The West sees destructive wildfires every year — yet it hadn’t seen anything like the Camp Fire. Three months after the most destructive wildfire in recent history, wildfire sociologists went to the devastated town of Paradise to learn how residents and town leaders were recovering.

Edgeley works at the intersection of forest management and sociology, studying how human communities adapt to wildfire and how they prepare and recover. Despite the significant human toll of wildfires, particularly in recent years, as fire seasons in the West have gotten longer, more severe and closer to development, most research has focused on the ecological effects and response.

«The human side is really challenging because it’s always evolving,» she said. «Humans move, fires come through in different ways, dynamics change — the same community could be completely different after a few years. There are always new things to be looking at, which makes it a lot more challenging than basic ecology. We often have a good idea of how vegetation is going to return, but we don’t necessarily know how people are going to respond.»

This research, «Exploring the social legacy of frequent wildfires: Organizational responses for community recovery following the 2018 Camp Fire,» published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, examines not just how the people of Paradise and the surrounding communities responded but also how lessons learned from one fire could be applied to future fires. For all the similarities of wildfires in American West, there is a surprising amount of discontinuity in the responses. A community today could respond to fire differently than it did five years ago. The same fire could hit communities differently. Or, as is increasingly common, fire responses are layered — organizations are still responding to one fire when another fire requires a response, and two months later, while in different response phases for the first two fires, a third occurs. There is not a manual that tells a community the correct way to respond because each fire and each community are distinct enough to require a more specific approach.

How the research started

Three months after a fire is early for a sociological study. Edgeley collected the data then because the initial emergency response was winding down and the long-term recovery was ramping up. FEMA and the American Red Cross were leaving, shelters were closing, people were returning and planners were asking how — and whether — to rebuild.

Story Source:
Materials provided by Northern Arizona University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.