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Perhaps most important, residents of rural and fire-prone communities need to be better prepared for the big fires that will inevitably come, and take measures to protect themselves, such as replacing shingle roofs with metal ones and clearing away flammable materials from around their homes. Research by Cohen and others has shown that the principal cause of home loss during wildfires is the flammability of the home and its surroundings rather than the wildfire itself. Most people think that a wall of wildfire comes rolling through the community and destroys the houses, but that’s not what happens, Cohen said. Rather, the wildfire provides the initial ignition, but the houses themselves provide the fuel that spreads it to other houses. It doesn’t need to be that way: “We can readily make changes on and around our houses to make them more resistant to ignition.”

California has stricter building codes for new construction within high-fire-risk zones, but many older wildland communities are still extremely fire-prone. “The Tahoe Basin is littered with houses that will burn,” Varner said--homes with cedar shakes on their roofs, decks littered with pine needles and overhung by branches, wood stacked up against the walls. “We know how to keep houses from burning,” said Stephen Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in fire history. “So why do we still let people build with combustible roofs?”

In Australia, rural homeowners learn how to prepare for fires and are then encouraged to stay and defend their homes, if they are able and willing. Studies have shown that most houses are ignited by wind-blown embers and spot fires that well-trained homeowners can put out on their own.

Historically, ranchers and other rural dwellers in the West defended their own properties from fire, but “we’ve gotten away from that here; now the government does it for you,” said Pyne. He stresses, however, that people must be properly trained and their homes and land prepared.

“We’re always going to have extreme wildfires, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer the same level of destruction,” said Cohen. What we need to do, he said, is let go of our belief that through technology and sheer manpower we can bring every wildfire under control, and focus instead on protecting the things we value within the fire zone. “If we continually view the problem as a wildfire problem--as one of wildfire control and prevention--we’re not going to keep the houses from burning.”

Aftermath
On July 9, I stood with Jenny Griffin and Rick Hautala on a dirt road in the Salmon Creek Forest, looking out across a steep drainage at the Navarro Fire’s point of origin. The vista was oddly wintry, despite the day’s heat: ash made it appear as if a snowfall had blanketed the steep slopes, and the dense smoke still hung in the air.

Here and there we could see wisps of smoke--and sometimes a good-sized billow--where hot spots were still flaring up. Hautala and others were putting them out, as well as digging water-bars (angled trenches) across the new roads bulldozed by the fire crews, to divert rainfall, and seeding and putting down straw on slopes to control erosion.

Considering the magnitude of the blazes statewide, Mendocino residents were lucky. One volunteer firefighter died of a heart attack, but otherwise no lives were lost and only two structures were destroyed. The Fund was lucky as well: The Indian Fire burned only one acre of its Big River Forest, stopped by a creek, low winds, and Cal Fire firebreaks. The Jack Fire burned 717 acres of its Garcia River Forest, but it was a less damaging low-intensity blaze. The Navarro Fire burned 461 acres of the 4,300-acre Salmon Creek Forest and badly scorched some areas that had been clearcut by the previous landowner. These areas will have to be replanted and closely watched for erosion.

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