BY BILL MANNING
Today on a national radio station, a reporter interviewed a woman from Southern California whose home had been spared in the October-November wildfire disasters, yet she was moving her home anyway. “Where are you moving to?” the reporter asked. “Someplace where there are no trees to burn,” the woman answered.
Before containment of the last of more than a dozen fires had been achieved, the finger pointing was on. People were yelling about helicopters, about resources, about consolidations, about emergency disaster declarations, about money, about not enough federal or state support—and they have every right to do so. But the woman “fleeing from the trees” had nailed it, simply. It’s about many thousands of people living in combustible homes surrounded by dry trees in a desert climate with nothing in the way of destruction but firefighters sworn to save, in many cases, unsaveable property. Thousands of tinderboxes stuck in thousands of acres of kindling ready to explode. Explode it did, and explode it will continue to do.
A newspaper interview with another Southern California woman tells a story about when she bought her new tinderbox in the kindling brush-and-woodland hills and her contractor matter-of-factly told her, “This house will burn down in your lifetime.” It surely did, this October.
But everyone knows this. Within our growing wildland-interface communities, the question is not if but when. How do you break such matter-of-fact indifference, disregard? How do you overcome 30 years of virtually unchallenged, politically protected, homeowner-supported, “Pass Go, Collect $200” policies that have turned capitalization on the urban flight phenomenon into unlimited, irresponsible development in the most dangerous fire environments known to mankind? Each time disaster strikes, exacting its terrible toll on human life and property, you wonder, Will this disaster be enough to make people change?
Even now, agents for powerful land developers and homeowners associations, operating from behind the “individual property owners’ rights” shield, are sharpening their swords to cut down any progressive momentum toward community fire protection reform in Southern California. They’re poised to fight for the status quo. In California and many other states with big-time interface issues, this means opposing or failing to take responsibility for proactive measures that would help to keep interface fires manageable and limit recurrent disasters—and save lives. The immoral opposition to proactive fire protection in the interface, or the irresponsible (and by association, immoral) acquiescence to the opposition, is pure insanity.
I dare the anti-fire protection madmen to tell the world that the money they made from developing kindling woodlands without accountability or the time spent enjoying spectacular views from their hillside Shangri-las or the money saved selling out prescriptive fire safety for reactive “total suppression” policies was worth the lives of Firefighter Steven Rucker and 21 others cut down in this most recent spate of fires.
Sure, we can no more stop Americans from taking to the woods than we can stop them from building in flood plains or on Hurricane Beach. You can have 100 water- and flame retardant-dropping helicopters and planes at the ready, too, but that’s not the point, or it shouldn’t be. Continuing to assume reactive postures to imminent natural disasters and expecting things to turn out differently is the definition of insanity. Especially when we have the means to limit those disasters to appreciable degrees, well in advance, before we need to put firefighters and others at risk.
I remember the images and read the accounts of some 7,500 or more firefighters making their last stand in Malibu in 1993 as the fires raced toward the Pacific Ocean. The fires went out—when there was nothing left to burn. I remember the 1991 Oakland Hills Fire, too, and how it burned up and down the hillsides and across 150-foot highway breaks, pushed along by near-hurricane-force hot Santa Ana winds. Few firefighters who fought that fire would disagree that it had a very good chance of spreading all the way to Berkeley had not the winds receded.
There are, of course, pockets of communities in the West that espouse firesafe, wildland fire-resistive building practices and vegetation management policies, like the Stevenson Ranch community in Los Angeles County, which was spared from the recent wildfires, in part, because it was planned and built with firesafe construction—and creating a defensible space for firefighters—in mind. Residents talked about a football game they were playing in the glow of the fires not too far away. One resident said, “I think when our kids grow up, the memory they will have of this fire is that football game. We were together as a family, and there was no panic.” That’s the type of security the anti-fire protection lobby cannot claim or give. But it’s where we should be.
Is this a complicated issue? Yes and no. Are there many factors involved? Yes. Is a major coordinated effort on the part of politicians, government agencies, insurance companies and other private sector entities, and private citizens required to reverse the trend of insanity and encourage firesafe construction and the creation of defensible spaces within the volatile wildland interface environment? Yes. Do we need to address dealing with bark beetles and brush and forest clearing and prescribed burning and roof materials and clearance distances and underbrush? Yes.
Does it require real leadership? Yes. Is real leadership complicated? Is doing the right thing complicated? “The right thing” is never complicated, but it takes leadership and commitment and hard work to make it happen.
Thirty years of wildland interface disasters show that the concept of “total fire suppression” promulgated by the developer/building lobby and their politician friends doesn’t work—in fact, it’s a myth. It’s reactionary, and puts thousands of people at risk who don’t need to put in that position. All our eggs in the “backend” of the fire equation basket doesn’t work for dense urban populations, for in-between suburban populations, or for interface populations. That’s not to say the fire service, on the front lines of disaster, doesn’t need more and better resources. But it means our leaders need to take responsibility for and help build accountability into the “front-end” of the equation.
Frankly, it’s not too far a stretch, in my mind, to think that we’ll begin to solve the interface problem by demanding that our governments, in conjunction with the insurance companies, develop a strong, no-nonsense, definitive strategy that forces—yes, forces—life-safety standards on builders and residents. The forfeiture of insurance payouts and enjoinment of criminal negligence charges seem like good places to start, considering the serious implications to human life.
I think that’s the only way to begin to break the insanity that will lead to decades more of destruction and death in the wildland interface.
God bless Firefighter Steve Rucker and the many brothers and sisters who have died fighting fires in the wildland interface. Maybe someday we won’t have any more funeral for firefighters trying to save a mountain full of trees or an evacuated village of wildland tinderboxes the “system” allows to be built without any consideration for those who die for them when the disaster is full-on.
