Homeowners feel the heat from fires
New model shows risks to properties across US
Teresa Burgess woke up in the middle of the night to her neighbor’s son shouting and pounding on the windows and doors of her home in Ventura, California. Through the windows she could see an eerie orange glow.
A raging inferno that became known as the Thomas Fire, one of California’s most devastating wildfires, threatened their community after racing 10 miles in just a few hours on Dec. 4, 2017.
“It was pretty frightening,” Burgess said. “We could see emergency vehicles. The winds were howling.”
After grabbing just a few things, she and her husband could feel the heat as they loaded their three dogs into vehicles and drove away from their home of 25 years. It would be one of more than 500 homes torched that night by flames and glowing embers the size of basketballs.
Fires like these have put California in the news countless times in recent years, but it’s one of many states where residents face a growing wildfire threat, and that risk is forecast to increase exponentially in the years ahead, concludes a new report released Monday by the First Street Foundation.
The report analyzes the results of a first-of-its-kind wildfire risk model, developed by the nonprofit foundation and its partners in a public-private collaboration. The model assesses each property’s risk based on a broad array of data and information, including property type, building materials, terrain and proximity to historic fires.
Property owners across the country can type in their address at Riskfactor.com or at Realtor.com and learn more about their risk, then scroll through and see how that threat changes over time and what they might consider doing to make their properties safer.
About 80 million homes and other structures across the country are threatened by wildfire risk, said Matthew Eby, the foundation’s founder and executive director. Of those, more than 10% face a risk considered major, severe or extreme, with anywhere from a 6% to 26% chance of a wildfire over a 30-year period.
The First Street Foundation, based in New York, has modeled flood risk from rising sea levels and extreme rainfall, launching a tool for homeowners in 2020 on Realtor.com called Flood Factor. The results of its latest work, Fire Factor, launched Monday.
Millions of people each year make decisions on the biggest investment of their lives – buying a home – without the right information at their fingertips, Eby said. He hopes to change that.
Although the annual number of wildfires has decreased slightly in the U.S. over the past 30 years, the number of acres burned each year is increasing, more than double what it was in the 1990s, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Fires burned 7.1 million acres in 2021 and 10.12 million acres in 2020, just below a record high set in 2015, based on statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center.
The fires burn in conflagrations that give people little time to prepare or react. Rising temperatures and lengthy droughts make conditions worse and put more people are in harm’s way. More than 3,500 homes burned last year.
Not only is the wildfire risk expected to increase over the next 30 years, but many properties with moderate levels of risk now will move into higher levels, the report said.
“Fire is driven by heat, and heat is the No. 1 thing we see changing in climate models,” Eby told USA TODAY.
Over the next 30 years, the states with the biggest increase in the number of properties that meet the foundation’s threshold for risk are Colorado, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Montana. Also in the top 10 with the biggest increases are Oklahoma, Arkansas, Wyoming, Kansas and South Carolina.
Seeing those Southeastern states in the list was the biggest surprise after hundreds of millions of model runs, said Ed Kearns, the foundation’s chief data officer.
In Appalachia and along the East Coast, it’s going to get drier and more combustible, said Kearns, a former chief data officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It kind of reaffirmed a fear that I had, but it’s even more widespread than I thought.”
But states in the Northeast have a low fire risk, the study found.
Among the list of counties with the most properties at risk are three in California – Riverside, Los Angeles and San Bernardino – along with Maricopa County, Arizona, and Polk County, Florida.
The counties with the largest percentage of properties at risk are Los Alamos, Harding and Colfax in New Mexico and Mason and Gillespie in Texas. In each of those counties, more than 97.9% of the structures in the county are at risk, according to the foundation’s modeling.
Most encouraging to Kearns are model results that show efforts to reduce fuels and use fire breaks do make a difference. “It’s a really good sign there are some big steps we can take on a large scale to protect communities,” he said.
Jim Karels, fire director for the National Association of State Foresters and retired director of the Florida Forest Service, isn’t aware of any other nationwide program that allows property owners to examine their risk.
“The more tools the better,” Karels said. For him, the big question is how to persuade people to take action once they learn about their risk and to get them past the point of thinking a wildfire won’t happen to them.
In states like California, where people see recent or regular damage to neighbors’ homes, people take wildfires more seriously, he said. To his dismay, the same doesn’t appear to be true in Florida.
“Convincing homeowners to take steps to reduce their threats is probably the biggest hurdle we’ve got,” he said.
“Convincing homeowners to take steps to reduce their threats is probably the biggest hurdle we’ve got.” Jim Karels, fire director for the National Association of State Foresters