When you think about living with the risk of wildfires, Pennsylvania may not be the first state that comes to mind.
But, a recent fire in Reading near the famous Pagoda made the NBC10 Investigators interested in just how much our region is at risk for wildfires.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, there have already been more than 15 fires in our area this year.
In 2024, there were nearly 200.
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One Berks County resident, Esther Cintron, has lived in her home with her family for nine years but it wasn't until this past fall when she started to worry about wildfires as the fire burned in the William Penn Forest area.
Cintron's home is in what's called a "wildland-urban interface" which is when high-density developments overlap with vegetation, according to FEMA.
Dozens of counties in Pennsylvania have more than 50% of homes in these types of areas with it becoming increasingly common for homes to be built here.
In Berks County alone, almost 60% of homes sit within that kind of boundary. Despite that number, the USDA Forest Service's data shows that the county has an overall low risk for wildfires.
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"We're in a valley. We have a big mountain there. And so we have those trees, you know, on multiple sides of the city," Cintron told NBC10.
It all depends on the topography and construction material, according to Richard Deppen who is the assistant forest manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
"Fires can spread pretty rapidly. And then if you give it to a home and if the homes are close enough together, you got homes igniting homes," Deppen explained.
The William Penn Forest district covers all of the Pennsylvania counties in our region, except Philadelphia. There were 25 more wildfires in this area last year compared to 2023. The fires in 2024 consumed upwards of 700 more acres of land, according to a state report.
"This fall was something unique. Never seen something like that before," Deppen said.
The district spent more money last year fighting wildfires than ever before. In 2024, it cost over $770,000 to suppress wildfires in our part of the state. That's 10 times as much as it cost in 2023, according to a report.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's latest budget proposal allocates $198 million to the department. That number is an increase over last year, but the funding has not always been steady.
This comes as federal grant money has decreased by 16% in two years.
Deppen said that funding is used for a variety of training tactics.
"I'm not going to lie. I dig prescribed fire. I love being able to manipulate an ecosystem with fire. We have a lot of these. A lot of these ecosystems are fire dependent when we have excluded fire. And now we got issues with invasive plants and everything else in in the shift in species composition," Deppen said.
Another way to reduce the risk for wildfires is making the people who live in high wildland-urban interface areas away of it and create, what Deppen calls, a community protection plan.
"It would define a fire risk and hazards, maybe some single home assessments. So where we go out and look at the homes within wildland-urban interface, give them direction on how they can improve their protection zone," Deppen explained.
