The problems posed by fire in the wildland-urban Interface are not new.

In one of two investigative reports examining the events leading up to the crew’s deaths, the Arizona Forestry Division was cited and fined for sending the men to defend homes deemed indefensible. The state is appealing the fine.

Some neighborhoods participate in Firewise, a National Fire Protection Association program, which teaches how to actively manage the land around homes to mitigate the chance of fire.

During off-months, the Granite Mountain crew helped people in Prescott clear pine needles off roofs, cut dead trees and branches and clear brush or bramble, shrubs and trees deemed too close to the house. At block parties, the hotshots brought in a massive wood chipper and hauled away debris that would otherwise provide fodder for fires.

But with only one thousand communities certified nationwide, these programs have yet to spread as the wildfire has. In Prescott, 23 neighborhoods are certified FireWise, said PJ Cathey, Chair of Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission.

Dean Smith watches as the Yarnell Hill Fire encroaches on his home in Glenn Ilah, June 30, 2013 near Yarnell, Ariz. (AP Photo/The Arizona Republic, David Kadlubowski)

“The Yarnell community was not one of them,” Cathay said, though some individual property owners did take precautions.

Larger properties are more expensive to manage and maintain, and federal grant funding usually covers only the first treatment.

Also, some people are just not interested.

“We have those who are tree huggers, and those who are not going to be told what to do,” Cathay said.

Questions about who is responsible when fire breaks out on private land, and who should pay to mitigate fire danger, challenge many of the individualistic, frontier philosophies that historically helped define the West.

“There is a consequence to not providing defensible space to your house, and there is a consequence to not providing the ability for us to do our jobs like we’d like to,” said Prescott Fire Department Spokesman Wade Ward.

What many homeowners in the wildland-urban interface don’t realize is that the biggest threat is not from an approaching wall of fire, but from embers that take flight on the wind and silently land on wooden roofs, said Michele Steinberg, a Wildland Fire Projects Manager. After whole neighborhoods are evacuated, there’s no one left to notice a smoldering ember, much less put it out.

“Once one home ignites, it's a chain reaction, and it goes from home to home to home,” Steinberg said.

But increasingly, people are thinking about the future.

”People are asking, ‘What could be done? What about regulation? What about planning?’ instead of ‘Who can be blamed for this fire?’ which has been the question for a long time.”

Even as places like California have enacted building codes aimed at creating defensible space, so much new development has already happened without taking fire into consideration.

“We've got 30-plus years of really bad construction,” said fire historian Stephen Pyne.

Homes are built with wooden shaker roofs, in a landscape where the oldest surviving structures are made of adobe. Junipers, nick-named “little gas cans” in the fire community for their flammability, are still a popular landscaping choice.

“There are so many things that are different,” Pyne said.“The climate has changed, land use has changed. What we're willing to tolerate has changed,” he said. “It's just a mess.”

Compared to 40 years ago, wildfires are now consuming on average twice as many acres per year, U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said at a 2012 Senate hearing.

"Large and long-duration forest fires have increased fourfold over the past 30 years in the American West,” the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate 2010 report says.

Fire seasons are also two and a half months longer than they used to be. “Recent research indicates that earlier snow melt, temperature changes and drought associated with climate change are important contributors to this increase in forest fire," the report concludes.

Retrofitting existing developments in fire-prone areas will be costly, but the expense of fire suppression is already a huge and growing public burden.

The average federal budget for wildfire suppression was less than $1 billion a year throughout the 1990s, but that figure has tripled since the early 2000s. "Wildfire protection now accounts for nearly half of the Forest Service annual budget, and more than 10 percent of the budget for all Department of the Interior agencies," says a report by Headwaters Economics, a non-profit think tank, which recommends that communities limit future development in vulnerable areas.

Some experts predict that fire will increasingly be treated like a hurricane or tsunami, not to be fought, but endured.