A recent series of wildfires near Anchorage and the hottest day on record have sparked fears that a warming climate could soon mean serious, untenable blazes in urban areas
The risk is particularly high in the city’s burgeoning Anchorage Hillside neighborhood, where multimillion dollar homes have pushed farther and farther up steep slopes and to the forest’s edge. Making the challenge even greater is that many of these areas on the Hillside — home to about 35,000 people — have but one road in and out, meaning that fleeing residents could clog a roadway or be cut off from reaching Anchorage at all.
Schrage’s city fire department is adept at fighting blazes in buildings. But as Anchorage has grown, the available land is higher up, where wild and urban areas intersect, and those fires are very different from what his firefighters are trained to combat. “Our strategy is basically to put as many resources as we have on duty on a small fire so that we can keep it contained” while waiting for assistance from the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection, Schrage said.
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