“The New York Times has created a series of maps visualizing wildfire and smoke risk for the different parts of Los Angeles County [gift article], where several devastating wildfires have been ravaging since early January. The newspaper used wildfire risk scores data from CoreLogic, a California-based business and property analytics company, and spatial data from the SILVIS Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to depict how high the risk of wildfires or negative impacts from smoke is in each neighborhood. Green shades indicate lower risk and red-purple shades show higher risk. Neighborhoods in hills and coastal areas, even if they are not in the immediate vicinity of the Palisades fire, are at extreme risk”

Across the country, including in California, millions of Americans have been moving to places at risk of burning, particularly developments on the outskirts of cities that bump up against forests, grasslands and shrub lands. The rapid growth in these areas, known as the “wildland-urban interface,” has increased the odds of devastating blazes, especially as climate change fuels larger and more intense wildfires across the West. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in fire-prone parts of California grew by 40 percent, according to research led by Volker Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By contrast, the number of homes in less-flammable areas — such as downtowns — only grew by 23 percent.  Across the West, there are now more than 16 million homes in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”). When wildfires erupt, they tend to do the most damage in these zones where developments encroach on wilderness. Examples include the Palisades Fire last week, where a brush fire quickly spread to 1,000 houses and buildings in an upscale neighborhood. Or the Camp Fire in 2018 that incinerated Paradise, Calif, a town surrounded by forests. If someone had walked through these communities a week before the fires, they would never think that they were fire-prone, said Dr. Radeloff. “Their distance from natural vegetation seems way too far, but it’s not. Fire scientists know that it is not.”