatedly since
then, attempts to define the problem of
wildfire disasters and the so-called wildland/urban
interface, or WUI, continue
to elude us as a society 50 years down the
line. It's no surprise that, without agreement
on what the problem is and where
it lies, we have not been able to solve it.
The United States continues to struggle
with the problem of homes and
communities burning down during wildfires,
and our neighborhoods and lands
are more vulnerable to wildfire than ever
before. Lessons have been learned about how to limit harm
to people and property, but the argument over what exactly
constitutes the WUI still confounds lawmakers, enforcers, land
managers, first responders, insurers, and homeowners. In Colorado,
where the legislature took the historic step last year to
create a statewide WUI code board to govern new construction,
months have been spent discussing this key definition to
determine what requirements should apply in which locations.
The question will be posed once again at the upcoming NFPA
Conference & Expo®
in " WUI...Do We Even Know Where It Is
Anymore? " , an education session by Vernon Champlin and Alex
Cooper, Jensen Hughes staff consultants and wildfire experts.
While acknowledging that NFPA and federal agencies all have
WUI definitions going back to the 1980s, they also note the
differing approaches of those definitions and how this creates
challenges across jurisdictions for establishing regulations and
educating the public on wildfire safety. Pressure to expand the
definition comes from communities seeking eligibility for grants,
and even more pressure comes from individuals who want to
64 | NFPA JOURNAL * SUMMER 2024
It's time to clear away
competing definitions
and pursue a unified
approach to ending
wildfire disasters.
shrink the official footprint of the interface
out of fear over how it could impact
the availability and affordability of property
insurance. What might seem like a
semantic quibble has very real impacts on
the people and property exposed to wildfire
threat. Public acceptance of regulation
on private property is often shaky to begin
with; when people perceive inconsistency
in definitions that affect them, they are
more apt to perceive regulations as unfair,
inequitable, and arbitrary.
Champlin and Cooper also note the
absurdity of insisting on definitions that
don't match physical reality. The traditional
definition of the WUI as a physical
location marked by a line between forests
and the built environment becomes
meaningless when more than a thousand
homes burn in a wildfire where there is
no forest, as in the 2021 Marshall Fire in
Colorado. The dynamic conditions of fire
on the landscape defeat our expectations
of a neat and linear problem and solution set. The failure to
recognize the vulnerability of the structures that burned in the
Marshall Fire meant that designers, builders, landscapers, and
residents had not considered wildfire exposure in their creation
and maintenance of these homes and neighborhoods. In a similar
scenario, the densely developed Coffey Park subdivision in Santa
Rosa, California, had been officially zoned as " unburnable, " a
designation that proved dramatically inaccurate when more than
1,400 homes were destroyed by the Tubbs Fire in 2017. The legacy
of that tragedy continues with the rebuilding of homes that do
not have to meet California's protective wildfire safety standards.
The last 50 years have seen the creation of millions of homes
nationwide that face wildfire risk. It's time to clear away the
clutter of competing definitions and pursue a unified approach
to ending wildfire disasters through sound policy and practice.
For more information on the session and on the NFPA conference,
visit nfpa.org/conference.
MICHELE STEINBERG is director of the Wildfire Division at NFPA.
MICHAEL HOEWELER
http://www.nfpa.org/conference
NFPA Journal - Summer 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - Summer 2024
