The town of Paradise, California went through what can best be described as hell on Earth in 2018 when more than 27,000 residents trying to escape the Camp Fire got caught in a nightmare traffic jam. The catastrophe brought to light the reality that California’s highways are not designed to handle mass evacuations.
About a three-and-a-half-hour drive south of Paradise to Sonora, a Gold Rush town where this writer grew up. Karl Rodefer is a Tuolumne County supervisor, and he thinks about the Paradise fire and how something like it could happen in Sonora.
“If that happens here, we’re going to have the same kinds of issues,” he said. “There’s a lot of anxiety in the foothills now because of the Camp Fire.” Both Sonora and Paradise are isolated communities with few roads leading into and out of town.
About 350,000 Californians live in areas that have the highest wildfire risk designation, and either the same number or fewer exit routes per person as Paradise. And that is a scary thought. A USA Today Network-California analysis of populations, fire risk zones and roadways shows roughly one out of every 100 ZIP codes in California has a population-to-evacuation-route ratio that is near to or worse than that of Paradise.
Development and building codes
California did develop fire code standards for roads in the 1990s, that included things like “grades, road surfaces, passing areas, signage on dead-ends and critical secondary access to any subdivision,” said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with Cal Fire’s office of the state fire marshal.
California does not require communities to plan for wildfire evacuations. And while experts recommend cities and counties develop evacuation plans, there is still disagreement over what should be included in those plans.
There are also building codes that regulate room capacity and emergency exits, said wildfire evacuations expert Tom Cova. However, with climate change bringing an increase in severe weather conditions, from droughts to flooding, there has also been an increase in the number and severity of wildfires.
It seems that today, though, the dream of a home in the middle of a wooded lot is more apt to go up in smoke. The 2018 firestorms that brought California to its knees also brought a keen awareness of the need look at how developments are encroaching into forested lands.
Sadly, development companies are at work in the state and in South Lake Tahoe, a city west of the California-Nevada state line. One such project is a proposed redevelopment plan for Squaw Valley Resort. The developers plan on adding about 1,500 bedrooms and additional retail and resort amenities to the valley over the next 25 years.
There is another plan for the development of hundreds of homes near a two-lane highway near Truckee. The strange thing about all this is that the developers, for the most part, agree that there are instances in which a wildfire could burn through faster than people could evacuate.
We have to learn from the events of the past
But even with developers agreeing on the danger from wildfires, local governments have approved the developments over the objections of environmental groups and hundreds of residents who spoke out against the plans. While both development plans are now being challenged in court, it still leaves an unanswered question – “When will they ever learn?”
It would be fair to say that private lands can be sold for development, even if they are located in forested areas. But nature has thrown us some curveballs in the guise of global warming and all its impacts. This means we have to reassess what is required to live under a different kind of environment than what we have been used to dealing with.
The two development projects are in what scientists and land managers call the wildland-urban interface or WUI. Even though WUI’s are not always associated with a greater risk of wildfires, in California it does. This is because the state is the most populous in the U.S.
Added to this designation, the state’s WUI areas – which happen to be close to dense populations – are overgrown with underbrush that dries out in the summer, increasing the risk of wildfires. According to recent research, 75 percent of buildings destroyed by a wildfire are in WUI zones.
“There are a lot of buildings and there is a lot of woodland vegetation and they are close to each other, and there is a lot of fire,” said Anu Kramer, a wildfire scientist at the Silvis Lab at the University of Wisconsin who conducted the research. “When those things come together that is when you are going to see a lot of destruction.”
