The percentage of homes surviving California wildfires is dropping, despite efforts to harden them

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Set us as preferred At the turn of the century, wildfires destroyed only about 3% of the California homes they came into contact with.By 2020, the rate had risen to 18%, according to a new study from UC Merced.

It’s an indication that decades of efforts to clear flammable plants around homes and fortify their exteriors against flames, heat and embers are being outpaced by increasingly extreme wildfire behavior and construction in fire-prone areas.“Fires will continue to grow, because climate change has already occurred,” said Mukesh Kumar, a postdoctoral scientist at UC Merced who led the study.“The encouraging message is that we have identified the factors associated with higher survivability — even in California.”While the entire American West saw a decrease in the percentage of homes surviving wildfire, California saw a particularly pronounced drop.

The findings add to a growing body of research showing the rising number of destroyed homes across the Western U.S.is driven not only by wildfires reaching more properties.

but also by homes faring worse when wildfire reaches them.“That’s really kind of disheartening — that we’ve tried our best to mitigate fires ...yet fires are destroying more homes,” said Amanda Carlson, a research scientist with the U.S.

Geological Survey who was not involved in the study, but has found similar drops in the percentage of homes surviving in much of the American West.California has taken significant steps to increase the odds of homes surviving wildfires in recent decades, in response to increasingly destructive wildfires fueled partly by global warming and a history of forest mismanagement.In 2006, the state expanded fire-safe landscaping rules that require property owners to create separation between trees and shrubs and remove dead vegetation.

The rules, which prev...