Social and Community Impacts of Fire

In wildland–urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility.

Methods and models to design, prioritize and evaluate fuel break networks have potential application in many fire-prone ecosystems where major increases in fuel management investments are planned in response to growing incidence of wildfires.

Scaling up climate-adaptation in wildfire-prone watersheds requires innovative partnerships and funding. Water utilities are one stakeholder group that could play a role in these efforts. The overarching purpose of this study was to understand water utility engagement in wildfire mitigation efforts in the western United States.

Background Wildland firefighters have physically and psychologically demanding jobs that can result in social, economic and health-related stress.

The increasing frequency of wildfires has posed significant challenges to communities worldwide. The effectiveness of all aspects of disaster management depends on a credible estimation of the prevailing risk.

Evacuation is a crucial policy to mitigate wildfire impacts. Understanding traffic dynamics during a wildfire evacuation can help authorities to improve in improving emergency management plans, thus improving life safety.

As wildfires are increasingly causing negative impacts to communities and their livelihoods, many communities are demanding more proactive and locally driven approaches to address wildfire risk. This marks a shift away from centralized governance models where decision-making is concentrated in government agencies that prioritize reactive wildfire suppression.

While increased length and intensity of wildfire seasons in many places have led to more concern about wildland firefighter safety, we believe ethnography has been underutilized as a method within this domain. In response, we begin building a shared idiom for ethnographic engagement with wildland firefighter safety and similar occupations.

Objectives. To describe demographic and social characteristics of US communities exposed to wildfire smoke. Methods. Using satellite-collected data on wildfire smoke with the locations of population centers in the coterminous United States, we identified communities potentially exposed to light-, medium-, and heavy-density smoke plumes for each day from 2011 to 2021.

Wildfire risk is increasing all over the world, particularly in the western United States and the communities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas are at the greatest risk of fire.