Recommended Practices—Wildfire Regions

In recent years, property damage and loss of life due to wildfires has been significant and on the increase, primarily due to more people living in wildland-urban interface regions. The U.S. Forest Service reported that over 30% of the country’s housing units are located in these high risk areas. Over the past ten years especially, there has been a steady increase in wildfires exceeding 50,000 acres.30 Although the Wildland-Urban Interface Institute developed a map of the severity of fire risk across the country, serious fires have broken out in what was once considered low or moderate risk areas. As a result, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing something akin to the use of the Richter scale for earthquakes—but for wildfire—to better predict and characterize the risk and severity and more communities are adopting Wildland-Urban Interface Code provisions.