Removing vegetation and building with fire-resistant materials is the best insurance a homeowner can have. Photo © Andy Stahl
“Run or hide?” That’s the choice I’ll face when wildfire visits my rural, forested valley. A lightning–struck tree a half–mile up the road from our farm reminds me that wildfire is only one act of Nature—or careless person—away. When, not if, a wildfire arrives, I’ve chosen to stay put and ride it out.
My choice is neither courageous nor foolhardy. It’s a thoughtful decision that thousands of other backwoods residents are realizing is their best option, too. City leadership in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a mountain community tucked into highly flammable pine forests, has decided that its residents will “shelter in place” when the next wildfire strikes. At least six communities in the San Diego area have been designed for residents to shelter in their homes rather than evacuate with a wildfire hot on their heels. And sheltering is a whole lot safer than panic–driven evacuation. Many of the sixteen civilians who died in the 2003 San Diego fires did so while evacuating. No one who sheltered in a defensible home perished.
Many Australians have chosen to “prepare, stay and defend” their homes if wildfire threatens. Research in Tasmania has shown that evacuated houses are three times more likely to burn in a wildfire than houses whose residents remain to defend them.
U.S. Forest Service fire scientist Jack Cohen’s North American studies show that most houses burn hours after the wildfire flame front has passed by, as a result of embers or firebrands thrown by fires onto vulnerable wooden decks or roofs. These small ignitions can be readily extinguished by a homeowner armed with a garden hose or wet burlap sack.
Shelter in place is an ecologically pragmatic approach to Nature’s vicissitudes. Regardless of whether wildfire is “good” or “bad” for the environment, it is inevitable. As the hundredth anniversary of the Big Blowup of 1910—the event which is widely believed to mark the beginning of modern America’s war against wildfire—approaches, it is clear to anyone who has been paying attention that the war is not only fruitless, but self–defeating. The more we try to suppress fire from our landscape, the more widespread and intense the fire insurgency becomes.
To prepare for wildfire, I copied what people have been doing for 10,000 years in North America: I created defensible space around my home. American Indians used fire to burn away flammable vegetation around their settlements. I use the internal fire of a lawn mower to keep grass and brush at bay. A metal roof, concrete “hardiplank” siding, covered gutters and double–glazed windows make it less likely that my house will succumb to the initial fire front. After watching the fire go by, I’ll saunter out onto the porch, prepared to stamp out any stray embers.
There was a time, not that long ago, when citizen militias of volunteers were our nation’s firefighters. Paid fire departments were not organized until the mid–nineteenth century, and then only in urban areas. The rural West, where I live, still relies upon fire departments staffed primarily by volunteers. Through fire–sensible home design, landscape maintenance and the common sense to shelter and not run from fire, I’ll make sure that no firefighter has to make the ultimate sacrifice just to save my insured real estate.