The recent wildfires
that burned 600 square miles, razed some 3,000 homes, killed 14
people and forced the evacuations of over a half-million Southern
Californians shared one characteristic: All the homes burned were
so close to public land that fire moved easily from hillsides
covered with chaparral into subdivisions packed with natural
vegetation.
I’ve seen fire like this before. In
2000, I was readying my fire gear with other seasonal firefighters
on the Pike National Forest in Colorado’s Front Range. A
spotter plane had reported a fire moving fast toward homes in a
heavily forested area. But the houses were so well hidden that as
we drove toward the blaze, I had to ask, “Is there really a
suburb ahead?” There was, but not for long.
Before
we could control it, the Hi Meadows Fire destroyed over 50 homes
and was then the largest “urban interface” fire in
Colorado history. Urban interface is the term the federal
government uses to describe areas where houses abut public lands.
Just two years later, the Hayman Fire earned the distinction of the
state’s worst fire, scorching 85,000-acres and burning
hundreds of homes. Regrettably, one of my former co-workers started
that blaze.
I fought fires on a Hot Shot crew for the
Forest Service for nine summers and loved the job, chasing fires in
every state in the West. But my work changed dramatically as more
people built homes among the trees. Fires that once were relatively
easy to deal with became complicated and much more dangerous.
Here’s an example: In earlier years when a ridgetop
fire was raging, firefighters could safely light a back burn from
the bottom of the hill to meet the oncoming fire. After housing
dotted the hills, we were increasingly asked to insert ourselves
into the forest where fire behavior was always uncertain, and where
we were expected to make heroic stands. Not surprisingly, as more
pressure was put on fire crews to protect homes, more firefighters
died trying. Newly married in 2002, I read the writing on the wall
and quit.
I didn’t leave fire entirely behind.
I’d been working toward a doctorate in environmental history
and began focusing on fire’s relationship to settling the
West. Wildfires like those recently in Southern California
aren’t new; they’ve thundered down the coastal
mountains for generations. But interface fires were new in the
1930s, when they began burning on the edges of Southern
California’s new national forests. That’s where
developers had begun to build subdivisions – I think of them
as wilderburbs – on ridge tops, hillsides or valley floors.
They featured large lots and retained natural vegetation to provide
the illusion of solitude, yet were close to the city. They also
interrupted the path of historic fire. A blaze in 1956 swept down
the Santa Monica Mountains all the way to the Pacific Ocean,
destroying more than 100 Malibu homes and killing one person.
The Malibu Fire 51 years ago demonstrated the problems to
come. Federal fire-suppression policies produced loads of natural
fuels that were ripe for a large blaze. Yet the federal government
offered tax relief and soft repayment loans to burned-out
homeowners to rebuild, removing responsibility from the homeowners
and developers who continued to throw up homes in increasingly
volatile, fire-prone areas.
When the federal government
finally recognized that forests could not be — or should not be —
prevented from burning, it faced two major problems: the
region’s increasing periods of acute drought and its
irresponsible homeowners. I’ll never forget the day in Utah
when I worked feverishly with two other firefighters to cut down
15-foot-tall oak brush overhanging a highly flammable shake-shingle
roof. The homeowners appeared and started screaming at us not to
cut down their beloved trees. Dumbfounded, we wrote that home off
as a loss and moved on to try to save another structure.
By now, everyone must know that the tragedy in Southern California
will repeat itself. The West is simultaneously drying and heating
up while more and more people are moving into vulnerable
wilderburbs. One survey estimates that 14 percent of public land
boundaries are already developed. Most of the residents there
probably believed at one time that their environment was safe, but
it is not safe and never was. Residents have moved into forest
landscapes that have evolved to the point where they are now prone
to massive fires called “stand replacing.”
Take it from one former-firefighter turned historian: Visit the
woods often. Just don’t build your house there.
Lincoln Bramwell is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a historian at the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
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