Wildland Fire Prevention

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Wildland Fire Prevention Abstract Living in a house surrounded by nature and wildlands can be peaceful and beautiful, but it can also be risky. Wildfires that spread into wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities can be extremely costly in structural losses. The 1991 Oakland and 2007 Witch Creek fires in California resulted in property losses of $2.7B and $1.5B, respectively. The risk of a high intensity wildland fire, is rising in many wildland ecosystems, and with it comes an increased risk to homes in this interface area. The good news for people living in wildland settings is that you can do many things to protect your home even before a wildfire gets started. Wildland Fire Prevention: Wildfires present a major threat to homes in the wildland/urban interface. This is the area where wildland and residential areas meet, and where each other affect them. Low humidity and low rainfall increase the chances of a fire, wildfires can happen anywhere in the country, at any time. Major wildfires blaze across the country, putting towns, and hundreds of woodland homes at risk if a wildfire occurs near you, it may spread rapidly, and become a serious problem. If you are living or building on the edge of a wildland area, you need to prepare for the risk of wildfire. To better understand how to protect your home, it is important to know how fire behaves. Fire needs fuel and oxygen. To a wildfire, homes and other structures are forms of fuel, and the wind provides plenty of oxygen. The slope of the terrain is also important to a wildfire's rapid spread. A fire moving up a slope moves faster and has longer flames than one on level ground because hot gases rise in front of it, pre-heating its path. This is the way wildfire spreads. The fire heats and dries fuel above it, causing it

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