Wildfire (Will-Burn) Zones

When homes are built in ‘will-burn’ zones, then the homes will burn, too. This is never a surprise to watchers of TV news, though victims of fire are always caught off guard, having been lured by a site’s charms. Charm breeds complacency.

Imminent danger is often glossed over by the beauty of a place. Too attractive to resist is a high mountain site with long vistas, or a middle-of-the-plain homestead surrounded by a sea of rolling meadows.

Then, there’s the wind, the friendly wind. Breezes, ever present, are seen nodding treetops, waving grass and grain, and playing the world’s music on instruments of rustling leaves, moaning boughs, and brushing fronds.

But the friendly wind is also the friend of fire. Gentle waving becomes ferocious pushing, as fire is urged over every surface, up every slope, around every barrier to renew and start again, encouraged by an endless supply of oxygen delivered by moving air.

A fire needs dry air and fuel. Where there is anything that might burn, the chance looms that it will burn. Long seasons, when the air remains dry and waterless, foster dry forests, parched grassy plains, and withered crops, all primed for combustion. These are ‘will-burn’ zones.

Will-Burn zones are not isolated to the way-out-wilderness. Fire will come to wherever there is something to burn. Ready-to-burn are dry jumbles of heaped underbrush left from clearing an inner-city lot, or an unkempt job site covered with drifts of sawdust along with piles of lumber scraps.

It takes very little to start a fire. To ignite may only require a strike of lightning, or of a match on a stone; or a still smoldering dropped-out-a-car-window cigarette butt; or a campfire, carelessly abandoned; or the overheated undercarriage of a passing vehicle.

Once burning, fire will rush from fuel to fuel, whether across flat fields, or over rolling hillsides. Everything will be consumed. Grass, shrubs, straw, weeds, moss on stones, tree bark & trunk & limb, and the important one for this book, home.

Back to Charm and Complacency:

So, the place attracts the person. The person builds the house. Fire burns the house. The cycle repeats.

Break the cycle. Choose a homesite with wide-open eyes. Investigate. Discover ‘will-burn’ zones. Then, don’t build there.

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