Significance: Recent wildfire events throughout the world have highlighted the consequences of residential development in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) including hundreds to thousands of homes burned during a single wildfire to, more tragically, firefighter and homeowner fatalities. Despite substantial investments in modifying wildland fuels near populated areas, losses appear to be increasing. In this article, we examine the conditions under which WUI wildfire disasters occur and introduce a wildfire risk assessment framework. By using this framework, we examine how prefire mitigation activities failed to prevent significant structure loss during the Fourmile Canyon fire outside Boulder, CO. In light of these results, we suggest the need to reevaluate and restructure wildfire mitigation programs aimed at reducing residential losses from wildfire.

Over the last two decades wildfire activity, damage, and management cost within the US have increased substantially. These increases have been associated with a number of factors including climate change and fuel accumulation due to a century of active fire suppression. The increased fire activity has occurred during a time of significant ex-urban development of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) along with increased demand on water resources originating on forested landscapes. These increased demands have put substantial pressure on federal agencies charged with wildfire management to continue and expand the century old policy of aggressive wildfire suppression. However, aggressive wildfire suppression is one of the major factors that drive the increased extent, intensity, and damage associated with the small number of large wildfires that are unable to be suppressed. In this paper we discuss the positive feedback loops that lead to demands for increasing suppression response while simultaneously increasing wildfire risk in the future. Despite a wealth of scientific research that demonstrates the limitations of the current management paradigm pressure to maintain the existing system are well entrenched and driven by the existing social systems that have evolved under our current management practice. Interestingly, US federal wildland fire policy provides considerable discretion for managers to pursue a range of management objectives; however, societal expectations and existing management incentive structures result in policy implementation that is straining the resilience of fire adapted ecosystems and the communities that reside in and adjacent to them.

Wildfire activity in the United States incurs substantial costs and losses, and presents challenges to federal, state, tribal and local agencies that have responsibility for wildfire management. Beyond the potential socioeconomic and ecological losses, and the monetary costs to taxpayers due to suppression, wildfire management is a dangerous occupation. Aviation resources, in particular large airtankers, currently play a critical role in wildfire management, and account for a relatively large share of both suppression expenditure and firefighting fatalities. A recent airtanker modernisation strategy released by the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the US Department of Interior highlighted cost effectiveness as the fundamental tenet of both the replacement strategy and the use of aerial firefighting resources. However, determining the cost effectiveness of alternative airtanker fleets is challenging due to limited data and substantial uncertainty regarding aerial firefighting effectiveness. In this paper, we significantly expand on current airtanker usage and effectiveness knowledge, by incorporating spatially explicit drop location data linked to firefighting resource orders to better identify the period in the fire history when drops occurred, and through characterisation of the resulting outcomes of fires that received drops during initial attack. Our results confirm earlier work suggesting extensive use of large airtankers on extended attack, despite policy suggesting priority use in initial attack. Further, results suggest that containment rates for fires receiving large airtanker use during initial attack are quite low. We explore possible causes for these results, address potential limitations with our methods and data, and offer recommendations for improvements in data collection and aviation management.

Wildfire management involves significant complexity and uncertainty, requiring simultaneous consideration of multiple, non-commensurate objectives. This paper investigates the tradeoffs fire managers are willing to make among these objectives using a choice experiment methodology that provides three key advancements relative to previous stated-preference studies directed at understanding fire manager preferences: (1) a more immediate relationship between the instrument employed in measuring preferences and current management practices and operational decision-support systems; (2) an explicit exploration of how sociopolitical expectations may influence decision-making and (3) consideration of fire managers’ relative prioritisation of cost-containment objectives. Results indicate that in the current management environment, choices among potential suppression strategies are driven largely by consideration of risk to homes and high-value watersheds and potential fire duration, and are relatively insensitive to increases in cost and personnel exposure. Indeed, when asked to choose the strategy they would expect to choose under current social and political constraints, managers favoured higher-cost suppression strategies, ceteris paribus. However, managers indicated they would personally prefer to pursue strategies that were more cost-conscious and proportionate with values at risk. These results confirm earlier studies that highlight the challenges managerial incentives and sociopolitical pressures create in achieving cost-containment objectives.