Costs prompt officials to rethink land use
By Brad Heath
USA TODAY
Copyright 2007 Gannett Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are moving to neighborhoods in the West repeatedly scorched by wildfires that now threaten to burn more often and with greater intensity.
Since 2000, roughly 450,000 people -- enough to populate a city the size of Atlanta -- moved to Western areas endangered by wildfires, a USA TODAY analysis shows. About 3.5 million people now inhabit those places, dotted through forests and scrub-covered mountain slopes from California to Colorado.
Many settle there to live in scenic settings, or because of the outward expansion of Western metropolises. A fire sparked on a dry and windy day could grow rapidly to catastrophic proportions, the analysis shows.
Several fires already are raging this week: One savaged a park in Los Angeles before firefighters brought it under control.
The rapid movement to fire-prone areas propelled the federal government’s cost for battling wildfires to nearly $2 billion last year. It threatens to drive up insurance rates. Allstate will stop writing new policies in California starting July. It also has Western cities and counties rethinking how and where people should build homes, and in extreme cases, it puts more homeowners and firefighters in danger.
“This is a lesson that’s been learned in the blood of our firefighters for many years,” says Tom Harbour, the head of firefighting for the U.S. Forest Service. “We need to be telling people ... that just because you built something here, we’re not going to die for it.”
Wildfires scorched a record 10 million acres nationwide last year, and the federal government predicts this will be another bad year. The years ahead could be worse: Climate studies suggest even warmer and drier weather could turn Western forests clogged with dead and dying trees to tinder, ideal conditions for fire.
The growth is most pronounced in the brittle hills of Southern California, near Riverside and San Bernardino, where 240,000 people settled in fire-prone areas since 2000. The growth is also playing out along Nevada’s eastern Sierra slopes, where the at-risk population grew by nearly 14,000; outside Boise; and at the fast-growing fringes of metropolitan Phoenix.
“Some things are a once-in-a-lifetime event where you can say it’s an act of God or nature,” says Kate Dargan, the state fire marshal in California, which will start enforcing some of the nation’s toughest wildfire building codes next year. “Wildfires happen every year.”
The population in high-fire areas grew 15%, faster than the West as a whole. “Smart growth means not building in high-fire-risk zones,” says Dan Silver, president of the Endangered Habitats League. “That’s stupid growth, and everyone pays the price for it.”