During last year's Esperanza Fire in Southern California, five Forest Service firefighters died trying to protect an isolated, unoccupied home. The home was positioned at the top of a series of steep gullies surrounded by dense, highly flammable chaparral vegetation -- normally the type of place firefighters would avoid for a direct fight of a wildfire.
But the Esperanza Fire occurred in what firefighters term the "wildland-urban interface" or "Red Zone" -- the area of transition between developed urban areas and undeveloped wildlands. In this case, the fire was pushed by strong Santa Ana winds out of the chaparral and into a housing development. This has become an all too common occurrence as the wildlands shrink and the suburbs and exurbs steadily grow.
Wildland firefighters are entering the Red Zone more and more often as waves of subdivisions and McMansions have lapped at the edges of our national forests and public lands over the last two decades. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that 8.4 million new homes were added to Red Zones across the country in the 1990s, and this rate of growth is being sustained.
This tremendous expansion has not only made wildfires more dangerous, it has made them more expensive. A recent audit by the General Accounting Office detailed the tremendous increase in the costs of fighting wildfires (hitting $1.9 billion in 2006 and topping $1 billion in three of the past six years), and the feds place most of the blame for the rising costs on fighting more fires in the expanding Red Zone.
In the Red Zone, the normal command system that governs wildland firefighters "goes into the toilet. There is no organized lookout, aerial surveillance, or communications," says Jack Cohen, a former Hotshot firefighter and current researcher with the Rocky Mountain Research Station. "Escape routes go away -- with the smoke it becomes difficult to tell whether roads lead to safety zones."
When a normal backcountry wildfire overwhelms a fireline, firefighters simply retreat to the next ridge or the next road and dig another line. However, when wildfires move out of the forest and threaten homes and communities, there is no fall-back line. Fire managers are forced to throw every available resource -- including expensive helicopters and air tankers -- into the fight. Failure to do so can be a career-ending decision.
"Fighting fires in communities is very unforgiving," says Michael Rains, director of the Forest Service's Northern Research Station. "The costs are high and the standard for evaluation is perfection. You have to have resources in reserve 'just in case.' Firefighters are going to hedge their bets, and that is an expensive proposition."
In recent years, firefighting costs have been taken to unprecedented heights that threaten to overwhelm the Forest Service's overall budget. Wildfire-related costs are expected to account for 44 percent of the agency's overall budget in 2007 -- up from 13 percent in 1991.
But the Forest Service budget hasn't kept pace. In fact, under the Bush administration, the agency's budget has been steadily reduced. So as firefighting costs have risen, the Forest Service has been forced to absorb the increases through a 35 percent reduction in other programs since 2000. The programs that have been hit by cutbacks include wildlife habitat restoration, recreation, invasive species control, state and community assistance, prescribed fire, and managed natural fire -- some of the very projects that could help restore forest health and reduce many of the factors that are creating the conditions for large, 'catastrophic' wildfires in the first place.
Rick Cable, regional forester for the Rocky Mountain Region, says that he has been forced to deal with the budget crunch by having fewer people on the ground. "We definitely have less of a field presence now -- fewer people working in recreation, wildlife management, managing vegetation in all its forms, range conservation -- fewer people working in fire ecology and fuels management. We can feel it, and the public can feel it."
The budget crisis led five former Forest Service chiefs to issue a statement to Congress last month expressing their concern. "As Chiefs of the U.S. Forest Service from 1979 to 2007, we wish to express in the strongest way that the Forest Service has been put into an untenable situation due to the way fire suppression is being handled in the Federal Budget," they wrote.
Despite the dismal situation, a series of experiments conducted in a deep jack pine forest in British Columbia may shine a light on the path out of this conundrum of uncontrolled housing growth, skyrocketing firefighting costs, and declining forest management and health.
Fire researchers like Jack Cohen study how houses burn. Probably more importantly, they also study how houses don't burn. In a series of now-famous experiments, Cohen set up wall and roof sections of different materials within a forest. He and his team then ignited a raging 'crown fire' that raced through the treetops with flame heights of 65 feet. What they found was that intense flames would not ignite the wooden walls at distances greater than 100 feet, and that that the wall could survive intense flame fronts as close as 30 feet.
The implication of this research is groundbreaking, throwing into question the basic assumptions that drive our current wildfire policy.
Forest managers have always assumed that large, expensive forest-thinning and fuels-management programs were the solution to controlling the size and intensity of wildfires -- and the resulting destruction in populated areas. Crews with bulldozers, chainsaws, and logging equipment are sent into forests to reduce the amount of small trees and ground vegetation that provide the basic fuel for wildfire. However, these types of projects are almost always controversial and costly, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per acre depending on the local conditions, and they have to be repeated regularly as forest growth continues.
Cable says that in Colorado there is a current backlog of 3.6 million acres in need of thinning and fuels management, but due to funding constraints, the Forest Service is only treating 86,000 acres per year.
While there may be other reasons for thinning and reducing fuels in forests, Cohen's research shows that these large-scale projects do little to stop houses from burning. It is not so much how big or intense the fire is in the forest surrounding the home, but what the fire does in the immediate yard surrounding it. That immediate area, which Cohen calls the 'home ignition zone,' determines whether the home burns or not.
"The vegetation surrounding the home within 30 meters determines ignitability," says Cohen. "We can separate the house burning issue from the wildfire problem."
His research illustrates that homeowners who choose to live in the Red Zone are ultimately responsible for protection of their home, not public land managers. This realization has spurred a number of developments aimed at making residents of high-risk fire areas assume some responsibility for the protection of their homes. These changes suggest we may be entering an era in policy where high-risk fire areas are treated like floodplains, where the burden is on homeowners to keep their property safe.
State and local politicians in parts of the West are also beginning to address the need for growth restrictions and building codes related to fire vulnerability. And, perhaps most importantly, insurance companies are filling a policy gap in some western states by forcing homeowners to address wildfire risk on their property. Over the last few years, State Farm inspected 42,000 properties across the West in high-risk areas for wildfires. Of those, the company required some sort of mitigation action on 33 percent of the properties -- usually as simple as clearing vegetation from roofs and gutters and away from the house.
"Insurance companies are saying it is a shared risk," says Carole Walker, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association, "Homeowners have to take scientifically proven steps to reduce fire risk or look for insurance elsewhere."
Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano has been considering a number of ideas developed by fire researchers at the University of Arizona that outline changes in zoning and insurance in what they are terming the "fire plains." Former National Park Service Director Roger Kennedy has developed the idea of a National Flame Zone Atlas, which would be similar to national floodplain mapping efforts. Kennedy has also proposed ending federally subsidized mortgages within the "flame zones."
Many firefighters and fire researchers hope these developments signal a change, and that they can get back to the job of managing forests and rangelands.
Cohen says that he got involved in the home ignitability research because he wanted to get the Forest Service and other land management agencies out of the business of protecting homes, and back into managing our wildlands. "We need to recognize the ecosystem role of fire," he stressed repeatedly. "We should be more concerned with fire not occurring as an ecological process as we are with structures burning down."
Like many fire scientists, Cohen is committed to restoring fire on the landscape -- resuming its natural role as a cleansing and regenerative force. In many forests, especially in the West, fires are needed at some regular frequency to regenerate different species, control disease and pests, and to create habitat for plants and animals. Forests, such as the ponderosa pine in the West and longleaf pine in the South, have adapted to frequent intervals of fire, and actually depend on it for continued viability. Currently, we put out 99 percent of the fires that ignite in our forests. That is done in spite of the knowledge that fire is a natural force that belongs on the land.
While scientific understanding of the role of fire has been around for decades, the public and political pressures to snuff fires out have mostly overwhelmed voices calling for long-term land management commitment. In the wake of disasters like the Esperanza Fire, voices calling for sane wildfire policy -- as well as planning and regulation in the wildland-urban interface -- are finally beginning to be heard.
