ShareThisA federal program intended to reduce wildfire risks in the West has been largely ineffective because fuel-reduction efforts seldom hit areas near homes and businesses, according to a new study.
Although the National Fire Plan calls for a focus on reducing combustible materials around the "wild land-urban interface" -- areas where buildings and other development are close to forests and rangelands -- researchers found that only 11 percent of fuel-reduction activities took place within about a mile and a half of such zones.
The team, led by Tania Schoennagel, a research scientist in the geography department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, analyzed 44,000 federally funded wildfire-mitigation projects carried out in 11 Western states between 2004 and 2008.
Those states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
The report was published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most of the land treated, 62 percent, was at least six miles from any major structures.
Yet a 2006 report prepared by federal officials and representatives of Western governors to guide future efforts of the fuel-removal program noted that federal land-management agencies were devoting more than 60 percent of their budgets for the program on projects within the land-urban interface.
Projects to reduce fuel available to wildfires use a number of tools, from thinning and removing brush to controlled burning to chemical treatment and grazing.
Schoennagel and colleagues from the University of Montana and Colorado State University said the main reason that federal projects rarely get close to high-risk zones is that 71 percent of the land is privately owed, with the federal government controlling just 17 percent and the rest managed by state or local governments or Native American tribes.
"This suggests that there needs to be a significant shift in fire-policy emphasis from federal to private lands" if protecting people and homes remains a primary goal, the researchers said. Experts say eliminating brush and outbuildings from a zone 100 feet around a private home is the most effective way to keep it from being destroyed by a wildfire.
Between 2002 and 2006, wildfires claimed more than 10,000 homes in the United States. In four of the five years ending in 2008, wildfires have consumed more than 8 million acres a year, and the total area burned in each of those years was greater than during any year between 1960 and 2004, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
The center reports that, as of June 5, there had already been nearly 44,000 wildfires that have burned in excess of 1.5 million acres in the United States this year. More people and homes are at risk from wildfires because more people are living in or near scenic wild lands. Other researchers have found that the number of housing units located near forest or rangeland increased by 68 percent between 1990 and 2000.
Along with more people, climate experts note that predicted higher temperatures, reduced snow pack and more severe weather events generally put the West and other fire-prone regions of the United States at higher risk.
Schoennagel and her team noted that other researchers have found that much of the homebuilding in the West is in forests and shrub lands on higher ground, where fires are likely to be harder to control and more severe, often driven by severe weather.
"These forests do not burn often because they generally are cooler and moister than low-elevation forests, but when they do burn, they burn hot and fast,'' Schoennagel said.
The study also suggests that fire-mitigation strategies put more emphasis on building and maintaining fire-resistant buildings, restricting building close to fire-prone wild lands and more cooperation between private and public landowners in curbing available fuel -- an approach federal agencies say they are already trying to implement more widely in future projects.
On the Net: http://www.pnas.org
(Contact Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com)
Policies to Promote Fire Prevention Practices
Most of us are subsidizing the fire insurance costs of those people building and living in these high risk fire zones. Every time the insurance companies take a hit from major wild fires all out rates go up, not just those in the high risk areas.
I think market forces could alleviate a large part of the problem if the wild fire zone home owners fully funded their insurance, mortgagors required adequate/additional insurance (similar to the flood insurance requirements but based on fire risk and individual owner land clearance history), and high fire risk building code and land clearance codes were created and strictly enforced.
There is usually a good reason that some houses remained unscathed while neighboring houses were destroyed.