We solved the fire crisis 100 years ago, by the way
When I cracked open retired firefighter Bruce Hensler’s 15-year-old book, Crucible of Fire, I felt I had found an oracle.
Before 15 out of California’s 20 most destructive fires on record, Hensler described large chunks of cities burning to the ground, insurance companies jacking up premiums after realizing they wildly underestimated the risk and politicians failing to enforce the few fire safety rules on the books.
He even describes the fire chief of a decimated city criticizing city its politicians for failing to properly prepare for such a disaster, resulting in the city ousting the chief. (Sound familiar, Palisadians?)
Yet Hensler wasn’t trying to predict what would unfold in California’s wildland-urban interface in the 21st century. He was simply telling the story of the late 1800s and early 1900s in the Eastern U.S.’ downtowns of dense, wooden buildings.
Spoiler: Firefighters, policymakers, local advocates and, notably, insurance professionals figured out how to stop it from happening. Here’s how they did it.
The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the Civil War, transformed Northeastern cities into denser and denser wooden tinderboxes filled with tons of humans more than capable of accidentally generating sparks.
Fire departments, inspired by the war, were already reorganizing under a new paramilitary structure to more quickly and aggressively respond to blazes although most were still primarily volunteer-based. And beyond a few ad hoc fire safety laws that were scarcely enforced, cities’ building codes and water infrastructure naively lagged far behind the threat cities were creating.
So, cities started burning.
In 1866, a Fourth of July firecracker burned down much of Portland, Maine.
The destruction — more than $240 million in damage in today’s dollars — seriously spooked insurance companies focused on downtown industrial properties. Within days, they joined together to form the National Board of Fire Underwriters to try to stabilize their industry and promote fire-safety measures.
It wasn’t enough. A barn fire burned down Chicago in 1871 — more than $4 billion in damage in today’s dollars. A warehouse fire burned down Boston the next year — causing more than $1 billion in damage.
After the Boston fire, the board raised rates by 50% in large cities and began hurling ham-fisted threats to pull coverage altogether if cities didn’t get their act together and address their tinderbox problems quickly.
Over the next few decades, the board slowly got its own act together: It began collecting data on what caused cities to burn and funded a lab to run experiments. After Baltimore burned in 1904, the board released its own national fire-safety building codes based on that knowledge and created a grading scale to identify the risk of different cities based on their fire departments and water utilities as well as how closely their building practices aligned with the board’s building and electrical codes.
For politicians who dragged their feet because bolstering a water system or fire department is costly and designing a fire-safe building is, quite frankly, more cumbersome, the grading system made maintaining the status quo no longer viable — try explaining to your constituents that insurance rates in town are through the roof simply because the city won’t adopt the board’s new codes.
At some point, cities no longer burned down, only blocks or buildings did. As fire departments and cities continued to adopt new tech (with some pushing from the insurance industry) — motorized fire engines to replace horse-drawn ones, and later, smoke detectors and indoor sprinklers, then air tanks that allowed firefighters to enter buildings — fires didn’t often spread past a single floor or room.
These reforms, targeted mainly at commercial and industrial buildings in dense downtowns, largely missed the looming crisis in suburban residential areas that were slowly building themselves into a different kind of tinderbox that burned from the outside in.
In those areas, we’ve already seen many of the same dynamics play out: first the insurance rate hikes, then the cancellations. Now, some conversations and many heated debates — often driven by the insurance industry — are taking place around what we ought to do to protect our urban-wildland interface areas and how we can make them insurable again.
Organizations such as the Institute for Business & Home Safety play the role of the National Board of Fire Underwriters. Insurance wildfire models are starting to play the role of the grading scale, and policies such as Zone Zero, the national building codes.
As Hensler wrote in 2011, we now “accept building fires as commonplace but no longer expect them to consume adjacent buildings or blocks.”
It reminds me of a text Keegan Gibbs, who leads the Community Brigade program with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, sent me when I asked what he hopes to see in 10 years’ time: “neighborhoods where wildfire can move through the landscape without becoming a community-level disaster.”
More recent wildfire news
State Farm reached a deal with California last month to keep a 17% rate hike that took effect after the 2025 L.A. County fires, my colleague Paige St. John reports. The state initially rejected State Farm’s 22% rate hike request but eventually offered a temporary approval of the 17% hike last year. State Farm — which said it paid $6.2 billion in claims last year, largely from the L.A. County fires — said the increase enables the company to continue serving Californians.
A monthlong heat dome over the American West, fueled by climate change, has melted mountain snowpacks significantly this year, writes fellow Boiling Point host Ian James. With more time for vegetation to dry out, the early melting brings an increased risk of wildfire across the region this year.
In fact, acreage burned this year is nearly triple the 10-year average, reports Tim Casperson of newsletter the Hotshot Wake Up. The uptick has been fueled by a series of fires in Nebraska that has stunned many of the state’s ranchers as it decimated the hay that cattle rely on and stressed pregnant cows, reports Anila Yoganathan at the Flatwater Free Press.
A few last things in climate news
The U.S. Forest Service announced a major reorganization effort Tuesday that will move its headquarters from Washington to Salt Lake City, close research and development facilities in more than 30 states and shift management from broader regional offices to more localized state offices, reports Christine Peterson for High Country News. Former Forest Service employees and tribal leaders expressed concern that the move would uproot thousands of employees, scattering specialized regional knowledge. The chief of the Forest Service said the plan is intended to make the agency more “nimble, efficient, effective and closer to the forests and communities it serves.”
Gas prices in Los Angeles surged to $6 per gallon this week after the U.S. and Israel’s and the U.S.’s attack on Iran prompted the nation to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, California’s petroleum market watchdog is warning that some of the inflated price may be due to price gouging, my colleague Blanca Begert reports. In January, refineries were making 49 cents on the gallon, the watchdog group said; now, it’s closer to $1.25.
Honda is scrapping plans to build and sell three new electric-vehicle models in the U.S. after the Trump administration abandoned Biden-era policy goals to increase EV manufacturing and adoption, Dan Gearino reports for Inside Climate News. It comes after similar moves by Ford and Ram.
Finally, Heatmap News, in collaboration with MIT, has launched a new tool tracking electricity prices across the country on a month-to-month basis all the way down to the Zip Code level. You can check it out here.
This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.
For more wildfire news, follow @nohaggerty on X and @nohaggerty.bsky.social on Bluesky.
