Details about this story

• Source: USA Today
• Date: May 11, 2007
• URL: Read the story
• Bylines: Brad Heath
• Topics: Census , Demographics , Disasters
• Data Types: Federal Data
• Description/Excerpt: Hundreds of thousands of Americans are moving to neighborhoods in the West repeatedly scorched by wildfires that now threaten to burn more often and with greater intensity. Since 2000, roughly 450,000 people - enough to populate a city the size of Atlanta - moved to Western areas endangered by wildfires, a USA TODAY analysis shows. About 3.5 million people now inhabit those places, dotted through forests and scrub-covered mountain slopes from California to Colorado. The growth is most pronounced in the brittle hills of Southern California, near Riverside and San Bernardino, where 240,000 people settled in fire-prone areas since 2000. The growth is also playing out along Nevada's eastern Sierra slopes, where the at-risk population grew by nearly 14,000; outside Boise; and at the fast-growing fringes of metropolitan Phoenix.