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Category Archives: Wildfire

Climate Change, Insurance, and the LA Fires

By | | Wildfire
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Scientific American blames the Los Angeles fires on climate change. A Yale University publication agrees. An article in Quartz predicts that climate change is going to make housing “uninsurable.” Instead of insurance, a New York Times op-ed by a former California insurance commissioner argues that oil companies should be forced to pay for fire damages.

The Palisades Fire on the evening of January 7. Photo by Toastt21.

It’s a neat argument that appeals to homeowners eager to blame the loss of their houses on anything other than their own decisions to buy or build flammable homes with flammable landscaping in a fireplain. Yet there are valid reasons to believe that climate change is not the issue, and that even if climate change is occurring, it won’t make homes uninsurable. In fact, people who believe climate change is the problem should be all the more interested in making sure that homes and landscaping are fireproof. Continue reading →

Will LA Finally Learn Its Lesson?

By | | Wildfire
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It was the worst wildland-urban fire in California history up to that point. Hundreds of homes were incinerated despite every firefighter in Los Angeles being called up in an unsuccessful effort to fight the Santa Ana winds. Hydrants ran out of water as 50-mph “devil winds” drove fires fueled by “the fastest burning ground cover in the western hemisphere” across major highways that would normally provide sufficient fuel breaks. Famous movie stars, writers, and composers lost their homes and a former vice president of the United States was photographed spraying water from a garden hose on the cedar shake roof of his rented house to protect it from the flames.

Other than a ban on wooden roofs, little has changed since the Los Angeles Fire Department made this film after the Bel Air Fire of 1961.

Just two years before this fire, the National Fire Protection Association had studied Los Angeles and declared (according to the above film) that “combustible-roofed houses closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads” was a “design for disaster.” They were ignored, but the 1961 Bel Air Fire, which burned 6,000 acres and 484 homes, was something of a wake-up call. After the Los Angeles Fire Department made the above film, the city banned wood-shingled roofs and required some landowners to clear their properties of brush. Continue reading →

Smart Growth Burns Thousands of Homes

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Los Angeles city and regional planners are just as responsible for the Palisades, Eaton, and other fires that have burned in the past few days as if they had poured gasoline on the homes and lit the matches. The destruction of these homes, including, for what it is worth, homes owned by Jeff Bridges, Billy Crystal, and Paris Hilton, among other celebrities, is a direct result of so-called “smart-growth” policies that call for establishing greenbelts around cities and packing people in high-density housing within those cities.

Pacific Palisades is on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains, most of which have been locked up from development in various regional parks, including 72,000 acres protected by the Santa Monica Conservancy, 157,700 acres in the Santa Monica National Recreation Area, and various smaller parks. These have severely limited the amount of land available for housing and other developments, driving up housing prices. Continue reading →

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By | | Wildfire
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The Antiplanner’s exurban area has been filled with smoke the last few days as winds have blown soot from wildfires in western Oregon towards central Oregon. As bad as the air has been here, it usually wasn’t as bad as it was in New York City a couple of months ago due to fires in Canada.

Smoke obscures the sun from New York’s Long Island in June 2023. Photo by Don Sutherland.

Canada has seen more land burn so far this year — more than 34 million acres as of August 18 — than any full year in its history: the previous record was 17.5 million acres for all of 1995. The Maui fires, of course, have had unprecedented impacts, with at least 115 known dead to date and more than 1,000 missing. Many are blaming these fires on or saying they are evidence of human-caused climate change. Continue reading →

Pouring Fuel on the Fire

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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The Forest Service today seems to believe that its main mission is to reduce hazardous fuels. The agency was spending close to half a billion dollars a year on this program, an amount that was doubled by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Yet there is a huge debate among fire ecologists over whether this program makes any sense.

Would any amount of prescribed burning prevented this 2020 fire from burning thousands of acres?

The latest volley in this debate was published earlier this week in a peer-reviewed journal called Fire. Representing those who disagree with the Forest Service’s fire policy, the paper charges that supporters of the policy have deliberately overlooked evidence that it won’t work. Continue reading →

Land-Use Planning in a Fire Plain

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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Fed by high winds, a wildfire about 50 miles from Antiplanner headquarters in Camp Sherman blew up on Sunday, burning 34,000 acres in a few hours. Meanwhile, Oregon’s Land Conservation & Development Commission (LCDC) is seeking comments on a report it has prepared on “wildfire adapted communities.”

Click image to download a copy of this report (2.9-MB).

The report says little about density other than to suggest that structures be clustered “in areas of lowest risk.” Since the only places in Oregon that are naturally at low risk of wildfire are underwater, this suggests that no “clustering” of development makes sense. Continue reading →

Spending More, Getting Less

By | | Wildfire
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Forest Service Chief Randy Moore have announced a new strategy to fix the nation’s wildfire crisis. Not surprisingly, the most important part of that strategy is to give them a lot more money.

Click image to download a 34.0-MB PDF of this report.

The Forest Service plan, if it could be called that, consists of two simple steps: 1. Give them enough money to do 5 million additional acres of hazardous fuel treatments a year for ten years. 2. By the time that ten years is up, they promise to write another plan for the next ten years. Continue reading →

Boulder’s Open Space and the Marshall Fire

By | | Policy brief, Regional planning, Wildfire
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At 11 am on December 30, 2021, a small fire was reported near the intersection of state highway 93 and Marshall Road in Boulder County, Colorado. Though driven by high winds, it took a full hour for the fire to creep across three miles of grasslands to the town of Superior, where it proceeded to burn 533 homes to the ground. It also crossed U.S. 36 into the city of Louisville where it burned another 332 homes, as well as 106 homes in unincorporated areas outside the two cities. In addition to killing at least one and possibly three people, the fire also destroyed about 100 other structures, including a hotel, and damaged 150 or so more. In all, it burned more than 6,000 acres in 30 or so hours before snowfall the evening of December 31 put it out.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

As it happens, I had given a presentation on wildfire to the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank, just two months before the fire. The presentation noted that state and local land-use regulations that require compact development make cities more vulnerable to fire. The Tubbs fire in 2017 destroyed nearly 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa, California and nearby communities while the Camp Fire in 2018 destroyed more than 14,000 homes in Paradise, California and nearby communities. Continue reading →

The Truth About Western Wildfire

By | | Policy brief, Wildfire
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According to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s latest situation report, nearly 40 major fires are still burning across the United States, but the report notes that more than half “are being managed with a strategy other than full suppression.” Generally, such fires are on federal or state land and the agencies are allowing the fires to burn while taking care that they don’t damage structures or trespass onto private property. In most parts of the country, the 2021 fire season is over.

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Despite shrill reports, 2021 was an ordinary fire year, burning about 94 percent as many acres as the previous 10-year average. Based on situation report archives, fires have burned well over the average number of acres in northern California, the northern Rockies, and the East, well under the average in Alaska, the central Rockies, the Great Basin, and the South, and about the average in the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, and the Southwest. Continue reading →

The Usual Misinformation

By | | Wildfire
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It’s fire season again, and so we are treated to various horror stories such as gridlock as people tried to evacuate South Lake Tahoe (though they all got out by 4 pm). These stories are followed by the usual misinformation that is spread around about wildfire.

Firefighters attempted to hold the line on the Dixie Fire in this July 29 photo, but since the photo was taken the fire has grown by more than 20 times. Forest Service photo.

“Wildfires in 2021 are breaking records,” says one report. However, in the United States, only 4.9 million acres have burned so far this year, which is 14 percent less than the last ten-year average of 5.6 million acres through this date. Continue reading →