Climate Hits Home: Wildfires in the American West, with Kimi Barrett

Notable Quotes

• Climate change and development patterns can, where combined, multiply wildfire risk: “It’s not just climate change that exacerbates wildfire risk. It’s also the fact that people continue to build homes in places we know are going to experience wildfire and have historically experienced wildfire. Right now, the most recent statistics indicate that there are 44 million households located in areas prone to wildfire. It is the fastest-growing type of land use in the country.” (7:20)
• Mitigation of wildfire risk includes more than putting out fires and managing forests: “While we do know that we need to have [forest] fuel reduction and firefighter suppression, these two approaches alone are not going to get us out of the wildfire crisis. We need to start intentionally and deliberately investing in how homes are being built in these wildfire-risk areas, and we need to start addressing the existing fleet of homes that are placed in very high-hazard locations.” (21:39)
• Federal support can help local communities become more resilient to wildfire hazards: “Communities cannot do this alone. They need resources, funds, appropriations, and networking that only the federal government or other public-private partnerships can provide. They need help in this effort, because they are stretched thin. Wildfires are one of many things that they are also trying to balance right now … Trying to provide them the adequate resources and funds to ensure that they can do this is part of the role of the federal government.” (30:57)

Top of the Stack

• “Building for Wildfire” from Headwaters Economics
• Books by Stephen J. Pyne
• The Big Burn by Timothy Egan
• “How Risk Management Can Prevent Future Wildfire Disasters in the Wildland-Urban Interface” by David E. Calkin, Jack D. Cohen, Mark A. Finney, and Matthew P. Thompson

Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I’m your host, Margaret Walls. Today, we continue our series we’re calling Climate Hits Home, in which we describe how climate change is manifesting in various ways in cities and towns across the United States, and how those cities and towns are addressing it.

In this episode, we’re going to have a discussion of wildfires. My guest is Kimiko Barrett. Kimi is an analyst for research and policy at Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research organization based in Bozeman, Montana, that works on issues related to public lands, outdoor recreation, economic development, and natural hazards such as wildfires and floods. Kimi leads Headwaters’ work on wildfire, has been deeply engaged with communities across the western United States, and is an active researcher on understanding fire risks and identifying effective approaches to mitigation.

We’re going to talk with Kimi about the growing wildfire problem in the American West, the extent to which these trends are linked to climate change, how communities are being affected by wildfire, and what some local approaches to dealing with the problem might be. Stay with us.

Hello, Kimi. Welcome to Resources Radio. Thanks for coming on the show.

Kimi Barrett: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Margaret Walls: If you’ve listened before, you might know that, before we dive into the heart of our conversation with our guests, we always like to start our show by learning a little bit more about you and how you came to do what you do. Can I ask you to share a bit about yourself and your background? How did you come to focus your research and policy engagement on wildfire issues?

Kimi Barrett: Thank you for asking me to be part of this podcast. This is very exciting. I love any opportunity we get to talk about wildfire.

I was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana, which is in the southwest corner of the state. We are somewhat of a neighborhood gatekeeper to Yellowstone Park, and I currently reside in Livingston, which would be a bedroom community to the larger Bozeman. I love it here. I love Montana, the landscapes, the rural character, the proximity to the outdoors, and the wildlands. Growing up here, my parents raised me with a very acute appreciation and understanding of the relationship we have with nature in the outdoors.

As a recreationalist, a hunter, and a conservationist—and this is something I grew up learning and developed an appreciation for long before I became a scientist—I realized that the relationship of people with the environment and our connection to the land is one of constant balance and struggle. It is a struggle of modern society wanting to somewhat domesticate, control, or dictate the terms of nature. This is evidenced with the European settlement across the US West, including where I live in Montana. But it continues to play out in how we approach and perceive wildfires.

I’ll be talking a little bit about this through the interview, but our approach is essentially premised on this assumption that we can control wildfires, when the reality is that wildfires are inevitable and a natural hazard—and it’s really only when people and homes are placed in harm’s way that the hazard becomes a disaster. My work focuses very heavily on this relationship and dialectic between society and ecology. I work with communities across the country to anticipate increasing wildfire risks and how to integrate wildfire risk–reduction measures into resiliency efforts, community design, and planning.

Often, communities that recognize the implications of living with fire are the ones taking very proactive steps to respond to these threats today so that they can be better prepared before a wildfire occurs rather than having that disaster strike. Then, of course, part of what I do through Headwaters Economics is to take these lessons that we learn from communities on the ground to help inform federal decisionmaking and policy.

It may not come to a surprise to you or your listeners, but very often what we see coming out of Washington, DC, in the political rhetoric isn’t often commensurate with what we see on the ground. This also is true for academic research. A lot of what I do is try to be that translator and catalyst for taking on the realities on the ground and ensuring that they are a bit more reflective of what we see at the policy level.

Margaret Walls: That’s why you’re perfect for our show. Let’s talk about climate change for a minute. I mentioned in my introduction that we have a growing wildfire problem. Could you provide a little more detail about that, a few facts that illustrate the size of the problem, and then what the connections are to climate change? People know that some of the other topics we’re covering in our Climate Hits Home series—say, sea level rise or extreme heat—are linked to climate change. Could you tell us about the connection between climate change and wildfires?

Kimi Barrett: In short, climate change is increasingly generating conditions for extreme wildfire behavior. Wildfires are a natural occurrence. They’re an ecological necessity, so they’re going to occur no matter what, but what we’re seeing with their behavior and the increasing trends across the board is that climate change is an exacerbating factor that generates conditions that are very conducive to extreme wildfire behavior.

Wildfires are getting bigger, lasting longer, causing a lot more damage, burning a lot hotter, and becoming more frequent. I have a couple of statistics to help set this in context. Since 1985, the wildfire season has become, on average, about three months, or 84 days, longer. Spring is coming a little earlier, and fall is lasting a little longer. In many places, particularly here in the American West, there is no wildfire season, now that these fires are occurring on a year-round basis. We saw maybe the biggest example of that come out of Colorado in the Marshall Fire that burned in December of last year.

So, wildfires are occurring more frequently on a year-round basis. We know this. Snowpack has a lot to do with this. As snowpack starts melting a little bit earlier, we also have altering precipitation patterns. We have warming ambient air temperatures, and relative humidity is going up. All of this is generating very conducive conditions for extreme wildfires that burn really hot and get really big. Another exacerbating factor is winds. These are the links that we see with climate change and that are making fires occur on a scale and a pace that we have not seen in previous decades.

The trends aren’t good. They’re not showing that these links are decreasing patterns of risk by any means. Risk is only going to go up. But one thing I like to note with climate change is that one thing is occurring in parallel with a very significant trend on the other end: that trend is ongoing development in wildfire-prone areas. It’s not just climate change that exacerbates wildfire risk. It’s also the fact that people continue to build homes in places we know are going to experience wildfire and have historically experienced wildfire. Right now, the most recent statistics indicate that there are 44 million households located in areas prone to wildfire. It is the fastest-growing type of land use in the country.

While we know that we have climate change making a lot of vegetation incredibly flammable, we have these extreme conditions and weather windows in which wildfires are quickly able to escape containment and get big and dangerous. We also have a lot of homes being placed in these areas that are prone to having wildfires. The more people living, recreating, and visiting these areas also means that you’re going to have a lot more people starting fires. 86 percent of all wildfires are ignited by people. It’s these ongoing parallel trends that generate the hazardous conditions that can turn a wildfire into a disaster, and that’s what we’re seeing across the West.

Margaret Walls: Could you drill down to a community level and tell our listeners what it’s like to live with wildfire or the risk of wildfire on a daily basis? How does this manifest itself? I have a friend in California, and they keep a go bag ready with essentials so that they can evacuate at a moment’s notice. That’s one small thing, and I’m sure many people do that, as well. What other disruptions are there to daily life for people, businesses, and communities? Can I also ask you how you think people are noticing changes over time and how people are coping with that?

Kimi Barrett: To the first question about what’s it like here during a hot, dry summer day with wildfire risk, it’s a real feeling. It’s palpable. The most obvious, ubiquitous manifestation of wildfires is in the form of smoke, because smoke from wildfires is pervasive, thick, and heavy, and it can saturate the sky. As wildfires are changing with respect to the size, how hot they’re burning, and what they’re burning, the smoke has become something that you can taste and feel. It alters how you spend your day. How much time are you going to be inside or outside? How active can you be?

This is particularly true for folks who have preexisting health or respiratory conditions. They have to be aware if they have asthma; particulates in the air can have a detrimental effect on health. You have to be aware about the air-quality measure for the day. How much are you going to be outside, and, if you’re inside, do you have adequate air-filtration systems? This is a real experience that is increasing as these conditions and risks are increasing.

What’s also important to note with air quality is that it can spread with winds. Here in Montana, it’s not unusual that we get the wildfire smoke blown in from Oregon, Idaho, Washington, or even California, which is a thousand miles away. Even if we don’t have significant events or incidents here in Montana, we’ll still get the smoke that comes over the Continental Divide.

In Portland, Oregon, last year or two years ago, the smoke was so bad in terms of particulate matter that it measured off the charts. They weren’t able to tell with their measurements what kind of air quality they’re looking at. They were saying, “It’s bad, because our measurement systems aren’t even picking it up anymore.”

What we know with wildfires in contrast to prescribed burns, which I’ll talk about here shortly, is that when they start to burn inorganic material—homes, vehicles, and what’s inside homes and the structures themselves—is that you have a significant degradation of air quality. You have a lot of particulate matter in there that is not organic, and it can have a detrimental effect on health.

These fires are enormous, too. A large fire here in Montana or the West would be over 200,000 acres—that’s 16 times larger than the size of Manhattan. There are huge swaths of land and material that are being burned, and it can affect your respiratory health and what you can and cannot do with your day.

When you say that your friend has a go bag packed, that’s part of it. You also have to have proper air-filtration systems in your home or wherever you’re going to be inside. You need to think through what you would take with you in case of emergency. Where are your pets? Do you have access to a vehicle? What would this look like during a state of disaster and an evacuation protocol? Those are just some of the disruptions on an individual level.

In terms of families, businesses, or communities at large, wildfire can have significant impacts and disruptions to infrastructure, watershed health, critical assets, the neighborhood at large, and a community’s economic fatality. Hundreds of thousands of people can need to evacuate.

It’s important to note that these are the physical impacts. The economic costs are well beyond that and can be significant. The research that we’ve done through Headwaters Economics and that has been validated by other peer-reviewed literature shows that wildfire suppression—the costs for firefighters to come in, contain, and extinguish a wildfire—is one sliver of the much larger wildfire budget that we see.

On average, we spend about $64 million per wildfire—and yet that’s still 10 percent or less of what total wildfire costs are when you start to account for short- and long-term expenses. The other 90 percent of a wildfire budget comes in the form of landscape rehabilitation, relief efforts, lost ecosystem services, or business revenue—all these other expenses that start to come to fruition in the many months or years following a wildfire event. Those are the economic costs.

Again, there are the physical costs that we know in terms of health and how many hospital admissions you have, but you can’t capture the real impacts in terms of social, psychological, and mental well-being. Those are unquantifiable. We know that they are real and substantial, and there is no real storytelling behind that piece yet. It’s starting to come to the surface—particularly with the firefighters in the first-response efforts. It’s real to have post-traumatic stress disorder coming out of a devastating wildfire event. It’s something that we’re starting to acknowledge and recognize in ways that we have not traditionally done. While we’re able to capture some of these immediate disruptions, the long-term ones are having real impacts on people and families living in these areas.

Margaret Walls: Before we talk more about community impacts, I want to take a pause and make sure that people understand that wildfire is a natural phenomenon. It has a lot of ecological benefits when it doesn’t hit where people live and work. Could you tell our listeners about that for a minute?

Kimi Barrett: This is so important. It makes wildfire a unique hazard compared to other hazards for two reasons. One, wildfires have a place and purpose in terms of their ecological benefits. Native Americans knew this well with their routine burning—what we now call Indigenous burning practices or prescribed burning. Wildfires do a lot for ecological rejuvenation and landscape health. A lot of the trees here in the West have serotinous seeds that can only be released under the high-intensity heat generated by wildfires.

We have these fire-adapted landscapes across the country; in the West, the landscapes need wildfire in order to provide the ecological outcomes and benefits that so many of our other ecological systems depend on. That’s one part of it. The other thing with wildfire that makes it somewhat unique is that we can prevent home loss and modify wildfire behavior in a way that we can’t do with other hazards, in terms of reducing and addressing fuel load.

By fuel, I’m talking about the timber and vegetation in these landscapes that feed wildfires. We, as humans, can play a role in modifying that behavior. You can’t really do that with a hurricane or sea level rise. You can’t manipulate things the way that we can with wildfire. This does make it somewhat unique in terms of the spectrum of other hazards out there.

When you think about the ecological benefits of a wildfire, we want to know how to enable prescribed burning or the intentional practice of burning to do what it needs to do from an ecological role while still minimizing home loss. That’s what we’re trying to get at with our wildfire research and policy perspective, as well. So, how do you allow beneficial fire on the landscape while still reducing loss or damage to homes and communities?

It requires addressing components within the wildland as much as the urban side. Here in the West, we call this the wildland-urban interface. It’s this dichotomy of two different environments that require risk-reduction measures on both ends of it. Right now, from a policy perspective, we’re only seeing a focus on the wildland component, in terms of fuels reduction. This often is in the form of mechanical treatments or logging efforts in forests. While we know that prescribed burning is absolutely essential in order to provide these ecological benefits, you don’t see it widely practiced—particularly when you compare it to historic trends with Indigenous tribes.

Prescribed burns are infrequent because of liability concerns. Politically, it can be scary to think about allowing a fire to burn or intentionally introducing a fire, because there is a small chance it could escape, like we saw with the Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico, which was the most significant, devastating event in New Mexico’s history. New Mexico is saying that the cause of this escaped fire is climate change.

Less than two percent of prescribed burns escape, but there’s still the political liability of having that escape as a potential outcome. Additionally, we do not like to see poor air quality in the form of smoke if we can help it. We push back, as a society, against allowing prescribed burning at the scale we need—even though, as I noted earlier, the air is going to be better with a prescribed burn than if it was a wildfire that was emitting smoke later on. It’s vital that we allow beneficial fire on the landscape, and yet we need to be addressing the urban side so that, in situations with escaped fires, nearby homes, communities, and infrastructure are prepared and have mitigated risk in advance of that wildfire.

Margaret Walls: Let’s turn to that. We have a problem when wildfire strikes where people live and work. I want to turn now to some of the solutions that local communities—and in particular, local governments—are coming up with. Let’s talk about homes and houses that are in harm’s way.

I’ve read on your website that we have a problem with home ignition and not a wildfire problem. Can you explain that and some of the solutions to home ignition, both for new construction and for existing properties that might need retrofits?

Kimi Barrett: I’m going to start with the second part of the question in order to shed light on the first part. Here in the West, we define the wildfire crisis as a crisis because homes and communities are burning at a pace and scale that our current forest management policies and suppression tactics are not able to keep up with. The idea that it’s a problem with home ignition comes from Dr. Jack Cohen and others who say that the issue is not so much that wildlands are burning out of control as it is that homes and communities are underprepared. No matter how much we try to control wildfire through these fuel reductions—logging or thinning the forest themselves—we’ll never be able to do it at the scale that wildfires are now occurring at.

We won’t ever be able to suppress all wildfires, either. We are good at suppression. We successfully contain and extinguish 95–98 percent of all wildfires, but it’s the 2 percent that escape that lead to wildfire disasters. The 2 percent is only going to go up as climate change continues to exacerbate extreme wildfire behavior. While we do know that we need to have fuel reduction and firefighter suppression, these two approaches alone are not going to get us out of the wildfire crisis. We need to start intentionally and deliberately investing in how homes are being built in these wildfire-risk areas, and we need to start addressing the existing fleet of homes that are placed in very high-hazard locations. This thoughtful investment in where homes are and how they’re being built is something that is often overlooked in policy.

When you start to think about how a wildfire burns down a community in the first place, you need to break it down and simplify it. Dr. Jack Cohen calls this a “wildfire disaster sequence.” If you hear the news or listen to interviews about wildfires in the West, it’s often portrayed as a wave of wildfire flames coming down a mountainside and incinerating a town, or it’s a tsunami of wildfire washing over a community. The reality is that embers or firebrands fly well ahead of a wildfire front; if they land on any flammable surface area, they have the potential to grow in size and intensity to become a spot fire. These spot fires start to grow and can burn down a home.

What I always tell audiences is to sit for a moment and think about what your home is, what’s inside of it, and what’s in and around it that could be potentially flammable. Think about an ember storm that’s comprised of thousands of fireballs in the sky thrown around by the wind. If you have pine needles in your gutters, dead vegetation in your roof alleys, firewood on your deck; if your house has a wood shake or wood-shingled roof; if you have a wooden deck,which almost everybody does—all of these have highly flammable surface areas. If an ember has enough fuel to feed off, then that little flame starts to grow. Wind can exacerbate that growth.

In the West, we do a lot of camping, too. When you’re around a campfire, and these little balls of flames shoot out of the campfire—a wildfire is the same thing, except on a larger scale. When you’re talking about home ignition, you’re talking about these balls of flame that can generate much more heat. They fly miles ahead of wildfires; they’re the real culprit of home loss. They account for 90 percent of all home damage during a wildfire. As a homeowner and resident, you can reduce your vulnerability by reducing your flammable surface area. That’s why we say, when it comes to new construction or retrofitting, think about replacing wood shake roofing with an asphalt or a metal roof.

Think about what’s in your gutters or roof valleys. Think about what is on your decking surface. Do you have furniture out there? Lots of us have wicker furniture, which is incredibly flammable. Where’s your firewood stored? What’s underneath your deck? Did you put your firewood underneath your deck? If embers land on a flammable surface area, that’s where your primary vulnerability rests. Once the home starts to ignite and burn, it doesn’t take too long for radiant heat to become a primary driver of home-to-home spread of that fire. Think about what’s inside your home.

A lot of home items are products based on petroleum, like your TV, appliances, carpet, furniture, and your curtains. All of these are incredibly flammable. When they start to burn, the radiant heat from within the home itself becomes a direct threat to neighboring structures. Then, you have home-to-home spread through an entire neighborhood, which can lead to a large urban conflagration. This is the wildfire disaster sequence. This is what we’re seeing play out over and over again in these catastrophic events in the West.

Margaret Walls: You’ve named some things that homeowners can do to reduce ignitability. I want to ask about where we build. Could you talk about some communities that might be success stories in dealing with managing land use in these risky areas? It’s such a challenging issue. Can you point us to any success stories or good approaches you’ve seen that deal with this?

Kimi Barrett: A lot of communities are recognizing this increasing risk. They also recognize that the federal government is likely not going to be the ones to enforce or mandate any sort of regulatory compliance measures. So, they’re stepping up in ways that are unique and aggressive, and it’s happening at multiple scales.

To start at the highest level, you have a place like California. The state of California has an aggressive building code that they call Chapter 7A. Chapter 7A mandates ignition-resistant construction design and assembly for homes that are located in high-severity zones. They also manage vegetation through a public resources code. These are land use regulatory measures that more or less stipulate how new development or significant remodels can be constructed, the building materials within those homes, and how homes can mitigate risk with respect to wildfires in these areas that are going to experience increasing risk.

That’s at a high level. Then, you have a more nuanced scale, like the town of Portola Valley, which not only has taken on Chapter 7A, but they also have supplemented it with a home-hardening ordinance, which adds additional requirements for decking material, vents, and things that go beyond what Chapter 7A has already done. They not only see what the state has done, but they want to make it even more aggressive for areas with great wildfire risk.

In Austin, which is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country, the city has recently adopted a similar code. It’s called the Wildland-Urban Interface Code and requires ignition-resistant construction, thoughtful design, and some vegetation management around the home itself. All this deals with how homes can be built with respect to wildfire mitigation.

The idea essentially is that, should a wildfire occur, these homes have been built with wildfire in mind to become more resilient. The city of Flagstaff has similarly passed a Wildland-Urban Interface Code. Chelan County has done this with wildfire mitigation and populations adversely impacted by wildfires. You are seeing it come up across the country at multiple scales, and officials are wanting to take more aggressive steps than federal inertia or policy management can take at this time.

Margaret Walls: For my last substantive question, I want to put you on the spot a little bit and ask you what you’ve learned from many years of working on these issues. What are the most important things that you think communities need to do to make progress and build resilience?

Kimi Barrett: I would just reiterate that communities are taking action where the federal government seems to be lagging or needs a little bit of time to catch up. Places like Missoula County, where I live in Montana, are recognizing their risk. They’re having to balance wildfire mitigation with housing pressure. How can they do this through regulatory measures and anticipate a wildfire before it occurs?

Some are working in unique private-public partnerships with organizations like United Way that work with the planning department, emergency services, as well as the firefighting departments to try and help guide homeowner decisionmaking with respect to areas that have a very high risk of wildfires. Things are happening in very collaborative efforts on the ground.

However, we also know that communities cannot do this alone. They need resources, funds, appropriations, and networking that only the federal government or other public-private partnerships can provide. They need help in this effort, because they are stretched thin. Wildfires are one of many things that they are also trying to balance right now. Housing affordability is a big one. Certain populations might need additional services and help before other groups, and communities are trying to identify where those groups may be and how they can direct resources accordingly. These are all things that communities are having to deal with. Trying to provide them the adequate resources and funds to ensure that they can do this is part of the role of the federal government.

Last, something I always like to leave with draws from the great work of a wildfire historian named Steve Pyne. He always makes the note that, when you think about our relationship with wildfire and trace it back historically, you start to realize that we have solved this problem before but in a different way.

The story he always shares is about the western settlement of Europeans across the country. At that time in the late 1800s, we were building cities that were routinely and repeatedly being burned down, because they were built entirely of flammable products. We had places like Peshtigo or Chicago in which up to 1,700 people were dying in these events. 1,700 people dying in a wildfire event—that’s so substantial.

Finally, after 1906 and the San Francisco fire, we collectively decided that we could do things differently in terms of how our cities were built with respect to fire. We stopped using sawdust for insulation, wooden roofs, and wooden boardwalks, and we installed things like fire hydrants; we developed evacuation protocols and built emergency doors; we started using concrete and noncombustible materials. We changed how we designed and planned our cities.

You don’t see that same level of structural fire anymore because of these deliberate decisions we made early on. We can do this again if we start thinking about wildfire in the same way with respect to the wildland-urban interface or these places that we know are experiencing increasing risks. I like to leave it on that note, because it’s positive and uplifting. It signifies that if we transform our thought paradigm about how we live with wildfire, we can anticipate wildfires before they become a disaster.

Margaret Walls: Thanks for that. We’re going to close our podcast with our regular feature that we call Top of the Stack, and that’s where we’re going to ask you to recommend a book, or an article, or a podcast to our listeners. Do you have something that you’d like to suggest? What’s on the top of your stack?

Kimi Barrett: I’m going to start by first saying it depends on the audience and how you like to digest your information. I have three that I think are really great. If you like quick, easy, nonthinking material that you can get walked through, we released a video called “Building for Wildfire” through Headwaters Economics, and it talks about the essential premise of how, as a homeowner, you can start to anticipate a wildfire and plan accordingly. What are these risks? That’s one type.

If you like history and want to sit down and read a phenomenal novel, I would recommend Steve Pyne. He’s the historian I referenced. He’s done a number of books that describe this relationship of people living alongside wildfires over time. Alternatively, The Big Burn about the fire of 1910 by Timothy Egan is a great one.

Last, if you’re an academic-theorist buff, there’s a great article that was published in 2014 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author is David Calkin; other authors include Jack Cohen, who I also referenced. That describes what I’ve just said in terms of community risk reduction, the disaster sequence, home ignition, and how we can start to address this from a policy perspective in a theoretical way. They’ve done an outstanding job of breaking it down academically, and I think it’s a great read for anybody who wants more information on this very complex, wicked issue we’re dealing with.

Margaret Walls: Thank you for those. That’s great. Kimi, it’s been a pleasure having you on Resources Radio. I’m so glad we were able to have you as part of our Climate Hits Home series. I think of you as one of my go-to experts on the many facets of wildfire, so I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your expertise. Thank you so much.

Kimi Barrett: Thank you, Margaret.

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