Many unaware of fire risks when building out West

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 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 ignorant of the risk.


Number of fires up
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 — 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.


'Coming to a head'
This spring, the U.S. Forest Service 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," McMorrow said, "this notion that people move out to the woods and put themselves in dangerous situations."

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

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 becoming less willing to write policies for those who do not meet a "wildfire checklist" by taking measures to protect their homes.