Fire branding: Why do new residents make a burn scar their home?

Researchers have sought to understand why wildland urban interface areas continue to expand in the United States despite increasing riskand loss to those areas. Using the case of the Camp Fire in northern California, which destroyed the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in the fall of 2018, this article explores how new arrivals to this area interact with rebuild institutions to evaluate their risk of future wildfires. The paper builds off of concepts of “disaster machine” (Pais and Elliott in Soc Forces 86(4):1415–1453, 2008) and “resilience gentrification” (Gould and Lewis, 2021) to show that people’s sense of risk is mediated by positive messaging and subsidization of the rebuild, what is referred to in this paper as “fire branding.” Using qualitative interview data with 32 arrivals new to the area since 2020, the paper analyzes three recurrent themes that help contextualize people’s willingness to move to a very high fire hazard environment. First, new residents often see themselves as pioneers with much to offer the rebuild. The sense that they can shape the direction of the rebuild and contribute to the community is based not only on the excitement of recovery but on the idea that they came to inhabit a “blank slate.” Second, many in the burn scar see the landscape as having lost the propensity to burn. Third, arrivals trust builders, fire organizations and town officials to do the work to keep them safe from fire. The exception to this trust is with the insurance industry.