Many of us live in neighborhoods designed to retain some natural surroundings. These patches of trees, grasslands, and scrub can beautify the area and keep us feeling closer to nature, but global warming is quickly turning many of them into hazards. The US Fire Administration tells us that
More than 60,000 communities lie in what is called the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and their risks of wildfire are growing..
Between 2002 and 2016, an average of over 3,000 structures per year were lost to WUI fires in the United States. Many more were closely threatened.
The WUI area continues to grow by approximately 2 million acres per year.
Urban fires in towns that were deemed safe, like Lahaina in Hawaii and Gatlinburg in Tennessee, force evacuations, destroy homes and, once started, overpower any attempts to slow or dampen them. Surprisingly, many communities - and even their fire departments - are completely unaware of this fast-growing danger.
What protective actions look like
Walk down a few streets. That house over there, for instance. It’s different from the others on this street. The leaves and twigs have been raked off the lawn for a very important reason other than tidiness. There’s no brush or tufts of dry grass, and no low-growing plants within 30 feet of the house. Also no pine needles or leaves on the roof to fuel wind-blown embers. All this for their own wildfire safety.
But home-by-home measures are not very useful if the rest of the neighborhood remains at risk. To actually get safer, we’d be seeing fire crews with bulldozers and hand tools cutting fuel breaks around an endangered neighborhood. They’d remove trees, brush and low-hanging limbs to create a buffer space around houses and structures. They’d be applying herbicide to invasive grasses that are a particularly potent wildfire fuel. And they’d be cutting back vegetation along critical access roads - not for looks but to both prevent a high-speed wind-blown conflagration from moving along those corridors and to make them safe as evacuation routes.
Unfortunately all the work and equipment needed to reduce the risk of a fire infiltrating our community takes time and money.
Funding
Fortunately there are huge amounts of money that can be quickly available for protecting communities from wildfires. The problem is sorting out the patchwork of sources. Everybody want to get in on the act.
The U.S. Fire Administration’s Wildfire and the Wildland Urban Interface program.
The U.S. Department of Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Fire Management Program
and more
Some of these offer grant money, some offer help applying for the grant money, and some consult about what protections are needed. Most of the grant money is authorized through the Federal Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act - by the billions! But, of course, most of these programs are on the chopping block of an incoming GOP President or Congress.
What we can do
Just like most other climate adaptations, individuals and small groups, by taking simple actions, can initiate and help create a fire-adapted community.
Find examples. Collect stories about fire damage to other neighborhoods in our area and about the steps other communities are taking to protect themselves.
Get the planning started. No funding is available if we don’t have an approved Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Assistance is readily available for drafting one.
Help start a Firewise USA Recognition site with a wildfire action plan and local education programs. Aimed at family safety as much as community preparedness, it’s a simple way to raise awareness and create some protection close to home.
Look for funding. Often the federal grants and services are administered locally and the place to start looking may be our own state Departments of Natural Resources. We can lobby and educate our town officials about the needs and opportunities, but It’s not just towns that can apply. Homeowners associations, local fire districts, nonprofits or county governments are also eligible and could lead a movement of other organizations around them
Know the danger season. In Washington, wildfire season begins in early July and ends in early October. Kentucky, on the other hand, has two fire seasons, one in the spring (mid-February through April ) and one in the fall (October through mid-December). Also know the wind direction. Many residential wildfires are started by embers blowing from a bigger wildfire up to a mile away.
Towns that have been safe from wildfires since their founding are suddenly at risk, thanks to climate change. The sooner their residents understand this and take protective action the more that risk can be lowered.
See Firewise Landscaping for tips.
Here’s a partial list of communities that are at high risk from wildfires