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Category Archives: Wildfire

Shelter in Place Works! The Real Answer to Fire

By | | Follow up, Wildfire
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This morning’s post on fire mentioned “shelter in place,” in which homes are made sufficiently firewise that people can safely remain in the homes during a firestorm. Five neighborhoods in the San Diego area were approved as shelter-in-place communities. The fires touched those neighborhoods, but not a single home was scorched.

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Heck of a Job, Smokey!

By | | Wildfire
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A couple of weeks ago, the Secretary of Agriculture proudly gave the Chief of the Forest Service an award for “exemplary leadership and accomplishment in reducing the risk of catastrophic fire to both the wildland and Wildland Urban Interface areas through the U.S. Forest Service Hazardous Fuels Program supporting the President’s Healthy Forests Initiative.”

This award would be pathetic if only because the Secretary gave it to the only agency in the Department of Agriculture that could be considered eligible for such an award. But it is particularly ironic in view of the forest fires that are now burning hundreds of homes in southern California.

Just why does the Forest Service deserve such an award? So far in 2007, more than 8.2 million acres have burned — and counting. That’s is almost twice the average number of acres burned in the last 40 years.

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Stay and Defend Better Than Hasty Evacuation

By | | Wildfire
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The GW Fire is threatening the extremely upscale Black Butte Resort, and all residents of the resort area have been told to evacuate. Although the fire so far has burned less than 10,000 acres, the Forest Service has spent well over $2 million trying to put it out, or at least to defend Black Butte.

Smoke from the GW Fire almost completely obscured Black Butte in the right background.
Flickr photo by Mizinformation.

There is a better way. Instead of putting the burden of protecting homes on the Forest Service and state firefighters, homeowners should defend their own homes. This “stay and defend” policy has been adopted in much of Australia, and a few U.S. fire departments are beginning to experiment with it as well.

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The Insurance Solution to Wildfire

By | | Wildfire
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The Forest Service’s biggest excuse for spending billions of dollars a year on fire suppression is that there are an increasing number of homes in the “wildland-urban interface” (abbreviated WUI and pronounced “wooeee”) and these homes need protection. I’ve always said that this is a matter between the homeowners and their insurance companies.

The Castle Rock Fire casts an eerie glow at sunset as seen from Ketchum, Idaho.
Flickr photo by kajo55

Now, an insurer named AIG has stepped up to deal with the problem. A national forest fire in Idaho has burned 22 square miles and threatens to burn some valuable homes covered by AIG near Sun Valley. AIG’s solution? Hire a fire truck to defend the homes from the fire.
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150 Years of Mismanagement? Or Seven Years of Misplaced Priorities?

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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When I drafted yesterday’s post about the Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe, I almost included speculation that local rules might have prevented residents from making their homes firesafe by removing the vegetation from around their homes. But I took it out before posting — this, after all, was a high-fire-risk area. Nobody could be that stupid.

Fighting the Angora Fire.
Flickr photo by joyseph.

It turns out you rarely lose by underestimating the intelligence of government planners. Local residents say that rules issued by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a federally chartered group, prevented them from making their homes firewise. One local resident says that he cut trees and shrubs in violation of those rules, and his house survived while his neighbors did not. Of course, the agency denies that the burned homes are its fault.

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Will Anyone Learn the Lessons from the Tahoe Fire?

By | | News commentary, Public lands, Wildfire
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At the risk of premature judgment, it appears the Angora fire that destroyed hundreds of Lake Tahoe homes will provide a classic example of what is wrong with federal wildland fire policy. As of Tuesday evening, the fire has burned more than 3,000 acres, and managed to destroy more than 200 homes and scores of other structures. (Get the latest official report here.)

The Angora Fire on Sunday.
Flickr photo by Steve Wilhelm.

As those who have read my most recent fire paper know, the standard story is that a century of fire suppression has led to a build-up of fuels in the forests. The standard solution is to allow the Forest Service and other agencies to spend close to half a billion dollars a year on fuel treatments.

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The Market Works

By | | Follow up, News commentary, Wildfire
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In my previous post on wildfire, D4P argued that government should require the use of nonflammable roofs and other firesafe practices on homes near wildfire-prone lands. I responded that this should be left to insurance companies.

It looks like the insurance companies are taking care of the problem. “Spooked by devastating wildfire seasons, the nation’s top insurers are inspecting homes in high-risk areas throughout the West and threatening to cancel coverage if owners don’t clear brush or take other precautions,” says the Associated Press.

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What is changing? Katrina, 9-11, and other disasters have forced the insurance industry to sharpen its pencils and insist that people make more effort to reduce risks.

Measure 37 and Forest Fire

By | | Regional planning, Wildfire
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“No one should be permitted to construct homes in the ‘fire plain’ any more than we permit home construction in a flood plain,” says my friend, George Wuerthner. Wuerthner recently edited a book on wildfire policy which included a contribution by me about wildfire budgets.

Now Wuerthner contributes an op ed to the Eugene Register-Guard arguing that “measure 37 exacerbates fire hazards” because it allows people to build homes on their own land in places where Oregon’s land-use laws had previously forbidden such construction.

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Fire Season Begins: New Cato Paper

By | | Wildfire
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Wildfire season has begun with nearly half a million acres burned so far this year, mostly in the South. And so it is time for the armchair generals to pontificate on problems with U.S. fire policy and how those problems can be fixed.

When it comes to the Forest Service, few have as much experience at armchair generaling as me, so it is timely that the Cato Institute should publish my paper on wildfire, The Perfect Firestorm. The paper shows that Forest Service fire expenditures are growing out of control, having increased by 450 percent in the last 15 years.

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Rail/Fire Plan Not Followed

By | | Transportation, Wildfire
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Here’s an interesting congruence of two of my favorite topics: fire and rail transit. Albuquerque’s new commuter train was running by the Islete Pueblo, which was doing a prescribed burn of some of its grassland. The railroad tracks formed one of the borders of the fire, and passengers reported they could feel the heat of the flames as the train passed by.

Apparently, fire plans required that fire managers notify the railroad before doing prescribed burning, but they failed to do so. As New Orleans learned, plans aren’t much good if you don’t carry them out.
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Don’t forget to watch the hot video of the train going by the fire.