California fires

As wildfires burn across the Western U.S., the people in harm’s way are increasingly those least able to protect their homes from fire risks, evacuate safely or recover after a fire. In a new study, we and a team of fellow wildfire scientists examined who lived within the perimeters of wildfires over the past two decades in Washington, Oregon and California – home to about 90% of Americans in the U.S. West exposed to wildfires over that period. Overall, nearly half a million people in California, Oregon and Washington were exposed to wildfires at some point during the past 22 years. Alarmingly, about half the people exposed to wildfires in Washington and Oregon were considered socially vulnerable. While the number of people exposed to fire rose overall, the number of socially vulnerable people exposed more than tripled between the first and second decades. How social vulnerability affects fire risk A variety of factors shape social vulnerability, including wealth,...

Over the past two decades, a staggering 21.8 million Americans found themselves living within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of a large wildfire. Most of those residents would have had to evacuate, and many would have been exposed to smoke and emotional trauma from the fire. Nearly 600,000 of them were directly exposed to the fire, with their homes inside the wildfire perimeter. Those statistics reflect how the number of people directly exposed to wildfires more than doubled from 2000 to 2019, my team’s new research shows. But while commentators often blame the rising risk on homebuilders pushing deeper into the wildland areas, we found that the population growth in these high-risk areas explained only a small part of the increase in the number of people who were exposed to wildfires. Instead, three-quarters of this trend was driven by intense fires growing out of control and encroaching on existing communities. A wildfire in 2017 dest...