Five hot tips for homeowners on the edge - includes related article - Burning Issues

American Forests, May-June, 1993 by Herbert E. McLean

If you live in the "wildfire interface," you have to protect your investment. Here's how.

Near Rogue River, Oregon, Guy Ramsey vividly remembers last summer's $8 million East Evans Creek fire. "A fireball exploded ... from tree to tree. The last thing I did was open my house and take one more look, and say goodbye."

Near Bend, Oregon, on another wildfire, Sheriff Darrell Davidson remembers facing off with "ranks of angry homeowners" at a roadblock as some of their homes burned.

"I barely got my ___ out of there," recounts a survivor of Colorado's 1989 Black Tiger fire, which took 44 homes. "I cried like a baby when I got to the end of the road."

These fire events, and the trauma they caused, occurred at the most critical pressure point in today's wildfire battleground, the so-called urban-forest (or urban-rural) interface, where home meets wildland. I call it the "wildfire interface."

Here in the woods--or on sprawling grasslands as around Spokane, Washington, where 92 simultaneous, wind-whipped wildfires burned 114 homes in 1991--humankind and nature come clashing.

Often located close to our western national close to our western national forests, and just as often tree-hidden in the mode of Thoreau's Walden, these interface homes now number in the hundreds of thousands.

The California Department of Forestry estimates that 1.5 million homes are in the wildfire interface--not including any within city limits, as in fire-ravaged Oakland. Oregon's Department of Forestry, a leader in pinpointing wildfire-sensitive areas, estimates that 187,000 homes "are at risk of wildfire destruction."

Paradoxically, these places in paradise can instantly be transformed into eloquent, charred statements of our ignorance about nature--particularly about the behavior of fire, which has burned naturally over the West for millennia. Conversely, these same homes can ignite major forest fires, as when weekenders head home without extinguishing their barbecue coals.

The shakes and shingles we pile on our abodes? During fire events, nature treats them as kindling.

The dense, cooling trees close around our places? Fire treats them as a welcome mat leading directly to our homes.

Our narrow, sylvan driveways? Suddenly they're a natural, oxygen-high route for fire to follow--and a sure turnoff to firefighters.

Sadly for those seeking paradise in the forest, the wildfire interface is fast becoming a philosophical thicket of hotly debated ideas:

* "Paradise on earth" suddenly becoming a scene of destruction and possibly death.

* Loving trees and wanting to protect the environment vs. removing some of them to protect the home and to survive.

* During a wildfire evacuation, the clashing attitudes of residents who shout, "I'm staying right here!" and sheriff's deputies who yell, "Get out now!"

Three years after one such interface fire, the trauma continues for some residents of Oregon's Sunrise Village near Bend, where 10 homes burned to the ground in 1990. Their president, Mary Zimmerman, speaks of "spared" and "not spared" residents, of the "burned" and the "unburned," of those in the neighborhood "who understand" and those "who don't."

Some home builders and homeowners' groups are major players opposing legislation requiring home protection, proper building materials, and "defensive landscaping," as Washington State found recently.

The guru-apparent in figuring some of this out sociologically is Dr. Ron Hodgson of Chico State University in California. His excellent organizational model for Community Emergency Response Teams is already proving effective in connecting fire-incident managers and local residents during and following a fire event. And his recent paper, "Using Leverage to Promote Landscaping for Wildfire Defense," speaks for itself.

Fortunately, people living in the wildfire interface can, if they know where to look, acquire the know-how to substantially increase their chances of saving their tails and their homes. My visits to a dozen wildfire scenes over the past six years confirm undeniably that residents who have fireproof or fire-resistant roofing, who provide defensive space around their homes, who move their woodpiles and other flammables off the porch, and who provide open, fuel-free access for fire equipment have bought an insurance policy no company could match. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't have spent several thousand dollars to replace our cedar-shake roof with an attractive steel one here on Orcas Island, Washington.

Distilling information from a major research effort throughout the West, and drawing on recent experience with our own neighborhood fire-protection program, here are five cutting-edge tips for protecting your home:

1. COMING UP TO SPEED

The National Fire Protection Association, the U.S. Forest Service, and state forestry departments have piles of excellent printed materials and videos on wildfire-interface home protection.

Some of these organizations, like Washington State's Department of Natural Resources, take their education on the road with wildfire town meetings. A few national forests, like the Prescott in Arizona, are developing aggressive, cooperative interface programs with local residents. And in California, "Volunteers in Prevention" spread the word on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis.