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Preparing for wildfire season can feel daunting. Reroof your house, the advice often goes. Bury your propane tank. Gather your important documents in a go bag.
That is all well and good, but let’s face it: The average American has nine unfinished home improvement projects at any given time, and it’s going to take a lot more than one weekend to figure out where you put your social security card.
Firefighters don’t call it “dirty August” for nothing, though, and the predictive maps for the coming month show “above normal” wildland fire potential for all of Washington and Oregon, most of Idaho and Montana, as well as large swaths of Texas, Alaska, and the Great Lakes region (fire potential will remain high in most of the Pacific Northwest through September, aided by persistent drought).
But if you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start, here are seven things you can do today — each in 30 minutes or less — to set yourself up for the weeks ahead.
The USDA Forest Service offers a handy dashboard for understanding the wildfire risk in your community. Take a few minutes to punch in your locale at Wildfirerisk.org and learn how on the alert you need to be.
The results might surprise you. As an experiment, I entered my mother’s address in the Phoenix area and learned she has a “very high” risk of wildfire — “higher than 94%” of counties. Yikes!
If you have anything more than a “low” risk of wildfire, you should sign up for emergency alerts for your area. Fires can spring up and spread quickly, and there are a number of different ways to stay informed of developing hazards. Here are three places to start:
Make sure you’re opted in to receive FEMA wireless emergency alerts (WEAs). Here is a guide for enabling the alerts on an iPhone and here’s a guide for Android. WEAs do not track your location but are sent using local cell towers in order to be relevant to cell phone users in a specific area. They are also free to receive and don’t count toward text limits.
Create an account on Smart911.com. Though the service is most commonly used to provide 911 dispatchers with extra information about you when you call during an emergency, Smart911 is also used by many counties to provide targeted weather, traffic, and yes, fire alerts to their residents.
Also check if your county has its own emergency alert system that you should be registered with.
Just staying inside isn’t necessarily enough to keep you safe from wildfire smoke. If you live in an area prone to wildfires, or in an area downwind of them, you’ll want to invest in a good air purifier before everyone else makes a run on them as the season starts to pick up.
If you don’t have an air purifier, can’t afford one, or have questions about using a purifier or AC unit during a smoke event, here is our guide to staying safe when the air quality is bad no matter what is at your disposal.
Sorry, you’ve got to put on shoes for this one. But it also might be the single best thing you do ahead of wildfire season.
Homes primarily catch on fire not from being overcome by a wall of flame, but because of small embers that can fly more than a mile from the main wildfire and ignite roofs, decks, and yard debris.
Fire managers like to talk about this in terms of the ominously named “home ignition zone,” which is the buffer area around your house that you want to make as inhospitable to embers as possible. It is broken down into three zones: Zone 1 or “the Immediate Zone,” which is the area zero to 5 feet around the sides of your house; Zone 2, or the “intermediate zone,” which is between 5 to 30 feet around your home; and Zone 3, the “extended zone,” which is 30 to 200 feet away from your home.
For the sake of prioritizing, though, you want to start with your house and work outward. Take a slow walk around your house and make a to-do list of future projects with an eye out for the following potential issues, as recommended by the National Fire Protection Association:
• Do your gutters need to be cleaned? Make a note to prioritize doing so — the dead leaves and pine needles that accumulate there can easily catch fire.
• Are there places on your roof where leaf litter and debris are accumulating? Make a note to get those cleaned ASAP as well.
• Do any tree limbs hang over your house? Add those to your removal list.
• How does the area immediately around the sides of your house look? You’ll want to keep this clear of dead vegetation, trees, shrubs, and wood mulch that can ignite and spread to your home. Add a gardening weekend to your to-do list if need be.
• Do you have a deck? Make sure it’s clean of vegetation above and below. Don’t store things under your deck!
• Locate the vents on your house; these are potential openings where embers can get in. Make sure they’re clear of vegetation and properly covered.
• Is your lawn starting to look overgrown? You’ll want to keep it mowed to about four inches for the duration of fire season.
• Do you have a wood fence — AKA, a fire superhighway — connected to your house? You’re going to want to do something about that eventually, too.
• Make sure your home address is visible from the road.
Now I know how we feel about home improvement projects, particularly ones that require a lot of labor, like redoing a garden, or money, like paying an arborist to cut down overhanging tree branches. But firefighters won’t waste time or their safety by defending homes that are dangerous. “You just drive past and you go to the places that you can save that have done some things to protect their own homes,” firefighter Bre Orcasitas told the authors of the forthcoming book This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat.
It might take a lot of work to get started, but in the event of a nearby wildfire, checking items off the to-do list you just created also might ultimately save you your home. Once back inside, pull out a calendar and set aside time to actually get these projects done.
Ready for a more robust checklist? Here’s the full home ignition zone task list from the National Fire Protection Association and here’s an additional checklist that focuses on potential design weaknesses of your home. This Is Wildfire is also an excellent guide for anyone who lives in fire country, with many additional tips for time-pressed individuals who want projects they can tackle after work or over a weekend. It can be pre-ordered here.
Maybe you put together an evacuation bag during your first wildfire season and have since forgotten about it. Maybe you never made a go bag at all. Now, though, is the time to make sure you have the basics set aside in case you need to quickly leave your home.
If you have an old go bag stuffed in a closet somewhere or buried in the back of your car, quickly look through it to make sure the items have not expired and all the batteries still work. There is no need to get extreme and fill it up with treasured heirlooms when there’s no active wildfire in your area, but do start setting aside irreplaceable items like photographs and beloved mementos if you get a pre-evacuation alert. And yes, now might finally be the time to start figuring out where your important documents are so they’re easily grabbed in the event you need to leave.
There are lots of slightly different checklists for preparing a go bag from scratch, but if you need a place to begin, here’s a good one. Here’s another that is specific to pet and livestock owners. You can also find pre-made emergency kits online to take some of the work out of getting started, though they tend to be pricier than assembling the items yourself.
Save this page (and if you’ve bookmarked InciWeb in the past, make sure the URL is up to date since it’s changed).
InciWeb is an emergency incident information page that offers the latest news on wildfires, including if a burn is prescribed, its containment, the number of responding personnel, potential evacuation orders, the firefighting outlook, and contact information if you need to learn more. If a fire is burning near you, it is the best source of general information, though you don’t want to use this to replace emergency alerts.
You probably check the weather in the morning anyway. When you do, keep an eye peeled for “red flag warnings” — many weather apps, including the one on iPhones, will display this, but you can also check the National Weather Service for alerts.
A red flag warning signifies that there is an increased risk of a fire starting due to warm temperatures (above 75 degrees Fahrenheit), low humidity (25% or less), and/or gusty winds (15 mph or greater). Lightning storms during prolonged dry spells can also trigger red flag warnings.
Red flag warnings tell locals they should be careful when extinguishing cigarettes outdoors and avoid any unnecessary burning of letters from estranged husbands. But the alerts also tell residents to be prepared in case a wildfire breaks out — as LAist says, consider it the “set” in “ready, set, go.”
And if a fire does ignite in your area, you’ll now know what to do. You took a day to prepare. Stay safe, stay calm, follow directions from authorities. And seriously, pack that go bag.
Read more advice about wildfires:
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”