My wife’s friend spoke of her fear.
Her home, in a pleasant development in a hilly, forested Urban Wildlife Interface Zone (UWIZ) at the edge of our town, could have burned down. One hot, early September night a wildfire roared through a park adjacent to her development. Only the rapid response of 12 regional fire departments and what one firefighter called some “good luck” kept the blaze from consuming her neighborhood.
“There was no way out,” my wife’s friend said. “There is only one road to our area, and the fire was getting close to it.”
Hearing this, I recalled witnessing the 1991 “Oakland Hills” fire which killed 25 people and destroyed 3,354 houses. In that case, the region’s fire departments had no control over the situation; only a major shift in the wind’s direction kept the blaze from being far more destructive.
As a resident of Berkeley at that time, I had a “front-row seat” during the conflagration, although I made it a point to stay away from the actual fire zone: The firefighters didn’t need an idiot gawker getting in their way.
However, I actively participated in the fire’s postmortem, spending several days hiking through the burned area after the blaze was extinguished and, with some colleagues, organizing an event called the “Phoenix Conference” to educate those who had lost their homes about rebuilding options.
By hiking, I learned something that astounded me: The fire, which mostly burned in hilly, forested UWIZs, was so hot (up to 3,000 degrees) that it not only obliterated almost every home it neared, it even baked their concrete foundations, so they crumbled if I gave them a gentle kick.
I also learned a great deal from the Phoenix Conference – which drew on the expertise of firefighters, architects, engineers and others – about making homes less vulnerable to wildfires by cutting back encroaching brush, installing metal roofs and so on.
But on reflection, my bottom-line takeaway from the conference and the fire was this: Creating UWIZs is a big mistake. (And now, as the climate in many regions becomes increasingly hotter and drier, living in UWIZs will prove a catastrophic, if not fatal mistake for thousands of people.)
Everyone wants the good life, of course. What could be better than to live in a forested setting just a few minutes from a shopping mall? What beats sipping a latte or a glass of Chardonnay on your (flammable) wood deck and listening to the birds sing in that big (flammable) tree above your head?
Developers and planning departments have been happy to accommodate these “needs” by building highly profitable (and taxable) neighborhoods in natural areas – conveniently forgetting that nature is rather fond of wildfires as a means of regenerating itself. The result is that millions of Americans now live in UWIZs, and most of them don’t know, or don’t want to think about, the danger they’re in.
And while few want to pay the taxes needed to provide fire mitigation services such as brush clearing and upgraded fire departments, there could be a bit of folk wisdom in their recalcitrant attitude: protecting an isolated dwelling from a wildfire is an endless, and often losing battle. Why not just take your chances?
While this hopeful approach to the safety of their families, possessions and properties might be all that someone who has invested his or her life’s savings in an UWIZ home can muster, a wakeup call – in the form of thinking about what’s really at stake in an out-of-control wildfire – just might save quite a few people’s bacon – from frying.
If you live in an UWIZ, you should realize that if there is a big wildfire in your area, there is only a slim chance that it can be contained. And if the fire comes your way, there is practically no chance that your home can be saved, despite any mitigation measures you might have taken. Perhaps you’ll get lucky, but your most prudent course – the subject of my next column – is to start planning just how your family and pets can escape with your most valuable possessions if a 3,000-degree blaze approaches your ecological house.
Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.
