As crews keep fighting fires in Southern California, as relief efforts begin and the many billions of dollars in damage is assessed, the question has come up: Could this happen in Las Vegas?
Many will say no, because we don’t have the same vegetation and thousands of homes dotting sloping hillsides.
We do, of course, have many homes on Mount Charleston. We are very dry and hot, as well. And the Las Vegas Valley is expanding.
Are we at a similar risk in Las Vegas?
Jason Douglas: You know, in our Las Vegas Valley, that likelihood is extremely low. Typically, like you said before the show started, our fuel type is very different. We do not have downslope winds for the most part. When it comes to the valley, we do have a windy valley, but you have to look at the fuel type and the terrain around our valley, we're full of light grasses, creosote, and different types of terrain. We're in a desert climate. You're looking at a coastal climate there that has chaparral brush, is extremely explosive, and fire dries out very quickly. The likelihood of it happening in the Vegas Valley, I would believe would be very, very low, at least, is something that magnitude.
What about Mount Charleston?
Douglas: Oh, absolutely. You know, our district up there is very unique. We are surrounded by the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area in that we have two box canyons. And anyone who knows a little bit about wildland firefighting, box canyons are very dangerous: one way in, one way out. Our canyons, they're just like anywhere else at high elevation. We do have trees. We have shrubs. It is more of a desert high-altitude forest, meaning we don't have as much undergrowth as some of the California and Pacific Northwest forests. The risk factor is still there. We do have the undergrowth. We have the trees. We have the steep terrain. One thing that we look at after this fire, we look at our own community, and honestly, when something like this happens, it's a good time for us to talk to our residents, because their eyes are open to the potential of something like this happening in their mountain, their area. So we've actually, and I would say, actually had some meetings with some of the residents, and we're looking at bringing down some of our friends from UNR their extension to actually help us with getting some more residents on board to do some defensible space operations up there.
Last year, the Davis Fire burned thousands of acres south of Reno. At one point, winds appeared to be threatening the city, but it didn't happen. Was that just luck?
Megan Kay: The fuel type up here in Northern Nevada, especially in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, is very different. You have mixed conifer forests running into sagebrush, and we have regular downslope winds — on that particular day that you're talking about during the Davis Fire, that National Weather Service had issued a PDS Red Flag Warning, which they actually just did one on the fire earlier this week. The PDS stands for a particularly dangerous situation. It's a new level of Red Flag Warning that we're experiencing with, you know, changing climate and as these wildfires are becoming more intense. So that particular day, firefighters were expecting really strong downslope winds coming out of the Tahoe Basin, pushing, potentially pushing the fire into the community at the base of Mount Rose and even into the Virginia City ... foothills. That was a worst-case scenario. That's what all the models were saying if things aligned in a certain way, that is, the potential was there. Luckily, all the things that you mentioned happened, so we had incredible suppression efforts by firefighters. There was a history of fuel treatments in that area going back decades, basically aimed at preventing a disaster in that area, and we were lucky we didn't have as extreme winds as we had. And also a lot of the communities in the Mount Rose corridor have done a lot of work to prepare and do fuel work in their neighborhoods. So I also want to give kudos to the HOAs and the unincorporated communities who have been working with fire districts.
Development is set to explode along Kyle Canyon into Mount Charleston, with thousands of new homes over the next 25 years. Do you have suggestions for builders?
Douglas: We're right in line with adopting that we code as well down here, I'm actually working with the fire prevention department here in Clark County, and that's something we're all about there. Like Megan was saying, our fire triangle for wildland is fuel, weather, and topography. We only have one thing that we can really impact where our areas are at, and that's the fuel that we're adding or taking away from the fire. So by doing that, enforcing those building codes ... I think that's the best thing we can do. There has been some pushback. Obviously, that does affect certain things with your building materials, a little bit different than our common building materials, but that's one thing that I would love to see really be implemented in the new buildings.
Guests: Jason Douglas, fire chief, Mount Charleston Fire and Rescue (Clark County Fire Department); Megan Kay, manager, Living With Fire
