The Chemistry of Fires at the Wildland-Urban Interface (2022) / Chapter Skim
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2 Defining and Contextualizing WUI Fires
2 Defining and Contextualizing WUI Fires
Pages 15-30
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From page 15... ...
Maps of WUI communities and fires in the contiguous United States illustrate the extent and distribution of WUI fires; however, quantifying the impacts of these fires, and even precisely defining the WUI interface, remains a challenge. An operational definition of the WUI as used in this report is provided, as are some descriptive examples of WUI fires.
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From page 16... ...
Subsequent analyses by the US Forest Service operationalized the Federal Register listing of WUI communities. These analyses provided a precise definition of interface and intermix communities that could be applied to areas not covered by the original notice (Figure 2-1; Stewart et al., 2007)
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From page 17... ...
While both intermix and interface WUI communities are found across the United States, housing units in the intermix WUI are more highly concentrated in eastern states, while interface WUI communities (houses at the edge of a large wildland area) appear to be slightly more common in the West.
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From page 18... ...
. DEFINING SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL SCALES The Federal Register notice and subsequent work provided the precise definition of the WUI used in this report; however, those WUI categories are primarily useful for assessing the risk of a wildfire before it occurs.
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. Furthermore, WUI communities are more vulnerable to fire events because geographical barriers make it harder to suppress fires in the WUI (Peterson et al., 2021)
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Land Management at the WUI Past wildland management practice has been recognized as an additional driver of increasing WUI fire threat. The wildland ecosystem in the western United States mostly evolved with wildfire disruption of the landscape (Hessburg, 2021)
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The US Forest Service stopped performing prescribed burns of federal lands in 2021 because the agency was overwhelmed with fighting wildfires (Sommer, 2021)
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Factors that influence fire severity include land use, vegetation, terrain, weather, and fire history. Although the US Forest Service led the development of Wildfire Risk to Communities (wildfirerisk.org)
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USING EXAMPLES TO CONTEXTUALIZE WUI FIRES The earlier sections of this chapter discuss how pervasive WUI communities and fires are; however, few data are available on how WUI fires differ from other wildfires. For the purposes of this report, the committee chose to explore a set of recent examples of the state of available information.
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From page 24... ...
In the severe Colorado wildfire season of 2012, the Waldo Canyon Fire stands out with its high social impact, which was due to its close proximity to Colorado Springs and other communities. The fire forced the evacuation of more than 32,000 people, including 22,000 residents within a two-hour period on June 26, 2012 (Chin et al., 2016)
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. In 2019, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection investigators determined that the cause of the Camp Fire was electrical transmission lines that ignited vegetation at two ignition sites (Mohler, 2019)
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"Boulder County Releases Updated List of Structures Damaged and Destroyed in the Marshall Fire." https://www.bouldercounty.org/news/boulder-county-releases updated-list-of-structures-damaged-and-destroyed-in-the-marshall-fire/ (accessed January 31, 2022)
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January 4, 2001. "Urban Wildland Interface Communities within the Vicinity of Federal Lands That Are at High Risk from Wildfire." Federal Register 66 (01-52)
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May 15, 2019. "CAL FIRE Investigators Determine the Cause of the Camp Fire." California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
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CAMP FIRE Watershed Emergency Response Team Final Report. https://ucanr.edu/sites/Rangelands/files/304942.pdf.
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