The Changing American West

This chapter establishes a conceptual justification for the implementation of an affluence-vulnerability interface analytic approach to manage current and prospective suburban landscapes—indeed a major characteristic of the West is the immense amount of land currently still eligible for suburban and exurban conversion. Along with this important land characteristic, it provides a synoptic view of the rapidly transforming West more generally through a discussion of recent suburbanization, climatic, and fire activity trends. Most importantly “the Incendiary” is introduced as a metaphor for treating the suburban West like a troubled patient (an arsonist) with deeply held and engrained behaviors and characteristics. The chapter suggests that engaging the West as merely a flammable landscape is to confront symptoms of the Incendiary, while confronting the Incendiary itself is to treat the essential character and core mechanisms driving growth and social-environmental changes in high fire risk landscapes at the urban fringe.

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents the author's recollections about the fire that almost burned down his childhood home when he was sixteen. He was home alone when he heard a policeman outside the house asking residents to evacuate. He describes seeing his neighbors' homes became the source of smoke and embers dropping in their backyards. He returns to his house to pick up his cat, gets in the car, and leaves. Returning home with his parents the next day, they find that their home remained fully intact alongside a neighbor to each side. While he was overjoyed to see the structure and all their possessions in one piece, this euphoria was quickly lost to the sight of smoldering ruins all around, including their neighbors' and friends' homes. In retrospect, he concludes that given the day's conditions and the previous century of extensive residential development, the outcome of the 1991 Tunnel Fire was both unsurprising and inevitable.

Smoke Screen

This chapter presents three cases that illustrate how the underlying drivers of wildland-urban interface (WUI) wildfires frequently mischaracterize the relative role of ecological and social structures of influence. The first case explores the rather unscientific origins of the term firestorm and the credibility it is afforded as a legitimate fire classification through its normative use and acceptance in mainstream fire discourse. This process diminishes the very social and profitable origins of the WUI fire problem and naturalizes these areas as a hazardous by-product of larger, exogenous, and inviolable environmental forces such as climate change. The second case examines recent efforts to study and explain the relationship between mountain pine beetles and fire activity in the western United States. The third case describes the deeply political and protracted process of challenging the economically powerful wood shingle and cedar shake industry. Collectively all three cases illustrate how contemporary discourses on fire tend to truncate the scope of what counts (or is allowed to be brought to the debate table) as an underlying driver of increased fire activity in the West.

Out of the Ashes

This chapter continues the discussion of post-disaster reconstruction and fire mitigation efforts by presenting two examples that illustrate the continued extraction of profits from these high-risk areas. First, home reconstruction data in California and Colorado reveal that rebuilt homes are both bigger and more proximate to one another than prefire structures. Not only do these larger homes increase property values; they also increase overall fuel load and potential fire spread between structures. The chapter reviews important political economic considerations leading to this reconstruction outcome that has in turn injected more fuel and value onto the landscape. Second, it considers the emergence of the private firefighting industry to illustrate yet another group seeking to extract profits from high-risk residential landscapes across the West. The chapter shows that fire-prone landscapes like the Tunnel Fire area are notable for their ability to generate wealth both before and after hazard events. Over time financial opportunism has contributed to the formation of vulnerable communities while simultaneously incentivizing efforts to mitigate those very same risks. This marks a financially viable self-fulfilling prophecy: profits in production, profits in protection.

Trailblazing

This chapter illuminates how the production of vulnerability proceeds through—and is supported by—interconnected economic development and resource use activities across city and regional scales. It explores the connection between lucrative resource extraction, realty speculation, reforestation, and home construction activities in the Tunnel Fire area. These Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire activities and resulting forms of vulnerability are linked to the development of the San Francisco Bay Area. The historically resource-rich Oakland Hills “countryside” played a crucial role in shaping and facilitating San Francisco's post-Gold Rush economic ascendance. These resource-provisioning activities generated roadways that several decades later fell under the speculative eye of housing developers in search of suburban homes and vacation retreats for the region's new elite. This transition from resource extraction to real estate speculation was instantiated in the landscape, as several logging paths in Oakland became arterial roads populated by municipal infrastructure, flammable tree cover, and eventually a vast collection of new home developments in high fire risk areas.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter begins by using the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona to illustrate the real risks and human tragedies that arise when fighting fires that threaten residential communities. The disaster reminds us that civil society, politicians, city planners, and private developers among others should no longer conform to fiscal pressures and incentives at the metropolitan fringe as if there were no consequences. Collectively these groups must stop merely treating the symptom of the problem by putting out small fires within the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Instead we need to address the root causes of the firestorm itself, by treating western WUI areas like a patient—the Incendiary—through a comprehensive assessment of their backgrounds, histories, underlying drivers, internal governing mechanisms, core characteristics, and connections to externally influential forces. The chapter also outlines strategies that will help initiate a conversation about how to shift from current tactics that grapple with WUI symptoms to more innovative approaches that directly tackle affluence-vulnerability interface processes.

Debates of Distraction

This chapter presents two debates that illustrate how key decision-makers become mired in ideologically contentious disagreements, and how these issues distract nearly all parties from directly addressing the systemic causes of fire risk at the wildland-urban interface. A first example explores contemporary debates over eucalyptus management in the Oakland and Berkeley hills. Disagreements over the flammability of eucalyptus and their nonnative status divert attention away from broader social processes: mechanisms of development that actually drive fire vulnerability (and the premise of these very debates) in the first place. A second case explores yet another ideological battleground, this time pitting private property rights advocates concerned with controlling their own fire protection against those advocating for greater public agency involvement. City fire mitigation fees have produced a contentious proxy debate that forestalls other important discussions, such as whether to build more homes at all and whether to shift fire mitigation efforts from adaptation to growth minimization.

Setting the Stage for Disaster

This chapter focuses on government retrenchment, conservative homeowner politics, and state tax restructuring spanning the 1950s to 1980s. It highlights the scalar dimensions of vulnerability-in-production. In the face of a postwar suburban growth politics—culminating in the overthrow of conventional structures of taxation—metropolitan core areas like Oakland experienced tax reduced revenue growth rates, as well as depleted operating budgets within tax-dependent city fire services leading to reduced fire department budgets up to and during the Tunnel Fire. In order to generate new sources of tax revenue, city officials pursued large housing developments within high fire risk areas. The gradual increase in exposure to wildfires in the Tunnel Fire area is thus deeply intertwined within California's broader tax-revolt political movement. The chapter challenges spatially and temporally truncated explanations of fire vulnerability that fail to grapple with complex socioeconomic factors undergirding the placement of homes in areas that are already susceptible to wildfire. It ends by illustrating how factors generating vulnerability and affluence in the Tunnel Fire area also contribute to the production of vulnerabilities throughout the rest of Oakland.

The 1991 Tunnel Fire

The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is perhaps the most significant urban wildfire in United States history. Located in northeastern Oakland, California, and stretching northward into the city of Berkeley and east into neighboring Contra Costa County, the Tunnel Fire destroyed more than three thousand dwelling units and killed twenty-five people over a twenty-four-hour period. In adjusted 2012 dollars, the fire is estimated to have generated $2.5 billion in losses. Across the region, nation, and even internationally, the Tunnel Fire (or “Oakland Hills Firestorm” or “East Bay Hills Firestorm” depending on who is reporting) remains the urban wildfire reference point in U.S. history. This chapter describes the importance of an affluence-vulnerability interface analytic approach as a complement to more conventional wildland-urban interface analysis. It also presents important background information on the book's primary case study thread—the Tunnel Fire.

Dispatches from the Field

This chapter uses radio communication transcripts from the Tunnel Fire to illuminate specific challenges experienced by residents and responders alike at the time of the event. Based on these first-hand accounts, several important issues emerge concerning water, road, and power infrastructure. A review of reconstruction efforts in each area of concern demonstrates that progress toward reconciliation has been mixed. Capital improvements were driven largely by private property considerations and residents seeking to leverage the disaster in pursuit of neighborhood enhancements and estate-based wealth accumulation. Upgrades to water and power line equipment were lobbied and partially paid for by residents who used their positions of privilege to engage in collectivized risk reduction. In these instances the community was willing and able to supplement beleaguered city budget capacities and help pay for municipal upgrades. This presented a win-win for residents and the city of Oakland alike. However, when private benefits were less evident (or simply not attainable)—as was the case with road-widening initiatives—residents were less apt to back such recovery efforts. As a result, the pursuit of win-win outcomes unraveled.