Climate change sparks disaster fears in Anchorage Hillside, Alaska

Investigation of a flat terrain for air evacuations. Talk about old-style civil defense sirens to warn of fast-moving wildfires. Hundreds of urban firefighters training in forest firefighting techniques while snow still covers the ground.

This is the new reality in Alaska’s largest city, where a recent series of wildfires near Anchorage and the hottest day on record have raised fears that warmer weather could soon mean severe and unsustainable fires in urban areas as well. than in the rest of the drought. plagued by the American West.

The risk is particularly high in the city’s booming Anchorage Hillside neighborhood, where multi-million-dollar homes have increasingly been pushed up steep slopes and toward the edge of the woods.

Making the challenge even greater is that many of these areas in Hillside, home to some 35,000 people, only have one road in and out, meaning fleeing residents could block a road or be left without access to Anchorage.

The prospect of a large wildfire keeps Anchorage Fire Chief Doug Schrage awake when conditions are hot and dry.

I have characterized this as probably the biggest single threat to the Municipality of Anchorage, he said.

The City of Schrage Fire Department is an expert in fighting building fires. But as Anchorage has grown, the available land is higher, where wilderness and urban areas intersect, and those fires are very different from what your firefighters are trained to fight.

The city also has limited wildfire equipment, and it’s almost impossible to get a fire truck up some winding roads towards the houses perched high in the mountains.

Our strategy is basically to put as many resources as we have on duty on a small fire so that we can contain it while we wait for help from the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection, Schrage said.

This spring, 360 city firefighters are training in wildfire fighting tactics, such as using water hoses to create a line around the perimeter of a fire, and the city is encouraging homeowners to participate in a program to identify hazards such as brush and old trees that could fuel a fire. Before it is too late. In a mountainous neighborhood, a community council is researching locations for a makeshift helipad that could be used for air evacuations.

That same small neighborhood with only one driveway in and out has also discussed installing sirens to warn residents in the city’s wooded fringes of fire danger and hopes to build a database of all residents for emergency communications. .

As much as you don’t want to do it…it’s like rolling the dice on whether you’re alive or dead, said Matt Moore, who fled home in 2019 so he wouldn’t get caught on the wrong side of the flames on the one path. .

Such precautions, common in dry, fire-prone states like California and Colorado, are relatively new to Anchorage in the face of increased fire risk brought on by global warming.

The city hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) four years ago, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city, and has had five significant wildfires in the past seven years that were extinguished before doing much damage.

Still, the US is headed for an El Nino year this season, which traditionally means a bigger fire year and raises more concerns, said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the National Weather Service, Alaska Region.

More than 4,844 square miles (12,546 square kilometers) burned across the state last year, an area just shy of the size of Connecticut.

Since 1950, there have been 14 years in which more than 4,687 square miles (12,139 square kilometers), the equivalent of 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares), have burned during Alaska’s short but intense fire season. . Half of those fire seasons have occurred since 2002, including the worst year on record in 2004, when more than 10,156 square miles (26,304 square kilometers) burned.

From his home high in Anchorage in 2019, Moore watched black smoke billow from a fire miles away in a wooded area of ​​the city. He packed their pets and important documents into his car, his wife was already safely in Anchorage, and he drove 5 miles (8 kilometers) down the only road that serves the neighborhood’s roughly 600 residents to safety.

“Luckily, they started to get it under control,” he said.

For now, both the city and the Schrage Fire Department are focused on keeping things under control by implementing as many preventative measures as possible.

The city department removed evergreen trees and thinned brush in 100-foot (30-meter) strips next to neighborhoods to help contain future fires, and Anchorage removed trees and other hazards in parks and along greenbelts.

Firefighters have also carried out inspections of people’s homes to identify fire hazards, such as firewood too close to their homes or too much vegetation on their properties, all in the hope of preserving homes, livelihoods and the community in a time of growing climate uncertainty.