Check out this CalMatters article, featuring CBI’s Dr. Alexandra Syphard, about why California continues to place new developments where wildfires are likely to occur.
No matter the other precautions a homeowner or local government might take, ‘you’re still taking a gamble when you place a new development out in an extraordinarily fire-prone environment,’ said Alexandra Syphard, an ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute who studies how land-use decisions affect wildfire risk. ‘Simply by the law of numbers, the more people you have in an area like that, the higher your likelihood that one of those people will start a fire and the higher the likelihood that that fire is going to reach a house,’ she said.