Californians are building homes vulnerable to fire in areas prone to the state’s worsening wildfires.
That’s because even California’s wildfire resilience policies, some of the most detailed in the country, and the world, haven’t caught up to wildfire seasons intensifying due to hotter and drier weather affected by climate change, according to a new report from Zurich North America, DuPont, and the nonprofit Institute for Social and Environmental Transition.
In addition, where those policies are in place, they often aren’t uniformly applied across a city, town, or region in the state, and California residents aren’t fully aware or convinced of the increasing risks they face, the report adds.
“Indeed, today’s actions are based on yesterday’s normal rather than on the new intensifying paradigm of wildfire hazards faced by communities across the wildland-urban interface today,” the report says. The authors offer a glimpse into California’s response to four fires in the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire seasons — the Thomas and Tubbs fires in 2017 and the Camp and Woolsey fires in 2018.
For example, while California has mapped wildfire hazard across the state, its maps don’t account for how climate change affects the level of risk, the report notes. In addition, California’s fire-resistant building code provisions, adopted in 2008, are mandatory only in certain areas that are considered highest risk, but not in the surrounding areas that have faced just as much damage from fires in recent years.
Those nearby areas are “where we felt like people were not really prepared, not aware, and not convinced” they were at risk, said Marcelo Milani, global strategy leader for resilient construction at DuPont, who worked closely on the study.
The fire-safe building code is “a bit like a safety belt” in a car, Milani said. Giving people the option of whether or not to wear a seat belt often causes more serious injuries than if it were required across the board, he added.
For example, the report notes that residents of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, which suffered damages from the Tubbs fire in 2017, are allowed to rebuild in largely the same way without having to follow fire-resistant building codes. That’s because the working-class neighborhood, where more than 1,000 homes were destroyed by the fire, isn’t technically listed as a high-risk area where the building code is required.
Milani said there’s a disconnect between the increasing risk Californian cities and towns face and the attitudes of the people living in them.
In some cases, Californian residents have rebelled against cities or counties imposing the fire-resistant building codes, for fear they would be too expensive or out of doubt that the risk was large enough. That occurs even in places just ravaged by fires, Milani said.
According to the report, only 18% of houses in Paradise built without observing the fire-resistant codes survived the Camp fire. That’s compared to 51% of the houses built according to the new codes that survived.
Even Paradise, though, hasn’t approved requiring all of the recommended fire-resistant building code provisions, in part because residents question whether it would cost more and whether the risk is really as high, according to the report.
“For governments, lacking a strong push from their constituents, they take action where it’s relatively easy but perhaps avoid areas that are more controversial,” said Karen MacClune, executive director of the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition. “Overcoming this will require developing a culture of wildfire awareness and active mitigation, at the individual, community, and state levels, coupled with identifying more cost-effective ways to incentivize change.”
That primarily includes reducing the costs of retrofitting homes and buildings to fire-resistant standards, MacClune added.
Milani also said California and other wildfire-prone states should enforce greater risk protections in so-called wildland-urban interface areas, or lands where cities and towns are directly adjoining undeveloped land.
Those areas have a heightened risk of wildfires but are increasingly being developed both because the nature-filled landscape attracts residents and because land is more affordable than adjacent cities, especially in California, where real estate prices are skyrocketing.
More broadly, California, as well as other states and the federal government, needs to be spending more before wildfires hit to better balance pre- and post-disaster funding, said Ben Harper, Zurich North America’s head of corporate sustainability.
He cited research showing that every $1 invested in mitigation measures in wildland-urban interface areas can save $3 to $4 in disaster costs in the future.
