Patrick Sisson | Bloomberg
Climate change and development are set to collide in the booming Austin-San Antonio megaregion as housing expands into fire-prone wildlands.
In early January, Keith Elwell was doing one of the things he does best, swinging chainsaws to help save forests from wildfire. Amid groves of junipers and white oak trees, Elwell led a team of a half-dozen volunteers, clearing brush and dead limbs in Twin Springs Preserve in Williamson County, Texas, a 170-acre county preserve a 40-minute drive north of downtown Austin.
Set on the northeastern edge of Hill Country, a rolling, rocky landscape of natural springs and wild grasses, it’s also adjacent to Georgetown, the fastest-growing city in the United States according to US Census Bureau data. Once a small farming town, it’s now an Austin suburb of more than 75,000 people with 60 subdivisions under construction.
Elwell’s volunteer group, Team Rubicon, does this kind of fire mitigation work as part of its larger mission to help communities withstand natural disasters. The operation at Twin Springs was meant to create a shaded firebreak, by ridding a wide swath of the park’s north side of small saplings, limbs, and dead trees that can serve as lighter fuel for any blaze. Over five days, Elwell and his crew, chainsaws and chippers at the ready, cut a corridor, carting away 105,000 cubic feet of tree debris.
Climate change and the weather extremes that accompany it make this work more critical than ever. But the danger, says Elwell, is being exacerbated by sprawl. Williamson County’s population grew 50% in the last decade, part of an explosion of development that’s making the vast Austin-to-San Antonio megaregion more susceptible to wildfire.
“Urban sprawl is definitely a factor,” said Elwell, a retired defense industry project manager.
He grew up in the surrounding Hill County region, and remembers the brush fires that frequently swept the dry scrubland — real estate that’s now laced with winding suburban streets and new homes.
“I don’t want to be a doomsday guy,” he said, “but it could spread really badly because these areas are booming.”
Avoiding Tomorrow’s Megafire
Many Texas leaders love to contrast the state with California, emphasizing its wide-open regulatory landscape as an antidote to deep-blue liberal excess. But increasingly, both of these populous states share a similar set of interrelated concerns — a combustible combination of expansive exurban development and climate-change-fueled extreme weather.
“The fire risk in Austin is pretty serious, and I don’t think there’s a level of awareness that there is in California,” said Alison Alter, an Austin city council member who represents the northwest corner of the Texas capital and has been actively raising the alarm on the issue since a 2019 audit. “If you look at the maps and see the areas of risk, they run in rings around the city. You can imagine the embers from a fire, which can travel one-and-a-half miles, starting to leapfrog to people’s homes and developments. If it gets to the center of town, that’s an enormous risk. We’ve been very, very lucky. The structural vulnerability is in the billions of dollars.”
In general, the wildfire peril in Texas can’t compare to that in California, which is among the highest in the world, said Sam Carter, founding principal of Resilient Cities Catalyst. Since the start of 2020, 24,519 blazes have consumed roughly 7.2 million acres of the Golden State, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, leading to tens of billions of dollars in damages to homes and businesses, as well as 45 deaths. Recent state budgets have devoted billions of dollars to preparing for and fighting wildfires.
But concerns about runaway blazes are growing, especially in the area around and in between San Antonio and Austin, a fast-growing part of the country expected to be home to 6.7 million people by 2030. This part of Central Texas is no stranger to megafires: In 2011, nearly 1,700 buildings were destroyed when a wildfire tindered by downed power lines raced through drought-parched subdivisions in Bastrop County, southeast of Austin. More than 30,000 acres burned and two people were killed.
The region used to burn more frequently than it does now, said Alex Bregenzer, community wildfire protection plans program coordinator at the Texas A&M Forest Service. That natural cycle is being disrupted by development in Hill Country, led by the expanding I-35 corridor between the two growing cities, which will see a major multi-billion-dollar expansion breaking ground in 2024.
Now Texas is just behind California in the number of buildings in danger of wildfire damage: More than a third of the land area of Austin is considered high risk. Austin is also the municipality with the fifth-highest cost for recovery and rebuilding from wildfires, ranked behind four cities in California.
Since the region, mostly grassland, doesn’t have the types of fires that make big headlines — the pyrotechnic pine-fueled conflagrations known as crown fires — many residents aren’t as aware of the dangers they can pose. But embers can still jump over a mile, spreading the fires between buildings and subdivisions.
“We have a lot of people that are migrating from other Western states — wildfire refugees — and they think they’re leaving wildfire country to be in a safer area,” said Justice Jones, the Wildfire Division Manager for the Austin Fire Department. “And it’s just a different kind of risk.”
Development and Disaster
Any land that isn’t explicitly protected is “potentially fair game,” Travis County Commissioner Ann Howard told Austin Monthly last year. In Georgetown, for example, wildfire doesn’t factor into planning decisions, and the city doesn’t track how many buildings are at risk, according to the town’s fire marshal, Jason Fryer. “The wildfire risk is something that we can only help out with the individual homeowner, or their homeowner’s association,” he said.
As climate change alters weather patterns, and more homes are built in harm’s way by the region’s real estate boom, experts fear that Texas-style development is setting itself up for a wildfire disaster.
“We continue to believe, as a society, that if we just treat vegetation, or wildland forests and reduce all that fuel, we can continue to build homes where we want and how we want, regardless of the risk,” said Kimiko Barrett, Wildfire Research & Policy Lead at the nonprofit Headwaters Economics. “At some point, we’re going to have to start addressing the built environment, because we continue to put homes in harm’s way.”
Bregenzer specifically worries about a fire near a high-density area in a community that hasn’t done fire mitigation work, where the majority of homeowners and renters aren’t familiar with the threat; that’s when a wildfire is going to “impact that community in a severe way.”
In 2016, Texas A&M did an analysis of Hays, Comal, Bexar, and Travis counties — the latter which contains Austin — which lie within the I-35 corridor, and found 1.1 million people in those counties, 39% of the total population, live in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, a higher-risk region where development runs up against natural areas. Within that subset, 423,000 are living in high-density areas.
“We’ve been having significant wildfire seasons since the late ’90s,” Bregenzer said. “But not everybody understands that there is a wildfire risk within the communities they are living in. It’s one of those things where until something happens, a lot of people just don’t take action.”
Texas, of course, isn’t alone when it comes to rising threats from wildfire amid increased sprawl and exurban development. Significant parts of North Carolina and Florida are now under high fire risk. Wildfires were once largely limited to lightly populated areas, said Richard White, head of research and development at LightBox, a data and analytics platform. “But that’s changed over the last five to 10 years,” he said. “It’s not a small subdivision anymore — it’s multiple subdivisions that are being threatened.”
Earlier this year, US Fire Administration Director Lori Moore-Merrell spoke of the compounding risk facing suburban areas; residents have less time to escape burning homes, and an increased chance of dying in a blaze, especially if they are poorer, minority or live in public housing.
As the climate shifts and weather patterns get hotter, like last year’s record-breaking Texas summer, the likelihood of a destructive blaze increases. But extreme heat and drought aren’t the only concerns: Bregenzer said the increased temperatures have been accompanied by heavier downpours in recent years, bringing on rapid growth of brushy vegetation that then becomes tinder during dry seasons. The region’s fire season has also stretched out: What was once a summer-to-fall fire season has started to bleed into winter, or even “fire years” of near-constant blazes.
Other natural disasters can play a role in increasing fire dangers. Ice storms and deep freezes, like those that accompanied last year’s Winter Storm Uri, cause tree damage that weakens limbs and branches, said Robert Abbott, fire chief of Lake Travis Fire Rescue, a booming suburb 20 minutes northwest of Austin, making forests more brittle and fire-prone. High winds from Tropical Storm Lee produced the gusty conditions that fed the 2011 Bastrop fire. Plumes from that fire were visible from Austin, said Jones, who felt the city really “dodged a bullet that year.” While no megafire has been sparked since, sporadic blazes have broken out within city limits.
Demand for fire mitigation far outstrips supply: FEMA, the federal emergency agency, dispensed $30 million nationally for brush removal exercises, according to Team Rubicon. But that just covers 8% of the requests the agency receives.
“Risk is determined not just by whether an event happens but what happens when that event occurs,” said Carter. “So if you’re putting assets with value in a risky zone, that is increasing risk.”
Texas exemplifies how development can track with disaster; last year, the state added 230,000 new residents, who, if they were homeowners, received a 40% higher property insurance bill due to rising wildfire dangers. The Austin metro area permitted more buildings per capita than any other in the US in 2022, Alter says — a building boom that contrasts sharply with California cities that have struggled to add housing. But the stiffer environmental and land-use regulations and community pushback that so often stymie Golden State developers (and frustrate housing advocates) can also make it harder to build within the WUI.The more lenient regulatory environment in Texas means that developers face fewer barriers — especially in the booming Austin-San Antonio megaregion.
Lake Travis fire chief Abbott points to areas of concern like Spicewood, Jonestown, and sites near the Pedernales River, where new or coming developments are taking shape around areas of significant wildfire risk. Dallas billionaire Steve Winn’s proposed 1,400-acre Mirasol Springs project, which has already drawn criticism from conservationists over the threats the project could pose to wildlife and the Hill Country’s rural character, would also place high-end housing in an area already ringed with gated communities and subdivisions. A 1,900-acre project broke ground last April in New Braunfels, in Comal County.
In response to fire risks, Abbott says that developers have stopped planting as many trees on their properties, or switched to less-flammable building materials, such as metal and tile roofs. But they’re still placing homes right up against the edge of ranch lands or heavily vegetated preserves or wildlands.
Creating a more fire-resilient central Texas would require a holistic approach and a lot of coordination between property owners: Unlike California, with its massive stock of state and national forests preserves and parks, 90% of Texas land is privately owned. Bregenzer argues that more fuel reduction work like the kind team Rubicon focuses on can help box in blazes and reduce the potential for massive fire. Community awareness and action also can go a long way.
In Austin, Alter has pushed for the development of a recognized home safety standard, that homeowners could apply for, to show insurance companies that their property is fire safe, but that’s still in the works. The city introduced a Wildland-Urban Interface fire building code in 2020, but it only applies to new structures in parts of the city deemed at high risk. Additional funding for wildfire training for city firefighters, as well as the development of more fire-aware coordination between city departments, has made the city a model for the region. But, as Barrett says, this is a case where you can only be as safe as your neighbor; fire researchers speak of contagion spread between neighboring buildings.
Much more work needs to be done. Most of the state still operates on the International Fire Code, which doesn’t include residential fire code enforcement powers. Across the US, only two of every five fire departments are specifically trained to cope with fires in the WUI. Currently,the Austin/San Antonio region has 40 Firewise communities, a program that promotes home hardening (upgrading homes with fire-resistant materials and design), coordinated emergency response and resiliency planning. A number of municipalities in the region have also introduced Community Wildlife Protection Plans, which coordinate local stakeholders and response plans in the event of a fire.
Bregenzer is optimistic the state and region are on the right track, and hopes to empower communities to be more proactive about the rising risks. But one thing he isn’t expecting is any curb on growth: He can’t think of any areas in that corridor where development is forbidden due to wildfires.
“Development is development,” he said.
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