VIDEO: People are building homes all over, including in and around our wilderness. It's a picturesque place to live, but it's also making things tougher on wildland firefighters.
New homes are popping up everywhere you turn, in downtowns, in suburbia, and in the wildland urban interface (WUI). The WUI is essentially where the natural environment like forests and rangelands meet housing developments. FEMA says as much as 40% of Idaho homes are in the WUI and that's growing. It's understandable. Who wouldn't want to live there? But it's also creating major problems, according to Ivy Dickinson, the Executive Director of Idaho Firewise, "When homes exist in areas where fires are naturally expected to occur, they essentially become fuel for the wildfires."