Environmental Science : Earth as a Living Planet Ten or 20 years ago, wildfires there would not have threatened many homes. But today, North Carolina has more acres of wooded property with homes than any other state in the nation. There are measurable costs to protecting those homes when fires threaten. For instance, the Forest Service’s CL-215 tanker plane costs $2,800 an hour to operate. It was flown 4.6 hours at the Wilkes County fires on Summit Ridge and Buck Mountain. The plane cost $4 million when the state bought it used in 1998.

Six years ago, the nation’s first national map that focused on the areas where undeveloped wilderness meets homes and other buildings showed that North Carolina had more than 12.77 million acres in the area foresters call the Wildland-Urban Interface. That was the most in the U.S., and the state has had the nation’s fastest-growing Wildland-Urban Interface since then, Birckhead said. The Forest Service and other agencies are using the North Carolina Firewise program to help teach people ways to keep their homes safe from wildfire. “It’s generally recommended as a minimum you have 30 feet of break in the fuels around your home,” said Roger Miller, a Forest Service public-information officer.

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