6/25/2006

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Protecting Homes from Wildfire: The Start of the 2006 Wildfire Season

South of Flagstaff, Arizona, homes and resorts are being evacuated as wildfires have swept up the mountains and across Oak Creek Canyon. This is scenic red-rock country, with candy-colored rock walls towering above the canyon floors. This charismatic landscape, like many other Western landscapes, has been attracting new residents, second home owners, resorts, and the businesses that support the growing residential settlement.

The US Forest Service, as expected, has deployed hundreds of fire fighters who struggle heroically in difficult terrain and suffocating heat to save people’s homes. We will watch again on our TVs the anxiety of forced evacuations and the personal tragedy of loosing one’s home and possessions.

This personal, community, and financial trauma will be used by some to argue for more logging and forest thinning as a way of “fire proofing” our forests and making them safe for human settlement. And again, our primordial collective fear of wildfire will be appealed to in attacks on those environmentalists who have opposed landscape-wide hazardous fuel reduction programs funded by commercial timber harvests.

Most of us get drawn into the strong emotions evoked by large wildfires: The awe at the raw natural power and frightening beauty of these conflagrations, the admiration of our young people who put everything on the line to protect us, and the empathy for the many who will lose most of their possession and, for a few, their lives. In that emotional context, how do we develop a rational public response to the wildfire danger to our homes?

One way to start is to ask a simple and basic question: How can we best protect our homes from wildfire? There are some simple answers to that. We should locate our homes where they are relatively safe from wildfire. Then we should build them so that they can resist ignition from wildfires. Finally we can maintain our homes and our property surrounding them so that it is harder for fire to reach them and, if it does, so that the wildfire cannot easily ignite the home. There is actually good science and engineering that tells us exactly how we can protect our homes ourselves in this way.

Of course there is another answer: We can demand that all of our fellow citizens dig into their pockets and give the US Forest Service and state governments a blank check to spend an unlimited amount of money to make places that are unsafe for homes safe and to try fruitlessly to protect highly flammable homes nestled cozily in flammable landscapes. We can spend even more money seeking to fireproof our forested landscapes even though wildfire has always played a crucial role in the development of healthy and productive forests.

In evaluating these quite different approaches, some basic principles can guide us. One is equity: Who should pay the costs associated with an individual’s decision to engage in risky behavior? Should we all collectively be responsible for those costs?

The second principle is efficiency: Is one of these approaches a cheaper way of protecting our homes? That may be a hard question to answer since very little analysis has gone into evaluating exactly how various landscape manipulations by federal and state agencies actually reduce the risk of wildfires damaging homes. Besides not knowing exactly how much the removal of trees will reduce the risk of a property-damaging wildfires, extensive thinning and logging can, in some circumstances, increase the likelihood of wildfire. The logging adds fuel on the ground, increases the penetration of sun and wind, drying out the forest floor more quickly, and opens the area to more human activity because of the network of roads that gets built, increasing the likelihood of human caused fires. Finally, in times of drought and high wind, the fact is that no forest treatment or fire control efforts will stop a wildfire. It is a natural force like a hurricane or flood or earthquake that cannot be stopped.

The truth is that even though Congress and the President have committed us to spending billions of dollars on thinning and logging, we really do not know exactly how much that effort will reduce the risk of homes being lost to wildfire. That makes an efficiency analysis of alternative approaches to protecting our homes from wildfire impossible.

The third principle is that of moral hazard: creating an incentive system that encourages people to engage in irresponsible, even destructive behavior. A government commitment to protect all homes no matter where and how they are built is a direct subsidy to residential sprawl out over natural landscapes that are dangerous for human habitation. Homes are built up narrow forested canyons. They creep up steep forested mountainsides. They are built in scrublands and grasslands that regularly burn in uncontrollable ways. This is not necessarily an appeal for the government to get involved in permitting every home. Rather it is an appeal for the government to stop subsidizing and enabling dangerous behavior for which all of the rest of us and the natural landscape have to pay. To encourage responsible behavior we individually have to be held accountable for the risk-taking decisions we make.

As wildfires roar down on beautiful homes and families flee for their lives while young people bravely face down the fire, it is hard to be analytical and rational. But if we cannot bring ourselves to demand exactly this type of hardnosed analysis, we are doing nothing to either protect our homes or our spectacular Western landscapes.