WUI

I thought that this post on “the WUI is dead” was relevant, both to many discussions here (one example here) and also to the later Marshall Fire in Boulder. Shout-out to FAC Net who always posts good stuff.

The WUI, at its core, was a term meant to describe a perceived problem; now it is used to demarcate a perceived place. A short look at a few examples illustrate the issues with this shift:

The Sleepy Hollow Fire burned into Wenatchee, Washington in June of 2015, in what might have first appeared as a classic WUI fire, with a wildfire burning up to the edge of the city and igniting nearly 30 homes. As firefighters were busy fighting the fire in the Broadview neighborhood, embers from the burning homes travelled to the downtown core igniting and damaging multiple businesses. Subsequent mapping by the Washington DNR shows that this downtown area is not part of the WUI.

The Tubbs Fire burned 5,636 structures in and around Santa Rosa, California, and just over 25% of those structures were in an area too densely developed to be considered WUI, and another 4% too sparsely developed to be considered WUI. That’s over 1600 structures lost to a single wildfire that weren’t part of the WUI!

Closer to home, Deschutes County, Oregon defined a “wildfire hazard zone” that encompasses the entire County in 2003. It was just too difficult to think that an area of the county wasn’t at some level of wildfire risk. Would this zone be so all encompassing today if we tried to define WUI instead of the wildfire hazard zone? We’ll see soon as the State is due to complete the task of mapping said WUI by June of 2022.

What is in a name, indeed? At its outset, WUI was used to describe an emerging issue. Now some are more focused on deciding who is in or out of it. And what is implied by being in or out of a WUI? If you are not located within the WUI the implication I get is you don’t have to worry much about wildfire, but that may send a dangerous message, and is leading us away from using an inclusive approach that is needed for communities to begin to live with fire.

When I really start to think about it, using the term WUI oversimplifies the landscape it tries to represent, with all its complex social, political, economic and environmental issues overlaid on an ever changing geography. It implies there are areas in our communities without any risk, it allows us (from residents to decision-makers) to point the finger of blame and transmission at “others” or those who live somewhere else, and our obsession over mapping it perfectly keeps us from dealing with the real issues of adaptation and resilience our communities face.

The WUI may work, albeit imperfectly, as a concept, but it’s not meant to be a geographical place. The WUI isn’t a place at all, it is a set of conditions, and the more we try to define it and map it, the more we’ll have to disagree about.

I submit that it is time to sweep the term WUI to the curb, admit that the issues we’re trying to solve are more complex than something that can be captured in three words, and get back to work restoring our forests and rangelands, improving our wildfire response and continually adapting our communities to the fire adapted ecosystems we are all living in. The WUI is dead. Long live the WUI.

Speaking with folks in DC last week, it sounds as if we don’t know a) if forest provisions will end up in the bill or b) which ones those are. But given that context, I’d still like to understand what they intend (ed?). But I don’t know that for sure.. perhaps someone out there has more updated information?

A simple reading of the bill as posted here takes this paragraph:

“$10,000,000,000 for hazardous fuels reduction projects within the wildland-urban interface;”

and this definition of WUI

(10) WILDLAND-URBAN INTERFACE.—The term ‘‘wildland-urban interface’’— 22 (A) in the case of the lower 48 States,
23 means the areas mapped as the wildland-urban 24 interface in the document entitled ‘‘The Wildland-Urban Interface of the Conterminous
United States’’, and published by the Department of Agriculture in 2015; and
3 (B) in the case of the States of Alaska and
4 Hawaii, has the meaning given the term in section 101 of the Healthy Forests Restoration 6 Act of 2003 (16 U.S.C. 6511).

So given the maps and the definitions from the 2010 mapping (published in 2015 with 2010 data) that we looked at yesterday that shows, and defines WUI, as already having houses… I wonder whether there is any NFS land in the 2010 mapped WUI to be treated?

If you’re in Alaska or Hawaii, though, apparently you get to use the HFRA definition, with which many of us are familiar (and may be the first thing that comes to mind when someone says WUI, especially related to fire).

A community gets to designate it via a CWPP (community wildfire protection plan) or otherwise it’s this default:

HFRA has a default definition of WUI (Section 101(16)(B (ii)). It is an area:

Extending 1/2 mile from the boundary of an at-risk community.
OR

Extending 1 1/2 miles from the boundary when other criteria are met—for example, a sustained steep slope, a geographic feature that could help when creating an effective firebreak, or Condition Class 3 land.
OR

Adjacent to an evacuation route. There is no distance limitation for evacuation routes.

Fortunately it appears that the at-risk community definition is the same.
“AT-RISK COMMUNITY.—The term ‘‘at-risk 6 community’’ has the meaning given the term in section 101 of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of
8 2003 (16 U.S.C. 6511).”

So for the lower 48, clearly it was intentional to use the 2010 maps instead, but the maps may not (are likely not to?) have any FS land on them. Was this intentional, or am I misunderstanding it?

When we explore new ideas and abstractions, it’s best to start with a definition. The first and currently ongoing (updating with 2020 data as we speak) is this group at the Northern Research Station and cooperators. It should be noted that residential and other development has a host of other impacts, but this mapping is specifically designed to inform fire policy. As we noted last week, at one time the Reconciliation Bill had this map as the delineation for FS funding (that is, the 2010 mapping published in 2015) 10 billion-wise and the Sec would have to say they’d completed all those projects before the FS could use the $4 bill outside those boundaries.

The Wildland-Urban Interface Defined
Although the idea of a wildland-urban interface is easily understood and the term widely used, a specific definition is needed to determine where it occurs and map its location. The definition we use here, as in earlier map projects, is designed to inform fire policy and management. It is based on a report prepared for the Council of Western State Foresters on WUI fire risk (Teie and Weatherford 2000) and was later published in the Federal Register. The WUI is composed of both interface and intermix communities. The distinction between these is based on the characteristics and distribution of houses and wildland vegetation across the landscape. Intermix WUI refers to areas where housing and wildland vegetation intermingle, while interface WUI refers to areas where housing is in the vicinity of a large area of dense wildland vegetation.
For more detail, see Box 1.

Box 1.—Definition of WUI and non-WUI land-use classes.
WUI Definition
Intermix Areas with ≥6.18 houses per km2 and ≥50 percent cover of wildland vegetation
Interface Areas with ≥6.18 houses per km2 and <50 percent cover of vegetation located <2.4 km of an area ≥5 km2 in size that is ≥75 percent vegetated Non-WUI, Vegetated No housing Areas with ≥50 percent cover of wildland vegetation and no houses (e.g., protected areas, steep slopes, mountain tops) Very low housing density Areas with ≥50 percent cover of wildland vegetation and <6.18 houses per km2 (e.g., dispersed rural housing outside neighborhoods) Non-Vegetated or Agriculture Low and very low housing Areas with <50 percent cover of wildland vegetation and density <49.42 houses per km2 (e.g., agricultural lands and pasturelands) Medium and high housing Areas with <50 percent cover of wildland vegetation and ≥49.42 houses density per km2 (e.g., urban and suburban areas, which may have vegetation, but not dense vegetation)

What you might notice is that WUI on these maps can be adjacent to grazing lands or agricultural lands. Which doesn’t seem to fit the definition above, so this is more complicated than it might appear. Certainly acres of WUI next to corn fields or a grassy pasture have different fire characteristics than, say, a ponderosa forest.

This 2007 paper by Stewart et al. has a literature review and some history on the WUI concept.

Throughout its evolution, the WUI definition always includes three components: human presence, wildland vegetation, and a distance that represents the potential for effects (e.g., wildland fire and human activity) to extend beyond boundaries and impact neighboring lands. Beyond these three components, most WUI discussions are imprecise regarding what is or is not included. For example, human presence has been defined by housing density, population density, number of houses, or configuration of housing developments and neighborhood characteristics. Wildland vegetation is always mentioned, but the density, extent, and type of vegetation that makes some vegetation “wildland vegetation” is not well defined. The distance that the WUI extends into wildlands or into a housing development has been described in many different ways, including the distance a golf ball will fly off the porch or the distance from which flames or firebrands can reach a structure (Summerfelt 2003), but specific distances are rarely given.

It’s interesting to look at your neighborhood and compare the 1990 and 2010 maps. Observations?

I find the abstraction of WUI enormously unhelpful to many of our discussions. Especially as sometimes conveyed not that long ago.. “the wildfire problem is due to people building in the WUI.”  Then you see fires potentially coming very close to cities; Denver for the Hayman, Colorado Springs for Waldo Canyon, and then South Lake Tahoe, and actually in to Santa Rosa. Clearly people already live in the WUI. While new requirements for development would be helpful, we have to work with what we already have.

When someone write “WUI” some people are thinking (say, Colorado) McMansions in Aspen, and others mountain development with commuters to Denver, others a summer cabin near Gunnison, and others a trailer park near Florence. In no way are all those the same kind of thing, and yet, we talk about the WUI often as if it is.

These distinctions were brought to a head in my thinking by two pieces, one in High Country News and one in Harper’s.

This High Country News story’s tagline is “wildfires often hit low-income, minority communities the hardest. ”  This makes sense in the narrative “climate change hurts minorities and underserved communities the worst; wildfires are due to climate change: ergo wildfires must hurt minorities and underserved the most.”

However, there is a competing narrative “WUI people deserve what they get.” This was a view before the climate change narrative took hold. I think the underlying assumption here is that WUI landowners are not poor or minorities, and that they could choose to live somewhere else, and if they did wildfires wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Of course, in many WUI communities we can look around and see that many don’t look all that well-off. Many are in subdivisions that are cheaper due to being farther out. WUI is not equal to well-off, in many cases rather the opposite. This Brookings study talks about poverty in red and blue districts, which doesn’t tease out the WUI, but it fairly interesting.

This Harpers piece is pretty hyperbolic, and perhaps an extreme example of this view.

In other words, we as a nation pay ever-mounting bills to save a comparative handful of houses owned by people who against all sane advice choose to build in the path of catastrophe. Between 1990 and 2010, a period when we should have already known better, 2 million new homes were built in the interface. These homes don’t always appear to be on the edge of the wilderness. The entirety of Seeley Lake, a town with more than 1,700 permanent residents, is located in the WUI: the main drag with its tourist trade, the sawmill at the edge of town with its 130 workers, the cabins, trailers, frame houses, the high school, Cory’s Market, the American Legion hall, and Pop’s café.

In Manning’s view, entire towns can actually be “in” the WUI. See how confusing this is?

Such policies, however, are toxic in the current political climate of the West. One can identify a conservative here simply by mentioning wildfire and waiting for the inevitable argument: “The Forest Service needs to put these fires out.” And the Forest Service does just that, as it has done for decades. (The agency, along with other federal entities and state and local crews, extinguishes about 90 percent of the many thousands of fires that occur each year on what is called initial attack, an all-out lights-and-sirens response the moment a fire is reported.) The conservatives who populate the canyons, gulches, and dead-end roads at the fringes of Western valleys are quick to put aside their customary laments about government overreach when it comes to spending billions to protect their own redoubts.

This seems kind of silly (living in the WUI=conservative) in “the West”. It’s… Montana. If that.

This might seem harsh in light of the example of California. Last year, nine thousand structures burned in the fires around Santa Rosa, and more than a thousand around Los Angeles. These were unprecedented numbers, and most of the victims committed no sin to merit this level of punishment. Nevertheless, a video clip from Santa Rosa makes a case for severe action. A reporter for NBC is doing a stand-up in front of a charred foundation that was once a home. The scene looks as you might expect, as long as you don’t look at the backdrop: a fringe of still-green trees. This image is common enough if you know what you’re looking for. Fire scientists have collections of such images, the aftermaths of fires that level entire subdivisions but leave the trees standing and green—the flames are hot enough to ignite building materials but not the surrounding flora. These aren’t forest fires; they’re subdivision fires, running house to house, fueled by bad choices in shingles.

About 30 percent of the houses that burned in one of the Santa Rosa fires, the Tubbs fire, were outside the WUI. Not in the woods. In cities. Urban. They were set alight by the burning of houses that were in the interface. Fire scientists speak of “ladder fuels,” which carry fire from one level to the next. In this case, thousands of irresponsibly built homes were the ladder fuel that destroyed houses situated in otherwise safe areas. There’s a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the house of someone who builds in the forest, but allowing his willful ignorance to destroy those of hundreds of more responsible neighbors is a travesty.

Steady on, there Mr. Manning! Sin and punishment.. isn’t that the realm of “conservatives” and their religious allies?
Perhaps we could expand it out of the West to “there’s a rude and satisfying justice in flooding the house of someone who builds along the coast.” But I don’t think that the editors of Harper’s might be as enthusiastic about that observation. Manning’s “justice” concept raised a few eyebrows when his wife, Tracy Stone-Manning, retweeted it last year and said it was a “clarion call.” To what, I am not all that clear.

But what struck me as oddest and most unusual was not that idea. We hear less hype-y (not sin and punishment) versions of that often. It was the concept that WUI people are responsible for fires moving into town. Seems like in some cases that I have noticed, a fire is coming from the forest towards town and is fought in the WUI, decreasing the chance it will get into the city. Thinking Waldo Canyon here (see photo). Maybe others have other experiences?

If we put these two articles together, we get that some people whose houses burn in the WUI are victims of climate change. Others deserve their fate. We’re using the same word to talk about vastly different people in terms of social class, race and ethnicity, cultures, history, and their physical and biological environment. Our first step in Rethinking the WUI will be to parse out some of these differences.