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As heat waves get worse, these fixes will help keep your home cool and energy efficient.
July 2023 will almost certainly be declared the hottest month ever recorded, but it is unlikely to hold that record for long. Climate change is making heat waves more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting across the U.S.
Adapting to this hotter future is often discussed at the scale of a city; measured in early warning systems, green spaces, and cooling centers. But there’s also a lot that individual homeowners can do to help their communities and protect themselves.
While the vast majority of American households — some 88% — use air conditioning for relief, homeowners would be wise to consider a variety of additional, “passive” cooling techniques. These are strategies that can keep your home at a safe temperature during a heat wave if the power goes out, an increasingly likely scenario. They will also save you a bit of money on energy bills. In a sense, adapting your home to extreme heat is just another way of thinking about how to make it more energy efficient.
These retrofits also have wider benefits. Since air conditioners work by transferring heat from inside your house outdoors, these fixes can cool down your neighborhood. They’ll cut carbon emissions and air pollution by lowering demand for electricity. If widely adopted, they’ll also help prevent blackouts and could shrink the amount of renewable energy projects that need to be built to replace fossil fuels, alleviating pressure on conservation.
I spoke with Steve Easley, a building science consultant who specializes in energy efficiency, and Shawn Maurer, technical director of the Smart Energy Design Assistance Center at the University of Illinois, about how homeowners should prioritize their options when it comes to passive cooling.
“I always recommend that people do a home energy audit from a certified HERS rater,” Easley told me, referring to the Home Energy Rating System, a nationally recognized system for inspecting and calculating a home’s energy performance. The auditor will tell you how leaky your house is, and how well your roof insulation, windows, and other parts of your house are working to keep out heat, and help you figure out what to attack first. (Easley also recommends getting at least three quotes for any of these solutions, because different contractors bid this work out very differently.)
Below are five things you can do to improve your home’s resilience to heat. Depending on a number of factors — such as where you live, how your house is constructed, and the condition it's in — the mileage you can get out of each of these measures will vary. The good news is that the federal government and many state governments offer tax credits and rebates for most of these solutions. The Inflation Reduction Act created the Energy Efficient Home Improvement tax credit, which offers homeowners up to $1,200 per year to spend on energy efficiency improvements. As part of that, you can claim $150 simply for getting an energy audit.
Maurer said the very first thing he would do to improve the efficiency of a home is to seal up any cracks where air can get in — for example, along the edges of the floors, around the windows, and in the ceiling around light fixtures. “That carries in moisture, heat, and everything from outdoors into the house. It's going to offset any air conditioned air you got inside the house. So air leakage is usually the place we recommend to start,” he said. “And then from there, it's what your budget can handle as far as adding more insulation to your house.”
Insulation comes in a wide range of materials, such as fiberglass and rock wool, blown cellulose, and rigid foam boards. It can be blown into your walls, installed on the floor of the attic, or underneath your roof deck. It’s a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to energy efficiency, since it keeps heat inside in the winter and blocks it from entering in the summer. That means it’s a great option for those in colder climates that also want to prepare their homes for hotter summers.
A 2021 study by a group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab modeled the efficacy of a wide array of passive cooling measures in low-income homes in Fresno, California. It found that roof insulation, along with solar-control window films, which we’ll get to in a moment, were the two most effective ways to keep heat from entering the buildings. However, the authors note that roof insulation is an expensive major retrofit, and recommend that it only be done when the roof needs replacement.
A good first step might be finding out what kind of insulation you already have. The most important metric when it comes to insulation is called “R-value,” and the higher the number, the more effective it is. Older homes may have attic insulation as low as R-13, whereas modern building codes typically require insulation between R-38 and R-60.
The new federal tax credit offers up to 30% of the total cost of a project for air sealing and insulation, maxing out at $1,200 total. (Labor costs are not covered by the credit.)
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Having a light-colored roof and exterior will most certainly keep your home cooler than darker options, but not all light colors are created equal. “Cool” roofs and walls are made with special materials that reflect solar energy back into space, preventing it from being absorbed by the building. They also have high “thermal emittance,” meaning they release a lot of the heat that they do absorb, rather than sending it indoors.
All kinds of materials have been developed with these properties. For roofs, there are tiles, shingles, membranes, liquid coatings, and products made of slate, wood, and metal.
Cool roofs don’t necessarily have to be white, although the color does work very well. According to a database maintained by the Cool Roof Ratings Council, the most effective products tend to be bright white coatings, but there are also gray, green, blue, brown, and tan products that are rated highly.
For reflective walls, the most effective products similarly come in white and other light-colored paints, which can reflect 60 to 90 percent of sunlight when new. An extensive 2019 study of reflective wall paints by the same group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that cool walls can reduce annual energy use in single-family homes in warmer U.S. climates by 2% to 8.5%.
Easley said it’s worth considering a cool roof if you have a central air conditioning system in your attic. Otherwise, attics in places like Arizona can get upwards of 130 degrees, taxing the equipment and forcing it to work harder. If your attic isn’t home to your AC, it may only make financial sense to do this kind of retrofit if your house is already in need of a new paint job or your roof needs work.
But it’s probably not worth considering a cool roof if you live in a colder climate, like the Northeast and upper Midwest, since cool roofs can actually make it colder inside in the winter.
There’s no federal incentives for cool roofs, but several states and utilities offer rebates.
This is a big category, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options. Starting with those that will likely cost the most to the least, you can:
• Replace your windows altogether.
• Add storm windows to the interior or exterior of your existing glass.
• Purchase films that can be applied to the existing glass to increase its reflectivity.
• Install external shutters or awnings that block the sun.
• Install interior blinds and curtains that block the sun.
Here’s a rundown of each option.
New windows: Replacing your windows can cost tens of thousands of dollars, so unless they are already in need of repair, you may want to hold off on that option. But when the day does come around, you’ll want to look for “Low-E” windows, which stands for low emissivity. The inside of the glass is coated with microscopic layers of silver that reflect heat while still allowing light to pass through.
Within that category, you’ll also want to look for windows that have what’s called a low “solar heat gain coefficient.” This measures how much heat is absorbed by the glass and transferred inside. It’s rated on a scale of 0 to 1. If you live somewhere that’s sunny year round like Arizona, you ideally want one rated 0.25 or lower.
Through 2032, homeowners can claim up to $600 in federal tax credits for purchasing Energy Star rated windows.
Storm windows: Rather than replacing your windows entirely, it’s far cheaper to install storm windows with Low-E glass, which basically involves bolting another window to the outside of your house. Storm windows have an added benefit of improving air sealing, eliminating drafts.
Film: An even lower-cost option is to look into films with low solar heat gain coefficients that can be applied to existing windows. However, Easeley warned that many manufacturers will void your warranty if you add films to your windows.
Shutters, awnings, blinds, and curtains: Exterior shutters and overhangs that block the sun from ever reaching your windows will generally be more effective than interior shades or blinds, but all of these measures can help. “Window blinds and curtains are really dirt cheap ways to control energy,” said Maurer. “It’s not a very good buffer, but it’s something.”
The Berkeley study on passive cooling measures notes that blinds moderately improve how much heat from the sun enters your home, but they can feel more effective by reducing the sensation of sunlight streaming into your house.
If you still have any incandescent lights, they can also be a significant source of heat. They should be replaced with LED lights.
Planting trees, climbing ivy, and other vegetation can also passively cool your house by shading both your house and any surrounding pavement. However, if you have solar panels, or plan to get them in the future, do not plant trees on the south side of your home as it may reduce the solar system’s effectiveness.
Maurer cautioned that if you do a bunch of work in your home to reduce your cooling needs, you’ll want to keep that in mind if you ever have to replace your air conditioner. He advised having a contractor come in to re-measure what size system you need, since doing a like-for-like replacement will probably be overkill and could result in it malfunctioning.
Read another helpful guide about heat:
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Current conditions: A prolonged heatwave in Mississippi is breaking nearly century-old temperature records and driving the thermometer up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit again this week • A surge of tropical moisture is steaming the West Coast, with temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than average • Heavy rainfall has set off landslide warnings in every major country in West Africa.
The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Friday to withdraw the Department of the Interior’s approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, Reuters reported. Known as the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, the $6 billion array of as many as 114 turbines in a stretch of federal ocean was set to begin construction next year. Developer US Wind — a joint venture between the investment firm Apollo Global Management and a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Toto Holding SpA — had already faced pushback from Republicans. The town of Ocean City sued to overturn the project’s permits at the federal and state levels. When the Interior Department first announced it was reconsidering the permits in August, Mary Beth Carozza, the Republican state senator representing the area, welcomed the move but warned in a statement the news site Maryland Matters cited that opponents’ campaign against the project, known as Stop Offshore Wind, “won’t stop fighting until the Maryland offshore wind project is completely dead.”
It’s all part of President Donald Trump’s widening “war against wind” energy that kicked off the moment he returned to the White House and issued an order halting approvals for new offshore and onshore turbines. If you read the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo neatly charted out earlier this month, you’ll notice how quickly the administration’s multi-agency crackdown on wind power expanded, particularly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4. The industry is just starting to push back. As I reported in this newsletter two weeks ago, the owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind that Trump halted unilaterally filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. US Wind said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin stands next to Vice President JD Vance. Megan Varner/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed killing the long-standing program requiring thousands of facilities across the country to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas they release into the atmosphere every year. Since 2010, the government has collected the data on emissions from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other industrial sites, which now represents what The New York Times called “the country’s most comprehensive way to track greenhouse gases.”
The decision could have grave consequences for carbon capture and storage. Some had hoped Trump’s vision of unleashing fossil fuels might spur more investment in the technology to capture emissions before they enter the atmosphere and recycle the gas for industrial use or store it in wells underground. But the mix of hardware, pipelines, and storage sites remains so underdeveloped that the EPA in June said it’s “extremely unlikely that the infrastructure necessary for CCS can be deployed” by the 2032 deadline a previous Biden-era rule had set for equipping fossil fuel plants with carbon capture technology, E&E News reported at the time. Eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program hampers all the federal programs that rely on its data. That includes the carbon capture subsidy, known by its tax code section head 45Q, which Republicans recently dialed up in Trump’s reconciliation law. The rules for claiming the tax credit include filing technical details to the EPA’s emissions program. When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reached out to the EPA to ask whether gutting the database posed a setback for companies looking to claim the credits, an agency spokesperson pointed him to a line in Friday’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
In a flurry of deals on Sunday night, at least a half-dozen U.S. nuclear companies unveiled plans for new facilities in the United Kingdom as Washington looks to fill order books for its fuel makers and next-generation reactor companies and London looks to ramp up its atomic energy output. Among the deals:
The announcements add to what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear power dealmaking boom.” In a recent paper, policy experts at the center left think tank Third Way concluded that “the U.S. and U.K. are well-suited for further collaboration on nuclear, specifically SMR and Gen IV technologies,” and “could reduce deployment costs through learning rates and commissioning larger order books.”
Nearly a decade of bureaucratic tinkering at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came to an end so abruptly it’s most succinctly captured in onomatopoeia: “Womp,” Harvard Law School’s electricity law program director Ari Peskoe wrote on X. “With one paragraph, FERC ends a 7.5-year effort to update its approach to reviewing proposed interstate gas pipelines.” The measure would have implemented a new formula for assessing the value of new interstate gas lines that would have weighted the environment more heavily than the existing methodology, which was written in 1999. But the push to modernize the criteria after three decades “was never a serious effort,” former FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee posted on X. “We got bullied into starting it and put on a show for years to hold protesters at bay. Just being honest. R and D led @ferc majorities both faked it.”
Ram has canceled its electric pickup truck, long expected to be a competitor to the battery-powered versions of the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, InsideEVs reported. Parent company Stellantis said it would discontinue the 2026 battery-powered Ram 1500 REV “as demand for full-size battery-electric trucks slows in North America.” Rivals such as GM have seen a boom in EV sales in recent months, that is likely driven by the law Trump signed that rapidly phased out federal tax credits after this month. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, August turned out to be the best month for EV sales “in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month.” Ford is still investing in what is billed as a Model T moment for EV construction. And, as I have reported here in this newsletter, Tesla’s plunge in popularity — even with former customers — has opened up more of the EV market to other vendors.
Though Ram’s all-electric pickup truck turned out to be a non-starter, its extended-range battery electric truck, formerly known as the Ramcharger, will now take on the 1500 REV moniker with a 2026 launch date. As Heatmap contributor and Shift Key podcast cohost Jesse Jenkins wrote when the Ramcharger was announced, “The economics and capabilities of a range-extended EV thus make a lot of sense, especially for massive vehicles like the full-size trucks and SUVs so many Americans love. And they squash any concerns about range anxiety that might give buyers pause.”
Scientists have long sought an economical way to harness renewable power from waves. But as Julian Spector wrote in Canary Media: “The first rule of wave power startups is that they always fail. But a plucky company called Eco Wave Power is doing its best to prove that rule wrong, and it just notched an important win in Los Angeles.” The company this month installed a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the port of Los Angeles, with seven steel floaters affixed to a central structure that bobs in the waves, “building up hydraulic pressure that gets converted to electric power by machinery in shipping containers on shore.” If the pilot pans out and Eco Wave gets a chance to bid on a larger area of the port, the technology could — at least in theory — generate power 90% of the time, supplying electrons at a capacity factor higher than almost any other energy source besides nuclear.
Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit
The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.
The Trump administration argues that the scheme, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, costs more than $2 billion and isn’t legally required under the Clean Air Act. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, described the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the program is more important than the Trump administration lets on. It’s true that the policy, which required more than 8,000 different facilities around the country to report their emissions, helped the EPA and outside analysts estimate the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
But it did more than that. Over the past decade, the program had essentially become the master database of carbon pollution and emissions policy across the American economy. “Essentially everything the federal government does related to emissions reductions is dependent on the [Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program],” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me.
That means other federal programs — including those that Republicans in Congress have championed — have come to rely on the EPA database.
Among those programs: the federal tax credit for capturing and using carbon dioxide. Republicans recently increased the size of that subsidy, nicknamed 45Q after a section of the tax code, for companies that turn captured carbon into another product or use it to make oil wells more productive. Those changes were passed in President Trump’s big tax and spending law over the summer.
But Zeldin’s scheme to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would place that subsidy off limits for the foreseeable future. Under federal law, companies can only claim the 45Q tax credit if they file technical details to the EPA’s emissions reporting program.
Another federal tax credit, for companies that use carbon capture to produce hydrogen fuel, also depends on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. That subsidy hasn’t received the same friendly treatment from Republicans, and it will now phase out in 2028.
The EPA program is “the primary mechanism by which companies investing in and deploying carbon capture and hydrogen projects quantify the CO2 that they’re sequestering, such that they qualify for tax incentives,” Jane Flegal, a former Biden administration appointee who worked on industrial emissions policy, told me. She is now the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.
“The only way for private capital to be put to work to deploy American carbon capture and hydrogen projects is to quantify the carbon dioxide that they’re sequestering, in some way,” she added. That’s what the EPA program does: It confirms that companies are storing or using as much carbon as they claim they are to the IRS.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “how the IRS communicates with the EPA” when companies claim the 45Q credit, Cavanaugh said. “The IRS obviously has taxpayer-sensitive information, so they’re not able to give information to the EPA about who or what is claiming the credit.” The existence of the database lets the EPA then automatically provide information to the IRS, so that no confidential tax information is disclosed.
Zeldin’s announcement that the EPA would phase out the program has alarmed companies planning on using the tax credit. In a statement, the Carbon Capture Coalition — an alliance of oil companies, manufacturers, startups, and NGOs — called the reporting program the “regulatory backbone” of the carbon capture tax credit.
“It is not an understatement that the long-term success of the carbon management industry rests on the robust reporting mechanisms” in the EPA’s program, the group said.
Killing the EPA program could hurt American companies in other ways. Right now, companies that trade with European firms depend on the EPA data to pass muster with the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax. It’s unclear how they would fare in a world with no EPA data.
It could also sideline GOP proposals. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has suggested that imports to the United States should pay a foreign pollution fee — essentially, a way of accounting for the implicit subsidy of China’s dirty energy system. But the data to comply with that law would likely come from the EPA’s greenhouse gas database, too.
Ending the EPA database wouldn’t necessarily spell permanent doom for the carbon capture tax credit, but it would make it much harder to use in the years to come. In order to re-open the tax credit for applications, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, the Interior Department, and the EPA would have to write new rules for companies that claim the 45Q credit. These rules would go to the end of the long list of regulations that the Treasury Department must write after Trump’s spending law transformed the tax code.
That could take years — and it could sideline projects now under construction. “There are now billions of dollars being invested by the private sector and the government in these technologies, where the U.S. is positioned to lead globally,” Flegal said. Changing the rules would “undermine any way for the companies to succeed.”
Ditching the EPA database, however, very well could doom carbon capture-based hydrogen projects. Under the terms of Trump’s tax law, companies that want to claim the hydrogen credit must begin construction on their projects by 2028.
The Trump administration seems to believe, too, that gutting the EPA database may require new rules for the carbon capture tax credit. When asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson pointed me to a line in the agency’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
The EPA spokesperson then encouraged me to ask the Treasury Department for anything more about “specific implications.”
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.