Arizona wildfire seasonTraining wildland firefighters| Grassland threat| Urban wildfire risk High-risk areas | Rebuilding smarter Wildfire forecast (coming soon)As the Palisades and Eaton fires ravaged neighborhoods across Los Angeles throughout January, Flagstaff residents watched nervously from afar, refreshing weather forecasts, hoping for any hint of moisture on the way.By the time the California flames were finally extinguished on Jan. 31, Arizona’s largest forested city had logged just 5.9 total inches of snow so far that winter — 12% of the 49.1-inch average by that date and just over half the previous record low of 10.2 inches, set in 1934. The numbers threatened the state’s water supply for the coming years.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementNoah Baker, the city’s wildfire, climate and community health specialist, knew the numbers also likely meant a long, fiery summer ahead. A member of the city’s Sustainability Office, Baker spends much of his time engaging community members on wildfire education and outreach, visiting neighborhoods and talking to homeowners about how to take fire precautions in western forests that, as the climate gets drier and hotter, resemble tinderboxes more and more.”I feel like half my job is psychology now,” he said. “People are looking to regulate their emotions by finding the ways (so that) what happened in L.A. wouldn’t happen to them.”Fire awareness is not new to Flagstaff or to any of the other communities along Arizona’s elevated northern rim. But the 30 lives and $30 billion in real estate losses from the sudden and, for many, unexpected Los Angeles burn was sobering, and another indication of the shrinking divide between normal and new.”Our community is ridiculously engaged in wildfire prevention,” Baker said, adding that he had 70 volunteers signed up to help clear dry brush from a drainage ditch the following weekend. “But it could happen anywhere.”Wildfire, climate and community health specialist Noah Baker engages in conversation in the woods of Flagstaff on April 16, 2025.In the case of fire run wild, as landscapes desiccate and become crowded with ignition sources, timber, invasive grasses and homes, anywhere increasingly does mean anywhere — to the point where a new, now-normal term, “urban conflagration,” has emerged.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“We’re building pretty close together and often we’re building without the understanding of how structure-to-structure ignition would happen or how wildfire will impact the exterior of homes and then cause everything around them to burn and ignite the next property,” said Michele Steinberg, the wildfire division director of the National Fire Protection Association. “And that’s called an urban conflagration.”In Los Angeles, the fire post-mortems included many experts pointing to the dense layout of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods — with crammed-together houses separated by flammable privacy hedges making the most of the seaside location — as a clear warning sign. More than 16,000 structures burned and nearly 13,000 households were displaced.More in U.S.Our coverage of the L.A. fires: ‘These are climate change fires’: As Arizona lends help to LA, experts assess the blameAfter the Marshall Fire, which killed two people and destroyed more than 1,000 structures in Colorado’s Front Range as 2021 ticked over into 2022, the assessment was that high winds and a disconnected power line contributed to the blaze that skipped over ridgelines to torch rooftops much further apart than in L.A.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementCompared to the pine-needled woodlands that previously put the “wild” in wildfire, a tidy expanse of million-dollar homes …
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