On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Fires Meet

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Excellent article from the NY Times:

Foreword: Public Lands At Your Peril: This is the first in a series of articles looking at the changing demands on federally owned land in the American West.

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COLEVILLE, Calif. — Lori and Don Morris had just started unpacking the boxes this month in their new dream house — four acres, national forest view, wide open land at their doorstep — when a wildfire raced down the stark bluffs over this high-desert town near the Nevada border.

More than 300 federal firefighters from as far away as Montana arrived, battling heat, 60-mile-an-hour wind gusts and flames bolting through 1,100 acres of bone-dry sagebrush and juniper. The Morrises, along with 200 other residents, watched helplessly as, miraculously, their homes were spared.

“Both of us were aware that these things happen,” said Ms. Morris, 47, as she looked out the window to the charred hillside. “We just didn’t think it would happen this fast.”

A new generation of Americans like the Morrises, in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.

Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_wisconsin/index.html?inline=nyt-org)— has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.

“It’s like a tsunami, this big wave of development that’s rolling toward the public lands,” said Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology and management at the University of Wisconsin. “And the number of fires keeps going up.”

But now federal agencies at the front lines of defending these new communities from peril are starting to say enough is enough. The constellation of federally owned parks, forests and arid sagebrush fiefs in the lower 48 states is collectively about three-fourths the size of all the land east of the Mississippi River, and is becoming too expensive to protect with so many people pushing up against the fringes.

This spring, the United States Forest Service (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/forest_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org)began warning state and local officials across the West that they would need to pick up more of the tab from the federal government, and do more to make homes less vulnerable to fire. About 45 percent of the Forest Service’s proposed budget for 2008 is designated for firefighting, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Last year, the agency spent $2.5 billion, a record, thinning fuels and fighting fires that burned 9.9 million acres, also a record.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘If you’re not going to do your part, we’re not going to risk our lives,’ ” said Stuart McMorrow, a forest-fuels expert with the North Tahoe Fire Protection District, which covers 31 square miles near Lake Tahoe.

“It’s coming to a head,” Mr. McMorrow said, “this notion that people move out to the woods and put themselves in dangerous situations.”

The Costs

Costs are also spiraling up like smoke for states and other federal agencies.

Wyoming budgeted $1.2 million for its 2006 fire season, then ended up spending $30 million. California (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/california/index.html?inline=nyt-geo), braced for what fire officials have said could be one of the worst seasons in history this year, has set aside $850 million for wildfire suppression.

The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_park_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org)and the Bureau of Land Management (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/bureau_of_land_management/index.html?inline=nyt-org), the country’s largest landlord, spent $424 million fighting fire last year. Early season firefights have cost $215 million already this year even before the traditionally worst months arrive.

The insurance industry, in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, has also begun taking a much harder look at the places where people and trees meet, and is less willing to write policies for homeowners who do not meet a “wildfire checklist” by taking measures to protect their homes.

“Fire has emerged as more and more a megacatastrophic risk like we saw with Katrina,” said Carole Walker, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association. “The financial exposure is huge, well into the billions.”

The result is a new tough-love approach from fire officials, where the soft and fuzzy reminders from Smokey Bear have given way to blunter assessments. The new rural Westerners, fire officials say and insurers increasingly demand, will have to start thinking more like the self-reliant Westerners of old.

That means clearing defensible spaces around homes and inspecting roofs and vents through which flying cinders can descend. Those measures protect homes, but also firefighters, since structures cleared of fuels are less dangerous to defend.

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source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=todayspaper

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All the while, federally owned public lands continue to attract more people as they evolve into something they were never intended to be: a real-estate amenity. As golf courses were to a past development wave, wild and scenic is to this one.

In Lake Tahoe, for example, glossy home magazines are filled with advertisements including cheery phrases like “adjacent to Forest Service land” and no mention of the fire risks.

“It’s like ocean frontage,” said Larry Swanson, an economist at the University of Montana in Missoula who studies public lands. “You would not have these high private property values without the public lands nearby, and the public lands are a huge part of the package that is driving the growth trends.”

Usually a summertime phenomenon, fire season has come early this year in many parts of the country, including Florida and Georgia. But it is in the West, where acres have always outnumbered humans, that the scale is greatest and the threat most acute.

Forests in the West are more prone to catastrophic fires than are Eastern ones, said David M. Theobald, a professor at Colorado State University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/colorado_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org)who has analyzed population growth and fire patterns.

That puts a higher percentage of the new housing areas in severe-fire zones — more than 50 percent in California and Colorado, 47 percent in Montana and more than 65 percent in Washington and Oregon, according to a soon-to-be published paper by Mr. Theobald and a colleague, William Romme. In the 37 states east of the Rockies, only about 10 percent of the new rural housing areas are in so-called high-fire zones.

Drought and the possible effects of climate change (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier)on the seasons have added their own vehement kick. In California, Nevada, Idaho and Montana, officials are prepared for a devastating fire year. Wildfires erupted throughout the winter.

“We had fires every month,” said Joe DuRosseau, division chief of special operations for the fire department in Reno, Nev., which fought a 750-acre fire west of town during the last week of May. “It’s a very dry year, and the fuels are extremely dry.”

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/arnold_schwarzenegger/index.html?inline=nyt-per)has asked for additional firefighting personnel, and officials worry that this summer could rival 2003, when fires caused more than $2 billion in damage, including 5,000 homes that burned in San Diego County.

Set for Battle

People like Robert A. Harrington, Montana’s state forester at the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, are haunted by the possibility of a year like 1910, when devastating fires in the northern Rockies could be not stopped. There are similar fears in more heavily populated areas like Lake Tahoe.

On Monday, in Lake Tahoe firefighters battled a fire that had destroyed 160 homes.

“On a good weekend there’s a couple million people in and around the Tahoe area, with ingress and egress along Interstate 80, essentially one way in and out,” said George D. Gentry, the executive officer of California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Imagine a conflagration starts and we have to evacuate people.”

North of the lake, where second homes pepper the 1.2 million acres of often remote wilderness, Forest Service firefighters train on roads, where turning a fire engine around is tricky even on a good day.

Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, a fire management officer there, said new housing in the far-flung fringe had made her job infinitely more challenging.

“There’s a housing area going up where the 80 and Highway 20 come together, with one-acre plots going at $1 million each,” Ms. Pincha-Tulley said. “I thought, ‘Oh great, this is just what I need.’ ”

Some residents in the high-risk areas worry that the federal government will be tempted to pass the problem along to local governments or homeowners.

“The federal government is there to protect the community from disasters,” said Ron Ehli, 50, a volunteer fire chief in Hamilton, Mont., an increasingly popular getaway in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula.

“Where Florida might have hurricanes (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier), or California earthquakes, we have wildfires,” Mr. Ehli said. “And the federal government should be there to protect us.”

Truth be told, the nation’s founders would probably be shocked that the government was still in the land or firefighting business. Land, as the early framers of the republic saw it, through legislation like the Homestead Act, was for settlement and farming, and especially for private ownership.


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source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fire.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=todayspaper

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But much of the western half of the United States did not cooperate. It was too steep, wooded, wild and dry to be tamed the way land was in the East. So hundreds of millions of acres became and remained public land, owned by the government.For most of the past century, the government’s policy of fighting fires on that land was single-minded: if it burns, put it out and figure the costs later.

So the natural fire cycle that cleans out the undergrowth and dying trees broke down, and combustibles began to mount. At the same time, the timber industry paid huge fees to the Forest Service to allow cutting of valuable forest sections that kept the firefighting budget afloat.

But that has changed. The timber money has slowed to a trickle in many national forests as companies have moved operations to places where trees grow faster, like the South, or gotten into the real estate business themselves, like the giant Plum Creek Timber Company in Montana, which owns hundreds of thousands of acres in the state.

Still, some Forest Service critics say the agency remains too dependent on timber sales and firefighting money from Congress. Together, suggest the critics — an odd-bedfellows coalition that includes local environmental groups like the Friends of the Bitterroot and free-market libertarians from the Cato Institute — the financing sources have skewed wildfire policy.

“We have now turned the fundamental function of the Forest Service into the fire service,” said Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona and chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.

Mr. Grijalva said the knowledge by Forest Service administrators that Congress would pay for firefighting in defense of the nation’s public lands had led to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of more and more money for firefighting.

Cuts in Spending

The surge in fire costs has in turn forced spending cuts in recent years in many other Forest Service programs, including campground maintenance, research, road repair and backcountry wilderness management.

“They’ve shifted the priorities,” Mr. Grijalva said. “And that puts property and people at risk, no question about it.”

Forest Service officials say they are used to being blamed. “Neither our strategy nor our priorities have changed,” said Mark E. Rey, under secretary for natural resources and the environment at the Department of Agriculture.

Safety of firefighters comes first, Mr. Rey said, then safety of residents, protection of structures and protection of resources.

What has changed, he said, is growth in the number of people living in harm’s way. That has bumped up costs because defending structures, Mr. Rey said, is more expensive than wilderness firefighting. At the same time, the knowledge of the woods and their dangers are fading as rural residents age and newcomers move in.

Ravalli County, Mont., for example, around the town of Hamilton, grew by 25 percent, to about 40,000 people, from 1995 to 2005. In the 2000 census, almost one-third of the residents said they had lived somewhere else five years earlier.

“I personally feel if they’re stupid enough to build their house with trees and stuff all around, it’s their dumb luck,” said Nancy Garness, 53, a baker at the Coffee Cup Cafe in Hamilton, who came to the area with her parents in the late 1950s when she was 4.

Insurance professionals say much the same thing.

“We all went through a period of, ‘write the policy and take the money,’ ” said Barry Whitmore, a State Farm Insurance agent in Hamilton. “Now we’ve got a wildfire checklist, and based on the answers, a home is either insurable or not insurable.”

In Coleville, a town of 400 people in the eastern Sierra Nevada, Ms. Morris and her husband are leaving little to chance.

Not much more than a wide spot in the road about 200 miles east of San Francisco, Coleville is showing signs of discovery, with a handful of new houses and real estate signs along the main road, which is also lined with cottonwoods and scrub brush.

Ms. Morris said it was love at first sight when she discovered the town a few months ago. The Morris abutsland owned by the Bureau of Land Management.

“There’s hundreds of miles of forests,” she said. “The beauty of it. We have every kind of tree you can imagine right out the backyard.”

Now, after the fire, many of those trees are charred and blackened, and soot and ash fill the air every time the wind kicks up. Still, Ms. Morris says she is not going anywhere; instead, she is joining the local volunteer fire department.

(page 3 of 3)

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fire.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&ref=todayspaper

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Another excellent article!

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Photos/070627_070702/070628_Wildfire_wide.hlarge.jpg
A helicopter drops water on the fire burning in South Lake Tahoe, Calif.

Fire season is off to a hot and deadly start out West. Do firefighters have the aerial equipment they need to help keep the flames in check

Web exclusive
By Andrew Murr
Newsweek

June 28, 2007 - California’s Angora forest fire jumped out of control at about 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon. Until that moment, fire officials had seemed confident that the worst had passed in the blaze that had already burned 3,100 acres and destroyed about 200 homes south of South Lake Tahoe, Calif. But a backfire that firefighters had set to block the main blaze went wild and shot toward a subdivision, forcing 2,000 residents to evacuate. Helicopter pilots who had been methodically dumping water on hotspots quickly turned to drop their loads on the advancing flames. The water worked. “A couple of direct hits from the helicopters helped clean up those spot fires,” Bob Becker, a relieved U.S. fire information specialist, crowed Tuesday night.

Aerial warfare against the nation’s forest fires is nothing new. But as the fire threat grows—thanks to short-term droughts, the longer-range threats of global warming and a vast expansion of new homes built next to flammable wild lands—some wonder whether federal fire officials have the right mix of air power to fight the menace. “What you have is akin to a military mission, and you don’t have the proper (aviation) equipment to provide for safety on the ground,” says Jim Hall, a former chief of the National Transportation Safety Board who co-chaired a 2002 panel critical of federal fire-aviation safety and preparedness.

The pressure to get it right is growing. The annual national totals for forest-fire burns has topped 8 million acres only three times since 1960: in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The early 2007 fire toll—1.6 million acres so far—is already running well ahead of last year, when a record 9.9 million acres burned. And the season is just getting underway in the West; drought in the region has primed the Southwest, California and the northern Rockies to be torched. In California, record-low rainfall in Los Angeles and an unusually low snow pack in the Sierra Nevada range have already led to an unusual number of fires. “We’ve been very busy for this early,” marvels Linda Naill, a dispatcher at the air-tanker base in Minden, Nev., which services 10 million acres in Nevada and California. “We had 180 fires before June 1, which is sort of the start of our fire season. It’s usually just a handful.”

Officials say big planes are the most cost-effective way of mounting the initial strikes that help keep small forest fires from mushrooming into deadly conflagrations. But aerial firefighters are having to battle more blazes with fewer of these planes. Until 2002, the U.S. Forest Service hired 41 air tankers to fight fires—aging four-engine prop planes that could drop up to 3,000 gallons of water or foam retardant. Now, they have just 16. The current tanker fleet—mostly Lockheed P3 and P2V naval sub chasers—is made up of aircraft first made in the mid-1960s and manufactured up until a few years ago. To supplement the drop in tankers, fire officials have contracted for more helicopters: 35 full-time water-dropping choppers, plus another 300 on call. They’ve added 20 smaller planes called Single-Engine Air Tankers, or SEATs, which can drop 500 to 800 gallons of retardant or water (and have another 80 on call).

Aerial warfare against the nation’s forest fires is nothing new. But as the fire threat grows—thanks to short-term droughts, the longer-range threats of global warming and a vast expansion of new homes built next to flammable wild lands—some wonder whether federal fire officials have the right mix of air power to fight the menace. “What you have is akin to a military mission, and you don’t have the proper (aviation) equipment to provide for safety on the ground,” says Jim Hall, a former chief of the National Transportation Safety Board who co-chaired a 2002 panel critical of federal fire-aviation safety and preparedness.

The pressure to get it right is growing. The annual national totals for forest-fire burns has topped 8 million acres only three times since 1960: in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The early 2007 fire toll—1.6 million acres so far—is already running well ahead of last year, when a record 9.9 million acres burned. And the season is just getting underway in the West; drought in the region has primed the Southwest, California and the northern Rockies to be torched. In California, record-low rainfall in Los Angeles and an unusually low snow pack in the Sierra Nevada range have already led to an unusual number of fires. “We’ve been very busy for this early,” marvels Linda Naill, a dispatcher at the air-tanker base in Minden, Nev., which services 10 million acres in Nevada and California. “We had 180 fires before June 1, which is sort of the start of our fire season. It’s usually just a handful.”

Officials say big planes are the most cost-effective way of mounting the initial strikes that help keep small forest fires from mushrooming into deadly conflagrations. But aerial firefighters are having to battle more blazes with fewer of these planes. Until 2002, the U.S. Forest Service hired 41 air tankers to fight fires—aging four-engine prop planes that could drop up to 3,000 gallons of water or foam retardant. Now, they have just 16. The current tanker fleet—mostly Lockheed P3 and P2V naval sub chasers—is made up of aircraft first made in the mid-1960s and manufactured up until a few years ago. To supplement the drop in tankers, fire officials have contracted for more helicopters: 35 full-time water-dropping choppers, plus another 300 on call. They’ve added 20 smaller planes called Single-Engine Air Tankers, or SEATs, which can drop 500 to 800 gallons of retardant or water (and have another 80 on call).

Federal fire officials say they are making up for lost numbers by using their air assets more wisely. Tankers roam the West, getting into position so that they can move swiftly to stop a small fire from spreading, says Marc Rounsaville, deputy director for fire and aviation for the U.S. Forest Service. If that fails and the blaze grows into a “large fire”—one covering more than a few hundred acres—they bring in the helicopters and move the tankers to the next fire. “We focus our large tankers on initial attacks and use our helicopters on large fires” if the initial attack fails to quell the fires, says Rounsaville. “It’s more efficient and cost effective.” Officials have cut costs further by contracting for the exclusive use of air tankers and choppers for the whole fire season—rather than relying on more expensive contracts for aircraft deployed when emergencies arise. A new helicopter contract alone will save $20 million, offficials say.

Still, experts are worried there aren’t enough tankers. “Questions persist about the ability to have that rapid response, based on the age of the fleet and the need to retrofit it, so that it can be as effective as it should be,” says Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who chairs a public lands subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee. The addition of helicopters, he says, “is a wonderful complement to a robust tanker fleet, but I don’t see it as a substitute for a robust tanker fleet.” Rounsaville says that three more tankers will be used later this summer, and military planes can be pressed into service in emergencies.

The reduction of the tanker fleet followed two deadly crashes in 2002 of aging aircraft that broke apart in midair amid firefights in California and Colorado and killed five crewmen. A blue-ribbon report on aerial fire-fighting safety headed by former NTSB chairman Hall and Texas state forester James Hull found that the tanker fleet had an unacceptable safety record. After a second critical report, in 2004, this time by the National Transportation Safety Board itself, the Forest Service canceled contracts with tanker operators, terminating 33 tankers, banned further use of two older types of planes involved in the crashes—and re-evaluated the rest of their fleet. "The (16) planes we have now are some of our most effective air tankers that we had prior to those catastrophic crashes," says Rounsaville.

The new system makes up in efficiency what it lost in air-tanker numbers, according to one federal contractor whose company owns eight air tankers. “Now the Forest Service stations the planes where the greatest risk is,” says Terry Unsworth, CEO of Aero Union Inc., of Chico, Calif., rather than basing them at set locations whether or not there are fires nearby. “I think it’s working better.”

Fighting fire isn’t cheap. It accounts for a whopping 45 percent of the Forest Service's proposed 2008 budget, according to Forest Service officials—up from 25 percent in 2000. Last year, the fire suppression total was a record $1.5 billion. The air war sucks up a quarter to a third of that spending. P3 tankers cost the government $9,300 for every day of the season—plus $6,104 for each hour the plane actually flies, according to Rose Davis, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center, in Boise, Idaho. The smaller P2V costs $3,230 each day of the first season. Fire officials say the plane and helicopters are well worth the cost. They save millions by keeping fires smaller, obviating the need for additional firefighters—and in keeping forests and homes from going up in flames. The new helicopters are more expensive. A large helitanker costs the government $18,800 each day it’s under contract, plus $6,370 per hour in the air; a large chopper with a water bucket runs to $11,250 per day, and $1,251 per air hour.

Critics call for the replacement of today’s aging, retrofitted tankers with a modern craft built just for aerial firefighting. Jim Hall, who co-chaired the panel that explored the safety problems, calls for “aircraft that are specifically designed for (the fire-fighting) mission.” That’s an expensive solution. But Hall points out that Congress spends freely when designing military aircraft to counter external threats, and he thinks Congress should find a way “to encourage or incentivize the private development of large tankers” designed specifically for the need that, as he says, “is going to be with us.” Rounsaville says the Forest Service is in talks with the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies, but warns that aerospace contractors aren’t likely to jump at the chance to spend millions designing a plane with a potential sales market of only 30 or 40 units.

Some contractors, meanwhile, have explored the possibility of turning jumbo commercial planes into supertankers. The federal government has talked off and on with a company about outfitting a Boeing 747, but nothing has come of it yet. California state fire officials recently signed a three-year, $5 million deal for a DC-10 widebody jet capable of dropping an impressinve 12,000 gallons of foam on fires. But on Monday the plane was damaged when a severe downdraft forced it to scrape the treetops while fighting a second Californaia wildfire, near Tehachapi. No one was hurt, but officials had to ground their newest air asset indefinitely. Meanwhile, U.S. Forest Service officials were quick to point out that they had declined to certify the plane for fighting federal fires. The reason: safety concerns. Here’s hoping the flames die down soon.

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19487117/site/newsweek/page/0/

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Forest homes heat up fire risk
By Taryn Luntz

Medill News Service

WASHINGTON -- There was a time when you could tell a forest from a suburb. One was a place filled with towering trees and rugged trails that lent itself to camping and weekend jaunts. The other one was where you lived.

But over the past three decades, homeowners coveting scenic views and pine-tinged air have blurred the line between wilderness and civilization -- and increased the risk to lives and property from forest fires.

That has U.S. Forest Service officials scrambling for more money to fight fires and calling on state and local governments to enact tougher land-development regulations.

Annual federal firefighting budgets that averaged $1.1 billion from 1996 to 2000 are expected to reach $3 billion this year, the Government Accountability Office says.

The fire risk is particularly acute in Washington, where developments are pushing deeper into the forests.

"It's the continuation of a trend that has been taking place across the West over a number of years," said Joe Shramek, a fire-control employee with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, which is responsible for protecting more than 12 million acres of private and state-owned forests.

"We've got issues with forest health in terms of fuels being primed and ready to lead to extreme fire behavior. We've had droughty conditions for quite some time. And we have increasing numbers of people living in areas that are fire-prone," Shramek said.

At a U.S. Senate hearing this summer, senators grilled officials from the departments of Agriculture and Interior, demanding an explanation for a new Government Accountability Office report that said the Forest Service is not adequately prepared for this year's fire season.

The agency officials said that homes in or near forested areas, which are the responsibility of state and local governments, are a major source of the problems.

Firefighting is generally a collaborative effort, with the unit closest to a fire responding first, regardless of jurisdiction. The Forest Service, with its arsenal of firefighting equipment and people, is often asked to come to the aid of state and local fire agencies when wildfires threaten homes near forest boundaries.

"Every new subdivision presents a new challenge and inherently more expensive fire-suppression cost, if we're going to defend that subdivision," Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Ray told the Senate in June.

Because firefighters always give priority to human life, the presence of more and more homes near forests often diverts resources from effectively containing fires, directing them instead to saving people.

"That means the defense strategy against the fire is dictated not by where the fire is moving within the forest, but where the houses are within the forest," said Jim Schwab, a researcher at the American Planning Association.

Money spent protecting these areas is money not used to keep the forest healthy, which helps prevent wildfires from starting, federal officials said.

Few development limits

Even as housing encroaches on wildfire territory, few counties require developments in high-risk areas to be accompanied by wide roads and turnarounds to accommodate firetrucks -- basic measures that would make firefighting less expensive and less dangerous.

"Homeowners and towns and counties have the opportunity to enact ordinances that would make their homes safer," said Bobbie Scopa, a forest-fire manager for the Okanogan and Wenatchee national forests. "But there's a certain amount of pressure to allow development. Some of these ordinances may cost the developments money."

Brian Minnich, legislative-affairs director for the Building Industry Association of Washington, said state laws meant to contain urban sprawl often result in more homes being packed into tighter spaces, leaving less room for wide roads and creating densely populated areas near wildfire zones.

"Some of the new development going in some of the more densely populated areas of King County have 3,000- or 4,000-square-foot homes, and they're not much more than 3 or 4 feet apart from each other," Minnich said.

But he added that most counties do have building codes that take wildfires into account, though he believes there should be more consistency between counties and a greater effort to teach homeowners how to maintain their land.

Forest officials said firefighters sometimes must contend with overgrown housing lots that can be fodder for fast-moving, catastrophic wildfires.

Laws haven't kept up

"One issue is that the laws haven't kept up with the current situation," said Mark Gray, a state Department of Natural Resources fire-prevention official. "The hazard laws we had in place were based on abating logging debris. But if a landowner just allowed their forest to become unhealthy and fuels to accumulate naturally, there wasn't anything we could do."

The Washington Legislature began to address the issue this year, creating a study group of state and county fire officials, environmentalists, housing developers, landowners, insurers and real-estate representatives to recommend new fire policies.

According to the bill authorizing the study, the group will evaluate whether state and local building codes adequately address the dangers posed by development in areas subject to wildfires.

The group also will examine whether an annual wildfire-protection fee that some forest landowners must pay is high enough -- it's currently about $18 for 50 acres of land -- and what Washington can learn from other Western states' wildfire policies.

"These kinds of laws are always controversial because they involve telling people what to do on their land," Gray said. "I think regulatory actions to create more restrictive zoning and so on are controversial. I think we're certainly not there yet. But we are getting closer to a tipping point."

from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003812394_wildfire30m.html