Guest Opinion: George Wuerthner's On the Range

The Angora Fire—Homes Burn Homes

By George Wuerthner, 8-10-07

Earlier this June the Angora Fire near South Lake Tahoe in California captured national attention. The fire charred more than 3100 acres. The Angora fire was a rather small fire by most standards, but it was still one of the largest fires in the Tahoe Basin in recent times. But what made the fire noteworthy was the fact that more than 250 homes burned to the ground. 

Reporting by a compliant media too eager to write anything offered up by political hacks, uninformed public and/or the timber industry provided a distorted and inaccurate portrayal of the causes and effects of the fire. 

First, the Angora Wildfire rather than a disaster, was ecologically speaking, a great success. The fire burned in a mosaic pattern, creating a patchwork of burned and unburned forests, creating new snags, reducing fuels, and setting up new ecological opportunities. 

The Angora urban fire, however, represented a huge failure on the part of individuals and the local community. It is a tragic example of poor land use planning, zoning and implementation of fire wise home protection strategies. It’s worth repeating—the home losses resulting from this fire were---for the most part—completely avoidable had the community taken fire risk prevention seriously. 

Individuals and groups with an ax to grind against environmental protections and who wanted to shift blame for the home losses to someone other than local officials and homeowners quickly jumped on the Angora Fire as an example of what was wrong with federal land management policy. According to the critics, if environmental groups hadn’t stopped logging in the Basin, and the Forest Service had been more aggressive in logging the forests, the fire would have died or at least not burned up so many homes. 

The agency had actually logged the forest in thinning projects adjacent to the burned homes over the past six years and as recently as three months before the fire. However, the logged area actually contributed to more greater tree loss since the “thinned” forest burned hotter with higher tree mortality than unlogged areas in the same area.  But media reports failed to mention this in most accounts. 

Furthermore, it was not crown fires burning in tree tops rolling across the South Lake Tahoe homes that led to their destruction, but rather surface fires burning through brush or burning embers often coming from other burning homes that ignited most structures. Worse for home owners in the community, most of the homes that burned down were ignited by their neighbor’s homes, and were not a direct result of crown fires. 

I visited the Angora Fire site this past week to look over the site and get a first hand look at the fire results. There were a lot of burned out cellars surrounded by trees that were green or trees burned most severely adjacent to homes—suggesting that it was the homes that were the prime fuel, not the forest. 

Like most wildfires, this one was driven more by high winds, low humidity and drought than anything to do with fuels. Under extreme weather conditions, fires burn through all fuels—even a lack of fuels—jumping over roads, lakes, rivers, and clearcuts to create new spot fires well beyond the fire front.  Such fires are rare—the bulk of all fires seldom burn more than a few acres. However, under the right climatic conditions, fires are unstoppable. And contrary to common opinion, fuel treatments (i.e. logging) can actually enhance fire spread by creating slash on the ground that provides fine fuels as well as opening up the forest to more drying and wind penetration. Apparently this is what happened with the Angora Fire. 

But the factor that contributed more to home losses than any other was the limited amount of fire preparedness in the community. The heat and flames coming their neighbor’s homes ignited most of the homes that burned to the ground. Homes burn much hotter than a forest fire. So if only one home fails to practice fire wise precautions such as removing fuels from the immediate area adjacent to a home or has a wooden shake roof instead of a metal roof, they are much more likely to catch on fire. A chain reaction occurs where the heat and flames from that burning house sets the neighbor’s home on fire. That appears to be the situation with the Angora Fire. 

The real lesson from the Angora Fire is not that more logging of our forests is needed, but rather that the real responsibility for the losses associated with most wildfire losses rests with individual home owners and local communities. 

First, permitting house construction in the fire plain—i.e. any landscape that is highly fire prone--should be avoided by zoning. Just as we do not permit homes to be constructed in river flood plains (at least in some parts of the country), we should not permit home construction in the midst of forests and other highly combustible sites. 

In addition, in those places where homes are already in areas with high fire risk (as is the case with the entire South Lake Tahoe community) mandatory fire wise practices should be implemented, regularly monitored, and with stiff penalties for failure to comply. Increasingly I hope the insurance industry will begin to cancel policies for those homes that do not meet fire wise standards as well. 

As it now exists, we all pay the cost for those homeowners and communities that fail to implement such policies. First we ask firefighters to risk their lives defending buildings that should never have been built in the first place. Then we pay for the fire fighting efforts to save these structures. And taxpayers often provide the “disaster relief funds” to rebuild in such sties. And lastly we all pay higher insurance premiums that result when insurance companies have to make large pay outs for losses that are completely avoidable. 

Wildfire in the forest is desirable. We should not be suppressing such blazes. Wildfire in urban areas is avoidable if we learn to live with fire, but the responsibility for implementing these changes lies with the local communities and state agencies. Unfortunately I predict that many communities and individual home owners will continue to experience devastating urban fires in the future unless the rest of us start forcing people to accept responsibility for reducing or eliminating fire risks and hazards.

George Wuerthner is the editor of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy published by Island Press and 33 other books on natural history and ecological topics.

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