WildfiresFor Forest Towns, 3 Wildfire Lessons as Dixie Fire Destroys Historic Greenville, California

By Bart Johnson and David Hulse

Published 9 August 2021

How can people prepare for a future that’s unlike anything their communities have ever experienced? The emergence of extreme fires in recent years and the resulting devastation shows that communities need better means to anticipate mounting dangers, and underscores how settlement patterns, land management and lifestyles will have to change to prevent even larger catastrophes. Our research team of landscape architects, ecologists, social scientists and computer scientists has been exploring and testing strategies to help.

A wildfire burning in hot, dry mountain forest swept through the Gold Rush town of Greenville, California, on Aug. 4, reducing neighborhoods and the historic downtown to charred rubble. Hours earlier, the sheriff had warned Greenville’s remaining residents to get out immediately as strong, gusty winds drove the Dixie Fire toward town. At the same time, firefighters were also trying to protect two other communities – all not far from where the deadly Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.

This kind of trauma is becoming familiar, from loss of homes to the obliteration of entire towns. Fear of what the future holds in a changing climate lends uncertainty to people’s daily lives. They want to know how to protect their homes, their families, their communities. But they also want to protect core values they cherish – good places to raise their children, freedom to choose their lifestyle, a sense of place in nature and belonging.

How can people prepare for a future that’s unlike anything their communities have ever experienced?

The emergence of extreme fires in recent years and the resulting devastation shows that communities need better means to anticipate mounting dangers, and underscores how settlement patterns, land management and lifestyles will have to change to prevent even larger catastrophes. Our research team of landscape architects, ecologists, social scientists and computer scientists has been exploring and testing strategies to help.

What Might the Future Hold?
Because climate change is contributing to unprecedented extreme fire weather, we used simulation modeling to explore and test how forest management and rural development could reduce or amplify wildfire risks in coming decades.

To do this, we created a computer version of the rural landscape around Eugene-Springfield, a midsize metropolitan area in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with a rapidly expanding population. Our simulations played out in carefully mapped representations of that landscape beginning in 2007, including its vegetation, property boundaries and the type of landowner managing each parcel, such as farmers, foresters or rural residents who moved to the countryside from the city.

For each of 50 simulated years, as climate models generated fire weather and altered the vegetation, each landowner chose actions such as removing hazardous fuels like small trees and underbrush, restoring fire-adapted ecosystems, growing crops, building homes or protecting homes with landscaping and building materials recommended by the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise program.

Over time, the simulated landowners could respond to emerging threats while protecting valued crops, amenities, lifestyles and ecosystems.