I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t need one either. I’ve been studying wildfires for more than 20 years. Fire is a part of life in the West — and becoming more so with human-caused warming. I can’t tell you when or where exactly the next wildfire disaster is going to happen, but I can tell you that many of us — tens of millions of Americans, in fact — are living with far too much wildfire risk around our homes, schools and workplaces.
Fires are different today than they were just a few decades ago. We’ve seen more extreme fires, we’ve seen highly unusual winter fires, and we’ve endured more intense nighttime burning. It’s not a coincidence: Since 2000, wildfires in the United States have gotten four times larger and three times more frequent.
And they have grown more destructive. The Marshall Fire that burned just a mile or so from my house near Boulder, Colo., destroyed more than 1,000 homes and took two lives in the last week of December 2021. This fire came on the heels of one of the driest summers and falls ever recorded along the Front Range in Colorado, and was driven by more than 100 mph winds. Heavy snow put the fire out soon after.
We are also losing the braking effect that nighttime plays in slowing wildfires. Our nights, which used to slow fires down, are getting hotter and promoting more intense fires. In the American West, there are 11 more of these “flammable nights” every year than there were 40 years ago — a spike of more than 40 percent. And in the past 18 years, we’ve seen a companion 28 percent increase in nighttime fire intensity.
And we’re living too close to the fire lands. Some 59 million homes were within a kilometer of a wildfire boundary over a two-decade period. Fires are burning 365 days a year now and there’s a lot in the way. That helps explain why firefighters, who not long ago worked mostly in summer, are fighting wildfires year-round. Moreover, we are asking fire crews to fight multiple extreme fires across the country at the same time. These crews are not resourced to do that.
I see three critical solutions: Build better, burn better and reduce the sparks.
It starts with home building. We have flood plain maps, but we don’t have maps that assess future fire risk to help set insurance costs and direct developers away from vulnerable areas. We also need better fire-focused construction codes that encourage fire-resistant materials, replace highly flammable landscaping and use roads as fire breaks. The cost of building a new fire-resistant home is about the same as building a new conventional one.
Second, we need to better use fire to fight fire. By carefully burning in cooler seasons, fire can be used as a tool to reduce the fuels that lead to more intense wildfires in warm seasons. Native Americans have managed fire with cultural burning for millennia. Today, we need much more prescribed burning to help the landscape when and where it can.
Finally, we need to admit that, when it comes to fire, we are sometimes our own worst enemy. A whopping 97 percent of ignitions that threaten our homes come from us. Debris and trash burning, yard equipment, hot exhaust pipes on the side of the road, cigarettes, electrical lines, fireworks, and other human sources cause the vast majority of sparks that burn our homes down. The single day of the year with the most human-started wildfires is the Fourth of July: Over two decades, more than 7,000 wildfires have started on this holiday, now just a few weeks away.
We live on a flammable planet. The public and government agencies need to move from an emergency and reactive mind-set about wildfire to a proactive, planning mind-set that emphasizes resilience. Data and partnerships can help: We can use satellites to give us early warning of wildfires the way we do with dangerous storms. We can use social media to better understand and manage evacuation chokepoints. We can use housing data to identify highly flammable neighborhoods.
The alternative is to simply brace ourselves. Fire is going to do the work in the landscape that it needs to do in a warming climate. If we do nothing to curb our risk, these fires will do far more than just pollute the air.
