“It is almost as if hazard zones attract rather than repel development,” researcher Virginia Iglesias wrote last month. Some 57 percent of U.S. buildings, a study found, are in the 31 percent of the country most susceptible to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or wildfires.
Wildfires are a hazard that prospective homebuyers tend to ignore more than others. Flood zones are well-mapped and comparatively well-known, but “we don’t have fire maps that direct development and insurance in the same way, so you don’t think about it when you buy your house,” Colorado researcher Jennifer Balch told us last year. There’s a web site and app called Defensible that tries to make that information more available.
If you do choose to live at the edge of fire-prone woods, there are clear steps you can take to protect your own home. They range from cleaning gutters to spacing trees and trimming brush around the house to strategically using driveways or other unvegetated areas as firebreaks. Protecting yourself that way helps others too. As Nat Geo’s Sarah Gibbens explains, when a modern home is consumed by flames, residues of all the synthetic materials it contains spread through the air, sometimes for many miles, like a toxic echo of the traumatic loss.
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