MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Wildfire is the word we tend to use when we talk about what Los Angeles has been dealing with the past week. But Lori Moore-Merrell, the U.S. fire administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency - FEMA - she used a different word when she spoke to NPR this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LORI MOORE-MERRELL: These are conflagrations. These are not wildland fires with trees burning. These are structure-to-structure fire spread.
KELLY: Conflagrations - well, they may have started at the suburban fringe. They did not stay there. Stephen Pyne is a fire historian and an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. I asked him how a wildland fire differs from an urban fire.
STEPHEN PYNE: Basically, what we're seeing is you begin getting houses ignited. Most of the houses on the fringes will ignite by embers. And if there are high winds, if it's the middle of the night, if there are too many, it can quickly overwhelm the capabilities to suppress those fires, and then you get a transition into an urban conflagration. It's eerie to look at many of the photos and see how much of the vegetation survived and the houses are vaporized.
KELLY: You're talking about some of the photos we've seen where the house is just a smoking ruin, but there's a perfectly green bush sitting beside it.
PYNE: Yeah, next to it. So these...
KELLY: Wow.
PYNE: ...Are not being propagated by the vegetation, yeah. But it is essentially the energy released by the combustible house that is carrying the fire to the next one. So, you know, everything in a city we build. So we can, in principle, control all of that.
KELLY: Yeah, there would seem to be some advantages to trying to control a fire in the city. The urban infrastructure - there are fire hydrants.
PYNE: It's curious because during the settlement period, the U.S., our cities - our major cities burned about as often as the surrounding countryside because they were made of the same materials. There were lots of ignitions around. Open fire was used everywhere. But we broke that cycle in the early 20th century, I think - San Francisco, 1906, after the earthquake.
And then we really didn't have urban conflagrations until across the Bay in 1991 when Oakland burned, and that sort of inaugurated a new era. And I look at it - it's like watching polio return. I mean, we solved this problem. We understood what it took to prevent cities from burning - building codes, fire codes, material standards, all of those things. And now it's coming back.
KELLY: So let's apply all this to a city, like, for example, LA. What should we do to prepare?
PYNE: You can certainly harden houses against the kind of ember storms. I think the issue is going to be - we've got decades, if not a century, of building without this kind of problem in mind, and we're not going to be able to retrofit all of it immediately. And so I think the big question is, how do you rebuild? And the instinct is always to build back as quickly as possible, probably as much like it was as possible so people don't feel as dislocated. But if you do that, then you're just recreating the same problem.
KELLY: That's fascinating. We've just heard from California Governor Gavin Newsom weighing in along those lines, saying we are going to try to make it as easy as possible for people to rebuild.
PYNE: Well, of course. I mean, what's he going to say? But if you really are interested in solving the longer-term problem, the way you control fire is by controlling the landscape. And that doesn't mean you nuke it. It doesn't mean you clear-cut it. It doesn't mean you pave it. It means you organize that landscape in ways that allow you to survive fires.
KELLY: So if you were rebuilding LA, how would you do that?
PYNE: Well, I can give you suggestions how I would do it, and I can guarantee that nobody's going to accept them.
KELLY: (Laughter).
PYNE: You're talking about a lot of people, and you're telling them they're going to have to change where and how they live. And in some ways, you know, you can model fire as a contagion. So how would you deal, say, with COVID or the flu? Well, you wear masks to prevent aerial transmission. That's like hardening houses against embers. And then you clear your vegetation around the house - a short amount. Well, that's social distancing. And then you have to get the whole group to do it. Otherwise, your neighbor's house is going to irradiate yours even if you've done all the work. So this is - suddenly it's looking very complicated.
KELLY: You're heading me toward a final question, which is just the long view on this. I know you've thought about fire for a long time. You were a wildland firefighter yourself back in the '60s and '70s, right?
PYNE: Yep. Well, fire is not just a chemical process. It's also a relationship. You know, fire has been our constant companion as a species. So in that sense, I'm optimistic. But right now we've made our best friend our worst enemy, and that is going to require a lot of change in thinking and understanding. And I want to believe we can do it. I've got grandkids, and I want a future for them. But I have to say, the record has not been all that hopeful.
KELLY: Fire historian Steve Pyne. He is emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Thank you.
PYNE: Well, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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