The L.A. / Palisades wildfires got me to thinking recently, as such things do, about how this scenario might have played out differently if this were after a SHTF event … a time where normal services might be suspended or unavailable either regionally or nationwide. And while most of us would be preoccupied with two-legged problems and whatnot, Mother Nature could absolutely make a SHTF event exponentially worse. Wildfires are a primary culprit, though hurricanes and other natural disasters shouldn’t be ignored.
A brief online search indicates that there are more than 60,000 wildfires in the United States each year, magnitudes larger than I’d assumed. Of course, that’s now being blamed on climate change, whatever you think of that topic. Thankfully, most of those wildfires turn out to be nothing-burgers. This is, at least to some degree, due to brave men and women who get out there and fight them.
But it’s also due to mitigation techniques, such as proactively clearing brush, creating defensible spaces, prescribed burns (whether you believe those are useful or not), disallowing burning in certain areas or times of the year, firebreaks, community education, and more.
That’s all good news. Again, however, sometimes the best laid plans and efforts just can’t stop what’s bound to happen. Personally, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. My uncle was a firefighter who had at least once (but probably more) deployed to southern California to fight wildfires. It’s just one of those things that happens in the area because, well, it’s a desert where people think they should live.
If you peruse the Wildfire Hazard Potential Map generated by the USDA Forest Service, you’ll quickly discover that about half to two-thirds of the United States is subject to wildfires of at least a moderate level of risk. To be clear, many of these wildfires peter out on their own despite human intervention, though not all. I briefly tried to find out how many wildfires may have been prevented due to human involvement, but I couldn’t find an answer. My guess is that’s it’s not an insignificant fraction.
I also looked into how many wildfires are caused by human carelessness. The Brave browser-generated response shocked me: “According to recent research, human carelessness is responsible for a significant portion of wildfires in the United States. Specifically, humans are the cause of more than 80% of all wildfires. This includes unintentional actions such as discarding cigarettes, leaving campfires unattended, and losing control of prescribed burns or crop fires. Additionally, human-caused fires extend the wildfire season by three months, making it three times longer than the period of natural, lightning-caused fires.”
Honestly, that number feels like a huge overestimation since this would mean that of the conservative 60,000 wildfires each year, 48,000 are caused by humans in some way. Shouldn’t Mother Nature get more credit than that?
Where am I going with this?
If we agree that during normal times a large fraction of wildfires are caused by humans and that human efforts mitigate these fires to some degree. And if we assume that during SHTF times humans will surely cause more fires than we already do due to carelessness while also realizing that mitigation and firefighting efforts will be minimal to nonexistent, then there will absolutely be more wildfires post-SHTF, none of which will be managed by traditional authorities.
The bottom line? Wildfires are going to be a huge problem post-SHTF for large swaths of the United States IF … and this is a big IF … things don’t return to normal relatively quickly, say, within a month or two. Clearly, the height of fire season could be bad no matter the duration of a SHTF event.
My question for you is: what’s your plan? Normally, we’re accustomed to getting alerts via text or the news, for instance, but during a time when society no longer functions normally, you could be left to your own senses. And knowing what I know about wildfires, they can creep up on you in minutes. Could you evacuate in time if you had to? Where would you go? How would you know that where you’re headed isn’t cutoff a mile down the road?
And this is to say nothing of smaller, localized fires that could utterly devastate neighborhoods and small towns because your neighbor down the block decided to light his backyard campfire with gasoline. Ugh.
Leave a Reply