Jasper Wildfire: Can We Fireproof Cities?
TLDR: Probably not. But I’m bringing up the question in the aftermath of a wildfire that destroyed about a third of Jasper, Alberta, a town of 4,700 residents near the western border of the Canadian province. It’s a story that’s dominated headlines on CBC but has mostly been absent from American headlines that are more preoccupied these days with what the American Right is whining about at any given moment– Black women running for president, or gay people participating in the Olympics. But it’s always worth thinking about what’s going on in the latest of however many billion-dollar disasters we’ve faced down this year.
Building With Fire
The built environment is substantially shaped by disasters. Many cities have stories of how the average building was built out of wood until the disastrous fire of 18-something, after which builders prioritized masonry construction. We have some famous older ones, like Istanbul (1660) or London (1666), and then more modern examples in the great fires of Detroit (1804), Chicago (1871), Boston (1872), Vancouver (1886), Seattle (1889), and San Francisco (1906). While Americans love to pave over our history– less palimpsest and more overt revisionism, forgetting the past and moving on to the next big thing- it is possible to track down plaques indicating that A Great Tragedy Occurred On This Spot Mad Long Ago.
It’s possible that planners, preservationists, historians, and urban designers could get together and think about ways to improve this– to try and encourage people think about how to avoid future disasters- but that is perhaps a story for another day.
The reason why I’m mentioning this history is because it indicates that things like building codes are generally not developed in a vacuum. We have examples of how a lot of code provisions have been developed in a vacuum— by white suburban engineers who don’t think about anything but the single-family detached house, for example, or different typologies of dwelling units or urban forms- as I’ve written about in the past.
Fire ratings are a good example, though, because the idea is to ensure that people have enough time to get out of a burning building. Residential fires in the United States are relatively common, but deaths are fairly rare. But what about getting out of a burning town? Is it possible to fire-rate a town? Yes and no, with a bit more emphasis on the “no, not really.” In general, if you get an evacuation order, you should pack your bags and get thee gone. There are plenty of hideous stories from pretty much any disaster in which someone thinks, “I’ll be fine!” You may well be fine. Or your house could go up in flames.
Living With Fire
Building with fire has its limits. Most fire codes are designed not to save a building, but to save lives. Sprinklers, for example, destroy buildings, because water destroys buildings– but the idea is that even a $500,000 complete loss in replacement value from insurance is, from an actuarial perspective, far cheaper than the cost of a human life. Beyond that, buildings comprise a lot of components that can be catastrophically damaged even if the structure itself remains intact. Hardiboard might hold off fire, but the paint on it will incinerate at a much lower temperature– as will, say, Romex buried in a wall. Glass won’t melt, but windows are usually catastrophically damaged by even being near fire (just ask the remaining original 27 windows in our historic 1895 home, most of which have severe fire and water damage and aren’t operational).
To that end, thinking in terms of saving a city is a much more monumental undertaking. I’ve illustrated how extreme the undertaking might be by this Midjourney rendering below– of a giant wall surrounding a city that might well protect it from fire. But seeing as how hard it has been to claw back money from former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who allegedly embezzled millions in private donations to build the border wall— a wall that was notably neither fireproof nor humanproof– it seems like raising money to build a giant fire wall around an entire city would be a nonstarter.
Fires As Not Just A Bad Thing
Fire prevention, of course, would be a great solution. We heard last week that the huge wildfire that has engulfed hundreds of thousands of acres in California was allegedly started by a man pushing a burning car off a road. But fire isn’t always bad. Prescribed burns have long been used to clear out brush and even to eliminate invasive species. So-called “cultural burns” have long held value for native peoples who recognized this, and it’s only in recent decades as wildfires have become far more destructive that the mainstream American society is starting to even think about the idea of wildfires as being a tool for renewal rather than one solely for destruction.
The idea is that controlled burns, prescribed burns, or cultural burns can renew the local ecology by clearing out undesirable species, providing additional carboniferous material for local soil, and clear out potential fuel for bigger fires. Large swaths of the prairie lands of what are now the middle states, ranging from the Mississippi Basin to the savannah and wetlands of the northeastern Midwest, are thought to have burned fairly frequently back in the day.
But returning to Jasper, where the notion of prescribed burns do not help people who just lost their homes, the challenge here– beyond decades of damaging propaganda of Smokey the Bear telling us that only we can prevent forest fires, as my Grinnell College friend Jacob Gjesdahl/Gorton used to say- is that our built environment quests after the suburban, rather than the denser urban. This means that more houses are exposed over a larger area to fire threat. This also accordingly means that infrastructure costs and insurance costs are spread out the same way. Insurance has yet to figure out ways to encourage the development of better built environments, no matter how much they tell me they’re saving the damn world by telling me that I may not, under any circumstances, have a wood stove in my house.
If You Think Climate Change Mitigation And Resilience Are Expense, Try The Alternative
The case of the Jasper wildfire is tragic but hardly unusual in today’s day and age of climate change. It’s also a hideous display of irony in a province that has made fossil fuel extraction at all costs a cornerstone of its economic agenda. No, this is not to say, “told you so,” because we know that the average member of the proletariat has little to no bearing on big picture policy or economic machinations. But it does highlight how we are all at least tiny parts of a larger system, and how the policymakers and decisionmakers and movers of capital should probably start thinking about climate change mitigation.
The United States has spent trillions on “natural” disasters over my lifetime, and most of that expenditure has been in the past decade, as a product of increased development in disaster-prone areas, decreased regulation of development in those areas, and increasingly severe weather exacerbated by climate change. I have written about this a lot, but I previously (in 2019) likened the current scenario of climate disasters to a hypothetical robbery: you know that a masked blackmail artist is going to arrive at your office within a specific window and demand a specific amount of dollars. You have to pay the amount because you know the bandit isn’t joking. So, you have to pay it. The alternative to paying it is to invest in better security, but you are unable to authorize this expenditure. I’ve also written about the need for better data and better modeling.
But no matter how much preparation we do, the unfortunate reality remains that we have a built environment that is too extended– spatially, laterally- and it is built on a paradigm of low-cost, high-impact, in a way that makes it really hard to think seriously about how to make fire-resilient buildings, let alone fire-resilient communities. If we want to think about how to address this in a way that can prevent– nay, mitigate- future catastrophe, it will require less silver bullet thinking as I’ve illustrated in the goofy images above (“Build The Fire Wall!”) and more incremental, transformative thinking. Part of that has to be thinking about climate change in the big picture and part of it has to be thinking about how we build buildings in ways that can hold up to disasters. Perhaps this can’t be done in ways that will save entire cities, but if they can save lives and save housing, it’s always worth exploring the possibility.
The wildfire in Jasper, Alberta is a reminder that the house always wins– if we’re thinking about the house as the planet. The house as far as a human construction often does not win. But we can still think about how to play the game a bit more responsibly in a way that can avoid similar disaster.
The Canadian Red Cross is maintaining a list of resources for those affected by the Jasper wildfire.
