Sunday, a fast-moving lightning-strike fire in Arizona killed 19 firefighters — some of them in their fire shelters, and some just outside.
Last month, two residents died when their home burned in a wildfire near Colorado Springs.
As horrifying as those deaths are, the number and scope of the wildfires burning around the West right now probably make them nearly inevitable. Firefighters do a remarkable job of surviving, but the job itself is more dangerous than most people can begin to imagine.
Last Friday, firefighters put out a lightning-strike fire burning a single tree in the La Platas above Mancos. That’s how such fires start: a single bolt of lightning, a single tree, then the surrounding trees, then hundreds of thousands of acres. Or they start with a human action, either a thoughtless error or, as with last year’s Weber Fire, an intentional crime.
The property statistics are depressing: Nearly 100,000 acres burned in the West Fork Complex around Wolf Creek Pass. More than 133,000 — that’s 200 square miles — in the Silver Fire in New Mexico, and 44,000 in the Little Bear Fire, plus 156,000 burned in the Los Conchas Fire earlier this year. Big fires in California. Tens of thousands of acres in Alaska. At least 200 homes lost in the most recent deadly fire and 509 in the Black Forest Fire near Colorado Springs.
Some Colorado residents sift through the ashes of their homes. They’d believed sufficient safeguards were in place. They hadn’t really understood the power of fire, especially the new kind of fires
Others, whose homes still stand, gaze at the charred landscape around them and wonder just how far their property values will plummet. Trees grow slowly in the arid West.
And mountain dwellers look at the beetle-killed trees on nearby slopes and know that someday those trees will burn — maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but, the odds suggest, soon. Many have exit plans and lists of what they’ll grab. When they see the wildfire pictures on the news, and when they hear about the deaths of highly-trained firefighters, they wonder whether they’ll have enough time. Some of them, in remote locations, may not. The weather is hot, windy and, so far, dry. The fuels are dry, if not dead. The risk is not diminishing.
In the abstract, nearly everyone agrees that a home is not worth the life of a firefighter. Of course it’s not. Yet those same homeowners hesitate to evacuate. They sneak back in behind the firelines to keep watering their roofs.
That behavior is insupportable. Get out. Stay out. Don’t put anyone’s life at risk. If you’re tempted to do otherwise, consider for a moment what it’s like to burn to death.
Congress must find ways to fund big projects to mitigate wildfire risk, and the men and women elected to Congress also must find ways to ensure that nothing about fire policy is debated in a partisan manner. Talk about the science. Talk about the condition of the forests. Talk about the weather.
Talk about the dead firefighters.
But don’t waste time talking about whose fault this all is. Figure out ways to make the situation better, soon. Just as residents’ actions shouldn’t be allowed to endanger firefighters, the condition of the nation’s public lands should not be allowed to endanger neighboring communities.
Thank you, firefighters. Thank you for the lives and homes you save. Thank you for the risks you take. Stay safe. Please, please, just get out of the way.