The Daily - A Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Wildfires

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

When many in California talk about this year’s wildfires, they describe the color — the apocalyptic, ominous, red-orange glow in the sky.The state’s current wildfires have seen two and a half million acres already burned.Climate change has made conditions ripe for fires: Temperatures are higher and the landscape drier. But the destruction has also become more acute because of the number of homes that are built on the wildland-urban interface — where development meets wild vegetation.The pressures of California’s population have meant that towns are encouraged to build in high-risk areas. And when a development is ravaged by a fire, it is often rebuilt, starting the cycle of destruction over again.Today, we explore the practice of building houses in fire zones and the role insurance companies could play in disrupting this cycle. Guest: Christopher Flavelle, who covers the impact of global warming on people, governments and industries for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedailyBackground reading: “People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’” a climate scientist said. “I always say no. It’s going to get worse.” If climate change was an abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians.Research suggests that most Americans support restrictions on building homes in fire- or flood-prone areas.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, wildfires are ravaging the West with California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado all facing record fire seasons. My colleague Chrislavel, on the cycle of building and rebuilding that is making the annual fires so destructive. It's Friday, September 11th. You guys need any help? Huh? On the inside?

Hey, let's go! Come on, lady! The fire is here! The fires this year really got bad starting in mid-August with a series of lightning strikes. Nearly 11,000 lightning strikes. Setting off hundreds of fires. You had already dry conditions, so those fires just spread. of lightning strikes. Nearly 11,000 lightning strikes. Setting off hundreds of fires. You had already dry conditions, so those fires just spread.

These fires stretched the length of the state. Quickly became out of control. The governor of California declaring a state of emergency tonight. Trapped. There's fire on all sides, all around us. All the roads are burnt. Right now there's more than 2.5 million acres that are burned in California alone. It was like the entire wall of the forest was just coming at us down the road. I looked up at the back of my house, it was on fire.

And it's spread beyond California right now. We've got big fires in Oregon and Washington. Burn injuries, two victims en route. More than 14,000 firefighters are fighting these blazes. More than 560 homes destroyed here. And is threatening 5,000 more. At least five fatalities. Seven people killed. One-year-old boy killed while fleeing with his family from a fire in Washington state. The governor there saying this could be the worst loss of life and property in state history. Do you see what California looks like right now?

When I talk to people in California who are dealing with this, they always describe the color. You can see the red hue, the red-orange glow in the sky. It's apocalyptic. Ominous. Ominous and bleak. There's a strong note of fear and also awe in their voice. It's raining ash. It's literally raining ash, bro. I mean, we can't even breathe, bro. And the thing to remember is we are not yet in the peak of wildfire season. I talked to a county fire chief yesterday, and he said he is looking at months more of this until the rains come.

Look at this. Look. Let the world know what's going on in California, man. We burning down. Chris, the scenes you're describing sound horrific. And what feels particularly awful is that every year seems to bring another set of devastating wildfires, and they keep getting worse and worse. And I think the question everyone has at this point is, why, if we know that these fires are coming, do we see such extreme destruction year after year, fire season after fire season? So there's a few things. Certainly the main theme here is climate change, right? Climate change is making the conditions worse. It's drier. There

are more dead trees. The temperatures are higher. There's no getting away from the rule of climate change. But it's important to note it's not just climate change. The other big change is the number of homes being built in this area, this exposed, vulnerable part of the state. Experts have a term for it. They call it the wildland urban interface or the WUI. And what that means is simply the place where development meets wild vegetation. It can be forests, it can be grassland, areas where you're going to have vegetation. It can be forests. It can be grassland. Areas where you're going to have wildfires. And that housing development keeps on increasing in those areas. So you get more fires, but you also have more homes that are burning in those fires because there's more homes to begin with in those areas. So when we think of this wooey you were describing where it feels like nature and man

kind of meet, it's extremely likely to catch fire over and over again. So why are people moving to such land? Yeah, it's a few reasons, and they all are happening together. If we go back a few decades, California has always grown at a fast rate. But what's really accelerated is housing pressure in urban areas. The cost of a home in San Francisco or Los Angeles keeps on going up. The tech boom in particular in the Bay Area accelerated that further. And there's more to it than that, right? The state's getting involved. The state is saying,

understandably, we've got a huge homelessness problem, a massive affordability problem. They're looking increasingly aggressively to find new ways to deal with that. And one thing they're doing is putting more pressure on local governments out in the regions to say, we want you to increase your housing stock. And there's economic incentives. If local governments don't build enough housing, they can lose state funding. So all the incentives line up towards more and more housing, and that pressure is increasing over time as the housing crisis gets worse. Huh. So the state government in a place like California is actually going to punish a town in the WUI, in a place that's highly flammable,

if they're not expanding the amount of housing for all the reasons you just explained, which is that California needs more housing, more affordable housing. Yeah, and when you talk to local officials, they'll cite that. They'll say, look, we might know what the risk is, but we're getting pressure from the state. We can't stop doing this. We've got to build houses somewhere, and the easiest place to build houses is out here in open land that's never been developed. So that's where the pressure winds up. So because of all these forces, people, and it sounds like a lot of people, are suddenly living right in the middle of where the pressure winds up. So because of all these forces, people, and it sounds like a lot of people, are suddenly living right in the middle of where the fires are going to be burning. Exactly.

And it's now dovetailing with this second overarching trend of climate change. So just as you've got people flooding these areas, you also have increasingly severe fires, and they're overlapping, and they're both getting worse. severe fires and they're overlapping and they're both getting worse. A great example of this is Sonoma County, which some people call wine country. It's just a little bit north and inland from the Bay Area. Beautiful countryside, but it's populating quickly. If you go back to 1964, there was a big fire called the Hanley Fire in Sonoma County, destroyed fewer than 100 homes.

So not a massive impact. Why that fire matters is because in 2017, the Tubbs Fire hit roughly the same area as the Hanley Fire, but this time it destroyed more than 5,000 homes. Wow. And what was different, of course, wasn't the fire. The fire was basically the sameley Fire, but this time it destroyed more than 5,000 homes. Wow. And what was different, of course, wasn't the fire. The fire was basically the same landscape burning.

What was different, of course, was the massive wave of development between those two fires. Right. And this is important, because after the Tubbs Fire, Sonoma County had a moment to sit back and say, what should we do differently? We know these fires will keep on hitting. Should we rebuild differently? Should we change say, what should we do differently? We know these fires will keep on hitting. Should we rebuild differently? Should we change our standards? Should we not rebuild? And when I spoke with officials in 2018, they had a very clear position, which was, yes, we know this will burn again. There's no question. No one disputes that. What they said, though,

was it's not our place to tell people not to rebuild because number one, it's not fair. Number two, where does that go? If we don't rebuild, we'll lose our tax base, we'll lose our population. So they rebuilt, and they're still rebuilding. I mean, that is a real head-scratcher, because I would imagine the moment after a big fire, and definitely after two major fires, would be exactly the time to re-evaluate everything, to either not rebuild at all or rebuild in a very specific precautionary way.

My sense for importing this for several years is that this is the moment right after a fire where you see officials saying, maybe we should try something different. But then a very predictable cycle starts. And that's when officials realize that the economic incentives all point towards rebuilding. Remember, these towns, these counties, so much of their budget and their revenue comes from property taxes. If you don't rebuild your houses, you don't get that revenue back. You can't pay for your schools, your garbage collection, your police, your fire departments. All that stuff depends on a healthy, growing, and repaired housing market. So right away, all the money incentives say build back. But why not build back better and smarter? Well, then you get the

second part. The second part is the emotion, right? The emotion of this is so raw, especially, primarily for the homeowners who lose their houses in these fires. All of a sudden, they're living with relatives, they're in a motel somewhere, They're maybe in an RV that they parked in front of their burned out house. And they're saying to their elected officials, get me back into my house as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Don't put new requirements on me. Don't make me change the way my roof is built or the way my road is structured. Just let me do this the way it was and right now.

Just let me do this the way it was and right now. And that kind of pressure is really hard for politicians, both politically, because it's tough on your career if you're the guy who said no to a family that as easy as possible. So it turns out that this moment after a fire is actually the worst moment to really rethink how and where we build. And you see that on the ground over and over again. These rebuilding efforts start pretty fast and they tend to produce homes that look a whole lot like the homes that burned down before. And so all the reasons not to rebuild, which seem manifold, get swamped by these financial forces and these emotional forces. And I guess on some level, this kind of deeply American spirit of rebuild, you must rebuild. I mean, you can think of every natural disaster over the last half century, and there is a mayor or a governor or a president who swoops in and says, our first priority is to rebuild. It's this profoundly deep-seated instinct.

That's exactly right. It's almost muscle memory, right? There's been so many horrible events in this country. Pick your period of time. There's almost a script to follow, and that script says, we will rebuild because not rebuilding would mean surrendering and giving up on our community and on voters and our families. And no one wants to be the person who does that. And this, it sounds like, is what happens in Sonoma after that 2017 fire, the Tubbs fire. That's right. And for all these reasons, Sonoma County keeps burning. In 2019, That's right. And for all these reasons, Sonoma County keeps burning. In 2019, the county got hit again by the Kincade Fire, which burned 77,000 acres.

It was the biggest fire in California that year. And then last month, the Walbridge Fire, part of the giant LNU Lightning Compass Fire, again hit Sonoma County, burning 55,000 acres. It's just recently been brought under control. No one thinks that the problem is over though, because it's only early September and there's probably more fires to come. We'll be right back. Chris, it feels like eventually something has to give here, that some pillar of this self-perpetuating, very dangerous cycle of the WUI being built on and catching fire as it is basically designed to do, that this has to come to an end.

And I wonder what you expect that it will be that will break this cycle. Yeah, and what's interesting here is it doesn't look like it'll be the government and it doesn't even look like it's going to be individual homeowners. It looks like, if anything, it'll be the government, and it doesn't even look like it's going to be individual homeowners. It looks like, if anything, it'll be the insurance industry. And here's why. The people who pay the cost most immediately when these fires hit is first homeowners, but then insurance companies.

And in the massive fires of 2017, 2018, they paid out so much money that it wiped out what was said to be a quarter century worth of profits. And insurers responded by saying, we've got to figure out what we can do differently. We don't want to have these massive claims, these huge losses again. We can't afford it. What can we do? And what they did was they started dropping customers. They started sending homeowners letters at the end of their one-year contract saying, you're in a wildfire zone. We are not gonna renew your contract. So people in the wooey started saying,

I can't get insurance. And the fear that that sparked was immense. And they went to the state. They said, what can you do? And so last year, California acted. The state imposed a one-year ban on insurance companies dropping homeowners in these areas hit by wildfires. And it was sort of the nuclear option. They'd never done it before. It was a big, a bit of a Hail Mary.

So just so I understand this, last year, the state of California said that insurance companies dropping coverage for houses in the way they're likely to keep burning would be such a catastrophe that they're going to stop insurance companies from dropping homeowners policies. They're going to basically block them from doing it. Exactly. And it was meant to be a bit of a band-aid. What they didn't do is really say what happens next. And so we're now going into the end of this year, which will be really uncharted territory. No one knows if insurers will en masse pull out of these areas at the end of this one-year ban. And when I talk to insurance

groups, they say what they've been looking at to figure out what they'll do next is the fires. They're trying to get a handle on what kinds of losses they're facing from this year's fires. And if there's another big year of losses, like 17 and 18, that's going to be one more really compelling reason for them to keep on fleeing these areas. So, Chris, what would it look like if in three months, four months, six months, like if in three months, four months, six months, people don't have insurance in California in these wildfire zones and their houses burn down? So for now, if you can't get private insurance, you can get insurance through a high-risk pool that the state runs. It's very expensive. It's not very good coverage. It doesn't cover many things. The real nightmare scenario down the road is that eventually you can't get insurance

anywhere. And the problem with that is a few things. Number one, if your home burns, you can't rebuild it unless you're wealthy. Most people just can't pay out of pocket to rebuild their home from scratch. But probably even more concerning, you probably can't sell that home. A home that is effectively uninsurable, no one's going to buy. And so the housing market collapses, your home value collapses, and these entire communities in these wooey areas, they become undesirable, unprofitable, and they ultimately die. And the whole conversation now is how do we avoid that kind of economic death for these communities? And what's a fair way of getting there. Chris, are there people who think, and I know this may sound a little bit heartless,

and I don't mean for it to be, but are there people who think that as horrible as this sounds, insurance companies basically pulling out the rug from underneath people, that it's the kind of shock to the system that really would break this cycle? There are people who see it that way. They tend not to be people who live in California.

The vibe I get from my sources in California is they don't want this to be the solution because it's so heartless. It's so harsh. It's so unbending to people who already live in these areas. So I think everyone agrees that you want to find a way to protect people. And the goal is to not have the insurance industry be the bad guy, but to have some sort of public policy goal or outcome that isn't as harsh. a homeowner in California, I would be absolutely furious to hear that insurance companies are dropping me. And the government is letting that happen because, as you explained earlier, the government allowed me to build this home in the Wooly. In fact, in some cases, encouraged it because of the housing crunch in California. And now the government is standing by as I lose my ability to insure my house, and if there's a fire, I will

almost assuredly not be able to afford to rebuild it without that insurance. I may go bankrupt. But if the government does step in and, I guess, backstops the insurance companies or requires them to insure, then they're perpetuating this cycle all over again. And so this is like the definition of a pick-your-poison messy situation. That's exactly the dilemma. There's nothing governments can do that seems like a good idea right now. They can bend to pressure to protect homeowners

and make sure insurance is still available and affordable, even if that means you keep on encouraging home construction in these areas. Or they could, in theory, let the market take its course and let this risk that is growing price out more people so they can't afford to live in these areas. But there's no political appetite to do that. It's too harsh. And the result is the problem continues. You have more building, you have more fires, you have more damage, you have more deaths, and no one can articulate a good way out of it. I wonder if, Chris, what you're describing is going to more or less be the people leave places that we now think of as almost uninhabitable because of the changes in our climate. And that's exactly the shift that you're seeing among experts. Experts are saying

we can't keep rebuilding. We've got to shift towards moving people away from these areas. But it is just a gargantuan shift in mindset that you're describing. And the opposition to that idea is so great that we're only beginning to talk about it and only beginning to have some pilot programs where a few communities start to look at moving, but that is much smaller than the growth in these areas. Wildfires, flooding, hurricane. So for now, it's more of an idea and just the beginning of a movement. But I think you're right.

As the damage from climate change increases, the only real alternative to endlessly subsidizing insurance and rebuilding is you say people have to move. And we're not there yet, but it seems like we're gradually creeping in that direction. Chris, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Here's what else you need to nerdy. Congress has spent months talking, talking about whether to give the American people more relief as they continue grappling with this pandemic. Today, we're going to vote. Today, we're going to vote. On Thursday, Senate Republicans failed to pass a limited economic relief bill amid opposition from Democrats who called the measure inadequate. The truth is this emaciated bill is not a serious attempt at legislation

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