Magazine

Diversion

Shelter-in-place is straightforward: First, accept that wildfire will be part of your new home’s ecosystem. Then, deprive it of fuel: Avoid flammable landscaping and construct a house that’s as fire-retardant as possible.

But how do you get developers, construction companies, insurers and homeowners to bear the costs of this new construction regimen?

“It’s real simple,” say Rancho Santa Fe fire marshal and 37-year California fire-service veteran Cliff Hunter. “Don’t approve the plans. If you don’t approve the plans, they don’t get a house.”

Just like that, Hunter is helping to rewrite the drama that has long played out in communities from San Diego County to the Gulf Coast and in the multitudes of other regions across America where catastrophe and construction are co-stars. This drama stars the “greedy developer” and the “sentimental environmentalist.” Should we build or shouldn’t we build? It’s the land-use equivalent of a Shakespearean dilemma, and just like Shakespeare’s plays, it may seem real but it’s ultimately fiction. Even with Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Katrina firmly lodged in our collective memory, development in hazardous regions continues. Even if construction were to stop entirely in these regions, we would still have generations’ worth of property and citizens to protect from a changing-risk environment that now includes the effects of climate change and the realities of aging infrastructure.

Hunter’s shelter-in-place gospel is only one of many possible solutions currently emerging in a national move towards hazard realism, which seeks to get beyond the age of “should we build or shouldn’t we?” Many of these ideas have been around for a while, including shelter-in-place, but they are only now being applied as the stakes of failure grow higher and higher. Others are less well-known, intermingling sustainability theory and sophisticated new mapping and modeling technologies in order to profile hazards and predict their effects with greater accuracy. It’s a trend that cuts across the disciplines of planning, architecture and ecology; it includes first responders and emergency preparedness experts. And, if successful, the hazard realists will more and more be shaping national trends of development in America’s most hazardous regions.

Life in the WUI

Max Moritz sees a philosophical puzzle in the way Californians think about hazards. “We fight fires — it’s very military — but we don’t fight earthquakes,” he says. “We avoid them or we engineer against them.” Moritz co-directs the Center for Fire Research and Outreach at the University of California, Berkeley. He wants to correct this inconsistency. Not fighting earthquakes, Moritz argues, has led to strong building codes and reasonable expectations of the built environment in earthquake-prone cities. It coincides with a century-old history — a post-1906-quake reckoning of the costs involved in rebuilding San Francisco or Los Angeles every generation. “We don’t co-exist with fire and we need to,” Moritz explains. “That’s a fundamental difference.”

Between 2000 and 2006, the United States witnessed five new records for acreage burned in wildfires, according to statistics collected since 1960 by the National Interagency Fire Center. The U.S. Fire Service reports that losses from “Outdoor and Other Fires” have averaged $260 million per year over the past decade. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that in 2005, there were 800,000 fires in this category, resulting in 50 civilian fire deaths and 950 injuries. 

Moritz has an explanation. “Part of this has got to be, while we are learning more, we are seeing the results of climate change, the accumulation of fuel and an expansion of the WUI.” WUI is fire-ecology-speak for the “Wildland Urban Interface” — that region of development where the suburb meanders into undeveloped space. As people move out into the WUI they start doing what you would expect — they put out fires that threaten their homes. Fire season after fire season, this leads to the fight, with Herculean efforts by thousands of firefighters called out to save the day. Such efforts, even when successful, are costly. 

To Moritz, who looks at the problem with a scientific eye, the real trick is not in denying development in the WUI outright, but in understanding when, where and with what frequency wildfires strike. With this knowledge, a set of rational land-use policies and building codes can be developed — policies that don’t necessarily say no to developers but do entail accountability when developers and homeowners insist on taking risks with the full knowledge of what they are doing.

Moritz has spent much of his career studying the interactions among the large-scale forces that cause wildfires, the elements that make up a “fire regime” — like vegetation, geography and weather patterns. While the fire regime changes over time, it can be mapped. And mapping means decisions about fire-resistant building codes, for example, can be based on hard data. “The last real solid work on [fire weather patterns] was done in the ’60s for civil defense reasons,” Moritz notes. It seems that the federal government was worried about nuclear war-induced firestorms, so a set of fire maps was developed. In the ’80s and again in the ’90s, California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) commissioned “Fire Hazard Severity Zone” (FHSZ) maps after especially bad fire seasons, to assess risk in wildland areas controlled by the state and to show areas where local residents are responsible for fire protection. But the pace of construction in the WUI has been brisk since then, leaving these maps outdated.

In response to the accelerating threat of wildfires in recent years, the California Building Standards Commission initiated a revised mapping effort in 2007, intended to guide the next generation of development in the WUI. A major break with past efforts is now possible thanks to the introduction of computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. Applying GIS to fire hazards in California (think Google Maps for disasters) enables experts to create maps that integrate potential fire locations with locations of buildings and the past fire history of a given area. The new FHSZ maps are designed to give realistic probabilities for fire behavior in areas rated according to “moderate,” “high” and “very high” levels of risk. These areas show up on a map in yellow, orange and red bands that reflect not only the history, but also the possible future of the WUI.

Drafts of the FHSZ maps were discussed in localities across the state for months, and they went into effect on Jan. 1, 2008. The result, hopes Max Moritz and many in the fire protection community, is a science-based system of understanding risk and allocating responsibility in a rational way across the state’s WUI. Moritz’s lab and CAL FIRE even co-host a Web site where people can input a physical address and see where their property sits in relation to fire hazard. If the property sits in one of the highest-risk zones, enhanced building codes kick into effect. The state estimates the cost per home to meet the new codes in the highest risk fire zones will run about $1,800. Enforcing codes, of course, is another matter — but it will be more and more difficult to keep on building in the same old ways in the WUI. So, where will development go from here?

From the individual structure up to neighborhood design, Moritz says, “we can use what we know about fire in educating urban planners.” Moritz’s lab holds workshops to demonstrate these new tools and has local fire agencies and planners engage in cooperatively crafting the new building codes. Better understanding of fire could also point the way to innovations in architecture and construction. We can soon expect to see technological revisions of household sprinkler systems, attic vent covers and fireproof roof materials to protect against flying embers. We can also expect the prohibition of traditional favorites like cedar shake roofs, which tend to burst into flame at the slightest provocation.

Moritz’s lab is also charged with providing information and outreach to homeowners — in a sense, the final frontier of fire hazard mitigation — and he has developed what he calls a “Fire Information Engine Toolkit”. The toolkit offers a Web-based diagnostic allowing a homeowner to find out whether his home might be susceptible to fire and includes a fire mitigation guide that advises on fire protection for everything from decks to landscaping plants. Moritz expects that homeowners might be incentivized to use the toolkit by lowered insurance rates. Or, by simple common sense, perhaps. Either way, Moritz’s fire research lab is trying to accomplish something rather radical these days — taking the products of macro-level hazards research and making them available at the micro level of the homeowner.

Our river levees cause or exacerbate the flooding, because we don’t look at it as a system.”
— Ivor van Heerden, Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center deputy director

Rediscovering the Mississippi

In 1993, the Mississippi River flooded for several months, from Minnesota down to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a “500-year event” in the lingo of flood experts, costing $15 billion before all was said and done. In historical memory only the Great 1927 Flood matches it. As the waters receded, landscape architect and professor Anuradha Mathur and her husband, architect Dilip da Cunha, started getting interested in what they saw as a very narrow, very shortsighted, post-flood conversation about what to do next with the river. In the introduction to their 2001 book, Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape, they recall:

“From one side we heard calls for more control of the river; from the other, for the withdrawal of settlement from the floodplains; even as the Mississippi was erasing property lines and dissolving boundaries of all kinds, it was not shaking the distinctions by which this landscape has been looked upon and inhabited for the past three centuries: River and settlement, nature and culture, water and land.”

Shaking these distinctions would come to define Mathur and da Cunha’s research method. They traveled up and down the river, conducting interviews, digging up old maps, and eventually riding along on one of the massive Mississippi barges for a week. They channeled Mark Twain, in whose Life on the Mississippi they found a respect for the water — as both a resource and muse. That made more sense to them than the dry calculations of the Army Corps of Engineers. They met old blues musicians, studied the racial history of the land alongside the water and at last came to a rather startling conclusion: The Mississippi River is not separate from the land through which it courses. 

To say that land and water are part of one ecosystem with permeable boundaries is a rather difficult proposition in a country founded on the sanctity, and fixity, of property rights. Liberated from this concept, one immediately sees the road, or the stream, not taken. And, in fact, if one searches out the history of the river, the “fixed river” appears only as an apparition. Rising water was a seasonal guest. Travel out of New Orleans up the river to the sugarcane country and see the 18th-century Creole mansions. They were built to flood, with permeable basements and front doors that opened right to the river. Think about the land before industrial oil and gas production cut up the wetlands and real estate developers built houses in the lowlands. It’s like the Nile in Egypt: Flooding brings life, replenishes the land; it gives rise to culture— a culture that values cycles and feels a deep shudder of memory and respect when the waters rise.

Moments of profound disruption in the American system don’t come along often, but surely Katrina was one. In such a moment new ideas are often aired; and so, after Katrina, Mathur and da Cunha set about again to tear down the psychological boundaries between land and water along the Mississippi. The result was “New Orleans: Inhabiting a Fluid Terrain,” a 2006 design project that developed into an exhibition. Mathur took her students down to the Gulf, where they studied the geography and met the people and imagined the possibilities of the space for themselves. They developed plans that conjured up the city of New Orleans as a submersible space for living. The “Roof/Ramp” by Huiqing Kuang was one concept. It’s an enormous multi-level ramp with housing, retail and public space inside the structure — on the roof is a garden. Day by day, it is a place to live, to work and to play. But, when the waters rise, as they invariably will again, the ramp becomes a lifeline to safety. And when the waters are high, the ramp could even be used as a temporary city, a place to locate housing for evacuees, keeping them rooted to the city where they live rather than dispersing them to the four corners of the nation as refugees.

High-density housing along the natural levees formed by the riverbank was another idea that grew from the process. Again emphasizing traditional use of land in New Orleans before the current levee system existed, the designers made use of a common sense proposition: Build on the high ground and restrain development in the lowlands. Another proposal called for the creation of new canals in the city that would simultaneously channel water to Lake Pontchartrain, but also discharge rainwater into the natural “bowl” that is New Orleans. Such a plan would “allow once more the Mississippi Water to flow through the city.” This may seem counter-productive, except that the new canals will allow for more construction on high ground — the canal banks — and also return sediment to the city’s naturally swampy areas, thus lifting the overall elevation.

At their core, the visionary designs of Mathur, da Cunha and their students seek to remind us of two key lessons for life along the Mississippi: First, the city and the water are not separate. Second, separating them insults history, and, if the past is ignored, eventually you find yourself marooned on a rooftop in a sea of survivors who can’t connect.

Know your Enemies

Such lessons perfectly echo the thinking of Louisiana State University hurricane researcher and Hurricane Center deputy director Ivor van Heerden. “Be very careful of expanding the footprint of your city into wetlands — they are wet for a reason,” van Heerden warns. Like Mathur and da Cunha, van Heerden and his research team at LSU started with the history of the river and the history of its big floods to understand the bad planning that led to Katrina’s devastation.

Sediment is a big player in van Heerden’s analysis. Rather than turning the river into a canal, a process begun after the 1927 flood and renewed after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, van Heerden believes we need to allow periodic flooding of the Mississippi’s surrounding lands. The flooding provides the sediment that builds land and nourishes the wetland plants — land and plants that counteract subsidence and erosion that serve as powerful buffers against hurricane-induced storm surges. “We’ve lost over a million acres of protective apron,” says van Heerden. “The river is in straitjackets, and it pours into 400 feet of water out in the Gulf. But, we could siphon the water and sediment out and into the wetlands, we can use diversions, we could even allow the river to take a different course.”

Like Mathur and da Cunha, van Heerden laments the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers seems to be drawing just the opposite conclusion. It’s “a mad rush to get a plan and start working, [with] very little thought to effectiveness. They’ve dusted off old Corps plans and put them in a shopping bag.” Echoing Mathur and da Cunha, van Heerden believes that a fundamental philosophical shift — let the land and the water co-exist — must come first. He argues, “Our river levees cause or exacerbate the flooding, because we don’t look at it as a system — we have to start taking the European systems approach.”

The European system to which van Heerden looks for guidance evolved from the greatest modern flood disaster to hit the Netherlands. In the winter of 1953, an enormous flood engulfed the country’s vast lowlands, killing over 1,800 people, destroying 4,000 homes and causing an evacuation of 100,000 people. Just as with Hurricane Katrina a half-century later, this was a disaster caused by a failed levee system — a disaster predicted and still sadly endured. The remediation strategy was a highly technological one, involving the construction of massive surge barriers at the meeting of land and sea. Rather than barring the two from meeting, however, the barriers have gates that can be raised and lowered, allowing saltwater estuaries and tidal zones to continue to exist. The gates are only closed when the seas are high and flooding is imminent. The Dutch looked at the hazards they faced after 1953 and calculated that they wanted to reduce the risk of serious flooding in their cities to an extraordinary ratio of 1:10,000. Within four years, the protective barriers were complete, and they continue to build and monitor them as the environment changes. Van Heerden laughs when he remembers showing pictures of the piecemeal Mississippi levee system to Dutch scientists. “Compared to the Dutch, ours are little sand castles,” he says. The emphasis here is less on copying the Dutch exactly, but in adopting the seriousness with which they approached the issue, and making a long-term societal commitment to protecting our cities. By cutting siphons through the current levee system, building serious levees where they are needed, and restoring the wetlands, van Heerden sees a way to co-exist with the mighty Mississippi. He also cites the need to mimic the Dutch process of opening the levee design process to competition. The Corps can build, in van Heerden’s estimation, but visionary designs are quite another matter.

As with Max Moritz’s work in California, there is new promise in using computer-modeling and GIS technology to project the implications of certain remedial actions, or of taking no action at all. The Dutch, according to van Heerden, are once again showing the way forward, with sophisticated computer models allowing researchers to play out any number of scenarios and rediscoveries along the waterway. If van Heerden can get his models done in time, he might just be able to win over the politicians, the engineers and the developers who are right now building the next generation of flood controls along the Mississippi.

Back at the Ranch

Back in Rancho Santa Fe after the fire, Fire Marshal Cliff Hunter’s gamble paid off. The local and even national press were jamming up his phone line, wanting to know what the success of shelter-in-place meant for the rest of the country. Hunter is optimistic, but also realistic. “I don’t recommend that people stay in their homes during a fire,” he says. Shelter-in-place is, in fact, a second line of defense, intended to protect people who can’t escape because of age or illness or panic. Still, he is obviously pleased when he explains he knows some people who stayed behind during the Witch Fire, despite the robocall warnings to evacuate. And they were fine, he says. The strict requirements of keeping a vegetation-free perimeter around the home, blocking attic vents from flying embers and liberal use of fire-resistant building materials in addition to wider than usual escape roadways add up to a winning strategy for co-existing with fire, in Hunter’s view.

The downside, of course, is the increased cost of construction and upkeep, and the risk that people will try this on their own but forget that shelter-in-place design must be maintained and monitored all the time. At Rancho Sante Fe, this is accomplished by inspectors who come around every fire season to catalogue code abuses, and through private restriction rather than public law. Recently, one woman put 22 forbidden cypress trees around her home and was flagged for a code violation. “Why did you do it?” Hunter wanted to know. “I never thought you would inspect,” the woman replied. This attitude troubles Hunter, and especially agitates those who are concerned that shelter-in-place is unsustainable without costly and constant oversight.

Hunter sees another big problem: It’s too expensive to retrofit all of the homes in California’s WUI that don’t already make use of shelter-in-place. Such requirements, despite the new code structure and Max Moritz’s fire maps, would take political courage that is currently untested, but historically weak. This is the same sort of problem that faces the Gulf Coast. Those levees along the Mississippi? Not coming down anytime soon. This means more living on borrowed time as the water and the land remain temporarily separated. 

For years, developers have built unsustainably in harm’s way. Every disaster necessitated more government oversight, more firemen and rapid reconstruction to demonstrate that the “fight” with nature was being won. Now, as we settle into the 21st century, realists are working hard to redefine how to best live with hazard. They know people want to live in disaster-prone areas, for cultural and economic reasons that are out of the control of any governing entity.

However, with new construction methods and more rational building codes facilitated by accurate map-making and computer models, it is unlikely that residents of the WUI will remain heedless. A fundamental realignment of construction with ecological reality — rather than feebly trying to push the ecology away from the construction site — will present new design options and ecological philosophies to be discussed in classrooms, town halls, laboratories and firehouses. And as the discussion continues, disaster realists will make their case: You can live where you want to, but have a good, long look at a map first. 

 

This article appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!