On the evening of September 10, the situation looked dire for the ski resort town of Wrightwood in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles. Driven by extreme fire weather, the Bridge fire, which started on the other side of the mountain range, grew from just a few thousand acres to 34,240 acres that day, and spread to the city. According to the next morninghad reached the limits of Wrightwood.
This could be a disaster, like Camp fire in 2018which claimed dozens of lives and destroyed thousands of houses in the northern Sierra Nevada city of Paradise. However, of the more than 2,000 homes in Wrightwood, 13 were destroyed by the Bridge fire. It is tragic that homes were lost, but the fact that more than 99% of homes survived and everyone was safely evacuated is a significant fire success story. Does it explain?
In recent years, Wrightwood has become very serious community fire safety measures. Before the Bridge fire started, the local Fire Safety Council held an educational event, coordinating with many agencies and the government. He promoted the importance of simple “house hardening” measures to make homes more fire-resistant, such as sweeping pine needles and leaves from roofs and installing modern exterior ventilation that prevented burning embers from entering the home. He preached about the effectiveness of “defensible space,” encouraging residents to prune grass, saplings and lower limbs immediately near the house. And they made an evacuation plan.
The Bridge fire is still burning, but it is slowly being brought under control. That now 71% containswith some zones still under evacuation and evacuation warnings. As threatened Wrightwood, the wildland fire team prioritized the kind of protection of the immediate community of the city has prepared citizens for, instead of focusing on remote wildland areas, and trying to stop the wind-driven fire that can not realistically stop.
He found that most of the houses in the city had defensible grounds, thanks to the pruning done by the owners. Firefighters collected fire retardant drops and water near the community, to prevent the fire from entering the city. And he helped those who fled, according to the plan that the townspeople had made.
Wrightwood’s success in keeping their homes safe shows that focusing directly on at-risk communities, rather than on forest management activities within forests, is an important way to protect cities from wildfires. We have seen the terrible results of logging large areas of remote forests under “depletion” and telling people that the zone will become fuel, preventing forest fires from reaching the city. Paradise, Greenville (destroyed in the Dixie fire in 2021) and Grizzly Flatswho are still rebuilding after two-thirds of the Caldor fire in the same year, are all examples of the error of this approach.
But there are those who will ignore examples like Wrightwood and want to repeat the failed strategies of the past. The most dangerous example today is the deceptive name Fix Our Forests Actbill sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.). If passed, it will roll back the bedrock environmental law and allow for clear-cutting – taking out most or all trees in the area – and logging mature and old-growth trees on federal public lands. The bill is wrong in science.
While certain forest management practices, such as controlled burning and prescribed burning, are important fire management tools, there consensus is growing among ecologists and climate scientists that “thinning” and other logging activities do not curb wildfires and others often tend to intensify their behavior and effects. Some Forest Service scientists are now criticizing the agency for failing the old approach, as ineffective and inefficient. urging direct focus on community protection. Another Forest Service scientist reported that denser forests tend to burn less in wildfires because of a darker, cooler microclimate, while “thin forests have more open conditions, which are associated with higher temperatures, lower relative humidity, higher wind speeds, and increased fire intensity..”
We cannot go backwards and repeat costly mistakes, as the Fix Our Forests Act did. Vulnerable communities need officials to heed examples like Wrightwood and start prioritizing community fire safety over logging industry profits.
Chad Hanson is a wildfire scientist The John Muir Project of the Earth Island Institute and author “Smokescreen: Debunking the Wildfire Myth to Save Our Forests and Climate.”
