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SALT LAKE CITY — Fueled by drought and development, wildfires in the West are getting bigger and more aggressive, creating conditions so dangerous that fire bosses are increasingly reluctant to risk lives saving houses - particularly if the owners have done nothing to protect their property.

From Southern California to Montana, seven firefighters have died this year battling blazes that have destroyed more than 400 houses, a dramatic increase from last year.

The firefighters' job has been made more hazardous by an onslaught of houses and vacation cabins being built across the rugged West - some of them inside national forests. An estimated 8.6 million houses have been built within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982.

"There's the frustration of knowing these people aren't taking care of their home, and why do we have to do it?" said John Watson, a Fairfield, Mont., firefighting contractor who uses a 750-gallon fire engine to protect remote houses.

"There isn't a whole lot that needs to be done to mitigate the threat, but they (homeowners) won't do it. They say: `I'd rather have my cabin burn down with the trees than have you cut some down.'"

Fire commanders say they are more likely to walk away from houses without a buffer zone, which can be as simple as raking debris from around a house and leaving a bed of gravel at the foundation, or putting metal roofs on their homes instead of flammable wood shakes.

"We will not ask a fire crew in a dangerous fire to defend a structure that has not taken precautionary steps," said Don Smurthwaite, a U.S. Bureau of Land Management spokesman and former firefighter. "That's definitely a change."

Wildfires have always naturally swept the landscape, but scientists say they are becoming more catastrophic. There is little dispute that the wildfires are being fueled by a hotter weather, a yearslong drought, the spread of weeds that burn like oily rags and the buildup of forest debris from decades in which fires were routinely suppressed.

So far this year, wildfires have consumed 8.2 million acres nationwide, an area larger than Maryland, and most of it in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. That figure is fast approaching last year's record of 9.9 million acres, and the fire season can last through November in many parts of the West, particularly in fire-prone Southern California.

By Sept. 26, wildfires had destroyed 409 houses across the West, more than 1 1/2 times last year's total of 263, federal statistics show. California, as usual, has the biggest toll, with 338 houses burned so far this year.

From the West Coast to a few Plains states, 26 million houses - 40 percent of the housing stock - are in forests or perched on the edge of flammable wildlands, according to Volker C. Radeloff, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"There's more at stake," Radeloff said. "Everybody loves to live close to the wildlands and the houses are getting dispersed, making them harder to defend."