Think only California burns? Think again. Even Florida, Texas and New Jersey at risk.
SAN FRANCISCO – The country has watched in horror as thousands of acres in and around Los Angeles burned this month. But while California may seem especially fire prone, fire experts warn that wildfire risk is increasing across the country – often in places residents might not expect.
“There are a lot of cities that share similarities with what happened in Los Angeles,” said Kelly Pohl with Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group in Montana that had done research on the cost of retrofitting homes to protect against wildfires.
Think Boise, Idaho. Salt Lake City. Amarillo, Texas; Reno, Nevada; and Oklahoma City, she said.
A Paste BN analysis found that 3.3 million Americans live in census tracts where the wildfire risk is “very high.” Another 14.8 million live in tracts where the risk is “relatively high.”
That includes states that might not spring to mind when thinking about wildfires, such as Florida, West Virginia and New Jersey.
It's not even about forest fires any more, the analysis found. A full 74% of people living in “very high”-risk census tracts are in metropolitan areas.
The Paste BN analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data calculated how many people are living in very high wildfire risk areas and where those population centers are located.
The top three metropolitan areas with the highest percentage of people living in very high wildfire risk tracts were:
- St. George, Utah
- Rapid City, South Dakota
- Wenatchee-East Wenatchee, Washington
Two things that have changed in the past couple of decades are contributing to the threat.
Many parts of the country have become hotter and drier and subject to “flash droughts” that dry things out quickly. And an ever-increasing number of people want to live in or near wildlands that evolved to burn.
Their homes may be surrounded by trees and plants with stunning vistas of unspoiled nature, “but it comes at a cost,” said Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Paste BN analysis found that even as the risk rises, Americans are flocking to very high wildfire risk areas in significant numbers. Population growth in metros with people in high wildfire risk areas increased about 70% between 1990 and 2020, while population in the average American metro over the same period increased about 40%.
Fires don't stay on wildlands, said Pohl, the associate director with Headwaters Economics, which also works on land management and economic development.
“What these disasters all have in common is while they may have started as wildfires, they then spread into densely populated urban areas,” she said. Once there, the flames spread from home to home. “We’re now seeing urban conflagration resulting from a wildfire.”
High-risk areas:
The Southwest
One might imagine the desert couldn’t burn if it wanted to. But many areas of the Southwest are actually scrubland. Today, invasive plants such as cheatgrass have created a contiguous carpet of fuel that fire can race through, igniting shrubs and trees that are normally spaced apart, allowing blazes to spread over large distances.
“Cheatgrass was involved in 39 of the largest 50 fires across the Great Basin West,” said Jennifer Balch, a fire scientist and professor of geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
It’s also a landscape that in the past would have experienced frequent low-intensity fires, clearing away brush and keeping fires from becoming infernos.
In areas where there are forests, increasing droughts and homes pushing ever further into the wilderness are putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.
Reno, for instance, Pohl said, is "a place that could experience something catastrophic.”
Idaho
Idaho is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. People flock there, in part, for its affordable housing that is still near the state’s tremendous natural beauty.
“Idaho is consistently rated high on the proportion of structures they have at risk," said Michele Steinberg, director of the wildfire division of the National Fire Protection Association.
Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas
These states are subject to big grassland fires that can move very quickly in high wind conditions, putting large numbers of homes a risk, said Radeloff, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor.
In 2021, the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, killed two people, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and caused the evacuation of more than 37,000 people. The grassfire was the most destructive fire in Colorado history.
Grassland fires destroy as many homes in the United States as forest fires do but don’t get as much attention.
“Grass fires are not as intense as forest fires, but they burn hot enough to set a house ablaze,” Radeloff said.
In addition, fires are moving faster, which makes them harder to fight and increases home loss. “Fires are 250% faster in the West and 400% faster in California,” said UC-Boulder's Balch. “Speed is fundamentally the underlying driver of why fires are getting so much bigger.”
In the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma, the Smokehouse Creek fire in February 2024 was the largest in state history. It killed two people, burned more than 1.2 million acres and destroyed more than 30 homes. It was also the costliest fire in the state’s history, according to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.
Appalachia
Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and the Carolinas all have areas with the potential for large fire events, Pohl said.
In 2016, the Great Smoky Mountains wildfires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, killed 14 people and destroyed more than 2,500 homes and businesses. The fire burned for five days in an isolated part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park before high winds whipped it up and swept it toward Gatlinburg.
“All it takes it is a little bit of above-average temperature, low humidity, relatively persistent drought in an area and the wind to pick up ‒ and you end up with red flag warnings,” said Jeremy Porter, who runs climate implications research for the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that has created wildfire and flood risk models for the entire nation.
An area that’s starting to worry people is West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, which is becoming a bedroom community for people who work in the Greater Washington, D.C., area.
“They’re starting to urbanize in areas that we know have a fire history, a natural ecosystem that burns,” said Steinberg.
Florida
Tourists spend time on the beaches, but many parts of Florida and southern Georgia are ecosystems that have historically burned frequently.
“It’s shocking how many historic fires there were, like around the Everglades, in areas you would never think of as flammable,” Porter said.
Polk County, Florida, between Tampa and Orlando, has the fourth highest county-level fire risk by First Street’s calculations.
In 1998, the Florida Firestorm burned more than 500,000 acres, damaged or destroyed over 300 homes and burned timber worth more than $300 million. The first was so large, officials closed off a 140-mile stretch of Interstate 95, and the races at Daytona Speedway were canceled.
The state’s population is growing fast, and suburban areas are expanding outward and moving into wild areas. Unfortunately, that has set the stage for fire.
“We’re seeing increases in the number of wildfires in the ecosystems that make up the majority of Florida,” said Victoria Donovan, a professor of forest management at the University of Florida.
Those highly flammable ecosystems are now home to millions of Americans.
“Even in Florida, it only takes a few months for fuels that were saturated at one point with water and humidity in the summertime to dry out and become fuels for a wildfire,” said Porter.
New Jersey Pine Barrens
The New Jersey Pine Barrens, a large, beautiful national reserve in the southern part of the state, is a unique ecosystem composed of forests, scrubland and waterways.
It’s also highly flammable and increasingly surrounded by development.
“If you look on the maps, it’s a hot spot – a bright orange circle right in the middle of New Jersey,” said Porter.
It’s not surprising the state's Ocean County, with a population of 660,000, is number seven on First Street's list of most at-risk counties for fire.
Protecting yourself
While the dangers are real, there are newer tools that can help people protect themselves against fires.
The first is simply avoiding, when possible, living in areas at high risk, Porter said.
“This information is available now. You can go on Zillow, you can go on Redfin, you can go on Realtor.com and there’s fire risk information for every property across the country,” he said.
There’s also increasingly clear data on how to protect a home from wildfires, especially the dangerous embers that can drift for as much as a mile.
Research by Headwaters Economics shows that becoming wildfire resilient doesn’t have to break the bank, said Pohl.
“The cost of retrofitting can be as inexpensive as $2,000,” she said. “Some of the most effective things can by done by a homeowner over a weekend.”
Contributing: Ignacio Calderon