Wildfire disaster, recovery, and resilience: what have we learned?
January 16, 2025 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Join the first event in the 2024-2025 Focus on Environment and Sustainability Series, a three-part special seminar exploring critical environmental challenges.
Crystal A. Kolden
Associate Professor in the Management of Complex Systems department,
School of Engineering, at the University of California, Merced
In 1991, the Tunnel-Oakland Hills Fire in the San Francisco Bay Area of California destroyed over 3,000 homes in just a few short hours, ushering in the modern era of Wildland-Urban Interface wildfires. Since then, over 50,000 structures have been destroyed in the US by wildfire, displacing tens of thousands of people for weeks to years. As most of these disasters have occurred in the last decade, little is known about the post-fire recovery process and what processes drive or hinder it. We evaluated recent wildfire disasters in California in order to improve understanding of how communities are affected by and recovering from wildfire disasters. We found that communities recover extremely slowly from wildfire stemming from challenges that are unique to the post-wildfire landscape. These include long-term exclusion from the burned area relative to other disasters due to the requirements around hazardous tree and toxic waste removal, critical infrastructure loss, exacerbation of existing affordable housing shortages, regulatory challenges, and substantial problems with duplication of benefits, uninsurance, and underinsurance. Socially vulnerable populations are further marginalized by wildfire disasters, and there is evidence for gentrification in post-fire areas yielding climate migrations. Despite these many challenges, need has produced innovative solutions that can improve the post-fire recovery process and mitigate future wildfire disasters.