Check out our LibGuides on Significant Wildfires in US History and Modern American Wildfires.

Also, head on over to the library materials tab in this LibGuide for books about the history of wildland and rural firefighting.

If you've watched the news at all these past few years, you've probably heard about at least one massive wildland-urban interface fire: the Old Fire, the Tubbs Fire, the Lahaina Fire, the Palisades and Eaton Fire... the list goes on. Although wildland-urban interface fires are now more frequent and more often display extreme fire behavior, America has a long history of fire events at the border between wild and human-occupied lands. For example, the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 killed somewhere between 500 and 800 people as it devastated the logging settlement in Wisconsin.

"... [W]hen residential development is exposed to extreme wildfire conditions, numerous houses can ignite and burn simultaneously, overwhelming firefighters and reducing fire protection effectiveness. Thus, WUI fire disasters principally occur during the extreme fire behavior conditions that account for the one to three percent of the wildfires that escape initial attack control. Table 1 lists WUI fire disasters between 1990 and 2007. Every one of these disasters occurred because extreme fire behavior conditions overwhelmed the firefighting resources."    - The Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Problem: A Consequence of the Fire Exclusion Paradigm. By Jack Cohen, 2008.