Most dry summer months,
somewhere in the country, a wildfire fills the sky with flames and
forbidding columns of smoke. During the rest of the year, state and
local governments would do well to keep that specter in mind when
they determine where many American communities will be growing.
In too many places, people have been moving into the
edges of fire-prone forests and dry grasslands, establishing a new
American frontier where settlement mixes with wild landscapes. And
they’re counting on governments to protect them when flames
come roaring in their direction.
As one consequence, the
U.S. government’s costs to fight wildfires have soared to $2
billion per year. Roughly half of last year’s wildland fires
burned across national forests and on other federally owned lands.
Meanwhile, state forestry agencies and rural fire departments also
have been bearing a mounting share of controlling blazes that race
onto state lands and private property. Last year, for example,
California’s firefighting costs climbed close to $200
million, twice the amount state officials had budgeted.
With its expansive national forests and desert grasslands, the West
has been particularly vulnerable to calamitous wildfires. But this
spring, after months of drought, nearly 29,000 fires also broke out
in the South, burning more than 1.1 million acres. Several fires
merged in southeastern Georgia and northern Florida, burning
600,000 acres and scorching through the Okefenokee Swamp. Moreover,
during the past century, forests in the Northeast have reclaimed
abandoned farms with dense tree stands.
Wildfires are
clearly a national problem as millions of Americans move to
sprawling exurban towns or second-home resorts that sit on the
fringe of combustible forests, within hailing distance of the
fastest-growing metropolitan areas. During the 1990s, more than 10
million new homes were built within 15.5 miles of a national park,
national forest or wilderness.
In the Lower 48 states, 60
percent of all new housing units were located in what’s
called the wildland-urban interface. The interface now covers 9
percent of the land and holds more than a third of the
nation’s population. The trend will accelerate as jobs move
to suburban offices and industrial parks, baby boomers retire to
rural towns, and urban professionals buy bucolic weekend retreats
just a day’s drive from major cities. Once the buffer between
civilization and wilderness, much of the country’s woods,
foothills and swamps have begun filling with homes that could be in
the path of wildfires.
The presence of these homes makes
it more difficult and costly for the government officials who are
responsible for bringing wildfires under control. Last year, a U.S.
Forest Service audit concluded that the federal agency has been
spending up to $1 billion a year — as much as 95 percent of
the expense of fighting some big fires — to protect homes and
other structures. That’s coming out of taxpayers’
pockets, but homebuilders, real estate agents, bankers and
insurance companies haven’t taken that into account as they
play a role in developing subdivisions that encroach on fire-prone
landscapes. Nor, so far, have most local government land-use
planning efforts.
But federal and state officials are
thinking about forcing counties to pick up firefighting costs,
unless they start regulating interface development. Utah and Oregon
have already imposed land-use planning requirements, and the
Montana Legislature looked at the issue — although it balked this
year at withholding state fire-suppression funds from counties that
don’t manage growth in risky terrain.
U.S. Forest
Service officials are also talking up that idea, but in the words
of Jim R. Wattenburger, a supervisor in Mendocino County, Calif.,
“If you start cramming building codes down our throats,
you’re going to make the Sagebrush Rebellion look
tame.” Yet Wattenburger is a retired California state
firefighter himself.
After defending one Malibu mansion
for the third time, he told the owner, “If you rebuild here
again, I’m not coming back.” For half a century, Smokey
Bear told the public we could count on firefighters to do whatever
it takes to stomp out blazes before they threaten lives and
property. Ecologists now see fire as an elemental force that
cleanses and refurbishes the natural environment. It will be a
tough sell, but local officials and fire managers need to let
borderland residents know that they put themselves and many others
at risk when they move out to that nice place in the trees.
Tom Arrandale is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia,
Colorado. He is a columnist for Governing magazine in Washington,
D.C.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
