All Is Not Well In the Wildland Urban Interface

I have been spending the last few days staring at maps and thinking about communities. While communities are places to raise families, meet friends, work and create connections, in the eyes of those who exist in the world of wildland fire they are most often defined by a single question. Are they at risk?

Wildland fire, fire outside the confines of brick and mortar buildings, can certainly be a hostile environment to outsiders. It is filled with jargon that can be far from inviting for anyone who doesn’t know their FMO, how to find their PPE, or just exactly what an IC does. The important thing to know about wildland fire is that those who spend their careers managing fires when they do occur spend a lot of time thinking about one inconvenient acronym, WUI.

Simply put, wildland urban interface, wui for short, is any area where houses are next to a significant amount of plant life that has the habit of catching on fire. While the wildfires that make the news generally give the impression that it is only a problem in the Western part of the country. A quick look at the 2010 data on communities at risk, CAR for those inclined to brevity, from wildfire shows that it is largely a national problem.

States in the southeast actually have the largest number of communities at risk from wildfire. The list of these communities and ones doing something about that risk is compiled every year by the National Association of State Foresters. A map from their 2012 report is below.

While not every number on this map is important what is important is the big picture. The number of towns that need to do something to reduce wildfire risk is around 72,000 nationwide with only about 20% having a plan, commonly called a community wildfire protection plan, to take steps to lower their risk. Of those, about 4,000 are actually considered at reduced risk because of the steps they have taken to reduce vegetation and protect homes.

Consider, the federal government ran out of its budget for fire fighting in both 2012 and 2013. In 2013 alone, according to the Washington Post, over $967 million was spent fighting wildfires. When the budget for fighting the fires was over topped funds had to come from somewhere and at least last year that somewhere included funds aimed at reducing the risk of wildfire to communities before it starts.

While it seems like the problem of such proportions could not possibly get worse, there are signs it just might. I mentioned earlier how most of the communities as risk were in the southeastern United States. This will likely be true for the foreseeable future. But, the greatest potential for future communities at risk from wildfire is in the west. Drawing a line of western states from Montana to New Mexico and west to the coast finds that areas of private land next to forested public land are largely undeveloped at present. According to a recent study. the two states with the least amount of future WUI, Colorado and Washington, still have 80% and 70% of these lands without development. While resources in both firefighting and prevention seem stretched now, a future where even a modest 10% rise in houses on these lands across the west could constitute a doubling or more of the current at risk areas and undoubtedly more costs at both the state and federal level.

Cristi Turner at High Country News covered an unusual even in the world of wildland firefighting, Wildfire gurus from the western states got together to come up with solutions now to prevent the problem of wildland sprawl before it gets worse. Here are a few of their ideas as reported:

• Fire risk mapping and mandatory notice. The federal government would create and maintain detailed fire risk maps of the entire WUI, as is already done for floodplains. Potential property buyers would be notified of the risk level where they intend to build or move, and agree to certain requirements – such as fireproof building materials or signing a contract acknowledging that in the event of a fire, firefighters wouldn’t be sent in.
• Development plans that include standardized wildfire risk ratings. In other words, the integration of Community Wildfire Protection Plans into local development plans, rather than only applying them to existing structures.
• Federal assistance based on fire-risk planning. Many rural counties currently depend on “payment in lieu of taxes” from the federal government, money they receive to compensate for their nontaxable federal lands, with no strings attached. Those payments would be withheld if counties don’t complete comprehensive development plans that take wildfire risk into account.
• Denial of loans for houses in high-risk wildfire zones. This is another case where floodplains legislation has set a precedent: no borrowing money to build in the most dangerous places.
• Putting the costs on local communities. Currently, when a fire gets too big for local government to handle, the feds – read: federal taxpayers – step in and foot the bill. Fighting wildfire accounts for nearly half of the U.S. Forest Service budget, and national wildfire fighting costs have averaged $1.8 billion annually since 2008. If communities had to pay their portion of the astronomical bill, they would have an incentive to implement policies to keep costs manageable.
• Full-cost accounting of wildfires. Shift the conversation around the cost of wildfires to show the full scale of federal taxpayer dollars spent, rather than keeping it fragmented into how much each agency spends in the event of a fire. Disrupted economies, lives lost and everything in between would be pinned to local government. Portions of that full-cost figure are already accounted for – like annual economic losses from wildfires have averaged $1.3 billion since 2000, almost five times the annual average of the 1980s.
• Tiered homeowner insurance rates. The more mitigation a homeowner does on their own dime – like thinning trees, removing underbrush, building with fireproof materials and installing sprinklers – the lower the cost of their insurance. The less mitigation, the higher insurance would cost – or, they would have no access to insurance at all.
• Other existing zoning tools. Numerous urban planning tools already exist that could enable authorities to implement fire-risk planning for the 84 percent. Cluster zoning places buildings in close proximity while maximizing open space, performance zoning controls the intensity of land use, and transferable development rights allow for building rights to move from a place where development is discouraged or prohibited to a zone where it is encouraged. But currently, these development tools are generally not applied with wildfire risk in mind.
• Standardized, robust data collection. Surprisingly, there is no mandated, centralized public data collection around wildfire – a gap that agencies and groups like Headwaters fill piecemeal. This is particularly controversial in terms of tracking wildfire-related deaths; nobody can seem to agree on a single data set.

Many challenges lie ahead for the way in which wildfires are fought across the country. Not least of which includes the questions involving where people choose to build homes and call home and how wildland firefighters choose to fight the fires that do occur in these landscapes. As they say, the times they are a-changin.