Ten weeks later, the Marshall fire was still raging. Boulder County, Colorado, was blasted. on December 30, taking with it one man’s life and over 1,000 houses, some residents with the means to do so are now preparing to build back.
The instinct to return home, and the planning, saving and grappling with underinsurance that requires, is unfolding amid the backdrop of the western United States’ worst drought in 1,200 years and what’s morphed into a year-long fire season. Winter wildfires, also known as Emerald and Airport scorched thousands of acresCalifornia. This caused the destruction of over 100 structuresKansas; and, amid this writing. This prompted the evacuation 1,100 houses in the Florida Panhandle — at a time of year when those with intimate knowledge of the cycles of burning and regeneration once relied on wetter and cooler conditions to keep blazes at bay.
According to a February 23 reportThe United Nations has stated that extreme wildfires, such as the Marshall fire, are expected to rise by 50 percent by 2100 in response to climate change. “We have reached a point where there is no future scenario in our lifetimes that does not see an increase in wildfire,” Molly Mowery, executive director of the Community Wildfire Planning Center, told Truthout. “So we must accept fire and learn to live with it.”
But in Colorado, many looking to build back on their land have no plans — or no ample budget — to upgrade the houses they’ll erect again to be any less flammable than the structures that just burned down.
Colorado is just one of many. eight statesSome critics are calling for officials to address this issue. Because there is no comprehensive state policy, fireproofing is not required for Superior and Louisville. These towns were destroyed by fire on December 30. Residents may rebuild their homes using the same combustible materials.
Oregon, unlike Colorado, passed a wildfire mitigation bill in 2020 that required a set of standards for high-risk areas. This was in response to a series of destructive fires. According to a December 2021 study, early research has shown that enforcing a code that includes fire-resilient material may reduce the chance of a building being destroyed by wildfires by 40%. working paperBy the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Beyond the Forest
Wildfire ecologists believe that there are many factors that contribute to the rise in extreme fires. A heightened concentration of oxygenIn the atmosphere as a consequence of changing climatic circumstances, for example, acts on smaller fires just like blowing on embers in a wood stove to light flames. A paperPublished in February 2022 Nature found that an increase in nighttime temperatures across burnable areas of the earth has had the overall effect of weakening the “brakes” on wildfires — the overnight window during which a landscape is less flammable, dew sets in and flames die down — thus allowing for even longer, stronger fires.
Another major factor driving the rise in destructive and traumatic fire events is the expansion of human designs — namely, suburbs — into what’s known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where the built environment intermingles with ecosystems lush with flammable vegetation. Nearly a third of all wildfires in the U.S. occur in the WUI — just about all of them caused by human activity such as downed power lines, fireworks, cigarettes, and potentially in the case of the Marshall fire, which is still under investigation, smoldering underground coal mines.
We continue to build the WUI. A study of public documents on 200 million parcelsZillow data shows that the number of WUI-built residential homes rose by 32,000,000 between 1992 & 2015. That’s on track to doubleBy 2030
“The general public tends to think that they aren’t in a fire-prone environment if they don’t see the forest right up against the neighborhood,” John Abatzoglou, head of the University of California Merced’s Climatology Lab, told 5280Boulder County grassland. “By thinking that way, we may be increasing the vulnerability of communities that are not in forested environments but are still quite fire-prone,” Abatzoglou said.
Social scientists have pointed out that the expansion of these hyper-flammable areas is also driven in part by our system of unencumbered growth and the lack of a strong safety net. Unaffordable housing has pushed some residents to purchase homes or build in the WUI, where it’s cheaperFurther expanding burnable structures in the most flammable areas.
Many discussions about resilience to fire revolve around hardening homes with measures like covering a foundation in gravel and blocking vents using mesh to keep materials such as pine needles and embers out.
Sasha Plotnikova was an independent scholar, architect and writer based in Los Angeles. TruthoutWe also need to examine the often-horrible conditions that unhoused and working-class tenants are forced into. “As long as the places where we live are understood as commodities, we’ll only further entrench ourselves in a system premised on the exploitation of poor people and natural resources,” Plotnikova said.
The Housing Crisis is a Fire Factor too
In Louisville, Colorado, the coal-town-turned-suburb that the Marshall fire leveled, Mirek Maez, general contractor and owner of Cooper Building Group, says supply chain issues and the doubling in cost of building materials means the lumber and metal plates he’s ordering to help residents build back won’t show up for a year and a half.
“People are just ordering and ordering and ordering and well now, we have another 1,000 people ordering,” he told Denver-area NBC-affiliate 9News. “It’s a snowball effect that doesn’t seem to be ending.”
This delay is exacerbated by an already severe housing crisis. Former homeowners are now being displaced by fire stressing their rental market. The increase in rental demand continues to grow. drive up rental pricesYou can go even further.
“Landlords’ incentive right now is to push out long-time residents, do a superficial renovation, and jack up the rent,” Plotnikova said.
The principle of “degrowth,” which holds that scaling back what we consume could actually improve overall quality of life, could also, perhaps, slow expansion into the most flammable locales. If housing was more accessible and not driven by a growth-oriented economic model, the argument goes, there may not be reason to continue carving out the WUI, “to pull ever-larger swaths of nature into circuits of extraction and production,” as leading degrowth scholar Jason Hickel said of the concept in his book, Less Is More.
Short of system change, however — or while we work towards it — the reality is that houses and buildings must be adapted, or “hardened,” as soon as possible, to prevent loss of life and repeat infernos. You can take proactive measures like replacing wood fences by metal ones or retrofitting homes with fire-resistant roofing.
Unlike flood risk, fire risk must be viewed at the micro and the macro scales, Mowery said, “because property owners can make choices that can change their [and their neighbors’] risk.”
Fortunately, there is more data available on fire risk than ever before. A new map — the first-ever comprehensive tool to chart fire risk — was created by the USDA Forest Service under the direction of Congress in 2021. Mowery stressed that it is important to sign up for emergency alerts in your area and to tune into programs like Ready, Set, Go!And Firewise.
Rebecca Samulski, executive Director of Fire Adapted Colorado, also spoke. Truthout Wildfire professionals can still work in the WUI as long as construction continues. This is normal. Wildfire professionals can also form relationships with groups that promote urban infill rather than sprawl in the WUI for transportation and sustainable infrastructure benefits. “We cannot and should not exclude fire from our environments, but we can have wildfires without having wildfire disasters,” Samulski said.
We’ve Done It Before
We tend to think of flame-laden landscapes as uniquely of the Anthropocene — haunting and heartbreaking, which indeed they are. However, WUI-like conditions have been a reality for human communities for millennia according to a 2021 paperChristopher Roos, assistant professor in anthropology at Southern Methodist University, co-authored the book.
“One dimension of the issues that human communities seem to be facing … is a lack of historical perspective,” Roos said at a March 2021 Southwest Fire Science Consortium webinar.
Roos and his coauthors partnered with Jemez Pueblo fire experts as well as members of Hopi, White Mountain Apache and Zuni tribes, to study former “fire wise” villages and towns in the Jemez Plateau, in what is now northern New Mexico. “Fire and smoke would have been as commonplace as birdsong,” Roos said of how local Indigenous groups lived with frequent patches of controlled surface fires, prior to being displaced by settler-colonial dynamics.
“In a matter of decades, modern human-natural systems at the WUI have developed a pathological relationship with fire,” the paper reads.
Place-based, Indigenous-influenced fire management practices have been catching on in some state legislatures. In 2021 CaliforniaAnd New MexicoBoth passed prescribed burn bills. Notably, Colorado’s forest service is one of the only state agencies that is not allowed to conduct prescribed burns under state law, as Colorado Public Radio reported.
Chris Toya, an archaeologist and tribal historic conservation officer for the Jemez Pueblo spoke alongside Roos. He noted that controlled fires that keep grasses, and other combustibles under control, have not been seen on the Jemez Plateau ever since before the Jemez population was. removed to the Village of WalatowaAround the turn of 17 century, his ancestral lands were later subdivided. management by federal agencies, which includes the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the National Park Service (USNS). “As far as purposefully putting fire on the ground [now], we’re very limited to pretty much just the areas that we manage down here in the valley,” Toya explained.
The learning curve could be helped by more co-management relationships between federal agencies and states. “It all comes down to education,” Toya said. “We can manage our forest more efficiently, that way not only Jemez people can enjoy the forest but also anybody else that wants to be out there to get the benefits of being outdoors.”
