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If you’re looking forward to fireworks over the July Fourth weekend, you’re probably not a firefighter or someone with a house next to a tinder-dry patch of woods.

More Americans than ever are living in or near fire-prone forests. The territory some researchers call the “wildland-urban interface” grew by 61 percent between 1970 and 2000, according to a recent analysis. Add a rising global temperature and depleted snow packs, and you’ve got a recipe for lots more devastating wildfires.

Even with more federal funds going to fight fires, many believe the resources aren’t keeping up with the rising risks. The Boston Globe reports today that some wealthy homeowners are hiring private firefighters for additional protection, while California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing a “fire-fighting fee” on home insurance in the state, according to the San Diego Union Tribune.

A study published in the journal Ecological Applications last week explored the complex relationship between global warming and wildfire risk, suggesting that the creation of dry vegetation influences a fire’s destruction more than rising temperatures themselves. A case in point would be Western shrublands and grasslands, as they require a wet year, followed by a dry one, to produce the kindling for a large wildfire.

Those findings piggyback a paper released in the May issue of Ecological Monographs, which looked at historical data on fires from 15,000 B.C. to the present. Researchers found that certain types of plants compensated for heat’s increased threat. A dry climate 10,500 years ago, for example, actually resulted in a decrease in fires as fire-resistant deciduous trees had replaced flammable shrubs.

As if things weren’t bad enough already, hungry bark beetles pose a growing danger—more dead trees means more fuel for fire. The beetles have rendered at least 7 million acres of U.S. forest “all but dead, throwing a swath of land bigger than Massachusetts into a kind of fire-cycle purgatory,” The New York Times reports.

Photo by Calc-tufa via Flickr.

1 Comments

1. 1. mtrancher 07:00 PM 7/4/09

   We're presently seeing the result of 30 to 40 years of homeowners' and their insurance companies' disregard of the vegetation surrounding their structures and the problems in delivering fire protection to subdivisions with narrow, steep or limited access.
   
   Climate change, whatever the cause, may add to the problem but the threat of urban interface fires has always been there just as hurricanes have threatened seaside "cottages". It is hard to legislate common sense and be as effective as the financial impact of poor decisions can be; unfortunately the ones losing their homes often aren't the ones that made the critical decisions to put them in harm's way.
   
   If pine beetle infestation is involved don't feel alone; we're closing the last of the lumber mills now in Montana because there is no timber available but the forests are red with dying trees. Somehow its better to import Canada's trees and wait for ours to burn. We're setting up a "perfect firestorm" that will damage many watersheds and municipal supplies for years to come, along with sacrificing our wood products industry and its related payroll because we listen to the wrong "experts".
   
   

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