Steve and Heather Richards were cleaning their house in the Peppermint Drive area of the North Valleys on Aug. 22 when Steve saw a huge plume of smoke outside.
It was the Hawk Fire.
When the couple saw the “get set” yellow zone evacuation notice for their neighborhood was in place, they left their home with their cat, Tony, and two dogs, Maxwell and Cayenne. They did not yet know whether their neighborhood would be in the “go now” red zone.
“But the fire looked like it was getting bigger, and the smoke was getting thicker, and that neighborhood sort of seems primed for a fire, so we decided to leave early,” Steve said. “We had just put our bags away from packing for the Bug Fire.”
A short part of their drive was on Interstate 395, where they just missed a huge traffic jam.
“We’re very lucky, because I saw footage of it, and it was just bananas,” Steve said. “There was stopped traffic, people trying to go around the traffic in the wrong lane, and then emergency vehicles trying to get in.”
The Richards went to a friend’s house in Sun Valley to regroup. There, they met up with Steve’s father, David, whose Northgate neighborhood in Northwest Reno had been evacuated. Later—with David’s cat, McCavity—they went to stay with friends on Wells Avenue; they’d remain there for five days.
The Richards still had a home. Steve said they “had a fridge to clean up, since they turned off the power for the whole road. And there was a lot of ash everywhere, and everything smelled like smoke for weeks.
“But we were incredibly lucky. From what I can tell, there were about four or five structures lost on our street, and a lot of people got their back fences scorched.”
Considering the risks
The wildfires in August and September served as a reminder that fires can devastate neighborhoods within the city limits. According to leaders in the first-responder community, both natural occurrences and human actions will continue to lead to wildfire threats in Reno and Sparks neighborhoods.
Dave Cochran, fire chief for Reno and Sparks, said that climate change is one important factor.
“Everybody knows that, because we’re getting the temperatures warming up,” Cochran said.
The West’s normal weather patterns are another.
“We’re high desert, so it’s already dry,” he said. “And then you get windstorms or wind events coming in. For a lot of these fires, that’s what really drives it.”
John McInturff, wildland battalion chief with the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District, said winter weather helps dictate what the next summer’s fire season may look like.
“If we get a lot of rain, we’ll have a lot of grass growth,” McInturff said. “If we don’t get a lot of rain, the brush component and the timber component become more viable for accepting fires.”
Both Cochran and McInturff said dangers have increased in recent years for wildfires encroaching on city neighborhoods and businesses. Cochran said more severe and erratic fire patterns are taking place, including flame-spreading patterns that can be hard to measure.
McInturff said he’s seen an uptick in human-caused wildfire ignitions since he started with the district in 2020.
“This year, it was mostly human-caused fires, where 2020 was a mix of human-caused and naturally started fires,” he said.
Statistics bear this out. John Beck, fire marshal for the Reno Fire Department, said 80% of Washoe County vegetation fires so far in 2026 have been human-caused.
Cochran mentioned another factor—Reno and Sparks keep being built outward.
“I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, but the cities are expanding out into the danger zone, with more building along the edges of those areas,” he said. “We’re pushing out into the area where the homes meet the wildlands.”
This is where the Wildland-Urban Interface Code comes into play. It spells out the rules for builders and homeowners concerning land use, landscaping and building materials. The region has adopted the WUI code, meaning more demanding building requirements are now in place for new neighborhoods that could be at risk for fires.
“The increase of the population into the WUI environment obviously comes with additional risks as far as the amount of response we need to have for large incidents or large fires,” McInturff said.
“We don’t have typically the same environmental conditions that drove (the Los Angeles area) fires. By that, I mean sustained heat and sustained winds day and night, and the congestion of the neighborhoods.”
Dave Cochran, fire chief for Reno and Sparks
Cochran explained that WUI codes include requirements on “the materials you use, the landscaping, and protective measures, such as screens over vents so embers don’t get into your attic, or not letting juniper trees grow against your home. Like, the material used for a roof—we can’t let them have wood shake roofs out in that area. It doesn’t eliminate the danger, but it helps mitigate it.”
Could a megafire happen here?
The fires this past summer raise an important question: Could there be a situation in Reno/Sparks like the devastating Palisades and Eaton Fires in the Los Angeles area, which destroyed more than 16,000 structures in early 2025?
“Never say never, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you that could never happen,” Cochran said. “We don’t have typically the same environmental conditions that drove (the Los Angeles area) fires. By that, I mean sustained heat and sustained winds day and night, and the congestion of the neighborhoods. The more typical pattern for Nevada is to have hot, dry conditions during the day, and as we all know, the temperature will change by 20, 30, 40 degrees overnight. That’s where the war can be won to slow down or stop a fire. It doesn’t always happen, but that’s more of a typical pattern in Nevada.”
McInturff pointed to the Caughlin Fire in southwest Reno, in November 2011, and the Washoe Drive Fire in Pleasant Valley, in January 2012, as previous examples of how fires could spread into residential areas. They destroyed 28 and 29 structures, respectively.
“The differences between the Hawk and Bug Fires with the Caughlin and Washoe Drive fires is the timing,” he said. “Both Hawk and Bug, obviously, were in the peak of summer and fire season, where Caughlin and Washoe Drive were low-pressure, wind-driven fires, more in the fall and winter. That’s why our fire risk is never fully extinguished during the wintertime. It all depends on what our temperatures are doing, and the precedent set through the winter.”
Prevention efforts for residents
One of the most significant ways in which first responders can fight fires is by fighting them before they even start—by giving residents tools to lessen the dangers.
“We’re very proactive as far as trying to eliminate risk,” McInturff said. “We have contracts with NV Energy to treat underneath their poles, in case there’s a spark that’s ignited from the power lines. And we’ve applied for several grants for fuel reduction throughout the communities of Washoe County.”
He also said the TMFPD has “a pretty robust wildland (fuels-reduction) program, and we hope to build on that in the future to where we can cover more ground and have more of a positive effect to reduce either the impacts of fires to the communities or prevent the fires leaving the community and going out to the wildland.”
The program includes green-waste events, where residents can take “brush, dead limbs from trees, all that stuff, and then give it to us and we’ll dispose of it,” McInturff said. “We do events in the spring and the fall.”
Cochran said his departments provide green-waste receptacles over the summer months. They also have been a part of goat deployments with local farmers.
“We’ve done that multiple times where we get grant money and we hire the same herd,” Cochran said. “The farmer brings his Spanish goats out, and they basically eat the vegetation to reduce the wildfire threat. Sparks has just accepted a grant for the goats. And kudos to Somerset, because they were successful a couple of years ago in earning a substantial grant to do a ton of work mitigating fields in that area and reducing the wildlife threat. … We’re doing a lot of things like that, either directly or indirectly, to reduce the threat.”
Reno and Sparks also have a team of fire inspectors that can speak with homeowners associations or can work directly with community members to educate on fire prevention, Cochran said.
“During the Bug Fire, they were up in the North Valleys at grocery stores, or other places where people were going to be, setting up tables with educational materials,” he said. “And if people ask, we’ll go out and evaluate their properties and give them specific direction and information on what they could do and how they could be safer.”
Funding for this story was provided by the Institute for Nonprofit News and Google News Initiative’s Disaster Response Fund.