The one thing we know will happen in the wake of the giant fires that have destroyed communities throughout the Lost Angeles area is that a lot of the survivors are going to move to Idaho.
Earthquakes, riots and past fires have prompted Californians to flee to Idaho and other western states. They filled up western Boise, Meridian and Eagle since 1990 as well as Couer d’Alene, Bonners Ferry, Idaho Falls and Nampa.
What they have found is that Idaho has more than its share of fires as well and most of all, smoke. Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico have all burned through dozens of subdivisions since the signal fires of climate change burned through Yellowstone National Park in 1988.
I used that fire because I was there. I survived the firestorm at Old Faithful on Sept. 7, waiting the flying embers as large as bowling balls, feeling the winds rise to 80 miles an hour, running for my life to the parking lot in front of the Old Faithful Inn. We were lucky. Not many buildings burned.
Los Angeles now knows what it was like in Paradise. And Santa Rosa, Lyyton and Lahaina. Thousands of homes burned in megafires unseen before the Yellowstone Fires of 1988. Since then I walked through the ashes of the rural community of Fall Creek east of Mountain Home. I stood with residents in the path of the deadly Oregon Trail Fire on the edge of Columbia Village just before firefighters stopped it cold on their yards.
This summer fire nearly burned foothill subdivisions and Harris Ranch, next to the Mesa and only a few years after they nearly burned in the fireworks-ignited Table Rock Fire. I drove this Fall through the fire than nearly burned into Stanley and saw the burned forest right up to Redfish Lake Lodge.
Boise, Ketchum and Hailey have upgraded their building codes to make homes and yards more resilient to wildfire and to increase prevention. But many areas, like Idaho County, have no building codes. That means when Californians move into the proposed subdivisions west of McCall, all Idahoans are going to have to pay to fight the fires that will burn into them.
The Republicans that run our state want to blame the huge increase in fires over the last 35 years on the federal government. I won’t let them off the hook but it has been a shared problem and in reality, Idaho has gotten a pretty good deal in the costs to fight the fires. Two years ago the state and the Feds restructured their fire cost responsibilities.
The Feds still pay more than they should but Idaho agreed to pick up more of the costs in the wildland-urban interface. We can reduce the costs by stopping more human-caused fires. By more thinning and prescribed fires and better land use planning we can make Idaho more fire resistant.
But even though we have gone through the last 35 years of megafires we are only beginning to feel the effects of climate change. Yes, we should change our economy and culture to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases.
But most of all, we’ve got to learn to live with a warmer world that won’t improve for a century even if we do everything right.
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