"More frequent and destructive fires are combining with booming oil production to put towns across the American West at risk, a new study has found.
These trends are made more dangerous by both rising temperatures and the sprawl of Western towns — driven by rising populations — into the increasingly fire-prone wildlands that surround them, the study in the journal One Earth found.
As more than 350,000 houses have been built each year in this wildland-urban interface (WUI), these outlying areas have also become the sites of tens of thousands of new oil and gas wells — sites that both contribute to, and are put at risk by, a new age of destructive fire.
The study found that about 3 million people currently live within about a half mile (1 km) of highly wildfire-threatened wells, and more than 10 million people live near wells that face moderate risk — a disproportionate number of whom are lower-income and people of color."
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