By TIFFANY YAP and RICHARD HALSEY |
PUBLISHED: June 19, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. | UPDATED: June 21, 2021 at 5:22 a.m.
Over the past decade Californians have endured billions of dollars in property damage, skyrocketing firefighting costs and tragic deaths due to wildfires. Hotter and drier conditions linked to global climate change contribute to this crisis.
As lawmakers wrestle with how to prevent and pay for these destructive disasters, there’s another crucial factor to consider — land-use policies. If state officials want to prevent the annual cycle of record-breaking fires, they must stop allowing home construction in extremely high-fire-risk areas.
California has more than 2 million homes in high-fire-risk areas. Since 2015, almost 200 people have been killed in wind-driven wildfires, and more than 50,000 structures have burned down. In the Bay Area last summer, millions suffered from poor air quality.
These grim statistics clearly show why projects such as the 57,000-resident Centennial development north of Los Angeles should have been denied. A court recently blocked L.A. County’s approval of the project because the environmental review failed to account for the risk of building on fire-prone wildlands. In this remote part of the county, 31 large fires have burned within five miles of the site since 1964.
Local officials in California continue to greenlight risky development projects that are built to burn.
In 2019 and 2020, San Diego County approved the 3,000-home Otay Village developments where several wildfires have burned. In Lake County, officials recently rubber-stamped a 16,000-acre luxury resort development on the site of numerous past wildfires. Weeks after the project was approved, the site burned again. Now the California Attorney General has joined the Center for Biological Diversity in challenging these developments in court.
If this reckless trend continues, up to 1.2 million new homes could be built in the state’s highest wildfire-risk areas over the next three decades.
Continuing to put more people in fire-prone areas will inevitably lead to more wildfires. Ninety-five percent of California wildfires are caused by human sources. The 2018 Camp Fire, for example, was caused by powerlines and killed 86 people.
The increase in the number of wildfires near residential communities has led to record-breaking fire suppression and recovery costs. In areas managed by Cal Fire, these costs increased to more than $23 billion during the 2015-18 fire seasons — more than double the cost of the previous 26 years combined, after adjusting for inflation.
State legislators are finalizing a budget expected to allocate $1.2 billion toward wildfire prevention but most of that is for chopping down trees and other habitat clearance often far from communities. That has proved ineffective in protecting homes and lives during wildfire. Just 3.4% of the overall budget is proposed for home hardening, which isn’t enough considering this is the most effective way to protect existing communities with high fire risks.
Current land-use policies hurt more than just people. When fires occur too frequently because of human-caused ignitions, non-native grasses that burn more easily replace native shrublands. This eliminates native species and degrades California’s biodiversity while simultaneously increasing the risk of more fires near homes.
Developers claim new building codes protect development in high fire-risk areas, but fire resistance does not mean fire immunity. No home is fireproof. An analysis of the 2018 Camp Fire showed that while new building codes improved home survival, about half of homes built to fire-safety codes still were destroyed.
The solution is clear. We need bold legislation that prohibits new development in high-fire-prone areas and invests more in equitably retrofitting existing at-risk homes with ember-resistant vents, fire-resistant roofs, external sprinklers and properly thinned (not cleared) defensible space next to the structures.
At the same time, we must address the affordable housing crisis by encouraging more dense, transit-oriented housing in safer areas that are already developed.
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California is a fire-prone region. Wildfires are inevitable. But the destruction of our communities by those fires is not.
Tiffany Yap is a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. Richard Halsey is Director of the California Chaparral Institute.