Fires in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are increasingly damaging to communities across the United States.  Beyond physical damage to homes and infrastructure and threats to life-safety, WUI fires induce large, indirect effects that cascade across regional economies.  We develop an approach to measure losses to employment, the number of households, household income, and industrial output from economic shocks induced from wildfires and compare the magnitude of effects across different communities.  Using computable general equilibrium models, we simulate wildfire shocks to business interruption, housing loss, and population outmigration.  

 David T. Butry

Dr. David T. Butry is the Chief of the Applied Economics Office (AEO) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  He leads research focused on (1) measuring the benefit-cost performance of life-safety technologies, building codes, and standards; (2) estimating the economic impacts resulting from wildland fires; and (3) measuring the return-on-investment of hazard mitigation activities.