526 Western communities of 15,000 or fewer are at higher wildfire risk than Paradise was; is your town one of them?

Wildfire hazard potential of towns with fewer than
15,000 households (Arizona Republic map)

The small California town of Paradise made national headlines when it was destroyed by wildfire last November. But 500 small towns in the West have conditions that put them even more at risk of wildfires than Paradise was, according to an in-depth, multimedia report from the Arizona Republic and USA Today.

According to an analysis of fire hazards in 4,784 communities across 760 million acres of the 11 Western states, 526 towns with fewer than 15,000 households face a greater potential risk of wildfire than Paradise, and hundreds more are also at great risk, Pamela Ren Larson and Dennis Wagner report. The story includes a searchable database. 

The Republic analyzed U.S. Forest Service data, weighing 65 risk factors such as previous fires, topography, precipitation, vegetation, and more, then simulated tens of thousands of possible fire seasons. They assigned wildfire hazard potential on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest. The median was 2.07 and Paradise was at a 3.81, Larson and Wagner report.

There are other factors in assessing human risk, though, including the number of mobile homes in a community; such homes pose a greater fire risk. The number of easily accessed exit roads also matters in an evacuation, and in Paradise the risk was greater because several of those routes away from the Camp Fire were effectively inaccessible. If a town has many older or disabled residents, that may increase the time needed for evacuation. "The median age of Camp Fire victims was 72. Among the 85 who died, at least 62 were age 65 or older; 36 were over age 75," Larson and Wagner report. "Across the West, 101 small communities have both a higher wildfire potential than Paradise and a larger percentage of residents with a disability."

Towns that lack an effective emergency notification system, or whose residents can't receive such messages by cell phone, also have a harder time evacuating. Phillip Levin, a researcher at the University of Washington and lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, told the Republic: "Fire is natural. But the disaster happens because people didn't know to leave, or couldn't leave. It didn't have to happen."