'Too late to stop it': California's future hinges on managing megafires

[Klaralven]

A century of suppressing low-level fires has stocked forests with plenty of vegetation that sits in bone-dry soil, baked in rising heat. California is getting hotter, by an average of 3F (1.6C) over the past century, and this summer it has roasted. California’s Death Valley recorded perhaps the hottest temperature ever captured globally - 130F (54.4C) - in August, a few weeks before Los Angeles County set its own all-time record of 121F (49C). “We’re in the midst of a climate emergency,” said Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, who has clashed with Donald Trump over the president’s denial of climate science. “I’m exhausted that we have to continue to debate this issue.”

It will get worse as the planet heats up further; the only question is the degree. Scientists predict the area scorched by wildfire will increase by 77% by the end of the century, with the number of extreme fire days jumping 20% in just the next 15 years – a scenario that raises profound questions over the way life is conducted in the US west in an evolving era of megafire.

The crushing expense of major cities across California has caused a housing crisis that has collided with the state’s wildfire problem. People seeking an affordable, or more bucolic and spacious, life have moved a rash of newly built houses carved into the scrublands and pine forests of what’s known as the wildland-urban interface. As a result, it is estimated that one in four Californians now live in a high-risk fire zone.

While there are some localized rules around clearing potentially flammable vegetation from near dwellings, there are no universally applied building codes to make houses more fire resistant, nor any state plan to steer development away from fire-prone areas. Insurers, facing mounting losses, have started to retreat, although California has imposed a temporary ban on cancelling insurance for about 800,000 homes situated in riskier parts of the state.

As a result, homes continue to be built featuring classic wood shingle roofs and deckings that allow burning embers to leap from building to building. “People often have an idea of aesthetic beauty that makes things more risky,” said Paige Fischer, an environmental scientist at the University of Michigan.

Some towns have faced repeated losses to fire, leading to calls for construction to be discouraged in certain areas. “If you move to a fire-prone area, even if you don’t lose your home, you’ll spend days or weeks each summer under stress, suffering the health risks of smoke,” said Fischer. “Things have changed dramatically and the livability of fire-prone areas is coming into question.”

A more provocative option was summed up in a memorable chapter of the academic Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear, titled The Case for Letting Malibu Burn. Davis argues that the chaparral – thickets of shrubs and bushes – around the wealthy coastal enclave was always meant to periodically burn and preventing this cycle only worsens fires. His suggestion of effectively leaving Malibu to its own defence resonated in 2018, when the huge Woolsey fire swept through the region.

Ecologists have put forward a more tempered version of this, where the west learns to live with fire in a more strategic way. “We are going to have to coexist with wildfire and change the way we build and live,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s not a land management issue, it’s a problem of where and how we build our communities.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/18/california-fires-wildfires-future-housing