In Fire's Way: A Practical Guide to Life in the Wildfire Danger Zone

Introduction: Victims or Partners?

 Home ignitability ultimately implies the necessity for a change in the relationship between homeowners and the fire services. Instead of all pre-suppression and fire protection responsibilities residing with fire agencies, homeowners should take the principal responsibility for assuring adequately low home ignitability. The fire services become a community partner providing homeowners with the technical assistance needed for reducing home ignitability. This will require a change in the current relationship between fire agencies and homeowners from one of protector-victim to one of partners. Jack Cohen, Forest Service Fire Scientist Can we learn to live with fire? The purpose of this book is to help ordinary citizens educate themselves about fire issues in the Wildfire Danger Zone (also known as the Wildland-Urban Interface). Though the book pertains to the entire Rocky Mountain West, it provides a close look at fire-related issues in two representative states: Colorado and New Mexico. Consider a case from Santa Fe County, New Mexico, where urban development bumps up against wildlands. Homeowners packed a public meeting to protest against a proposed ordinance to impose fire-prevention standards. County Fire Marshal Hank Blackwell proposed a set of regulations that would have required enough thinning of trees and vegetation around a home to create a defensible space between a home and a forested area. He called for new construction and remodeling projects covering more than  percent of the original square footage to be built with fire-resistant materials. And he wanted to require INTRODUCTION Victims or Partners? minimum water pressure in newly developed areas. Blackwell said that work started on the proposed ordinance even before the Cerro Grande and Viveash fires burned on opposite sides of the county in the spring of . He said, “Wildfire is the greatest public threat to Santa Fe County.” Both volunteer and professional firefighters supported Blackwell. The City of Santa Fe’s fire marshal said the proposed county code would be less stringent than the city’s code, which regulates areas with typical Wildfire Danger Zone names: Wilderness Gate and Hyde Park Estates, for example. Another local fire official said the ordinance would also do something that most people neglect to consider: “protecting the lives of four hundred volunteer firefighters who work in the county.” But almost everyone at the meeting opposed the proposed ordinance, and the commissioners voted unanimously to direct Blackwell to seek more public input before trying again. Opponents claimed that the proposal was onerous and unconstitutional, and would contribute to further scarring of the mountains with twelve-foot-wide driveways. They wildly clapped, cheered, and whistled when Chairman Paul Duran maintained that the proposals replicate existing ordinances . “I think this ordinance is totally unnecessary,” Duran said, before taking any public testimony. “Developments now get submitted to the Fire Department for review and they make recommendations all the time.” After Duran’s remarks, property owners lined up to speak against the provisions, charging that they would give to fire officials powers now reserved for police. Professor Kim Sorvig, who teaches landscape architecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he commutes from Santa Fe County, said that the requirement for removing vegetation would only aggravate soil erosion. “Fire is a major catastrophe, but erosion is a constant minor catastrophe in this region. I would guess that in this region, flash floods kill more people than fires do.” Santa Fe County has forty-three targeted interface zones, which include most of the villages and communities in unincorporated areas. The commission requested that Blackwell form a coalition to hold public hearings in each and every zone—and do it before reporting again to the commission in ninety days. Soldiering on, Blackwell said the level of public input met part of his objective: “I am grateful for the heightened public awareness on this issue. It would have been irresponsible for me not to bring this forward. I am just doing my job, which is to protect lives and property.” Clearly, until and unless property owners have incentives to act responsibly, they will resist technically correct solutions such as those proposed by Mr. Blackwell. Thoughtful critics like Kim Sorvig have more to say on the subject. Here is a letter Sorvig wrote to the Santa Fe New Mexican: A regulation many Santa Feans have never heard of—the “Urban Wildland Interface Ordinance”—is about to change the County’s future. INTRODUCTION  “UWI” is a fire code, and last...