Officials look for solutions to wildfire peril
Buffers between housing and dry bush, controlled burns among the proposals
BILLINGS, Montana — Creating fire buffers between housing and dry brush, burying spark-prone power lines and lighting more controlled burns to keep vegetation in check could give people a better chance of surviving wildfires, according to experts searching for ways to reduce growing death tolls from increasingly severe blazes across the American West.
Western U.S. wildfires have grown ever more lethal, a grim reality that’s been driven by more housing developments sprawling into fire-prone grasslands and brushy canyons, experts say. Many of the ranchers and farmers who once managed those landscapes are gone, leaving neglected terrain that has grown thick with vegetation that can explode into flames when sparked.
That has left communities ripe for tragedy as whipping winds and recurring drought that’s characteristic of climate change stoke wildfires such as the ones that raged in Northern and Southern California.
Hundreds of thousands of people were told to leave their homes ahead of the blazes to get out of harm’s way. Yet some experts say there’s been an overreliance on evacuation and too little attention paid to making communities safe, as well as not enough money for controlled burns and other preventive measures.
Search crews found many victims inside their vehicles, or next to them, overcome by flames, heat and smoke as they tried to flee. Survivors of the blaze that nearly obliterated the Northern California town of Paradise and nearby communities spoke of having just minutes to escape and narrow roads made impassable by flames and traffic jams.
“There are … so many ways that can go wrong, in the warning, the modes of getting the message out, the confusion … the traffic jams,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension program.
As deadly urban wildfires become more common, officials should also consider establishing “local retreat zones, local safety zones” in communities where residents can ride out the deadly firestorms if escape seems impossible, Moritz said. That could be a community centre, built or retrofitted to withstand wildfires, which can exceed 1,100 degrees Celsius, leaving little trace of ordinary homes.
Fire-protection measures in buildings can include sprinklers, fire- and heat-resistant walls and roofs, and barriers that keep sparks out of chimneys and other openings, according to the International Code Council, a non-profit that helps develop building codes used widely in the United States.
Creating more buffers — whether parks, golf courses or irrigated agriculture, such as the vineyards that helped keep 2017 wildfires in California’s wine country from spreading into even more towns — around new and old housing developments would help stave off wildfires threatening to overrun cities and towns.
So would burying electric power lines, which can spark and fail in the high winds that drive many of California’s fiercest fires, said Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in California.
Sparks from electrical utility equipment are suspects in the Northern California wildfire that consumed Paradise, destroying some 7,700 homes, and other deadly blazes in the state.
A proven method to prevent wildfires from getting out of control is the use of controlled burns. By intentionally lighting fires, property owners or land managers can remove dead and low-lying trees and brush — material that otherwise accumulates and can accelerate the growth of fires.
In the mid-20th century, California ranchers burned hundreds of thousands of acres annually to manage their lands, said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.
That was phased out in the 1980s after California’s fire management agency stepped in to take over the burns, and by the last decade, the amount of acreage being treated had dropped to less than 10,000 acres annually, Quinn-Davidson said.
Former agricultural land that rings many towns in the state became overgrown, even as housing developments pushed deeper into those rural areas. That was the situation in the Northern California town of Redding leading up to a fire that began in July and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. It was blamed for eight deaths.
“You get these growing cities pushing out — housing developments going right up into brush and wooded areas. One ignition on a bad day and all that is threatened,” Quinn-Davidson said.
“These fires are tragic, and they’re telling us this is urgent. We can’t sit on our hands.”