WORST FIRE RISKS IN THE WEST
Many areas poised to kindle same kind of spark that razed Paradise, Calif.
It started when hot autumn winds snapped a power line east of Paradise, California, showering the ground with sparks. Flames shot up in dry grass near the Feather River, fanned into nearby pine trees and raced 8 miles to town.
Eighty-five people died and nearly 19,000 buildings were destroyed in the Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire.
No one could have anticipated such a catastrophe, people said. The fire’s speed was unprecedented, the ferocity unimaginable, the devastation unpredictable.
Those declarations were simply untrue. Though the toll may be impossible to predict, worst-case fires are a historic and inevitable fact.
The same factors that doomed Paradise put hundreds of other towns at risk, according to an Arizona Republic and USA TODAY analysis of fire hazards across 760 million acres of the American West.
Though the hazards begin with fire, they ultimately are about human risks.
Phillip Levin, a researcher at the University of Washington, put it this way:
“Fire is natural. But the disaster happens because people didn’t know to leave, or couldn’t leave. It didn’t have to happen.”
The Republic and USA TODAY examined about 5,000 communities across 11 states.
Of small communities with fewer than 15,000 households, 526 face a wildfire potential greater than in Paradise. Hundreds of others are at risk.
The analysis began with U.S. Forest Service data, which weighed 65 risk factors such as topography, precipitation, vegetation and previous fires, and simulated tens of thousands of possible fire seasons.
Those simulations broke down the country into 18-acre squares. Each square was given a fire-hazard rating on a 1 to 5 scale.
Census-designated places, where the federal government tallies population statistics, showed populated locations in these states.
The newspapers’ findings exclude large cities and focus on smaller communities.
Around each place, the analysis drew a 1-mile buffer zone, generally the distance fire embers could spread into a town.
Finally, each place got a score: the average for each pixel of burnable land inside those boundaries. This is the community’s wildfire hazard potential. Paradise’s was 3.81.
Across the West, 526 small communities – more than 10% of all places – rank higher.
The wildfire hazard potential is only the first step in assessing human danger. Risks can be magnified by evacuation constraints, warning systems, residents’ ages and disabilities and types of homes.
Since 1984, about 6 million people nationwide have been hurt by wildland blazes, and there have been more than 2,000 deaths and $60 billion in property damage.
The threat escalates as development encroaches on forest fringes and as climate change increases the severity of monster fires.
The peril may be most pronounced in 11 Western states, where conditions are perennially ripe. When Paradise was obliterated, it became apparent that entire towns are at risk.
That doesn’t mean they must burn or people must die. Other variables escalate those risks.
Levin, the Washington researcher, studied the role of 13 socioeconomic factors in wildfire catastrophes.
If a community has high numbers of residents who are poor, elderly, disabled and minorities, he said, some won’t have money for flame-proof homes. Some won’t have the physical ability to maintain safe yards. Some can’t afford cellphones and internet to get early warnings or vehicles to get out.
“That combination makes a community more vulnerable – in some cases very vulnerable,” Levin said.
Last year, upward of 58,000 fires killed about 100 people and destroyed 23,000 homes – record losses over the past century.
There’s plenty left to burn: Verisk, an insurance industry analyst, estimated 4.5 million households in the West, with a total value of $237 billion, face high or extreme wildfire risk. In Montana and Idaho, more than a quarter of the population lives in extreme- or high-risk places.
“What happens when central Oregon becomes a Paradise?” asked Joe Stutler, a Pacific Northwest forester who preaches fire safety. “We’re seeing not just isolated homes but entire communities engulfed now. Hundreds of people killed. It’s a wake-up call . ... Are we going to ignore the problem, or what are we going to do about it?”
Escape routes
Many thought the town was too big to burn.
When it did burn, it felt too big for its 26,000 people to escape.
Paradise had a half-dozen emergency exit routes – more than many small towns – but as fire leapfrogged into town, several passages were blocked by fire or broken-down vehicles.
Thousands of people tried to jam onto the remaining escape routes.
Engineers estimate a single lane of traffic can accommodate 1,800 vehicles an hour. That’s under ideal conditions when traffic flows freely at high speeds. In stop-and-go traffic, the number drops below 500 vehicles an hour.
As panicking residents fled, flames licked at their tires. Smoke enveloped roads and obscured the sun, turning day into night. Power lines and trees collapsed, blocking streets.
On radio calls, firefighters described main roads as parking lots surrounded by fire and filled with civilians who could not get out.
As more roads backed up, ambulances were trapped and caught fire with patients aboard, the crews pleading for help.
Dispatchers diverted bulldozers from fighting fire to clearing roads.
Of the 79 fire victims identified to date, at least 11 were found inside charred vehicles or on roadways next to them.
Six of those were along a short stretch of Edgewood Lane, which deadends in a forest to the south. As fire arrived from the north, there was no way out.
Phil John, a Fire Safe Council leader in Paradise who helped draw up evacuation plans months before the Camp Fire, said he and others warned that the community was in danger, especially after the Tubbs Fire killed 22 and wiped out more than 5,000 structures in Northern California’s wine country.
“I was telling people, ‘Listen, we have to have a plan now,’ ” John said.
The town was divided into zones where evacuations would be staggered as fire moved deeper into the community. A USA TODAY Network survey concluded that escape plans for Paradise were among the best in the West. By contrast, more than three-quarters of the highest-risk communities don’t have detailed, publicly available schemes.
Because the Camp Fire was so overwhelming, John said, the best-laid plan broke down.
“We had 50,000 people all of a sudden on those highways,” he recalled. “No one’s ever seen a fire like that. It’s almost every horror story you hear firefighters talk about happening all at the same time.
“Even though 85 people died, a whole lot of elderly and infirm got out of this town. … I have to sleep ... knowing I did the best I could.”
The fact that nearly all of the victims died inside of their homes demonstrates another point: Safety wasn’t just about getting out. It was about getting out early enough.
“All the people making decisions lastminute are straining the system,” said Yi-Chang Chiu, an engineering professor at the University of Arizona who studies evacuations. “They will have a hard time getting out, and these are the most vulnerable people because they are at the end of the queue.”
The traffic chaos in Paradise exemplifies what could happen in scores of Western communities that have limited evacuation routes.
In many cases, just one escape road leads through town or dead-ends in wilderness.
The tiny community of Haigler Creek (pop. 19) in Arizona’s Mogollon Rim country is nestled along a gurgling stream. It’s a typical summer getaway with an adjacent campground that is busiest during peak fire season.
It’s classified with a severe fire risk. The only way out for residents who have a median age of 91 is a rutted, 15-mile Forest Service road that in places straddles a cliff.
Warning systems
The first duty of wildland fire commanders is to figure out where the blaze is headed, how long it will take to get there, who is at risk and how much time there is to evacuate. Using satellite photos, weather reports, computer models and firefighting experience, they set trigger points for evacuations.
Pushed by 50 mph winds, the Camp Fire outran projections. Embers flew a half-mile or more forward, igniting dozens of spot fires.
The town evacuation plan, which had 14 zones, instructed residents not to leave during a disaster unless a directive was issued for their area.
In many neighborhoods, the fire arrived before orders to get out. Residents who called 911, sometimes reporting flames in their yards, were told an evacuation had not been declared.
When the directive finally went out, it didn’t reach everyone.
Though evacuation instructions could have been broadcast directly to cellphones, community officials instead relied on reverse 911 calls that were delayed as cellular towers became clogged with calls. Many in Paradise failed to get an alert, or received one after the fire had swept over their neighborhoods.
Nationally, there is no uniform warning system for wildfires. The Republic’s analysis found that shortcomings in Paradise are common across the West.
Few towns have sirens, and residents seldom know what to do when they go off. Most communities rely on reverse-911 calls, radio and TV bulletins or Amber-type alerts to announce evacuations. Reverse 911 calls require enrollment. The Wireless Emergency Alert, or WEA message system, could reach every cellphone in an area unless individuals opt out.
This helter-skelter system is compounded by the fact many threatened locations are full of summer cabins, occupied at peak fire season by folks who may have no clue about emergency notifications.
The Republic mapped all locations across the West that are authorized to send wireless messages. A little more than half – 215 counties out of 413 – have been authorized by the Federal Communications Commission to communicate with all cellphones in a targeted area.
Even in locations where wireless alerts are approved, the system is often untested: Only 59 counties sent out alerts from 2013 to 2019, and just 30 have used the system since 2018, according to the Republic’s analysis.
Butte County, where Paradise is located, enrolled to send emergency messages, but authorities never ran a test. On the day of the Camp Fire, they didn’t try the system, instead relying on a private contractor.
Understanding evacuation directives may be more difficult for those who speak English as a second language. All but 14 of more than 500 wireless emergency warnings issued in the 11-state region over the past seven years were in English only.
Elderly and disabled residents
Disaster research, from hurricanes to tsunamis to wildfires, indicates elderly
and disabled residents are slower to escape.
They are more dependent on emergency services for transportation and more likely to hunker down, refusing to leave home.
A National Institutes of Health study found that, despite increased vulnerability, barely one-third of the elderly make significant disaster preparations.
In an era of increasingly dangerous fires due to global warming, they account for a growing share of the population: The number of Americans 65 and older is expected to more than double by 2060, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
How does that play out in catastrophic events?
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, about 15% of the city’s population was 60 or older, but that group accounted for 70% of the deaths.
The median age of Camp Fire victims was 72. Among the 85 people who perished, at least 62 were 65 or older.
A quarter of the town’s residents were disabled – twice California’s average.
The outcome in Paradise could have been far worse. Staffers at Sunshine Assisted Living home and other shelters saved hundreds of patients by ferrying them to safety in vans and personal vehicles – even persuading other evacuees to join the rescue effort.
Nationally, Paradise falls in the top quartile for age and disabilities. High rankings are not uncommon for firethreatened places.
The most recent American Community Survey lists 125 small, fire-endangered communities across the West with higher percentages of elderly residents and a greater wildfire hazard than Paradise. About 100 have higher disability rates.
Troy, Montana, a town with a population of fewer than 1,000, has a disability rate of 40%. One in eight residents is over 75.
Enveloped in Kootenai National Forest, the community has no Wireless Emergency Alert, so only those who opt in get disaster warnings by phone. There is a siren by the sewer station.
Lessons from the fire
The worst-case wildfire can travel through a coniferous forest at 6 mph or faster and through dry grasslands at 14 mph. Flame lengths can reach 300 feet, sometimes pushed horizontal by winds. Heat can melt cars.
Wherever one of these fires hits, the threat is not just a flaming wall but redhot embers lofted up to a mile ahead of the main blaze.
In Paradise, a blizzard of firebrands inundated the town – landing on unkempt yards, roofs and gutters full of dead leaves – and set off about 400 spot fires. Once in town, fire spread from building to building in densely built neighborhoods.
As demonstrated in Paradise, the amount of death and destruction in a community depends on available fuels – both vegetation and structures. Getting the landscape and buildings to firesafe standards can be the difference between life and death.
When Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire erupted in 2013, 19 hotshots were trapped by the blaze and killed a few hundred yards from a ranch house.
Inside the dwelling, protected by a metal roof and a vegetation-free perimeter, the ranchers comfortably survived a firestorm in which outside temperatures reached 2,000 degrees. Nearby, 129 dwellings were lost.
Before-and-after aerial photos provided evidence that fireproof buildings with so-called defensible space survive some of the worst fires – while others are reduced to ash and cinder.
That lesson has been replicated in almost every devastating wildfire.
Alex Maranghides, fire protection engineer with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is analyzing how the Camp Fire progressed through Paradise, just as he has with other burned communities.
The goal is to save lives and homes, Maranghides said, and the scientific evidence for fire-safe efforts is irrefutable: If mirror towns were hit by identical wildfires, but only residents of the first town had created a fuel buffer and made their homes less flammable, outcomes probably would be radically different.
“It can be the difference between an event becoming a catastrophe or just petering out,” Maranghides said.
Yet requirements for this kind of property management run afoul of a common preference for wild places free from government meddling, especially in the many unincorporated communities of the rural West.
A study of New Mexico dwellings in the wildland-urban interface found two-thirds of homeowners did not create defensible space.
Throughout the West, rural communities come with feeble building codes, limited landscape ordinances and little or no enforcement.
For hundreds of towns and villages, the result is a patchwork of peril that leaves individuals, often led by volunteer groups or homeowner associations, responsible for fire defense.
The Mescalero Apache tribe in New Mexico runs a program to help thin trees on tribal members’ lots. Above a mailbox where people can submit applications for tree thinning, a sign cautions that the wait list has more than 200 applicants.
Firewise USA recognizes residential areas with up to 2,500 dwellings if they meet criteria for safety and preparedness. The requirements include a formal risk assessment, a plan to reduce danger and at least one hour of volunteer work per household.
Firewise leaders said a blaze that roared toward Durango, Colorado, last year offers the classic “success story.” Residents of the outskirts enclave of Falls Creek were so zealous about their Firewise campaign that firefighters used the community to make a stand, halting the flames before they reached the city.
Across the West, 380 places have homeowner groups or neighborhood associations recognized by Firewise USA. An additional 150 places in California have Fire Safe Councils with a similar purpose.
The National Association of Foresters said three-quarters of Western states have Community Wildfire Protection Plans, which must be adopted to qualify for federal grant funds.
Those plans prioritize areas for hazardous-fuel reduction and recommend ways to reduce the flammability of structures. They contain general information rather than disaster prevention steps.
Mobile home parks
In a study co-authored by Levin, the University of Washington and the Nature Conservancy concluded that lowincome residents in high-risk towns are less able to fend off fire and to recover from a disaster.
Blacks and Hispanics are 50% more vulnerable to wildfire, according to the study, and Native Americans are six times more vulnerable.
A review of federal grants found that such communities get less grant money to fend off wildfire. The poor and minorities tend to be less experienced with bureaucracies and politics.
In Paradise, entire neighborhoods were wiped out not so much by the Camp Fire but via a chain reaction. Flames enveloped older dwellings less than 20 feet apart, passing from one structure to the next.
That phenomenon is glaring in satellite images of mobile home parks: Paradise Mobile Home Estates, Ridgewood Mobile Home Park, Pine Springs Mobile Home Park, Acres of Paradise Mobile Home Park.
Most were havens for low-income residents and the elderly. All were incinerated.
At least 37 of those killed by the Camp Fire lived in mobile homes or manufactured housing.
Among fire-endangered Western communities with fewer than 15,000 households, Paradise had the most mobile home parks and the fourth-largest number of mobile home units. Before the Camp Fire, one in eight households lived in a mobile home park.
Although Paradise’s mobile home numbers were high, the town was not unique: In Elko, Nevada, which has a population of about 20,000, roughly one household in nine is listed in a mobile home park. Elko has Nevada’s thirdhighest wildfire hazard score.
The San Bernardino National Forest surrounds Big Bear Lake, a city of 5,000 residents with a much larger tourist population. About one in seven of its year-round households live in mobile home parks tucked between thick pines.
Are threatened towns prepared?
For communities and their residents, the cost and hassle of protective measures may seem prohibitive.
But over the long haul, experts said, doing nothing to defend against fire is likely to be even more expensive, if not deadly.
A study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology calculated that each year, wildfires impose a total U.S. economic loss ranging from $63 billion to $285 billion. That includes everything from suppression efforts to property damage and post-fire flood control.
California’s insurance commissioner estimated the Camp Fire alone produced $7 billion worth of insurance claims.
How much difference can protective measures make?
After the Camp Fire, a news collaboration involving USA TODAY checked to see which single-family homes survived in Paradise. The key factor turned out to be a building code adopted by California in 2008. Half the residences built after that date were unscathed; four-fifths of older residences burned.
In Medford and Ashland, Oregon, a spate of destructive blazes has officials mulling new codes.
Ruidoso, New Mexico, embraced strict requirements for homeowners – and hired forestry officers to uphold them. The motivating force: In 2012, a blaze known as the Little Bear Fire razed 254 buildings, the most destructive blaze in state history.
Dozens of other towns are like Payson, Arizona, the hub in a triangle of wildfire threat. Safety advocates, including the fire chief, pleaded for fire defense regulations, only to be shot down by residents who condemned such ordinances as onerous, unconstitutional and likely to trigger neighborhood feuds.
Fire experts warned that even protections may not save communities built within forests designed to burn.
“It’s all about the fuels,” said Terry Hudson, a wildfire specialist with the Arizona Division of Forestry. “We can help mitigate 99% of the fires. But we know there’s 1% we can do nothing about. I’m telling you, you cannot catch that 1%.”
“What happens when central Oregon becomes a Paradise? We’re seeing not just isolated homes but entire communities engulfed now. Hundreds of people killed. It’s a wake-up call . ... Are we going to ignore the problem, or what are we going to do about it?” Joe Stutler Pacific Northwest forester