Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Humans have started 97% of wildfires that threaten U.S. homes since 1992

#1
C C Offline
https://cires.colorado.edu/news/line-fire

RELEASE: People are starting almost all the wildfires that threaten U.S. homes, according to an innovative new analysis combining housing and wildfire data. Through activities like debris burning, equipment use and arson, humans were responsible for igniting 97 percent of home-threatening wildfires, a CU Boulder-led team reported this week in the journal Fire.

Moreover, one million homes sat within the boundaries of wildfires in the last 24 years, the team found. That’s five times previous estimates, which did not consider the damage done and threatened by small fires. Nearly 59 million more homes in the wildland-urban interface lay within a kilometer of fires. “We have vastly underestimated the wildfire risk to our homes,” said lead author Nathan Mietkiewicz, who led the research as a postdoc in Earth Lab, part of CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We’ve been living with wildfire risk that we haven’t fully understood.”

To better understand wildfire trends in the United States, Mietkiewicz, now an analyst at the National Ecological Observatory Network, and his colleagues dug into 1.6 million government spatial records of wildfire ignition between 1992 and 2015; Earth Lab’s own compilation of 120,000 incident reports; and 200 million housing records from a real estate database from Zillow. Among their findings:
  • Humans caused 97 percent of all wildfires in the wildland-urban interface, 85 percent of all wildfires in “very-low-density housing” areas, and 59 percent of all wildfires in wildlands between 1992 and 2015.
  • Human-started wildfires are expensive, eating up about one-third of all fire fighting costs.
  • Overall, about half of fire suppression costs were related to protecting houses in all locations: the wildland-urban interface, low-density housing areas, and elsewhere.
  • Most human-caused wildfires were relatively small (<4 km2) but were responsible for most homes threatened (92 percent).
  • The wildland-urban interface or “WUI,” represented only 10 percent of U.S. land in 2010, but was the site of 32 percent of all wildfire ignitions.
  • The WUI is also expanding our vulnerability: between 1992 and 2015, we built 32 million new homes in the WUI.
“Our fire problem is not going away anytime soon,” said co-author Jennifer Balch, director of Earth Lab, CIRES Fellow and associate professor of geography. It’s not just that we’re building more homes in the line of fire, she said, but climate change is creating warmer, drier conditions that make communities more vulnerable to wildfire.

The new study, she said, does provide guidance for policy makers. “This provides greater justification that prescribed burns, where safe, can mitigate the risk and threat of future wildfires,” Balch said. And we need to construct more fireproof homes in these beautiful, but flammable landscapes, she added. “We essentially need to build better and burn better.”

“Smokey Bear needs to move to the suburbs,” Mietkiewicz concluded. “If we can reduce the number of human-caused ignitions, we will also reduce the amount of homes threatened by wildfires.”
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Mystery seed packets ship to homes. Prof warns: Do not plant them (Marxist terrorism) C C 1 154 Jul 29, 2020 07:18 AM
Last Post: confused2
  Data: quality farm soil disappearing + Europe: syphilis up by 70% since 2010 C C 0 288 Jul 13, 2019 03:48 AM
Last Post: C C
  Brexit: poll gives boost to Scottish independence + US can't afford homes in 70% of c C C 1 391 Mar 28, 2019 11:46 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Nearly half of all US homes will own a smart speaker by end of year, data projects C C 0 372 Sep 12, 2018 03:02 AM
Last Post: C C
  We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct C C 1 454 Oct 9, 2017 08:24 AM
Last Post: RainbowUnicorn
  Homes in Wealthier Neighborhoods Tend to Have More Bugs C C 0 460 Aug 5, 2016 04:29 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)