Tag: wildland/urban interface

From forest to front door – understanding wildfire spread into communities

Researchers burn an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in a controlled test, to study the impacts of wildfire. (Image courtesy Michael Gollner)

By Ty Burke

As California’s population boomed — from 10 million in 1950 to over 40 million today — the number of people living in fire-prone areas multiplied. Over the decades, millions of new homes and commercial buildings sprang up to accommodate the needs of the state’s growing population, and many of those structures stand in areas prone to wildfires.

As a result, more communities are now in harm’s way. The 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles show exactly how destructive urban wildfires can be. More than 16,000 buildings were destroyed, and 31 people lost their lives. By the time the recovery is complete, the cost of repairing the damage from those wildfires could approach a quarter of a trillion dollars.

This article appeared in Berkeley Engineer magazine, Summer 2026

“We are front and center in the wildfire crisis,” says Michael Gollner, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. “California is beautiful, but everything aligns for fires here. We need to learn to adapt, to limit the damage that wildfires cause. A lot of people live in fire-prone areas, and most of the country’s major urban wildfire disasters have happened in California.”

Despite the thousands of wildfires in California each year, we still don’t know that much about them — especially when it comes to how they spread in urban areas. The wildland-urban interface is the zone in which buildings and infrastructure border natural areas. Homes in this zone are at higher risk of burning, but quantifying that risk is challenging.

Until recently, the mathematical models used to predict wildfire spread largely ignored these areas. Where a simulated wildfire reached a developed community, the models treated the land as unburnable. Which, of course, it’s not.

“Understanding fire spread between built structures is a totally different equation than understanding fire spread in wildlands,” says Gollner. “It’s different physics, and until recently, it was not well enough understood to be integrated into the parameters of mathematical models. We still can’t do everything at scale, but we’ve begun to be able to simulate wildfires in urban areas.”

In the wildland-urban interface, fires will move freely between natural landscapes and developed lands. And the 2025 Palisades fire did exactly that. What began in the brush of the Santa Monica Mountains swept through residential neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades, before it crossed Mandeville Canyon and burned other parts of Greater Los Angeles. But predicting, and ultimately slowing, this kind of fire behavior remains a complex problem.

“To make good decisions about the risks communities face, we need more science,” Gollner says.

Professor Michael Gollner with a fire whirl in his lab. (Photo by Adam Lau/UC Berkeley Engineering)

Evolving science for a changing landscape

The increase in wildfires tearing through California communities isn’t just due to population growth. Historically, much of California burned every 7–15 years, a natural process that thinned forests and removed accumulated ground fuel.

“It’s actually restorative,” says Scott Stephens, a professor in the Rausser College of Natural Resources. These periodic fires created forests that were more fire resistant. Over time, California’s forests came to be dominated by fire- and drought-resistant pine trees, which shade the forest floor.

But a century of fire suppression policies and logging has changed the composition of our forests. As many of the largest pines were felled, forests grew thicker and less fire-resistant tree species flourished. Now, California’s forests are much more flammable than they once were.

“The effects have been profound,” says Stephens. “The fires we have today would have been unimaginable 50 years ago. In California, we put out more than 98% of wildfires, but the 2% that we can’t put out are responsible for burning 95% of the land.”

And the amount of land that has burned in California is mind-bending: more than 12 million acres since 2013. That’s an area more than twice the size of New Jersey. The damage hasn’t been confined to forests and chapparal, but has also torn through some of California’s largest cities.

As wildfires push into urban areas, they behave in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. But Gollner is figuring out how to predict what urban wildfires will do next — by turning fire modeling into a complex, evolving problem.

“There are so many things that go into modeling a fire; you need to account for the weather, the fuel chains and the fire itself,” Gollner says. “We are working on how to do those calculations for urban areas, but there are so many unknowns and uncertainties. Sometimes, we are just revealing what those uncertainties are. Other times, we are starting to put numbers to them.”

In research published in 2024, Gollner developed a landscape-scale model for predicting the spread of fire in the wildland-urban interface. Unlike other models that existed at the time, Gollner’s addressed the spread of wildfire through both vegetation and buildings.

“Other models treated them separately, but ours seamlessly couples the two,” says Dwi Marhaendro Jati Purnomo, a post-doctoral scholar in Gollner’s lab who led the development of the model. “It’s driven by the key mechanisms of fire spread in the wildland-urban interface: direct flame contact, radiation and firebrands — airborne pieces of burning material that are responsible for igniting many of the buildings that burn in wildfires. Our modeling framework also incorporates heat flux — the amount of heat that travels through materials. That allows us to quantify the hazard to nearby houses.”

Gollner and Purnomo tested their model using data from two highly destructive events from California’s recent past — the 2017 Tubbs and Thomas fires. And they were able to fine-tune the model to make predictions with a high degree of accuracy. Their model predicted the extent of the fires with more than 85% accuracy and the number of damaged houses with roughly 70% accuracy. Importantly, the researchers found that nearly a third of house ignitions were caused by embers, something ordinary Californians can take meaningful steps to guard against.

“There are two basic types of mitigation. The first is defensible space — basically clearing flammable things away from a house and reducing the amount of fuel available to a fire,” says Gollner. “The other is to harden a house, to make it more difficult for the building to ignite by changing the windows and siding or by installing ember-resistant vents. These are simple-ish things, but hardening a house can be expensive.”

Fire-resistant siding is made of non-combustible materials like stucco or metal, and installing it in a new build doesn’t cost that much more than traditional wooden siding does. But the costs of replacing the siding on existing houses can be high, especially when you multiply those costs across millions of houses. Gollner’s modeling is helping identify in which areas this type of mitigation will have the greatest impact.

“That’s the billion-dollar question,” he says. “We don’t have all the tools yet, but we do know that if you did all these things and have good spacing between your house and your neighbour’s house, you will be way better protected. But it takes money and time, so there is a question of exactly how much needs to be done. A house right next to the forest? Sure, we need to do that. But how far into a community do these mitigations need to go? We still don’t know exactly in which areas these investments will have the biggest payout.”

Developing a playbook to fight fire in urban areas

Gollner’s ultimate goal is to craft a playbook for wildfires that communities can use to protect themselves. Right now, there isn’t one. But Gollner’s work to quantify wildfire risk is giving communities the data they need to set priorities. And one of the communities doing that is Berkeley.

“Berkeley is in a fire-prone landscape,” he says. “We had major fires in 1991 and 1923, and we have mostly forgotten about them. But the weather conditions that happened during those fires will happen again; we just don’t know when those conditions will occur.”

Even the tiniest spark can generate an inferno, he adds. And whether one does is largely a matter of luck. In the right conditions, a fire can spread rapidly. Right now, there’s little to stop a fire from spreading through the tightly packed wood-framed buildings that line Berkeley’s narrow streets.

“How destructive a fire is depends a lot on the direction and the timing of the winds,” Gollner says. “If the winds only last a few hours, the fire might stop, but when a wildfire is raging at peak intensity, there is just not a lot that humans can do about it.”

When a wildfire enters a city, it sends embers flying everywhere, and they can ignite buildings by the thousands. No fire department in the world can handle a hundred burning buildings, much less a thousand, and no amount of investment in firefighting will allow us to extinguish urban fires on this scale.

“There is just no way to tackle this problem with an active approach,” says Gollner. “We need to limit the ways fire can spread. If we can do those simple things, we can make a difference.”

But you need to get people on board, and that isn’t always easy. In January 2026, the City of Berkeley implemented an ordinance called Effective Mitigations for Berkeley Ember Resilience (EMBER). It mandates a five-foot vegetation-free buffer zone around houses and also identifies areas at the highest risk from wildfires as priorities for enforcement.

Under EMBER, fines for non-compliance can reach up to $500 per day, and some local opponents have argued that EMBER is overly intrusive. But Gollner’s research highlights the value of defensible space. In a paper published in 2025, he found that houses with a five-foot, vegetation-free buffer were much less likely to be destroyed in a wildfire.

Gollner conducted a machine learning analysis of data collected on the ground after five major historical fires in California’s wildland-urban interface — the 2017 Tubbs, 2017 Thomas, 2018 Camp, 2019 Kincade and 2020 Glass fires — and found that houses with a vegetation-free buffer area were much more likely to survive a wildfire. The difference is stark. Just 20% of houses without a buffer survived these wildfires, while 37% of houses with a buffer did. In a major urban wildfire, that 17% difference could add up to hundreds or even thousands of houses saved.

“Clearing the vegetation that is closest to the house isn’t perfect, but it is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to reduce risk,” Gollner says. “The vegetation that’s right there has the highest likelihood of igniting a house. But people can be really protective of their plants, and some people are just opposed to doing it.”

But retired fire chief Dave Winnacker is using the data to convince people of the value in compliance. Winnacker spent about 20 years in the fire service in Fresno, Alameda County and the Moraga-Orinda Fire District. And now, he’s returned to his hometown of Berkeley to help the city implement EMBER.

“Dr. Gollner’s research has really given Berkeley a theoretical grounding to operationalize this initiative,” says Winnacker.

In the same 2025 paper, Gollner calculated that implementing both house hardening and defensible space could prevent the loss of 52% of all the structures lost in the major urban wildfires he studied.

“Fire is opportunistic,” Winnacker says. “And it will find a way to spread. But when you take mitigation measures, communities won’t burn. In the last 20 years, 80,000 homes in California burned, give or take. Halving that number to 40,000 homes still would not be great. But it sure would be a lot better than 80,000.” 

When more people adopt defensible space and harden their houses, the effect is amplified. Each house that doesn’t burn breaks a chain of ignitions — it means fewer houses burn overall. That’s a message that Winnacker has taken to the public.

“Urban fire is a big macro-phenomenon, and it is hard for people to connect the dots between these micro-mitigations, which can seem inconsequential, and this huge destructive thing,” Winnacker says. “But Dr. Gollner’s work allows us to do that. It helps us understand the drivers of loss in the urban environment. And from there, we can prioritize mitigations, so that we get the greatest value from a risk reduction standpoint. Otherwise, we would just be guessing.”

Smoke travels from one accessory dwelling unit to another during a controlled burn experiment. (Image courtesy Michael Gollner)

Read more on this research in the Berkeley Engineer.

The wildfire crisis: underlying barriers that impede mitigation

By Jerry Williams

Difficult and dangerous wildfires can and do occur across a wide variety of fuel types, all over the globe. But many of the worst fires occur in the western United States. Nowhere in the world is firefighting capability and capacity greater, yet the impact of wildfires is becoming worse.

Despite enormous increases in funding for fire fighting, wildfires have become more destructive and more deadly since the United States government organized for wildfire protection in 1905. Civilian fatalities have not been higher since the turn of that last century. Take that in for a moment.

The convergence of uncharacteristically dense biomass, over-accumulated fuels, droughts, extreme weather, and unconstrained growth at the wildland-urban interface have brought the western United States to this crisis.

This opinion piece is dedicated to the memory of Robert (Bob) W. Mutch (1934-2024), proud smokejumper (1954, 1955), esteemed fire ecologist, friend.
This article was drawn from the keynote address, at invitation, for the Zig Zag Hotshot crew’s 50th reunion in Zig Zag, Oregon, May 9-11, 2025.
It is published in the latest edition of Wildfire Magazine.

Since 2000, more than 300 wildfires, each with reported suppression costs of $20 million or more, have burned over the 11 western states. The fires burned out of control until firefighters got some relief in weather or could exploit a break in fuels. These incidents blackened more than 25 million acres and cost more than $13 billion to suppress. As staggering as these costs were, they represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars in property losses, infrastructure destruction, natural resource damages, human health impacts from smoke and other wildfire related consequences that go mostly unaccounted.

The wildfire crisis in the western United States is defined by the scale and scope of present dangers and future threats. Mega-fires have deep and long-lasting social, economic, and ecological impacts and can no longer be dismissed as aberrations; they require actions that are more far-reaching and more comprehensive than we are accustomed to thinking about.

The crisis is not so much a fire-management crisis as it is a land-management crisis that traces to the deterioration of fire-adapted ecosystems and the vulnerable condition of fire-prone landscapes, including houses. Building resilience in these ecosystems will be key to reducing wildfire severity.

“Nowhere in the world is firefighting capability greater—yet nowhere are wildfires growing more destructive.”

An open Ponderosa forest of 1897, frequently underburdened by lightning fires or tribal burning, and a changed Ponderosa pine forest circa early 1990s, where fire has been excluded. It is on these dense, dry sites that fire managers and communities have experienced some of the most dangerous, destructive and costly wildfires in the United States.

An open Ponderosa forest of 1897 (left), frequently underburdened by lightning fires or tribal burning, and a changed Ponderosa pine forest circa early 1990s (right), where fire has been excluded. It is on these dense, dry sites that fire managers and communities have experienced some of the most dangerous, destructive and costly wildfires in the United States.

A recent assessment that I conducted with my colleague Matt Panunto, a GIS specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, found that while many of the worst wildfires in the western United States occurred in perennially dangerous chaparral brushlands, two-thirds of the highest cost incidents were in conifer forests within the natural distribution of Ponderosa pine. A century ago, these open forests were among the most benign in terms of potential wildfire severity. Today, these same forests are choked with laddered, overabundant biomass and over-accumulated fuels. These sites are high risk because they are commonly where people and development are most concentrated in the forested areas of the intermountain western United States.

Changes in species composition, stand structure, and ecological function underpin the wildfire crisis.

The most aggressive firefighting tactics, the largest airtankers, and the most novel re-organizations cannot buck these changes or ignore the ecologies involved. The biggest challenge confronting government is not continuing to build greater, faster firefighting capacity, but instead building a mitigation workforce and reconciling the myriad regulatory requirements, fiscal rules, land management policies, social disincentives, and other factors that impede restoring resilient conditions on fire-adapted, fire-prone landscapes.

Some examples:

1. Under current environmental requirements, wildfires are treated as excepted events; their impacts are presumed to be unavoidable accidents of nature. Although man’s influence in predisposing many wildfire outcomes establishes an argument against this exception, the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1974), and other regulations do not anticipate, measure, or consider wildfire impacts with respect to the intent of the laws. Consequently, today’s wildfire impacts are often imperiling the very values these laws set out to save.

If this is a crisis, governing environmental regulations need to level the playing field. Proposed mitigation treatments should be weighed against probable wildfire outcomes in the absence of those treatments. A mechanism to comprehensively compile the cumulative impacts from wildfires needs to be established as the means to measure the consequences of avoiding mitigation treatments over the long term.

2. Under current fiscal rules, wildfires are considered emergency events, funded from unlimited reserve accounts. National shared resources (aviation assets, retardant bases, smokejumpers, hotshot crews, incident management teams, tool caches, dispatch centers, fire training facilities) and other firefighting assets are funded off the top, as a priority. A total mobility concept supports the firefighting effort. Resources from anywhere in the United States (and sometimes from the military and other countries) can be brought to bear in dealing with a wildfire emergency.

On the other hand, mitigation work operates from a constrained budget, often subject to several overhead cost deductions throughout the organization and dependent on whatever local resources can be obtained. Projects requiring the sequencing of selective harvest, understory thinning, and pile burning, followed by lower intensity prescribed burning are especially difficult to budget for. Although US Forest Service researcher Kimberly Davis and her team, in a recent 30-year meta-analysis, found this approach to be the most effective in reducing wildfire severity, it is seldom attempted in the western United States. Sequenced treatments have the added benefits of improving margins of safety, reducing prescribed burn intensities, lowering smoke impacts, and reducing the risks of escape.

Now, nearly always, a wildfire is a higher priority for funding, skilled personnel, and specialized assets than a prescribed burning or other mitigation work.

If this is a crisis, federal and state government needs to fully fund restoration work at scales commensurate with the wildfire threat, even if it requires multiple entries to mechanically thin or reduce fuels ahead of prescribed burning. The agencies need to mobilize for prescribed burning opportunities and other mitigation work the same way they now mobilize for wildfire emergencies with a dedicated workforce. It can no longer be “easier”’ to fight bad fires than it is to mitigate the hazards that fuel them.

3. The US Forest Service is a functionally oriented organization that operates from a budget arranged on line items. Budgets for wildlife habitat, timber production, watershed management, fuels reduction, and other activities are allocated with an expectation for acres treated or board-foot volume outputs. There is no line-item allocation or target that measures the health and resilience of fire-adapted ecosystems. Many natural resource objectives – by design or by default – aim for or result in undisturbed conditions. Ironically, under drought conditions, managing for undisturbed conditions in deteriorated fire disturbance regimes often threatens the resource aim.

If this is a crisis, the US Forest Service needs to better align natural-resource objectives with the dynamics of fire-adapted ecosystems and instead of attempting to maximize outputs, aim to optimize outcomes in the context of fire’s ecological role. (Across long-needle pine forests in the southern United States, foresters have successfully integrated frequent, low-intensity burning to optimize several goals, including those for wildlife, timber and wildfire protection; it has been a common practice since the early 1930s.)

4. Perhaps no place challenges wildfire protection more than the wildland-urban interface. Roles and responsibilities for protection are often confused or altogether abrogated. There are few incentives for homeowners to take precautions. In many places in the western United States, insurance companies have dropped coverages because they see the risks as too great.

Protecting lives and private property is almost always the priority, the vulnerability of the wildland-urban interface is told by the property losses and fatalities that continue to climb. Increasingly, this vulnerability has the federal government prioritizing the protection of private property at the expense of public values (air quality, watersheds, critical wildlife habitat, and others). The impacts to these public values are becoming more significant but are mostly overlooked.

“The solution isn’t more suppression— it’s restoration, resilience, and the courage to change how we manage fire.”

If this is a crisis, federal, state, local governments, and homeowners need to reconcile roles and responsibilities for wildfire protection. Government needs to find incentives for private property owners to reduce the flammability potential of their properties and their communities so governments can better redeem their responsibilities for protection of public values.

The costs of mitigation are high, contentious, and not without risk, but total wildfire costs, losses, and damages are much higher and are likely to go higher still.

The wildfire crisis is a systemic problem. Aspirations to mitigate wildfire threats and restore resilience are hamstrung by regulations, fiscal rules, institutional behaviors, behaviors at the wildland urban interface, and other factors. Until these factors are comprehensively confronted and reconciled by lawmakers and policymakers at all levels of government, it is difficult to see how the wildfire crisis will ever be brought to heel.

If this is a crisis , the nation’s political leadership needs to act on the factors that stifle mitigation work. The country’s wildland fire leadership needs to help them.

If this is a crisis, the United States needs to organize, staff, and fund for the scale of mitigation work needed much like the wildfire emergency response is now organized, staffed, and funded.

As a nation, the United States is asking much of its firefighters. Wildland firefighters represent the best of a can-do spirit. But there are narrow margins that separate can-do from make-do, and make do from tragedy. It is time to stop making do, get serious about mitigation, and do wildfire protection right.

To think the United States can meet greater wildfire threats with greater suppression force seems to miss the mark. In 1991, wildland fire researchers Stephen Arno and James Brown introduced the wildfire paradox; it holds that the better we get at putting fires out during moderate years, the worse wildfires become in extreme years. On the mitigation side, there is a corollary: The less we use prescribed fire and other mitigation work when we can, the harder it is to put fires out when we have to. Think Sun Tzu, not Clausewitz, where the least costly, least dangerous, most sustainable wildfire protection approach fights on favorable terms or avoids having to fight at all.

Risk assessment in the West

In 2018 Rick Stratton, a USFS fire planning program manager for the R6 Regional Office in Portland and Pyrologix provided a Quantitative Wildland Fire Risk Assessment for communities most at risk in the Pacific Northwest — and he listed the top 25.

Six years later he compared that assessment with what had actually happened, and 18 of the 25 communities had recorded significant/catastrophic wildland fires. His assessment illustrates a rapidly evolving wildland fire environment, in which entire communities are at risk. Below are some of Stratton’s slides.

How do interface disasters occur? Jack Cohen‘s work on wildland/urban interface fires demonstrated that in the beginning, the set-up for a disaster fire includes extreme fire conditions — much of which has been widespread across the West over the last decade or more. Abundant dry fuels, fire-friendly weather such as drought, extreme heat, low humidities, and high winds all contribute to a landscape ready for a fire disaster.

To that setting is added both wildland fire (with rapid spread) and urban fire — which includes multiple simultaneous ignitions and residential areas in which fire spreads from house to house to house, complicated by non-vegetation burning of cars, fences, decks, garages, stacked firewood, and often-hazardous materials typically found on interface industrial properties, workshops and garden sheds, or even gas stations. Frightened residents trying to evacuate on limited access routes, often with uncoordinated communications and plans, simply multiply the crisis.

How interface disasters occur — Jack Cohen

Pacific Northwest risk map: Clearly illustrated here is the band of interface-populated communities that runs down from the northeast corner of Washington to the southwest corner of Oregon — adjacent to and in forested areas.

Unlike the larger metro areas (Seattle, Portland), these communities are surrounded by rural and forested land, and consist mainly of smaller communities with limited suppression resources, and sometimes challenging water supply or prevention resources.

… and … 6 years later:

Interface fires in Northwest communities at risk fir catastrophic interface fire

Only a few of those ranked community exposure locations were NOT burned by a large interface fire. Ellensburg, Washington, suffered multiple fires, as did Spokane, Grants Pass, and Chelan.

A Western Region Co-Chair for the Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy, Joe Stutler worked 35 years with the U.S. Forest Service. Since retiring, he’s worked for Northtree Fire International and as senior forester with Deschutes County for 8 years. He has worked as a hotshot, smokejumper, district and forest FMO, district ranger, law enforcement officer, and regional fire operations specialist for both R5 and R6. He put in 33 years as Type I and II Incident Commander and 6 years on National Area Command Teams. He has managed all-hazard and law enforcement assignments across the country and currently fills Command and General positions on Type 1 IMTs and Area Command teams.

Here are a few of Joe Stutler’s thoughts on these risk assessments: I am wide-eyed at the accuracy of Rick Stratton’s predictions and the big fires that followed in 2018-2022. Most of these high-ranking landscapes were in Fire Regimes 1 & 2, and those that have been burned by large intense wildfire have now reset to Condition Class 1. But what about those that remain in Condition Class 3, like here in central Oregon and other places in the U.S.?

The wildland fire environment is rapidly changing, and this slide deck shows that to be true. The question is, what can we in the business of helping people understand it actually do about it? The answer lies in collectively and strategically communicating these issues.

From my world, I immediately think about how the Cohesive Strategy has been affirmed by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC) AND the President’s Wildfire Mitigation and Management Commission as THE strategic framework that can be applied at and by every level (federal, tribal, state, local, and NGOs) to address wildland fire challenges to make substantial, meaningful progress toward landscape resiliency, community resiliency, and fire adaptation — and a safer, more effective, risk-based wildfire response.

The part that stands out to me (apart from the obvious needs to increase the pace and scale of landscape resiliency treatments and address the different response approaches and needs of the “urban firestorm” probability) is the need for doubling down toward the CS goal of fire-adapted communities. The goal is described as “communities that are as prepared as possible to receive, respond to, and recover from wildland fire.”

This elevates the responsibility for preparedness to more than just our response as land management agencies and organizations, but to us as residents, responders, planners, emergency managers, governments, businesses, news outlets, and other organizations in communities. We each have a responsibility to think about what RECEIVING FIRE, RESPONDING TO FIRE, and RECOVERING FROM FIRE means to each of these community affiliates — and start heading down the path of preparation. These are ripe for defining within communities and providing suggestions for action. The definitions and suggestions will be different in every community, and we can organize and assist with these conversations, suggestions, and actionable solutions.

Many best practices have been applied and are underway across the West by all these entities, but the devastating destruction of entire communities over the last decade tells us that there is still much to do at the community level to prepare for wildland fire. Even today, many communities across the West — and for that matter east of the Mississippi — still do not realize that not only is the wildfire risk high, but there is also high likelihood of loss given the rapidly changing wildland fire environment. A changing climate (hotter, drier, windier conditions) alone is making “urban firestorms” a more prevalent reality, even in the East and South.

It’s clear that we need efforts toward all three goals of the Cohesive Strategy to make a difference and change the outcomes of wildland fire. Our vision is a good place to start — “To safely and effectively extinguish fire, when needed; use fire where allowable; manage our natural resources; and collectively, learn to live with wildland fire.” If we as individuals are truly learning to live with wildland fire, we must consider what that looks like in the face of the research and outcomes that Rick Stratton shares and then apply the Cohesive Strategy for better fire outcomes.

Ignoring our responsibility to learn to live with wildland fire is a choice. And we now know what the outcomes of that are.

risk assessment wildland/urban interface

USFS: Throwing money at fuels treatments won’t stop communities from burning

Large communities destroyed by wildfire has become a yearly occurrence as of late. Lahaina last year, Colorado communities in the 2021 Marshall Fire, Oregon communities in the 2020 Labor Day firestorms including the Almeda Drive Fire, and Paradise, California — leveled by the 2018 Camp Fire — all these communities were devastated by wildfire.

And the economic cost is incalculable — the Denver Post reported last year that the Marshall Fire was Colorado’s costliest ever; it destroyed $2 billion in property and killed two people.
USFS researchers are using the stories of these destroyed communities to try to find commonality — and possibly a solution to the growing threat of fast-spreading wildland/urban interface fires. Each of these fires was human-caused or ignited near or inside communities — and all of them occurred during extreme wind events — and they immediately overwhelmed both wildland and structural firefighting efforts. The most important, and arguably most overlooked, commonality is that none of the above fires were technically “wildfires” at all, but were “conflagrations,” or fires that spread past built barriers.

“These problem fires were defined as an issue of wildfires that involved houses,” researchers said. “In reality, they are urban fires initiated by wildfires. That’s an important distinction — and one that has big repercussions for how we prepare for future fires.”

… none of the above fires were technically “wildfires” at all, but were “conflagrations,” or fires that spread past built barriers.

The importance of the distinction laid out by the researchers lies in what people believe the solution might be. Recent federal investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act address fire risk and prioritize fuel treatments on public lands.

Environmental/Community conditios, urban fires

But fuels reduction on federal lands would not have prevented any of the above fires. As wildfire suppression costs have increased, so have disastrous interface fires. Most wildfires are started by humans on private lands, and those fires destroy a majority of western U.S. structures.

“Wildland fires do not per se encroach on communities,” the report says. “Rather, it’s communities that have impinged on wildlands, where fires play an important ecological role.”

If the goal of wildfire management is to stop the destruction of human communities, then communities and local governments must accept that wildland fires are a necessary and inevitable ecological aspect of the land they are living on. The change in mindset from wildfire suppression to adaptive living will require a shift at all levels of society. But the destruction and long recovery aftermath of each of the burned communities mentioned above shows that the rewards may outweigh the risks.

The California community of Paradise, leveled in 2018 by the Camp Fire, has been rebuilding partly with that idea in mind.

A few of the homes were rebuilt with a World War II-era military design, which is very resistant to ignition. The needed shift will take more than the transition of a few community homes, but it’s a start. Other changes, such as new construction siting, design, construction materials, and landscaping requirements will also need to be part of the new paradigm.

“We have to live with wildland fire, says the report. “We don’t have to live with fire in our communities.”

community fires community hardening wildland/urban interface