Estimated reading time: 37 minutes
This post first published June 05, 2022. Updated August 2026.
Cover photo Ethan Swope, AP news, 2025.
(This article will cover a lot, feel free to read it all or skip ahead)
When I first wrote this guide in 2022, wildfires were already getting bigger, hotter, and harder to fight. Since then, the fires have kept rewriting the record books.
In 2023, a wildfire destroyed the town of Lahaina, Hawaii, killing roughly 100 people — the deadliest US fire in over a century. That same summer, smoke from Canadian fires turned the skies over New York City orange and gave the East Coast some of the worst air quality on Earth. Then in January 2025 — January! — hurricane-force winds drove fires through Los Angeles neighborhoods, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. UCLA Anderson Forecast economists put total property and capital losses at $76 to $131 billion, making it one of the costliest disasters in American history.
In early August 2026, three fires burned into the neighborhoods of Spokane, Washington — roughly 65,000 people were evacuated and more than 700 structures destroyed. The National Guard was activated and evacuation orders covered large swaths of the city. And Spokane is not a remote mountain outpost; it’s a city of a quarter-million people.
And it’s not just in the U.S. In the summer of 2026, Europe was in the grip of another brutal fire season: in the space of two weeks, wildfires in France and Spain burned through more than 600 square miles, displacing tens of thousands of residents and tourists, while crews battled additional blazes from Provence to the Greek coast. Scientists analyzing the heatwave driving those fires found this kind of extreme fire weather is now up to 20 times more likely because of climate change.
The numbers behind the headlines tell the same story. Since 2000, wildfires have burned an average of about 7 million acres per year in the US, according to the National Interagency Fire Center — more than double the average of the 1990s. The fire season in many Western states is now two to three months longer than it was in the 1970s.
And the landmark research of Westerling and colleagues, along with work by Abatzoglou and Williams, ties these changes directly to a warming, drying climate: hotter temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and forests that spends more of the year dry and ready to burn.
When I read the 2006 paper by Westerling more than ten years ago, that was my “ah ha!” moment — the moment I knew that Western forests were in deep trouble. And now it’s apparent that ALL forests are in trouble. I wrote more about that seminal paper — and the megadrought risk building underneath it — in my July 2018 post, Forest Fires, Drought, Climate Change and You.
The rest of this guide is the practical part: what you can actually do — before, during, and after a fire — to protect your home, your health, and your family. Most of it costs little or nothing. Some of it, as you’ll see from one family’s story at the end of this post, can save your life.
This article is drawn from over 40 different sources, from various federal, state and private organizations around the web. We’ve distilled the best information on this topic into a single post. Get ready to take a deep dive and learn all you need to know to mitigate your risks…
- Forest Fire Basics
- Health Threats
- Determining Your Risk
- Wildland-Urban Interface
- Preparing Your Home
- Insurance: The Section That Changed the Most!
- Before, During and After A Fire
- A family story from Ruidoso, NM
- Five Easy Things To Get Started!
Disclaimer: The purpose of this article is to give you a place to start for your own preparations.
Please do your homework before taking any action. Your life is in your own hands.
Forest Fire Basics
How does a forest fire start?
The fire triangle is an easy way to remember what a fire needs to start and to keep burning. You need three things — Fuel + Oxygen + Heat. The fuel is the dead wood, leaves, pine needles, etc, on the forest floor. Oxygen is in the atmosphere. And heat is supplied by an ignition source, like a discarded cigarette butt, a smoldering campfire, faulty electric utility poles, or most often, lightning.
To learn more about the fire triangle and how climate change is altering it at every scale, see the June 2022 post — Changing Climate and Forest Fire Risk.
Health Threats
Health threats come in several forms. First, if you are caught in a fire there is a chance you could get injured from the fire itself. Most people caught in a fire suffer from varying degrees of lung injury due to inhaling smoke and superheated air. In fact, this is what kills people in all kinds of fires, not just forest fires. You are unlikely to be burned alive. The superheated, toxic smoke will kill you way before that happens.
Fortunately, weighed against the number of people who live through a wildfire each year, deaths are rare — it’s the smoke that reaches far more people. Though, thousands of people can be displaced by fire, hundreds of thousands of people can have their health affected by the smoke.
The smoke from a major forest fire can travel thousands of miles downwind and put a strain on people that have heart and lung diseases, causing asthma attacks, heart problems, strokes and other issues. The very young and very old are also affected, as is anyone that has to work outside for a living.
From one of the earliest studies of forest fire smoke effects, the graph below shows the levels of particles in the air before and after a large forest fire that occurred in 2003 in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, a city of about 179,000 people. The dotted vertical line that cuts the graph in half shows when the fire started.
The bottom part of the figure compares visits to local doctors for respiratory complaints between two periods of time; the previous 9 years of visits (grey squares), and the visits during the forest fire (black circles). If forest fire smoke makes people sick and go to the doctor, then the two sets of symbols will separate from each other. As you can see, this is exactly what happens.
I went deeper on that study, including a story from a pediatric patient I saw, in Forest Fires, Drought, Climate Change and You.
The research on smoke keeps getting more sobering. As I covered in What’s Hot in Climate Change – Summer 2026, a nationwide study in the European Heart Journal estimates that wildfire smoke is associated with roughly 17,000 strokes per year in the United States, with older adults hit hardest. In other words, the fine particles in smoke don’t just irritate lungs — they strain the cardiovascular system and make it work harder.
This study couldn’t cleanly separate smoke particles from fine particles from other pollution sources — the uncertainty bars overlap. But in a way, that’s the point: any exposure to fine particulates raises stroke risk, and climate-worsened wildfires are delivering more of it to more people, sometimes thousands of miles from the actual fire. Which is one more reason the smoke-protection steps later in this guide could be helpful to a much wider group of people — especially for the elderly and anyone with heart or lung conditions.
Furthermore, summer heat made worse by climate change also increases the amount of ground level ozone, especially in cities. The smoke from fires makes that MUCH worse. This site wrote about the impacts of ozone before, so check that out if you’d like to know more.
Also, let’s not forget about the economic hardships that follow a major fire. Property damage, complete loss of homes, loss of your place of employment, having to move, and so on. The economic effects also lead to psychological effects, such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress (PTSD) that many disaster survivors have to deal with for years to come. Definitely a topic for a future post.
Determining Your Risk
So what risks do you face from forest fires? Do you live in a forested area? On the edge of a city near a forest? And “forest” doesn’t have to mean dense forest of pines, it could be scrub oaks, brush, grasslands, pretty much anything that will burn if dry enough.
Also, if you are within a thousand miles of any major forest then you are at risk from smoke, especially if you have heart or lung disease, or are very old or very young. You may not have to protect yourself from the direct effects of a fire, but you might have to deal with the smoke (see the section below on what to do to Protect Yourself From Smoke and Ash).
To learn about your risk check out WildFireRisk.org, developed by the U.S. Forest Service. They have data sets for the entire U.S. and will show your risk, and some actions you can take.
The Wildland-Urban Interface: Why Fires Destroy More Homes Than Ever
Here’s a term worth knowing: the wildland-urban interface (WUI). It’s anywhere homes and wild vegetation meet or mingle — the forested subdivision, the ranch house backing up to grassland, the mountain resort town.
The WUI is the fastest-growing land-use type in the United States. Research led by Volker Radeloff at the University of Wisconsin found that roughly one in three American homes now sits in the WUI, and millions more are added every decade. We keep building closer and into the places that burn.
This is the other half of the wildfire story. Climate change is making fires bigger and fire seasons longer — and at the same time, we’ve put dramatically more homes in front of them. Bigger fires, more targets.
The result shows up in the record books: for decades, the “most destructive fire in US history” title barely changed hands. Then came Tubbs (2017), the Camp Fire that erased Paradise, California (2018), Lahaina (2023), and the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles (2025). The leaderboard of destruction has been almost completely rewritten in eight years.
For the full firefighter-fatality and structures-destroyed tables by year, see Changing Climate and Forest Fire Risk.
Watch it happen:
Everything in the “Preparing Your Home” section that follows — defensible space, ember-proofing, hardened roofs — is WUI survival strategy. It exists because at the WUI, your house isn’t just near the fuel — It is the fuel.
Preparing Your Home
The first threat from forest fires are the hot embers that are carried in the wind a mile or more in front of the fire, the ember cast. Defending your home and property from embers, heat and flames from a forest fire has several parts to it, summarized in detail below. Reducing the amount of burnable things on, touching or near your house creates a “defensible space”.
Defensible Space
Defensible space starts at the roof and walls of your house and extends outward. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) describes three zones, and most other sources use these zones or something similar. The original concept was developed by Jack Cohen from the US Forest Service.
The first zone is the Home Ignition Zone, which is the house or structure itself (not labeled in the graphic below.) Followed by the Immediate Zone, those things on, touching or immediately adjacent to your house. The next zone is the Intermediate Zone, going from things adjacent to your house, out to about 30 feet, landscaping for instance. The outermost zone is the Extended Zone, going out to 100 or 200 feet from your house.
The Home Ignition Zone
The structure itself is the ‘Home Ignition Zone’. Most newer homes built in areas at risk for forest fires are already built from flame resistant materials according to zoning and municipal building codes. Obviously a stone or brick wall will fare better than a log cabin with wood walls.
One important thing is the material your roof is made from. Tile or slate shingles are better than wood shingles. An asphalt shingle roof in good condition should be fine, but a sheet metal roof is best.
Houses catch on fire when an ember (or thousands of them) from a nearby forest fire land on the roof and find something to burn. This swarm of embers is called ember cast, as mentioned above, and it precedes a fire by hundreds to thousands of feet. So take the following steps to keep your roof and house from catching on fire…
- Keep your roof and gutters clear of leaves and pine needles (this also keeps the ants and other bugs from making a home!)
- Make sure all holes and cracks in the roof where embers might get in are caulked and sealed
- Soffit vents and other vents should have metal screens over them with gaps no bigger than 1/8 of an inch
- Make sure any chimneys have spark arrestors (keeps embers from flying out, but also keeps them from coming in)
- All exterior doors, doggie doors, garage doors and exterior openings should have good seals, and be closed during a fire event
- Plexiglass skylights may melt if they get hot enough, so switch to glass skylights (preferably tempered glass) if possible
- Dryer and kitchen vents should have self closing flaps, and screens (be sure to regularly clean the lint from your dryer vent/screen otherwise you are creating a fire hazard of another kind)
- Double-paned windows and heat resistant or tempered glass are best (that’s probably crazy expensive)
- As are metal roofs
Some of these changes are obviously expensive, but become more worth it the greater your risk!
From The University of Nevada at Reno, College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources – Living With Fire Program.
The Immediate Zone (0 to 5 feet)
After working on ember-proofing your home, fix what is immediately touching or adjacent to your house. This is called the “immediate zone”. A forest fire can ignite materials from a 100 to 200 feet away by direct heat, so protecting this zone is critical.
Defending the Immediate zone might include…
- Moving wood piles and propane tanks at least 30 feet away from your house, as recommended by the National Fire Protection Association
- Getting rid of any pine or juniper trees immediately near your house (the sap and oils from these trees is highly flammable)
- Removing any bark mulch from landscaping and replacing it with gravel or artificial mulch that does not burn easily
- Any wooden fence adjacent to your house should have a stone or metal break or barrier between it and your house
- If you have a wooden deck, keep it free of debris, especially underneath
- If you have a sprinkler or irrigation system, keep it in good working order
The Intermediate Zone (5 to 30 feet)
Fire defense in this zone is largely about taking care of landscaping and the forest or other vegetation near your house. The goal is to create a ‘reduced fuel zone’ to disrupt any fire that gets in this zone and make it difficult for fire to take hold.
Measures for the Intermediate Zone include:
- Keep lawns and native grasses mown to 4 inches or so
- Remove any accumulated forest litter or debris
- Space out trees so that their crowns are at least 20 feet apart
- Mature tree crowns should not be within 15 feet of your structure
- Get rid of ladder fuels — brushy growing under trees that can burn and spread fire up into the crown of the tree
- Prune all low hanging branches from larger trees
- Make sure to clear any forest litter or debris from under propane tanks, decks, picnic tables and any other objects or structures
- If possible, use walkways and driveways as fire breaks. A fire break is an area where there are no burnable materials.
The Extended Zone (30 out to 100 feet or more)
In the extended zone the goal is to keep large fires to a minimum by getting rid of major sources of fuel. Some steps to take in the Extended Zone include…
- Use driveways or walkways as fire breaks whenever possible
- Get rid of brush piles and large accumulations of forest debris
- Remove dead trees and bushes
- Remove small conifers growing between or under larger trees (ladder fuel)
- Remove shrubs and trees growing next to outbuildings (garages, sheds, etc.)
- Within a 100 feet of your home make sure the tops or crowns of the trees are separated by 15 feet or more. If you are on a slope, then the distance needs to be greater
- Within 200 feet of your home, make sure the tree crowns are at least 10 feet apart
Insurance: The Section That Changed the Most
If you skim one section of this guide, make it this one. More has changed here since 2022 than in any other part of wildfire preparation.
The question used to be whether you had enough coverage. Increasingly it’s whether you can get any insurance at all. In California, average homeowners premiums rose 84% between late 2020 and March 2026, and the FAIR Plan — the insurer of last resort — went from covering about 1.5% of single-family homes to roughly 5%. Reliance on it is now showing up in moderate- and low-risk areas too.
Then there’s the trap few see coming. After the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, 74% of policyholders turned out to be underinsured. After the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, 62% of total-loss survivors said they didn’t have enough to rebuild. These were not careless people. Policy limits stay flat while rebuild costs continue to climb.
Five things to do now with your insurance, while nothing is burning:
- Get a current rebuild cost estimate — not market value — and re-run it at every renewal.
- Buy extended or guaranteed replacement cost coverage if you can get it.
- Add ordinance and law (code upgrade) coverage, especially on an older house.
- Check your Additional Living Expenses limits. Rebuilding can take years, not months.
- Do a video home inventory this weekend and store it in the cloud, not in the house.
There is a lot more to this — your rights when a carrier non-renews you, how hardening your home now earns discounts (and sometimes decides whether anyone will write you a policy at all), the new state laws in Colorado and California, and what to do when a claim stalls. It outgrew this guide, so it will be its own post soon: Wildfire Insurance in 2026: Coverage, Non-Renewals, and the Underinsurance Trap.
So in summary, the steps for preparing against fire include…
- Be ember aware – ember proof your house
- Get a metal roof if you can
- Do not have anything flammable touching or near your house
- Get rid of all the dead trees and debris around your house
- Know your insurance policy
- Document your belongings
Before, During and After a Fire
Before the fire arrives there are two main things you should do…
- Have an emergency plan in place for you, your family and your pets or other animals
- Build an emergency kit that you can evacuate with, also known as a bug out bag, or at least give some thought to what’s important to you.
Have an Emergency Plan
Preparedness includes having a disaster plan for you and your family, keeping your car in good shape with a full tank of fuel or a full charge on your battery during times of higher risk (during fire season, for example), and making sure that everyone you are responsible for knows what to do in an emergency. Ready.gov has extensive resources for building your family emergency plan.
Some additional considerations for fire country include…
- Have two escape routes out of your neighborhood
- If there are official escape routes, make sure you are aware of them
- Have a family meeting place in your town or outside any areas of potential danger in case people get separated
Have a Bug Out Bag
The truth is, the most important thing to take with you are the things you can never replace, like family photos and heirlooms. Everything else can be replaced, but some things can’t. That decision is highly personal, so it would pay to think about it ahead of time, just in case.
The above said, what follows is the obligatory “bug out bag” contents list. In reality, you may be lucky just to escape with your health, your vehicle, a few odds and ends, and not much else. Fires move fast and it’s the rare (odd) bird that goes to great lengths to have a bug out bag ready at all times. Maybe we should all become a little “odd” these days.
Build a bug out bag with all the necessary ingredients for 7 days of survival for all persons and pets in your family. Most government sources will tell you that you need only 3 days worth of food and water, however, as disasters seem to get bigger and the government is stretched thin, seven days should be your bare minimum.
You should also consider keeping a smaller bag in your vehicle(s), to augment your main bag, or in case you are separated from your main bag. Similar to the bag described in the post on winter survival.
Here’s a quick list to get you thinking about it. If you are leaving your home to stay in a hotel or with friends or family, you don’t really need that much. But if you are building a bag for other reasons, or for a bigger disaster, or you might stay in a charity or government sponsored shelter, then you should pack accordingly.
Your home bug out bag should include…
- Water. Wherever you end up staying will likely have water, so take at least enough to get you where you are going. But if you are building a bug out bag for reasons other than forest fire, the typical recommendation is at least 2 quarts/liters, per person, per day. Or enough for 2 or 3 days, with additional means for water purification (e.g. water purification tablets and something store your water in)
- Food. Food is not as important as water, especially if you are evacuating to another town, but you might want to take snacks for the road. If you’re building a bag for other reasons, then enough calories for everyone for 3 to 7 days would be advisable. Dehydrated backpacking food is lightweight, tasty and nutritious. Don’t forget to account for pet food if you have pets!
- Medication. A basic first aid kit and prescription medications. A list of what prescriptions a person needs is something people should always carry with them. Doctors like to see a list of medications and doses, which makes it much easier to take care of someone. This can also be kept on your phone, or on a piece of paper in your purse or wallet. Don’t forget the other people in your family and your pets, who may also have prescription meds they need.
- Communication. Cell phones and other devices that operate on the cell network, wi-fi capable devices like tablets and laptops, and/or two-way radios, and the means to charge them
- Information. Copies of important documents in a waterproof document holder, and better yet, on a USB thumb drive (important documents include birth certificates, marriage licenses, property deeds and titles, insurance policies, etc.). Also, backed up to the internet via DropBox, Google Drive, or whatever your preferred service is.
- Money. Cash is good to have. Hit the ATM before any disaster strikes, otherwise it may be out of money. A bunch of $20 bills are better than $100 bills, easier to break, and doesn’t make you as big a target for thieves. Maybe not as important if you are going to another town.
- Power. Extra batteries (rechargeable batteries are a good idea), charge packs, portable solar panels, associated cables and wires for cell phones, tablets, radios, smart watches, etc.
- Light. At least three sources of light, including a small battery powered lantern. Headlamps are a good idea to keep your hands free.
- Shelter. Blankets, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, plastic tarps, a tent, a change of clothes for everyone, appropriate jackets for the season, especially if you will be living in a community shelter (usually a gymnasium floor with a cot if you’re lucky). Not so important if you will be in a hotel or staying with friends or family.
- Something to Put It All In. A big duffel bag or suitcase.
There are different types of bug out bags. The one described above is meant to be put in a vehicle that you are fleeing a fire in… assuming that that is the only reasonable way to escape the path of a large fire.
Of course, you could be bussed out or leave in someone else’s vehicle. In those cases, you’d probably want something you can carry on your back or put on your lap. And in fact that’s what ‘bug out bag’ means to a lot of people.
If you search the web for ‘bug out bag’ you will have more reading than you could possibly get through in a week. If you want a reasonable place to start, Ready.gov has an entire section devoted to building a disaster supply kit. Also, I thought this guys’ post on bug out bags was amusing and informative.
A Fire is Coming!
Well, now you have done all you can, you’ve made a defensible space around your house, you have an emergency plan that you’ve rehearsed with your family, you put together a bug-out bag.
It’s been a particularly warm spring, after a dry winter with not much snow. Then it happens. A fire starts in a nearby forest. Maybe it was careless campers, a cigarette butt tossed out a car window, or a lightning strike. Because it’s so dry the fire quickly establishes itself and is growing out of control. Now what?
First off, information is key, so make sure you are following the fire closely on the local news.
Besides the local news, far and away the fastest growing source of wildfire information is the app Watch Duty. It’s available for both Android and iOS. Created by a former Google exec as a non-profit source of the very latest fire information, it includes stats about fires, areas under evacuation orders, locations of evacuation centers, and other important news for people impacted by fire.
Watch Duty aggregates all available information, and has volunteers on the ground that provide up to the minute information. This is an essential tool. One of my cousins told me about this app when her father’s (my uncle) house was threatened by fire. More on that towards the end.
Besides staying informed, be sure to be ready to put your emergency plan into action…
- Check your bug out bag to make sure it’s stocked and ready to go (water, snacks, medications, batteries, etc.)
- Fill up the tank in your vehicle(s) and/or charge your vehicle’s battery (if you have a PHEV or EV)
- Communicate with all family members so they are aware what’s happening
- Listen to local authorities and news about possible evacuation plans
Protecting Yourself From Smoke and Ash
Even though you may be far away from a fire, as it gets bigger the smoke may head your way. In the northern hemisphere, due to prevailing winds smoke typically travels from west to east.
So if you are east of a major fire, you are probably downwind. Significant smoke can easily drift a 1,000 miles or more. Once it arrives near you it will be easy to tell. There will be a smoky smell in the air, hazy skies, orange sunsets. And the closer you are, there may be ash falling from the sky.
If you have allergies, asthma, chronic lung disease, or are very young or very old, you may start coughing and wheezing due to the smoke. If you have heart disease or other chronic medical problem, breathing smoke can make it worse.
Check out the AirNow Fire & Smoke Map for real-time air quality and smoke plumes. Also the EPA AirNow app for your phone.
Another great, all around map that tracks multiple threats, is the MyRadar app. I have the paid version and it’s worth every penny. Living on the Gulf Coast, I use it to track hurricanes, but it also has fire and other data on it. I’d say it doesn’t do one thing well, but it does a lot of things pretty good.
Some steps to take to protect you and your family from smoke include…
- Keep all windows and doors closed
- Do not sweep, dust or vacuum inside your house, because that will add more particles to the air
- Do not use a gas or wood stove, candles, incense, or anything else that adds gasses or particles to the air
- Use an air purifier if you have one. One with a HEPA filter is best.
- Or make your own air purifier! Check out how to make your own, relatively inexpensive, Corsi-Rosenthal Box.
- If you use an evaporative cooler, you may have to shut it down to keep it from drawing smoke inside
- Use A/C or fans inside to keep cool, or seek shelter elsewhere if it’s too hot inside
- Wear an N-95 or a KN-95 mask! Just like during the pandemic, this keeps the tiny particles out of your lungs.
Also on How to Make a DIY Air Filter from Ask This Old House!
Sketch by Amanda Hu, Flickr
The fire is here!
Suddenly, the winds have shifted and now the fire is out of control and heading your way. The air is thick with smoke. You may see a wall of orange fire coming down a hill or mountain side in the evening, and billowy columns of smoke during the day.
Law enforcement is working its way through surrounding neighborhoods asking people to evacuate. You’re next. What should you do?
It’s time to put all that planning into action…
- Load up your bug-out bag into your already fully fueled vehicle
- Get everyone physically and mentally prepared to leave
- Consider turning off your gas, if you have that. (Check out this site for info about how to turn off your gas from SoCal Gas. If you are not comfortable doing this, then just forget it, it’s not worth doing wrong.)
- Evacuate immediately when told to do so. In fact, consider leaving before you are told if you know it is inevitable. This helps clear the roads sooner and give law enforcement and firefighters more room to do their jobs.
- Keep your headlights on while evacuating, especially if the visibility is reduced due to smoke.
- Follow evacuation routes given to you by the authorities
- If you are leaving early or don’t know the evacuation route, then try to choose routes that are downhill, and use caution driving down canyons if you don’t know which way the fire is going or exactly where it is. Fire travels uphill faster than downhill, and canyons are like chimneys, concentrating the smoke and fire.
- Do not return to your house until told that it is safe to do so.
Ohh no! You got trapped in the fire! What now?
Obviously the first thing to do is not panic. If you panic, you will likely die. It’s okay to be scared, but don’t stop thinking.
If you are in a vehicle…
- Find a parking lot or area with no buildings, trees or other burnable material near by
- Park your car and turn off the engine
- Call 9-1-1 on your cell phone to let the authorities know where you are and your situation. (As a general note, never hang up on a 9-1-1 call until the operator tells you it’s okay to do so.)
- Keep your windows rolled up tight
- Put your climate controls to “recirculate”, then turn it off
- Close all vents
- Wait for the fire to pass before opening doors or windows
If you are on foot…
- Run! Downhill is better, because fire moves faster than you do uphill. In fact, most wildland fire fighter deaths are caused by fire overtaking them from the downhill side as they moved up
- Do NOT wet your clothes or put a wet bandana across your face. if you do, you will be steamed alive. Steam is a much more potent conductor of heat than dry air
- Avoid stopping in areas with lots of brush and dried grass
- Stop only if you have found a safe place to do so, an area without much flammable material — a road, a parking lot, rock slide, gravely flood plain of a river or creek, a clear cut in the forest, or a place that has already been burned, etc.
The fire has passed, whew!
Wow, that fire was a real doozy! You made it out with your family and pets and stayed in a nearby town. You were given the ‘all clear’ by the county incident command post to return to your neighborhood. Now what?
Going back to your house, it will either be standing, partially destroyed or a complete loss. Hopefully you escaped major damage. If not, then…
- If you have a gas line to your house that was not previously shut off, check for gas leaks. Do not enter any buildings until you know the gas is off. Call the gas company immediately about gas leaks. They will have to shut the gas off.
- Also, be sure to stay away from downed power lines
- Look for and extinguish any hot spots near your house. Don’t just check once for hot spots, but do it every few hours or so, until you are certain there are no more. Get help to put them out
- Use caution entering any damaged structures. Buildings can collapse, there can be live electrical wires exposed, and any number of other hazards
- Wear protective clothing, boots, gloves and consider using a dust mask if there is lots of ash still floating around
- Contact your insurance company immediately. Everyone else will be doing the same, so get ahead of the crowd as much as you can
- Hopefully you took pictures of everything you owned before the fire. If you listed everything in a spreadsheet or other document, you are ahead of the game. If you saved receipts, you’re a rock star!
- Take pictures of any damage from the fire
- Send whatever documentation is needed to your insurance agent (this can be a long process, days to weeks or longer)
- Contact FEMA to see what assistance applies to you
- DisasterAssistance.gov offers one stop shopping for Federal Aid and many other resources
- Or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362)
- Other sources of help to remember, include…
- U.S. Small Business Administration loans
- USDA loans for ranchers and farmers
- State and Tribal disaster assistance programs
- Also, if you’re a victim of fire or other disaster, you may be eligible for tax breaks come tax time
So in summary, the main steps to take just before, during and after a forest fire include…
- Have an emergency plan, and practice it!
- Make a bug out bag. Or at least think about what you can’t live without, things that could never be replaced.
- Stay informed. Listen to the news and check your apps during fire season.
- Protect yourself from smoke and ash. Buy or build an air purifier, such as a Corsi-Rosenthal Box, and wear N-95 masks if you are outside.
- Know what to do if you get trapped by a fire.
- Don’t go back home until you get the ‘all clear’.
- Document your losses.
- Contact your insurance company as soon as you can, and get them what they need to process your claim.
- File for any and all disaster assistance that’s available to you.
A Story from Ruidoso: What Total Loss Looks Like
“Get out now!” That’s what my uncle’s daughter told him when she saw the South Fork Fire closing in on his house in the WatchDuty app. He listened — taking the clothes on his back, his truck, a couple of chainsaws, and a few other things on his way out the door.
On June 17, 2024, a lightning strike started the South Fork Fire in the Lincoln National Forest of south-central New Mexico. The fire was discovered around nine in the morning. By that afternoon it was showing what fire officials called “extreme fire behavior,” driven by wind and bone-dry conditions. By evening it was pushing into the mountain village of Ruidoso, and officials gave residents the order to evacuate.
The town of roughly 8,000 people evacuated in a matter of hours. My uncle was one of them. His mountain house that he had lived in for over 30 years and raised two daughters, a great place for family retreats, burned to the ground, along with about 1,400 other structures.
Not everyone got out. Two people died in the South Fork Fire — one of them, 60-year-old Patrick Pearson, was found beside a road near the Swiss Chalet Inn; the second was found in a burned vehicle. Not leaving in time is one of the single biggest predictor of civilian fire deaths — see the data in Changing Climate and Forest Fire Risk.
Everything in this guide can feel abstract until you’ve seen what a wildfire actually leaves behind. Here’s what my uncle came home to…
This is worth pausing on, because it looks like it contradicts the advice earlier in this post. It doesn’t, quite. A metal roof defeats the ember cast — the shower of burning debris that lands ahead of a fire and starts most houses on fire. That is the scenario you are likely to encounter, and it is the one worth spending money on.
What a metal roof will not do is save a structure sitting in the heart of a raging forest fire, with radiant heat and flame on every side. My uncle’s house was in the heart of it. Harden your home for the fire you are most likely to get; understand that there’s a fire nothing survives.
This was a normal looking truck before the fire.
My uncle fortunately kept his fire insurance payment current. He had just mailed a payment off a couple of weeks before, so he was covered to a large extent. Though he literally lost nearly everything he owned. What did he regret losing the most? Something that can’t be replaced, all the old family photos of his kids growing up.
He was one of the lucky ones on the insurance side: his coverage was enough to buy a house somewhere else. Note the wording — somewhere else. Getting reinsured on that same mountain lot in Ruidoso is highly unlikely, another kind of loss entirely.
The disaster in Ruidoso didn’t end when the fire went out
When fire strips vegetation from a hillside and bakes the soil, that ground can no longer absorb rain. Rain from the next thunderstorm runs straight off the slope, picking up ash, mud, and debris. This is burn scar flooding, and it is a distinct, deadly hazard that can persist for years after the flames are out.
Ruidoso lived it. Even as crews were still fighting the fire in June 2024, thunderstorms over the fresh burn scar triggered flash floods. New Mexico’s Forestry Division ultimately attributed more than 150 additional structure losses to post-fire flooding — on top of the 1,400 lost to the fire itself. The federal Burned Area Emergency Response team warned that the flash-flood risk would stay elevated for at least two years in Ruidoso. They were right. On July 8, 2025 — more than a year after the fire — monsoon rain on the burn scar sent the Rio Ruidoso to a record 20.24 feet, five feet above the previous record, and three people were swept away and killed: a father and his two children, ages 7 and 4.
If you live downhill or downstream of a burn scar — even one from a fire that seems long over — take flash flood warnings deadly seriously. Some lessons for the burn-scar aftermath:
- Know whether your home is below a burned slope or in a drainage that runs off one.
- Sign up for your county’s emergency alerts, and never ignore a Flash Flood Warning or Emergency in a burn-scar area — these floods arrive with almost no warning and carry debris.
- Understand that standard homeowners insurance usually does not cover flood damage. After a nearby fire, look into flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program (there’s typically a 30-day waiting period, so don’t wait for the clouds to gather).
- Have an evacuation trigger for rain, not just fire. In a burn-scar zone, a summer thunderstorm is a threat.
Five Easy Things To Get Started
You have your work cut out for you if you live in the WUI. The steps outlined here range from expensive (new roof or siding), to free (moving combustible items away from your house).
You could probably do 80% of the measures outlined here in a couple days for not a lot of money. It would also make a nice family or neighborhood project, which would bring people together and also educate them about forest fire danger at the same time.
- Check your insurance policy to see what fire coverage you have, specifically for wildfires.
- Take pictures and videos of all your property, house and belongings. Then store them electronically in at least 2 different places.
- Download some important apps to your phone… WatchDuty, AirNow and MyRadar.
- Move all combustible items away from direct contact with your house (wood piles, gas grills, etc.) and make a list of the critical things you need to do to increase your defensible space to protect your property
- Visit Ready.gov and make an emergency plan.
Some closing thoughts
Modern forest fires are behaving in new ways, and are more destructive than they have ever been. As I like to say about climate change, “you put more energy into the climate system, you get more energetic events out of it“. I’ve said that referring to hurricanes, but it applies to forest fires too. The “more energy” is the energy that went into drying out the landscape and turning it into a tinder box, the “more energetic events” are the raging fires.
The truth is, if you live in the WUI your house will probably burn eventually no matter what you do. And if you live nowhere near a forested area, you will be affected by wildfire smoke eventually. This is not to say that it’s hopeless. Every bit of climate change that’s prevented, will make things a little bit less worse down the road. And every preparation you make today, will make your life easier when you are eventually confronted with the ongoing and accelerating impacts of climate change. Knowledge is the key, know your risks, and take action. Your world is in your hands.