By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 30, 2006

BANNING, Calif., Oct. 29 -- Dennis Watkins wanted a piece of the good life. Several years ago, the Frito-Lay salesman and his wife bought a three-acre plot of land in the San Jacinto Mountains. In May, they completed their house -- a 3,000-square-foot ranch-style abode, 3,500 feet above the smog of western Riverside County.

"We built our dream house," Watkins, 54, enthused as he surveyed his estate. "We planned to retire here. After 14 years living in tract housing with no back yard, we loved the space."

A fire that started on Thursday roared through the mountains where Watkins lives. It burned 63 structures and 63 square miles, and it killed four firefighters while they tried to save a weekend house, making it the deadliest wildfire for firefighters since 2001. A fifth firefighter was in critical condition Sunday with burns over 95 percent of his body. Investigators said the fire was the work of an arsonist. As of Sunday, it was 70 percent contained.

Watkins's house was spared except for two windows that blew out because of the blaze's intensity. Flames roared past the house; charred chaparral now surrounds it. Still, Watkins said the inferno did not extinguish his desire to spend his golden years here. "It'll take two or three years for this to get back to normal," he said.

Watkins's journey from the suburbs to countryside -- and his brush with disaster -- has become increasingly common in the United States. He inhabits a zone known to experts and firefighters as the wildlands-urban interface -- the space where houses intermingle with wilderness, a space where millions of Americans long to live.

"It's the place where I want to live -- it's probably where you want to live, too. It's an attractive setting, but if we don't start planning development with these fires in mind, the problem is only going to get worse," said Volker C. Radeloff, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an expert on the wildlands-urban interface.

In the 1990s, according to Radeloff's research, of the 13 million homes built in the United States, 9 million, or 69 percent, were constructed in these zones. California leads the nation with homes in these perilous districts -- with 5.1 million, up 12 percent since 1990 -- and it tops the nation in homes lost to wildfires. While many think the problem is confined to the West, New Jersey, because of the thousands of houses in and around the Pine Barrens, is second in the number of homes lost to wildfire. And 85 percent of New Hampshire homes are in the interface zone.

The development boom in forests and chaparral and along riverbeds has led some experts to question whether society can afford to have firefighters risk their lives to protect this lifestyle and whether federal, state and local governments should not limit development. Federal wildfire firefighting costs jumped 73 percent from 1994 to 2005, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center. This year in California there have been 7,757 wildfires, many near populated areas.

The growth in the number and intensity of the blazes has prompted fire chiefs to acknowledge that "some fires can't be fought," said Walter Boyce, the director of the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California at Davis. "That's a notion fire chiefs didn't used to admit."

Now fire departments in California and elsewhere routinely take inventories of new houses to determine which can be protected if a fire erupts. "If we face a choice, we'll pick the house that has the best defensible space," said Janet Upton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry. She said she could not comment on what prompted the Forest Service fire crew to take a stand to save a house on Gorgonio View Road; that is the subject of a federal investigation.

On the plus side, houses more than ever can withstand fire. Watkins, for example, built his house with a fire-retardant composite roof and cleared a 200-foot brush-free buffer. Insurance rules in California would have caused his rates to triple if his house had a wood-shingle roof.

Still, with more people recolonizing America's wilderness, wildfires that used to erupt in isolation now invariably threaten property and lives.

"Every fire in California is not a fire, it's a rescue," Upton said, "because people don't defend their own homes or they live in the middle of a fuel region."

A turning point in how wildfires are viewed came in 2003 with a week-long blaze in several Southern Californian counties that killed 26 people, destroyed 3,361 homes and laid waste to more than 750,000 acres at the cost of more than $2 billion. Fire specialists argued that residents needed to understand that infernos such as these were going to grow more likely as more people move closer to wild areas.

While there is general agreement that the problem is going to worsen, how to deal with it is a subject of much debate. For one, Americans don't take kindly to being told where they can live. In California, thousands of houses have been built not just in the woods and in chaparral but along perilous earthquake fault lines and in the flood plains of the Sacramento River.

Secondly, with respect to Southern California's wildfires, there is much debate about mankind's role in their frequency and intensity. One school of thought, led by Richard Minnich of the University of California at Riverside, contends that the fire-suppression techniques have contributed to the blazes' ferocity.

During the summer, he said, firefighters quickly extinguish small lightning-caused fires that historically ignited the chaparral. As a result, in late October, when hot Santa Ana winds whip across the region from the southwest deserts, the brush is more overgrown than ever and the fires burn hotter, longer and farther. Minnich bases his conclusion on a comparison between Southern California and the nearby Mexican region of Baja California. Because of man's work, he said, Southern California is the home to huge destructive fires, whereas in Baja, where nature has been left to its own devices, "they have 10 times as many fires, but they are one-tenth the size."

Minnich's research is challenged by scientists led by Jon E. Keeley and Max A. Moritz of the University of California at Berkeley. They argue that disastrous wildfires in the chaparral are natural and therefore must be planned for, similar to earthquake and hurricane preparation.

Back along Twin Pines Road, near where the firefighters died, residents had displayed huge thank-you signs for the firefighters who protected their property. John Rutgers, one of Watkins's neighbors, was rooting around in his shed amazed that it, too, had escaped the blaze. Inside was his Toyota MR2 sports car with a full gas tank, a motorcycle, jugs of kerosene, paint thinner and other flammables. The wooden half of the shed looked like the remnants of a big campfire. But here in the cement half, only a little charcoal dust provided evidence of the blaze.

Rutgers, 55, said he, too, planned to start building his dream house later this year. Did the fire change his mind? "Not at all. The only thing it changed," he said, surveying a charred field of small trees and scrub brush, "is that this year it looks like we're not going to have to do weed control."