…”Everybody knows that firefighting costs are going up, and everybody knows the WUI has a lot to do with it,” says Ray Rasker, director of Headwaters Economics, an independent research group in Bozeman, Montana. According to the group’s data, the U.S. government is spending as much as $3 billion a year to fight wildfires — twice what was being spent 10 years ago. “About a third of those costs are for defending homes,” Rasker adds.…
