5 ‘surprising’ areas where wildfire risk is rising

The deadly fire that killed at least 114 people on the island of Maui represents the arrival of a new era of fire threat for the Hawaiian Islands — and beyond.

The ruins of Lahaina, the tourist town nestled against the Pacific Ocean that was leveled by the blaze, now stand as a grim monument to the expanding geography of American wildfire.

“We’re starting to see fires happen in more and more places that seem surprising to us — because our expectations are based on previous decades,” said Philip Higuera, a fire ecologist at the University of Montana.

Higuera said that Americans’ view of fires — and fire risk — is heavily weighted toward where fires happened throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, which chiefly means the forested slopes of the Rocky and Cascade Mountains.

For all their occasional immense size, those 20th century Western fires had certain core characteristics that limited how risky they were — mainly that they burned through wild lands far from settlements. 

But as the climate warms, farmers leave the land and human settlements sprawl further into the surrounding wildlands, the area at risk for destructive wildfires is also expanding — even as the character of those fires is changing in ways that make them more dangerous.

Here are places outside the Western region where that risk is getting particularly pronounced.

Hawaii’s “feral” fire

For the next four months, the five Hawaiian Islands will be under unusually high risk of “significant fire” — the federal name for a blaze severe enough to overwhelm local capacity and require outside help, Robyn Heffernan of the National Weather Service (NWS) told The Hill.

According to the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Wildfire Risk to Communities tool, the islands’ biggest settlements are under high risk of fire: the city of Honolulu at higher risk than 74 percent of U.S. counties, and the surrounding county at higher risk than almost 90 percent. 

For other local communities, the risk is even greater: The nearly 40,000 people of Kualapuu are at higher risk than 94 percent of U.S. towns. 

In Hawaii, much of the risk of fire is climate driven. The protracted influence of climate change, magnified under the new El Niño conditions, has contributed to curing the landscape like firewood, and to powerful storm winds from offshore to turning the comparatively small Lahaina Fire into a deadly firestorm.

But Lahaina shared one other key characteristic with the sites of deadly fires from Portugal to northern California: It is a place where the landscape has grown “feral” as former plantations of crops or timber — cleared more than a century ago from the forest — were abandoned in the mid-20th century in favor of the new tourist economy, Higuera said.

That retreat created an opportunity for invasive, fire-loving grasses — introduced a century ago as cattle feed — to colonize the fallow fields, creating avenues to bring fire down into the outskirts of Lahaina.

Fire returns to the Great Lakes

After Hawaii, the states west of the Great Lakes are at the most protracted risk of significant fire, with parts of Wisconsin under elevated danger until October and most of Minnesota under threat until November.

The danger here is native trees, not invasive grasses like in Hawaii. In particular, the risk is that the weather will still be hot and dry when deciduous trees drop their leaves — creating a ready store of tinder that allows forests to burn, Heffernan of the NWS said.

“If that leaf drop of all this vegetation coincides with a very dry period, that can also be concerning,” she said.

And there’s another difference: While Higuera said that fires in the Great Lakes region are “not on the radar for the general public,” that’s not because such disasters have historically been rare there like they have in Hawaii.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the booming timberlands and rising cities of the Upper Midwest burned frequently and lethally. One such complex of fires in 1871 — which included the Peshtigo and Great Chicago Fires — killed thousands, and the Cloquet Fire of 1918 killed nearly 500.

Some of the conditions for those past great fires no longer hold, Higuera said: The woodlands surrounding the region’s major cities have largely been replaced by nonflammable structures like parking lots. 

But others do. Like the Lahaina fire, the deadly Midwestern fires of the past century were fanned to monstrous size by powerful winds from nearby bodies of water: in the latter case, from the Great Lakes.

Wind, Higuera said, is a deadly game changer. “That’s what moves wildfires from something that can conceivably be controlled or fought — to something that you cannot fight.”

Ignition risk in the mid-Atlantic

The National Interagency Fire Center has predicted an elevated risk of significant fire in October for mid-Atlantic communities from West Virginia to the Jersey Shore. 

But for many of the region’s smaller cities and suburbs, the risk is here already. That current danger is largely concentrated in coastal woodlands, like the region southeast of Philadelphia, or the steep forested valleys of the Ohio River basin. 

The city of Absecon, N.J. — a town of about about 9,000 on the outskirts of Atlantic City — has a wildfire risk 84 percent higher than the rest of the country, according to the USDA.

On the other side of the region, the West Virginia capital of Charleston is at greater risk for destructive fire than 76 percent of U.S. communities.

The mid-Atlantic shares characteristics with other at-risk areas, like rising temperatures and drought; a vulnerability to fire-stoking coastal winds; and a slow but protracted legacy of abandoned farmland in a north-south belt stretching from eastern Virginia through New Jersey. 

But the region’s high population means an increase in fire risk all on its own.  

Fire scientists have increasingly worried about the sprawl of American settlements into the “wildland urban interface” — the ragged fringe of increasingly fire-prone vegetation surrounding our communities.

That expansion represents a nasty “double whammy” of danger, Higuera said. The more structures in the interface, the greater the risk of an accidental spark, and the more money and lives at stake when that fire expands. 

Humans, he noted, “come with our own accidental ignition.”

Phase change in the Pacific Northwest?

Near-perpetual mist and drizzle have historically kept the Pacific Northwest’s riotous vegetation from easily drying into fuel.

But since 2020, destructive fires have burned in the coastal strip between the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

“That has historically been a wetter climate area that is starting to dry out, and we’re seeing more emergence of wildfires in the area,” Heffernan said.  

The National Interagency Fire Center has predicted elevated risk of significant fire along that strip through October.

This could be a sign of a serious shift in the ecosystem, from temperate rainforest to something else. As The Hill reported last week, the Northwestern forest belt is the surviving half of what was once an Oregon-like band of forest extending from Canada to the Mexican border.

About 13,000 years ago, however, a perfect storm of changes — in part linked to burning by humans — seems to have flipped an ecological switch, leading to that forest’s collapse during decades of apocalyptic fire, according to a study in the journal Science.

That history makes the recent incidence of fires in the Northwest worrying, Robin O’Keefe, co-author of the Science article, told The Hill.

But a few bad years do not make a trend, and it’s far too soon to say if the Northwest’s larger fires represent that kind of broader shift, Higuera said. 

Fire, he noted, isn’t unheard of in the coastal rainforest, it’s just rare. “The amount of area burned in a single year is likely not unprecedented — it’s the way those systems burn,” he said.

“It just happens infrequently.”

The Southeast holds risk in check

One area at rising risk is holding that danger in check.

The threat of destructive fire is growing in the humid forests of the Gulf Coasts for the same reason it is rising in regions like Hawaii, the Midwest or the mid-Atlantic: The region’s dense forests are growing drier and more prone to burning under the pressure of climate change.

That’s caused the Gulf Coast region — from Central Texas to the Alabama border — to have unusually high risk of significant fire through September. 

Some of the cities at risk are surprisingly large: Biloxi, Miss., is at higher risk than 89 percent of U.S. cities; Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is in the top 77 percent of cities, as is Mobile, Ala.; Miami is in the top 72 percent; and New Orleans is in the top 64 percent.

But in one important respect, the region represents “a good outlier,” Higuera said: Unlike virtually the whole rest of the country, the practice of deliberate burning to remove dangerous fuels — a common practice among Native nations before and during European settlement — were never suppressed there.

“There’s a lot of fire, but it is not feral fire — it’s put on the landscape intentionally,” Higuera said. As a result, “the vegetation, likewise, is not feral.”

That’s a practice the rest of the country is still struggling to readopt, Tim Brown of the Desert Research Institute told The Hill.

“A lot of prescribed fire takes place — but we still need more, particularly over larger areas, if we’re going to help mitigate these higher severity fires,” Brown said.

Is everywhere at risk?

While areas like those listed above are considered to be at especially heightened danger of fire, the question of where risk is increasing is a somewhat misleading one, experts told The Hill — because in a large sense, the answer is “everywhere.”

That’s not a reason to panic, Higuera stressed — destructive fire remains a very rare occurrence. But it is becoming less rare, and as such, it is also becoming less and less characteristic of any particular region.

“As the climate is warming,” he said, “the conditions for extensive wildfires are just happening more and more often — and the places where fire is turning into human disasters are increasing.”

That has immediate implications for emergency managers, he said. The Lahaina Fire was so deadly because the populace was unprepared — from the fire siren system that didn’t work as intended to a populace tragically unaware that wildfire constituted a serious risk.

For emergency managers across the country, Higuera said, destructive fire sweeping in from the wildland urban interface now needs to be a possibility that they plan for, alongside other rare-but-potentially lethal disasters. 

He offered a simple rule of thumb for those officials: “If there’s vegetation, and it’s warm and dry, and there’s an ignition, and there is flammable vegetation, then it can happen in your community — whether or not that was the case for our parents or our grandparents.”