The wildfires near Flagstaff will come with an even higher price: threat of serious post-fire flooding

The recovery and aftermath from wildfires could be a lot more costly than previously thought, according to research from two forestry and economics experts from Northern Arizona University.

As Flagstaff and the surrounding areas continue to manage and begin to recover from June's Pipeline and Haywire fires that burned more than 30,000 acres combined, the back-end costs of these wildfires is likely to increase as more and more structures become threatened by post-fire flooding.

The initial cost of fire suppression for the Pipeline Fire reached nearly $11 million, which included the work of more than a thousand people and relied on costly aircraft that drop fire retardant. Now as the monsoon rolls in, that price tag is only expected to grow.

According to Ryan Fitch, an assistant professor in NAU's college of business with a doctorate in forest science, the total costs of dealing with wildfires are now often more expensive on the back end after the initial threat from the fire has been suppressed, especially in fires where there is little to no structural damage.

Instead, the devastation to the landscape from these fires presents an increased risk of wildfire debris flows and serious flash flooding, which has been connected to multiple deaths across the state in the past few years. Notably, these dangers can take months or even years to arise depending on the amount of rainfall in these fire-stricken areas.

Consider the Museum Fire in July 2019, Fitch said, which consumed about 2,000 acres of forest and prompted evacuations for Flagstaff residents near the flames. Now, many residents in this same area live in danger of post-fire flooding.

"We really didn't have any significant rain events until 2021, and then we had two really significant ones," Fitch said.

"These wildfires leave an impact on the landscape that can take years to materialize in terms of losses."

Recent models from the Burned Area Emergency Response teams surveying the area impacted by the Pipeline Fire indicated an increased threat of flooding around Flagstaff, particularly beneath burn scars.

The main areas of concern include the Chimney and Schultz Creek watersheds that drain in the Rio De Flag and eventually flow into downtown Flagstaff, and the Government Tank, Paintbrush-Siesta, Campbell, Copeland, Peaceful, Brandis, Lenox-Wupatki Trails watersheds — which drain into the neighborhoods of Timberline, Wupatki Trails, Fernwood and Doney Park.

Expansion and climate change play key roles in increased wildfire risk, cost

One of the biggest reasons for these increasing costs in wildfire-prone communities is development in wild-urban interfaces, Fitch said, where human infrastructure like homes and businesses are butting up against forests and other fire-prone ecosystems.

Another major consideration in the increasing cost of wildfires is the impact of climate change, which is making fire seasons longer and more severe as well as changing the rainfall.

"We're going to see more variability in the precipitation with a longer fire season, really adding a new set of complications to how we combat these fires and then how we adapt to a changed landscape in the face of potentially more or less rain," Fitch said.

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Many of the challenges that come with managing some of the forests at risk for wildfires today can be linked to a long history of land development and mismanagement by settlers and an aversion to fire entirely, according to Andrew Sanchez Meador, executive director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at NAU.

Because of these practices, Sanchez Meador said, the forests today are largely in bad shape to begin with.

"The first challenge is helping people to understand the lack of forest health and the degree of degradation that these forests have," he said.

During early European settlement in the West, heavy harvesting of trees for houses and railroads would create areas where small trees could regenerate. Historically, Sanchez Meador explained, fire would have burned through and killed those trees, but settlers actively suppressed fires.

"So we basically cut out all the trees and then created space for all those little trees to grow and then eliminated the thing that might limit how many trees came back," he said.

Now we're faced with a problem more than a century in the making, he said.

When calculating the costs of potential wildfires across northern Arizona, Sanchez Meador said, the costs and benefits of pre-fire treatment need to be weighed against not treating the areas and then paying for direct and indirect wildfire suppression and the consequences that come with it.

"The mitigation — not having to pay suppression and indirect costs — the return on investment of that is way bigger than the amount of money that needs to be paid to have some trees thinned or removed," Sanchez Meador said.

Federal funding has already been allocated to address some of these costs.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs law has committed $3 billion over the next decade to fight wildfire across the country.

Within this funding is $61 million that will be invested directly in Arizona projects, including the 4 Forests Restoration Initiative (4FRI) and four other recovery and mitigation projects in impacted areas across the state. These restoration projects include wildlife habitat improvement, grassland, spring and stream channel restoration as well as trail and road maintenance across impacted and at-risk areas.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Emergency Watershed Protection Project also includes nearly $13 million for flood mitigation in the Museum, Telegraph and Bush fire areas around Flagstaff, Superior and Phoenix. These mitigation efforts typically include removing debris from stream channels, establishing vegetative cover on critically eroding lands and repairing damaged levees and structures.

"There's a lot of funds that are available for green infrastructure, and treatments are being implemented," Sanchez Meador said. "But we need to make sure that funding remains available. Even though the infrastructure bill is an unprecedented amount of money, we know it's still not enough to keep doing the work that we do."

Contact northern Arizona reporter Lacey Latch at llatch@gannett.com or on social media @laceylatch.

Coverage of northern Arizona on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is funded by the nonprofit Report for America and a grant from the the Vitalyst Health Foundation in association with The Arizona Republic.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Flagstaff wildfires come with long-lasting costs: threat of flooding