Hot Shots from Cronkite News on Vimeo.

This all came into sharp focus when the news that 19 forest fire fighters died fighting an Arizona wildfire over the weekend. The lost firefighters were part of a group known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite team of firefighters based in Prescott, Arizona, who specialized in wilderness fires. They lived on constant notice to spring into action. They had to maintain peak physical fitness so they could hike deep into wild country carrying all of their gear with them, and then still have the energy to fight the wildfires that awaited them. They represented some of the best of the best when it comes to fighting fires.

The Granite Hills Hotshots were deployed to help fight the Yarnell Hill Fire, which started on Friday (perhaps due to a lightning strike) some 85 miles northwest of Phoenix. Thanks to extremely dry and windy conditions, the blaze grew fast and furious and by Sunday, it had spread to 6,000 acres and had destroyed 200 homes. The Granite Hill Hotshots were fighting the fire when the winds shifted dramatically and unpredictably, trapping the team against a ridge. Apparently, they tried to deploy their emergency shelters, but for reasons as yet not made public, it was not enough, and 19 of the 20 team members on the scene perished.

For firefighters, the Yarnell Hill Fire is the deadliest wildfire since 1933, when 25 firefighters died in a California fire. And it is the largest loss of firefighters from any single event since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 341 firefighters and two paramedics.

As of Monday, the Yarnell Fire was still burning, and it comes on the heels of several other dramatic wildfires that have scorched large tracts of the western United States. Last year's Waldo Canyon fire was one of the costliest in Colorado history, which killed 2, injured at least 6 and destroyed 346 buildings, for an insured loss of more than $450 million. But this fire was surpassed in June by the Black Forest fire, in the same part of Colorado, which destroyed 511 homes, damaged 28 others, and became the most damaging fire in state history, in terms of structures lost.

(Paul Wilson, editor of sister site Producer's Web, was personally affected by the Black Forest fire, having to join his family as they franctically tried to move his grandmother's belongings from the home where she and her late husband had lived for decades. It was directly in the path of the blaze. It would have burned, too, if not for a sudden shift in the wind – every bit as sudden and as unpredictable as the one that killed the Granite Mountain Hotshots—which spared Paul's grandmother's house by a mere foot. Just twelve inches.)

This year has been a really wet one here on the East Coast, but it has been terribly try out West, and that part of the country is primed to burn. As the summer wears on, there will surely be more fires, more lost homes, and more lost lives. Wildfires are just a part of nature, but there is probably a somewhat comparable situation going on between homes in wildfire country and those on coastal flood zones or hurricane strike areas where, like so many other places in the world, commercial and residential development of the land has simply placed more values at more risk than at any other time in human history. The fires will burn, as they always have. Only now, there is a better chance that they'll burn more than trees.

To that end, the insurance industry is really stepping up. On June 10, State Farm sent letters to policyholders within Colorado wildfire “red zones” that they had to take certain precautions to mitigate their wildfire risk or else face increased premiums or outright cancellation of homeowners policies. (State Farm is also providing handy infographics to show policyholders where they can get started in terms of prepping their homes.) While I am sure there are a few folks who bristle at such a notion, I am equally sure that most people, if not already paring trees back from their homes and removing latticework under their decks, are not about to argue with the insurance company asking them to do so. Given conditions in Colorado and elsewhere, removing that propane tank next to your house is simply the smart thing to do.

Sometimes insurers get a reputational ding for requiring its policyholders to aggressively manage risk, but in most cases, that's an unfair rap for the insurer. Insurance is not a lottery system in which the policyholder is absolved from making common-sense risk management calls to prevent a claim from happening. And the western wildfire situation definitely calls for more common sense.

Hopefully, what State Farm (and other insurers, no doubt) are doing will be matched by citizens who take it upon themselves to really look into wildfire safety and figure out what needs to be done to prevent fires from starting, to keep their property as safe as possible, and should the worst happen, to get out of harm's way as soon and as swiftly as they can. The less time heroes such as the Granite Mountain Hotshots have to put their lives on the line for the rest of us, the better. Considering how they, like so many other first responders, take on the job of running toward danger while the rest of us run from it, we owe it them, at the very least, to make their need to go into action as slight as possible.