The New Normal

By Kristen Pope

As a wall of flames raced through the hills near Santa Rosa, California, last October, APA California Chapter President Pete Parkinson, AICP, knew it was time to go. That evening, for the first time in 15 years, he and his wife, Celia, fled their home on a ridge near Bennett Valley. Later that night it burned to the ground. And they were hardly the only ones. In total, more than 100 homes in their neighborhood were destroyed; only around 30 still stand.

Parkinson and his wife headed to his mother-in-law's home and arrived just in time to help her and some of her neighbors evacuate before that neighborhood caught fire.

"It was pretty horrifying," Parkinson says. "There were multiple fires in different locations. There was difficulty getting information about what was going on, and the wind was blowing like crazy." He later learned that wind gusts on nearby Geyser Peak had reached 108 miles per hour. "We feel lucky to [have gotten] out," he says.

Fire snapshot, October 17, 2017: The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection mapped several fires that burned simultaneously in Northern California when Parkinson's neighborhood was hit. The wildfires were fueled by years of drought, tinder-dry vegetation, and gusty winds. Map courtesy Pete Parkinson.

Just a few doors down, a neighbor died in the fire. Others survived to tell harrowing tales of driving through flames and desperately searching for routes to safety after roads were blocked by debris and fire. One family cut through a wire fence and escaped across a vineyard with their three children in the car.

As a planner, and now a survivor of wildfire, the need to plan for this hazard hits close to home. "I've been a planner for over 35 years now and have seen planning practice evolve constantly based not just on new ideas, but on a constantly improving and expanding [our] understanding of the world around us," he says. "The October fires were an object lesson in this knowledge-building process, though it was more of an order-of-magnitude leap rather than just another incremental step along the way."

With climate change studies predicting more — and perhaps more severe — wildfires to come, planners in at-risk areas are increasingly looking to learn from the past and move forward in making their communities more resilient.

Planner Pete Parkinson was among more than 100 home owners in his neighborhood in the hills near Santa Rosa, California, who lost their houses in the Nuns fire last October. Photo courtesy Pete Parkinson.

Burn zone

California is one of the states hit the hardest by recent wildfires. The December 2017 and January 2018 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties was the largest in modern California history, burning over 280,000 acres, claiming over 1,000 structures, and taking two lives. Out of the state's 20 largest wildfires on record from 1932 to present, 14 of the blazes occurred after the year 2000, and six of those have burned since 2012.

As builders and neighborhood associations look to use less flammable materials in home construction and create a zone of "defensible space" around structures, planners are examining rural density, setbacks, ingress and egress, and other vital issues in wildfire-prone areas. For example, a sparsely populated area with multiple, direct routes of ingress and egress will likely be able to be evacuated more quickly and provide better access for emergency personnel compared to a densely populated area with congested access routes.

Analyzing past fires is often a way to learn more about fire-prone areas. When looking at maps of the recent Sonoma fires, Parkinson noticed a startling pattern: The Tubbs fire's footprint closely resembled the 1964 Hanley fire. "The similarity ... shows that this area faces a more specific kind of fire hazard," he says. "Something about the terrain and weather and wind patterns elevates the risk. We need to understand this specific risk more clearly and then evaluate what can be done to reduce [it]."

However, he notes, that won't be a simple task. "Given the existing pattern of development in the area and the property rights that go along with that, this will be a difficult process. Saying we shouldn't rebuild ... is somewhat trite, in my view, and totally unrealistic from a legal and public policy standpoint. But we can do lots more to help reduce and mitigate risk, but exactly what that is will be the subject of much study and debate over the coming years."

Bigger Fires, More Destruction

Most of the Top 20 largest wildfires (in terms of acreage burned) in California have occurred in the last decade or so.

Source: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Planning's role in wildfire recovery

In October 1991, the East Bay Hills fire ravaged Berkeley and Oakland, California, claiming 25 lives and destroying more than 3,000 structures.

To expedite the recovery process, the Berkeley City Council passed an emergency rebuilding ordinance that eliminated costly permit fees and streamlined the previously months-long process to just a few weeks.

"We realized we needed an urgency ordinance," says Vivian Kahn, FAICP, who was Berkeley's zoning administrator and manager of current planning at the time. She is now an associate principal with Dyett & Bhatia, an urban and regional planning firm in San Francisco. "Berkeley has a very ponderous process for building housing, and is probably the only city in the U.S. where you need to get a conditional use permit in order to establish a residential use, including building a new single-family home. We recognized that obviously wasn't going to work in this situation."

Under the ordinance, neighbors signed off on each other's building plans and hearings only occurred in the event of a dispute. Only one dispute occurred, which was eventually resolved.

"That process went remarkably well," Kahn says. "Everyone was essentially in the same boat: Cut some slack for your neighbors, and they'll do the same for you."

Neighbors also needed to cooperate when figuring out their property lines after the fires. Berkeley is in an active seismic zone, and the Alquist-Priolo fault line runs right through the fire area.

"Fault lines are always moving, and no one knew where property lines were," Kahn says.

The city ended up surveying the center line of the streets and people worked with their neighbors using the metes and bounds descriptions in their title documents to find their property lines. The city commissioned an area-wide geological study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, instead of requiring property owners to conduct individual studies, which are required when building within 1,000 feet of a California fault line.

In an attempt to solve housing pressures following the disaster, once displaced property owners were located and people began rebuilding, the city allowed some residents to put second dwelling units on their properties so they could live there while their homes were being rebuilt.

"We ended up having to do some bending of the rules," Kahn says. "It worked extremely well and with far less acrimony than typically associated with the approval process for new homes."

Flexibility has also aided the recovery process in Sonoma County, California. Emergency housing measures have allowed people to stay on their properties in trailers, tiny homes, RVs, and other shelters. People parked in their driveways and hooked up to utilities while they began rebuilding. Campgrounds opened as temporary RV parks. Additional locations, like summer camps and county facilities, offered temporary housing.

Such housing measures are critical in a county that was facing a housing crisis before 5,100 homes burned. With a population of 500,000, Sonoma County only had 200 rental units before the fires and just a one percent vacancy rate.

To ease recovery, Sonoma County permit director Tennis Wick, AICP, and his colleagues have streamlined the permitting process, setting up a center with five modular units with everyone from planners and engineers to environmental specialists, geologists, and lawyers all in one place.

Before the fires, the permit office was already busy processing more than 9,000 permits; the county plans on processing those as quickly as possible.

"Regular business is vital to our economy, too," Wick says. "We are changing a number of our business practices to streamline our administration so we are ready to deal with the economic hit we are already experiencing."

Trial by fire

A firefighter battles flames in Coffey Park during the Tubbs Fire, which destroyed more than 5,000 structures in Santa Rosa, California, last October. Photo by Kent Porter/The Press Democrat, via Associated Press.

Located in the rain shadow of the Cascades, Bend, Oregon, sees only about 12 inches of precipitation per year, leaving it and Deschutes County ripe for wildfire, particularly in late summer.

"We always have a fire season here, no matter what kind of winter we have," says Deschutes County Forester Ed Keith. He estimates approximately half the ignitions are human-caused and the other half have natural origins.

Two large wildfires in the area in the 1990s spurred the community to begin planning for wildfire earlier than many other communities. The 1990 Awbrey Hall fire burned 3,500 acres and 22 homes in just 10 hours, and the 1996 Skeleton Fire, which burned 18,000 acres and 30 structures, were massive at the time, though they seem quite small compared to today's massive conflagrations.

Today, Bend and Deschutes County are among the nation's leaders in wildfire preparedness. They work on several collaborative wildfire risk reduction projects, including the Greater Bend Community Wildfire Protection Plan, Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan, Project Wildfire (http://bit.ly/2n1lpup), and FireFree (http://bit.ly/2DAuiVL), which urges people to create defensible space and lets people bring yard debris to the county landfill twice a year.

Development code standards require defensible space and fire engine access, including access to pools, ponds, and other water sources.

Despite all the preparedness, one of the biggest challenges planners face is how rapidly the population is growing. "We're always cited in just about every single growth study as one of the top growing counties," Keith says. "The new class of people moving here love the area but have no idea about moving to a fire-adapted environment."

Teaching new residents how to prepare for fires is crucial, and many efforts focus on simple steps like clearing pine needles from gutters, installing appropriate vents, and creating up to 100 feet of "fire-resistant space" around homes.

"One of the other things we face when we are contacting people is letting them know basically the science behind how homes are lost," Keith says. "People have in their minds a huge wall of flames burning into a community and there's not much they can do about it, but that's not the case for most home loss."

Educating residents on planning and zoning regulations is also an important part of the puzzle. Zechariah Heck, associate planner for the Deschutes County Community Development Department, frequently explains fire-related regulations to new property owners who have come in for permits.

"A lot of the education we do at our front counter is explaining why we have these rules and regulations," Heck says. "It's not uncommon to hear someone mention or comment that they're confused why they can't develop or subdivide their 20-acre parcel and can only get one house there . . . We do a lot of education about the general land-use system and especially about the forest use zone."

"It's an ongoing conversation," says Peter Gutowsky, AICP, planning manager for the Deschutes County Community Development Department. "You're never finished. Our county will always be at risk for wildfires. It's our number one natural hazard."

Planning tools

As planners work to plan for wildfire, they have a number of tools available. Aaron Pfannenstiel, AICP, a hazard mitigation planner and senior associate with PlaceWorks, cites a number that can help. He points to local hazard mitigation plans, climate adaptation strategy and plans, community wildfire protection plans, brush clearance programs, and an updated wildland-urban interface code (within a city's municipal code) as tools, in addition to GIS.

"There are a significant amount of GIS mapping tools and data sets that help inform communities on the location and extent of wildfire hazards within their community," he says.

He also mentions an obvious tool: the general, or comprehensive, plan. "In the general plan, [communities in California] have a safety element and that's focused on all varieties of natural hazards as well as some man-made hazards, and wildfire is one of those big hazards that is of greatest concern for a lot of communities throughout the state," Pfannenstiel says.

In addition to using planning tools and budgeting to prepare for wildfire threats, he notes the importance of assessing and preparing for vulnerabilities.

"It is always helpful to clearly understand where a community is vulnerable," Pfannenstiel says. "Not only from a physical perspective, where the hazard zone is located within the community, but also from a regulatory and administrative perspective, where regulations are missing or ineffective against current conditions, as well as a social vulnerability perspective. It is very important to understand how hazards may disproportionately affect vulnerable populations."

While the general plan can help communities handle new development, it doesn't address every concern. "We still haven't figured out a good way to retrofit some of the older developments that were around before more strict requirements came to life," he says.

Pfannenstiel notes building codes from decades ago may not meet current standards and construction techniques and materials for wildfire-prone areas have changed drastically over the years. He also points to vegetation-related issues.

"Older communities in the wildland-urban interface may not be as diligent about brush clearance as new communities," he says. "This could be related to who pays for the clearance, how the community was originally designed, and how active the community is in clearing vegetation and managing risk within the WUI."

Adaptive techniques and reframing problems can help serve the needs of older communities. One example is that some fire departments are rethinking the philosophy that bigger fire engines are better for every community.

"The bigger the fire engine, the bigger the streets you need to have," Pfannenstiel says. "Some older communities have roads a lot narrower than you would find in a community built in the last 10 to 15 years. How do we right-size our fire engines so they can navigate really narrow streets or steep topography?"

As planners use their existing tools to prepare for wildfires, they also face the possibility that in a changing world they may need to develop new tools — or even a whole new playbook.

"We plan for what we imagine the future will hold," Pete Parkinson says. "If, on October 7, 2017, you asked any planner, including me, to imagine and plan for a scenario where a firestorm jumps a six-lane freeway and roars into a community like Santa Rosa, destroying an entire suburban neighborhood, a mobile home park, the city's most upscale residential area, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space, you'd be accused of Chicken-Little- style fear mongering."

"We did not imagine that a catastrophe of this power and scope was even possible," he says. "But it's clear that [when it comes to wildfire], we need to imagine far bigger than we have before."

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer and editor in Jackson, Wyoming.