“Preparing for Wildfire Risks in Anchorage’s Hillside Neighborhood”

2023-04-30 19:36:23

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, USA (AP) — Investigation of flat terrain for air evacuations. Old style civil defense sirens to warn of fast advancing 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 sparked fears that warmer weather might soon mean severe and unsustainable fires in urban areas, while just like the drought-stricken western United States.

The risk is particularly high in Anchorage’s burgeoning Hillside neighborhood, where multimillion-dollar homes are increasingly close to steep slopes and the woods. This makes the challenge even greater in Hillside, home to some 35,000 people, who have only one road in and out, meaning fleeing residents might block a road or cut off access to Anchorage.

The thought of a huge wildfire keeps Anchorage Fire Chief Doug Schrage awake.

“This is 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, more land is available, and wilderness and urban areas intersect, and those fires are very different from what your firefighters are trained to fight.

The town 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.

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

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 32 degrees Celsius (90 Fahrenheit) four years ago, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city, and has had five significant wildfires in the past seven years.

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

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