The cost of wildfires
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Several major wildfires are raging in and around Los Angeles today. In this episode, we explain why the cost of fighting these blazes has ballooned. We’ll also hear about what makes urban wildfires particularly dangerous and destructive. Plus: More Americans work multiple jobs, an uptick in return-to-office orders signals shifting employer-worker relations and long-term bond yields rise as the future grows murkier.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the new normal for wildfires, a season that lasts year round. |
| 0:07.0 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:14.6 | In Washington, D.C., I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Risdahl. It's Wednesday, January 8th. Good to have you with us. The news out of Southern California today is grim. Multiple fires are raging in the Los Angeles area, driven by powerful winds. At least two people have died. More than a thousand homes and buildings have |
| 0:39.3 | burned and tens of thousands of people have evacuated. Fighting these wildfires takes a lot of |
| 0:45.6 | resources and money, and climate change has made them more frequent and more intense. Just consider |
| 0:52.1 | the fact that we're talking about this in January, so much for |
| 0:55.7 | fire season. Marketplaces Kaylee Wells has more now on how that's complicating the response. |
| 1:01.8 | When a fire sparks in L.A. County, Battalion Chief David Acuna with California's firefighting |
| 1:06.8 | agency, aptly named Cal Fire, says usually the local fire departments handle it. |
| 1:11.7 | But when they have incidents that get out of hand, we'll come in and provide our incident management |
| 1:16.4 | team. Which helps the local firefighters with logistics and communication. On top of those teams, |
| 1:22.3 | Cal Fire runs a massive website with up-to-date fire info. So we have information on evacuation warnings and |
| 1:29.4 | orders, which is updated moment by moment. As well as shelter locations, disaster relief info, |
| 1:35.5 | wildfire acreage, and containment numbers, it's a lot of work. Environmental economist Judson |
| 1:41.1 | Boomhauer with UC San Diego says urban fires like the ones burning in LA County can get even more expensive. |
| 1:47.5 | A really important driver of how much we spend fighting any given fire is just the amount of property in the path of the fire. |
| 1:54.3 | That matters, Boomhauer says, because it's not like a flood. |
| 1:57.9 | Firefighters can aim to steer steer the fires direction away from property. |
| 2:02.3 | You know, that ability to at least sometimes affect the path of the disaster makes fires different, |
| 2:08.1 | and it's also one of the things that adds the sort of hidden category of costs, because those |
| 2:11.7 | response efforts are really valuable, but they're also really expensive. |
| 2:15.0 | And they've gotten more expensive. In the past 10 years, Cal Fire's budget has more than doubled to $3.7 billion. |
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