AST August 2018 Magazine Aug 2018 Final (8.14.18) | Page 51

Volume 26
“What’s
changing is
August 2018 Edition
not the fires them-
selves but the fact
that we have more
and more people at
risk.”
Tomorrow’s tinder-
boxes can be seen
all over the Bay
Area — from the
new multi-million
(Wildfires in California continue to rage across the state. CNN’s Nick Watt reports on the latest
developments. Courtesy of CNN and YouTube. Posted on Jul 31, 2018.)
dollar dream homes
packed along the edges of San Jose’s
His major new analysis, published this
Almaden Quicksilver County Park and
spring in the journal Natural Hazards,
found a 1,000 percent increase in the
Mount Diablo State Park to older residenc-
number of western U.S. homes at risk
es, both modest and opulent, on peaks of
from wildfire over the past 50 years –
the Santa Cruz Mountains and Oakland
from about 607,000 in 1940 to 6.7 mil- and Berkeley hills.
lion in 2010.
Northern California has hotspots of high
growth in risky areas, according to his data,
with new home construction in pockets of
once-rural Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Cos-
ta and North Bay counties — but especially
the Sierra Foothills, a northern stretch of the
Sacramento Valley and the Mendocino and
Lake County region, near Clearlake, where
the River Fire now rages.
“This is a people problem,” said Jon
Keeley, a fire scientist with the U.S. Geo-
logical Survey’s Western Ecological Re-
search Center in Sequoia National Park.
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