Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Two Montana counties dwell on forest fire risk
Report outlines perils of housing growth in areas
MISSOULA, Mont. — Rapid population growth and the desire to live near forests means new housing in western Montana is being built in wildfire-prone areas, according to a new study.
Half of all new homes built in Missoula County between 1990 and 2016 were in areas at high or moderate risk from wildfires. In Ravalli County, more than 90 percent of homes built in the same period were at “high wildfire hazard,” says a report from Headwaters Economics in Bozeman.
Ravalli County’s 6,987 houses built in high-hazard areas in that 26-year period are more than in all other western Montana counties combined.
In Missoula County, 2,234 houses were built in the most fire-prone areas and 2,153 others were built in moderately dangerous areas.
Missoula County Commissioner Dave Strohmaier said he doesn’t think the county has weighed wildfire risk heavily enough in land-use decisions in the past, but he believes that is changing.
Pyrologix was hired by the U.S. Forest Service Northern Region to compile the data. To determine which areas are high wildfire hazard areas, the company used wildfire simulation modeling that incorporates the likelihood of a wildfire burning, the intensity of a fire if it were to occur and the “generic susceptibility” of a structure to those intensities. The 25 counties in western Montana studied were categorized by the Forest Service into three classes based on relative hazard: high, moderate and low.
If development near fire-prone forests continues and global temperatures continue to rise, fire suppression costs in Montana will increase by at least $4 million every year.
The report said that is a conservative estimate, because recent studies in Oregon and Northern California show that there are higher firefighting costs associated with low-density development of new homes and much of firefighting costs are estimated to be attributable to the defense of private property.
Ravalli County Commissioner Jeff Burrows said the Bitterroot Valley’s geography has meant lots of development in the wildland-urban interface, a term for where human development meets fire-prone areas.
“In Ravalli County, we’re 73 percent national forest and public land,” he said. “Basically anywhere you build is in the wildland-urban interface. There’s not a lot of area to build. And a lot of the lower areas of the valley, by the time you take out private property and floodplain areas. Between the bottom and where you get to the National Forest boundary, there’s not a lot of property left in between there.”
Montana’s 2017 wildfire season was the state’s worst on record, with more than a million acres going up in smoke. Places like Missoula and Seeley Lake saw long periods of unhealthy air and a drop in tourism revenue. That summer’s firefighting came at a total cost of $400 million, with a record $74 million of that falling on state taxpayers.
From 1990 to 2016, Missoula County’s population grew 47 percent, while Montana’s overall population grew by 30 percent. The county accounted for 10 percent of all homes built in Montana in that time period, 11,678.