Reno became an affordable, booming destination. Fires show the limits of all that growth

Over the last 15 years, the population of Reno — the so-called Biggest Little City in the World — has surged, thanks in large part to an influx of Californians drawn by Nevada’s cheaper housing, booming tech industry and relative lack of soul-crushing traffic.

From 2010 to 2025, Reno’s population grew an astonishing 26%, to more than 283,000 people.

With all that growth, new development has expanded farther and farther into the fire-prone scrubland surrounding the Sierra Nevada foothills city just across the California border.

This week, a massive fire posed a threat to these new boomtowns.

The Hawk fire forced the harried evacuation of more than 40,000 people. It ignited near a hiking trail in the parched hills just northwest of the city on Saturday. “It basically started in a residential neighborhood,” said Chris Buckley, a spokeswoman for the unified incident command fighting the blaze.

“There are so many more people moving into these areas because they’re so desirable,” said Buckley, who works for the U.S. Forest Service. “Who doesn’t want to move to a beautiful, wild area and have all the conveniences of the city? But it really strains the wildland-urban interface.”

Reno is discovering what California has long known: Sprawling development into fire-prone areas can put those new communities at risk.

The urban-wildland interface — where human development intermingles with wild places such as scrublands, grasslands and forests — is the fastest-growing land-use type in the United States.

And the Hawk fire is the latest example of the growing threat of destructive urban conflagrations in these zones as the planet warms, vegetation dries out and wildfires become more destructive.

“This has grown to a national problem as evidenced in the fires we’ve seen in the last decade,” said Patty Hernandez, co-founder and executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group that focuses on land use and development. “We’re really not talking about isolated communities in the woods.”

There’s Spokane, the growing eastern Washington city of 230,000 where fires this summer incinerated more than 800 structures. And Los Angeles County, where last year’s Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes, businesses and other buildings and took 31 lives.

From 2005 to 2025, wildfires destroyed 130,622 structures nationwide, with seven of the 10 most destructive fires during that time having been in California, according to Headwaters Economics.

More than 115 million people, a third of the U.S. population, now live in places with high wildfire risk, and more than 2.5 million homes were built in the wildland-urban interface during the 2010s alone, Hernandez said.

While much attention typically is given to the number of acres a wildfire burned, a factor that “people have historically underestimated, the one that turns a wildfire into a catastrophe, is the homes themselves,” Hernandez said, adding that building-to-building spread often is “what overwhelms firefighting capabilities.”

In February, the Reno City Council approved a new Community Wildfire Protection Plan that said the city’s wildfire risk has changed substantially over the last two decades because of “a rapidly shifting climate, population growth [particularly among older adults], rapid development, shifts in fuel types and quantity, fuel break construction, and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface.”

This week, authorities said they had confirmed the destruction of at least 47 homes by the Hawk fire and that they expected the number to grow.

At least four civilians and three firefighters have been injured in connection with the fire, Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District Chief Richard Edwards said at a news conference. Fire officials said Tuesday evening that they had made major progress and that the blaze was 85% contained.

Like the vast majority of wildfires in the United States, the Hawk fire was “human caused,” said Edwards, who provided no further details.

“We do not know if it was intentional or unintentional,” he said. “The investigators are still working through that right now. More than likely, this fire will be classified as ‘undetermined.’”

The fire was reported just before 11:30 a.m. Saturday near Hawk Meadow Trail near Somersett, a master-planned community that has been expanding into the hills a few miles northwest of downtown Reno.

In summer, the area is frequently affected by the Washoe Zephyr, a gusty afternoon wind that descends from the Sierra Nevada mountains in the west, blowing across the high desert basin around Reno.

On Saturday, the region was under a red flag warning, with wind gusts at Peavine Peak, about 8 miles northwest of downtown Reno, hitting about 35 mph, said Justin Collins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Reno.

It was dry too, he said, with relative humidity bottoming out at 12% that day.

Authorities said flames spread north and northeast, away from Somersett, with astonishing speed through extremely dry grass and brush. It eventually jumped Highway 395, a major thoroughfare that brings commuters from rural communities in neighboring Lassen County, Calif., before its progress was stopped.

The fire has burned more than 15,000 acres.

On Monday, shortly after authorities began downgrading some mandatory evacuation orders to warnings around Somersett, Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam said people were already venturing too far into dangerous wildlands.

“Right above Somersett is an active fire. We already had reports of people going out and hiking back into those burned areas,” he said. “Please do not do that.”

Balaam said authorities also detected one “illegally flown drone” in the burn zone, posing a threat to the aerial firefight.

Buckley, the incident spokeswoman, told The Times that on the parched landscape, “what’s really frustrating about these human-caused wildfires” is that people don’t seem to grasp that “all it takes is one small spark to get things going.”

She said residents have been exasperated by the evacuation orders and road closures, especially that of Highway 395, “but with the explosive growth and extreme fire behavior, we need people to be safe.”

More than 800 firefighters, including multiple crews from California, were battling the blaze as of Tuesday.

The Hawk fire is one of several wildfires to burn near Reno in recent weeks.

The Bug fire — which burned just north of the Hawk fire and in portions of California’s Lassen and Sierra counties — started Aug. 8 and charred nearly 94,000 acres. The Stallion fire started two days later near Pyramid Lake and burned nearly 41,000 acres.

On Aug. 11, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office announced the arrest of a 47-year-old woman in connection with the Freds Mountain fire, a blaze that burned at least 3,500 acres before merging with the Bug fire. The woman, Christine Mitchell, flagged down responding fire crews and told them she had intentionally started the blaze, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Frank Frievalt, director of the Cal Poly Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Institute, said the Hawk fire attracted more national attention than the much larger Bug and Stallion fires because it posed a more immediate threat to densely developed areas.

Many wild places historically depended on fires to maintain their ecosystems, and as people have continued to build farther into those places, they have, with great success, suppressed those blazes, Frievalt said.

Among other consequences, that has led to a buildup of dry, flammable materials that threatens those very developments, said Frievalt, who spent more than two decades working for the fire department in Reno’s neighboring city of Sparks, Nev., where he served as acting fire chief.

“Unless we’re going to stop building in these landscapes, and that’s unlikely … it means we have to start building and retroactively hardening these communities,” he said.