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ABSTRACT
The human community impacts of wildland fire is an understudied area. This article reviews the human disaster and hazards literature in an attempt to discover lessons applicable to understanding the social impacts of fire in the residential/wildland interface. It is argued that those literatures are potentially very useful in developing an understanding of wildland fire as a human event. A number of lessons are derived including why people tend to be unduly optimistic in the face of environmental hazards such as fire and why the characteristics of the affected community are at least as important as those of the fire in understanding social impacts.
Keywords: wildfire; disaster studies; community impacts of fire
Much ink has been spilled over the last 5 years on the subject of residential interface wildland fire in the western United States, and this media attention is not without good reason. A few statistics tell a compelling story. A National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) report (2003) reveals for example that in 2002, 88,458 fires were recorded, which burned 6.9 million acres. The total suppression cost for the federal agencies for 2002 reached $1.6 billion, and 2,381 structures were burned. In 2000, 122,827 fires were recorded, 8.4 million acres were affected, and 861 structures were destroyed. Total suppression cost for fires exceeded $1.3 billion for 2000. From 1990 to 1999, the average number of fires and number of acres burned reached 106,347 and 3.6 million acres, respectively (NIFC 2003), and the number of structures damaged by wildfires in the 1990s was six times that of the previous decade; more than 1,000 homes were destroyed during the summer of 2000 alone (Laverty and Hartzell 2000).
Much has also been written about whether or not the increase in large, difficult-to-control wildfires is a "comeuppance" for a century of fire suppression, too much forest management, not enough forest management, or the wrong kind of forest management in the wrong places. It is not our intention to enter that debate here. What does seem to be clear is honest disagreement among many (including forest ecologists) in at least some cases over whether or not a particular fire is a "natural disturbance," an "ecological disaster," or perhaps something in between. What is less in doubt however...