So what is the answer? I see you kind of rolling your eyes.
I really think local governments are the key. States can do a lot to force local governments to act, but states themselves can only take limited steps. Since the local governments are also the ones often saddled with the costs of wildfire, that’s an easy match. This is a layer of government that is facing the costs now and is therefore incentivized to create solutions. They run up against problems like, “If we close the wildland-urban interface from building, we’ve just reduced our tax base. We’ve just reduced the availability of private property in our town.” And no local government wants to do that. So it’s not easy.
Insurance companies are also key to this story, and we’re starting to see some real action on that in the West. We’re starting to see home insurance companies require their policy holders in risk areas to complete defensible space work around their homes. We’re starting to see policies with disclosure requirements across the West, so that if you are moving there and don’t know you’re moving into a risk zone, there’s mandatory disclosure. Those will help. I think the combination of home insurance action and local government steps are likely the location of solutions.
[Note: Insurance companies have have also been canceling an increasing number of homeowner policies in California’s wildfire-prone areas, with more expensive, less comprehensive policies as the alternative.]
After the devastating wine country fires a couple of years ago, that swept through dense urban areas in Santa Rosa, we saw residents go right back in and build in the same place. And the local politicians were very reluctant to say they couldn’t.
Well, I think that’s tricky. You’ve seen this for a long time across the West, which is part of why I’m a little distrustful of these risk maps. I think they lead to a false sense of safety for people whose homes are marked safe.
And, in fact, we know the fires are behaving in unprecedented ways so we can’t adequately predict the future. And we’re also seeing some really unexpected bottlenecks for progress. For example, one thing we kept coming up against in Colorado was homeowner associations that required certain building materials be used on their properties. Fire-resistant materials, for example, were forbidden in some of these homeowner associations.
For aesthetic reasons?
Exactly. So, they’re trying to create a style for all the homes in a community. And when those decisions were made decades ago, nobody was thinking about fire risk. We can do a lot with building materials, with requiring flame-resistant roof tiles for example, removing barriers to the adoption of those types of materials.
Local governments can do a lot to think about ways to get in and out of high-risk neighborhoods for emergency vehicles so that fires don’t become as catastrophic as we’ve seen and can be more easily tackled.
That was a huge factor in the Camp Fire, which leveled the entire city of Paradise in Butte County in 2018.
It’s a huge factor in many communities. Part of living up in the woods is that you live on these long, windy roads, and there’s only one road to get to you. So it’s also a transportation and road-network issue.
We have a lot of opportunities, I think, especially in the West since so much of it is not yet developed, to redefine the way we develop those areas, redefine the way we build in those areas, all within the framework of reducing risk from wildfire.
