Tag: prevention

Recommendations for change: the way ahead for a fire-literate and fire-adapted Europe

By Tiago Oliveira

A new era of wildfire mitigation and prevention in the European Union has been defined by two new wide-ranging reports, with the added support of a new global agreement with similar objectives.

• A report by the European Academies Science Advisory Board presented in Brussels on May 19 calls for an integrated European Union framework for landscape fire risk governance and the prioritisation of prevention.

Changing Wildfires – Policy Options for a Fire-literate and Fire-adapted Europe

• The European Academies report followed the publication in April of a proposal by Firelogue – a coalition of research projects – for an integrated wildfire risk management strategy.

View the United Nations global fire management hub initiative

• And on June 17, G7 leaders and guests meeting in Canada signed the Kananaskis Wildfire Charter, endorsing that nations adopt a whole-of-society approach to wildland fire, focus on prevention, leverage research, and build shared capacity to mitigate and respond.

[This article is published in Wildfire magazine. Read more wildfire news and articles here.]

The European Academies report, Changing Wildfires: Policy Options for a Fire-Literate and Fire-adapted Europe, synthesises state-of-the-art fire science and argues that forest ecosystems and European citizens will be exposed soon to a growing wildfire risk. The report recommends the articulation of policies, actively managing forests, and educating and engaging communities.

Already wildfires in the European Union burn, on average, half a million hectares yearly – almost twice the size of Luxembourg. In 2025, almost 1 million hectares burned.

Worked on by 23 scientists nominated by their respective national science academies, the report highlights the complex drivers behind the surge in wildfire risk.

Amplified by climate change, the drivers tie down to rural depopulation and land use changes. As droughts and declining summer rainfall are predicted to double the fire hazard by 2100, rural abandonment of farmland and unmanaged vegetation growth have created vast landscapes of flammable biomass.

The report notes the firefighting trap or paradox – the over-reliance on fire suppression rather than fuels and land management exacerbates future fires – argues that fire suppression alone is not sufficient, and questions the efficacy of EU policies for their overwhelming focus on fire suppression and emergency response.

The report presents European political bodies with eight recommendations:

1. Invest in integrated wildfire risk reduction, including prescribed burning and fuel management.

2. Implement nature-based solutions such as grazing and native species reforestation.

3. Embrace the role of fire allowing planned burns to maintain ecological balance.

4. Invest in education and communication to increase “fire literacy” and preparedness.

5. Invest in landscape management to reduce vulnerability, design and maintain resilient landscape that reduces wildfire risks.

6. Harmonise sectoral policies across agriculture, environment, and urban development to reduce conflicts and risks.

7. Promote compact urban development to limit wildland-urban interface expansion.

8. Encourage sustainable private land management to help landowners adopt fire resilient practices.

While the Mediterranean remains Europe’s highest-risk region, the report warns that a continental fire crisis is brewing, and Alpine and Boreal regions must also prepare for a new era of fire.

“The changing regime with larger, more intense blazes is driven not only by weather, but also by structural socio-ecological shifts,” said Orsolya Valkó, co-chair of the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council’s wildfires working group, in a statement in May.

“Many new areas, such as Central Europe and rapidly warming mountainous areas, will probably be exposed to severe fire weather. This marks a fundamental shift with major consequences for environmental and public safety.”

Firelogue – the coalition of research projects – supports wider calls for an integrated European wildfire risk management strategy.

“Following the example of Portugal, we propose that the creation of a strategy should include some key elements such as the creation of an Inter-agency at the EU level, to work transversally with the various agencies and European Commission directorates (DGs) to operationalise the implementation of inter-agency articulation and coordination, to avoid overlaps and gaps,” the Firelogue report says.

“Also, several of the measures proposed in this document concern the activities of some of these agencies including, for example [Directorate-General Environment, Directorate-General Climate, Directorate General European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support]. In line with this, we also advocate the implementation of a European Wildfire Management Directive as a regulatory framework to guide wildfire risk management activities.”

Building a handtool fire line and checking its effectiveness in Northen Portugal in 2016. Photo: Tiago Oliveira

The Kananaskis Wildfire Charter means that G7 nations –Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – in addition to guest participants Australia, Mexico, India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa, will move to integrated fire management and high hopes expressed by the G7 for the United Nations Global Fire Management Hub initiative, which is expected to play a pivotal role in fire-era diplomacy.

For the European Union in particular, the way forward is about interoperability, incident command system-based qualifications, common procedures and operational standards, and also the use of knowledge and science to better determine expansion of fire use as a tool in sustainable forest management, nature-based solutions, and Indigenous land management practices including cultural fire risk reduction measures around communities, buildings, and Infrastructure”

To be fire-literate and fire-adapted in Europe, as recommended in the May 19 report, challenges institutions and politicians. The 2023 Landscape Fire Governance Framework, which brings together governments, businesses, academia, and members of civil society to develop and implement balanced and technically supported solutions to landscape fire management, might be helpful for European institutions and decision makers to improve cooperation among civil protection and forest and conservation agendas and organizations, assuring that the pursued objectives are tackled and best practices are adopted.

Tiago Oliveira is a PhD and forest engineer with 30 years of experience in national and international activities specialized in the topics of wildland fire risk management and governance. Oliveria was appointed by the prime minister in the aftermath of the 2017 wildfire season to lead the creation of the Integrated Rural Fire Management System in Portugal. He has been chairman of the board of the Portuguese Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management since January 2019 and is the former head of the Department of Innovation and Forestry Development (2016-2017) at The Navigator Company. Oliveria was head of forest protection, responsible for fire prevention and suppression operational programs and R&D projects, from 2008 to 2016. Oliveria is has been a member of the IAWF board since 2023.

Two medium engines from a private wildland firefighting company, holding a line during the 2015 fire season near Porto in Portugal. Photo: Tiago Oliveira

Related Wildfire Today article Global wildfire cooperation agreement signed by G7 nations

Europe prevention

Wildfire reduction projects in 22 states funded by USDA

American Elk prescribed fire Wind Cave National Park

The United States Department of Agriculture on Tuesday announced that the agency has invested $200 million in 58 wildfire reduction projects across the nation.

The programs span 22 states and two tribes, and include efforts like updating community wildfire protection plans and removing hazardous fuels and overgrown vegetation.

The funding comes from the Congressionally-created Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program. The program is slated to invest $1 billion over five years to assist at-risk communities in preventing wildfires. 2025 is the program’s third year.

“No single organization can address the severe wildfire threats we face today,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said. “It is imperative that we work together to protect our forests and communities. For those communities that already have plans in place, these investments will enable immediate, collaborative action to reduce wildfire risk.”

The state with the most approved grants in round three of the program was Colorado, with eight projects funded. Two projects in the state each received just under $10 million in funding, including:

“Protecting the Gateway to the Rockies” through the Larimer County Office of Emergency Management, which includes defensive space improvements on 900 parcels, wildfire mitigation treatments on 500 acres of open space, and wildfire preparedness education at 75 community events.
Wildfire Risk Mitigation program through the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, which will expand the county’s Sustainable Lands and Safer Homes (SLASH) program, hire more staff specifically for wildfire risk education, and help purchase numerous kinds of field equipment and gear.

The project with the largest amount of funding approved was a $10 million program in New Mexico. The “Colfax Wildfire Risk Reduction Project” through the Cimarron Watershed Alliance will “implement high priority wildfire risk reduction treatments including fuels reduction, evacuation route clearing, restoration focused forest thinning, and defensible space work on private lands in and around communities.”

Click here to see the full list of funded proposals for each year of the program.

prevention United States

LAHAINA FIRE: The failure of fire, law enforcement, and other agencies at the 2023 Maui fires

~ By Chuck Sheley, retired smokejumper (Cave Junction 1959)
and current NSA Smokejumper Magazine editor

As part of our family drove along the Lahaina Bypass Road on July 5, 2023, I mentioned to my son that I had never seen things so dry in the 20+ years that we have been going to Maui. The bypass road ran by Lahaina a quarter mile or so up the hill from that historic town. The area between the town and the bypass was solid grass a couple of feet tall. With the continual downhill winds, I mentioned that this was a disaster waiting to happen. On August 8, it happened. Lahaina was a historic town and a major tourist attraction. Years of history there.

I’ve always wondered about the Hawaiian “Hang Loose” attitude, but their house, their attitude. You can substitute incompetence for Hang Loose in this fire. Let’s look at what happened at Lahaina, where over 100 people died. Could it have been prevented? Were fire and law enforcement caught off guard? Definitely not! They just ignored the inevitable.

The Warning: In 2021 a Maui County commissioned report, County of Maui Report on Wildfire Prevention, was released. A summary: Wild/brush/ forest fires appear to be increasing; wild/brush/ forest fires present a growing threat to Maui County citizens; there are ongoing fire threats to Maui Island: grasses and combustible materials along road rights-of-way; low-hanging, failure, or shorting of above-ground powerlines.

The report included comments on Maui County’s Fire and Safety Response: “Prevention is given short shrift. There is no stated goal of fire prevention or any metric to assess success or improvement in prevention. There is much space devoted to preventing injuries and illness of employees and to preventing equipment failure, but nothing about what can and should be done to prevent fires.”

They were told wildfire is coming. However, they respond with employee concerns. How about the citizens? Sounds like an employee union response.

2014: Michael Walker, Hawaii’s Fire Protection Forester, urged state lawmakers to make a relatively meager financial commitment to boost wildfire preparedness: about $1.5 million. That money would have funded new firebreaks, livestock grazing, and water infrastructure for firefighting. The bill died in committee.

National Weather Service data shows that in the last 17 years, the NWS issued 65 red flag warnings or fire weather watches for the area, including Lahaina.

When the predicted happened: The New York Times published an excellent report, with video, on this disaster from start to finish. “A cascade of failures by officials left thousands trapped and largely fending for themselves.”

Conditions: The NWS forecasted hurricane-force gusts up to 76 mph, with winds accelerating down the slopes leading into Lahaina. Using the NYTimes as a source, we have the following timeline: Shortly after sunrise on August 8, a powerline snapped and started a fire. Firefighters responded and contained the fire. Crew left site at 2:18 p.m. and returned to station. A 911 call at 2:52 p.m. as fire started again. (Fire Dept. did not leave anyone on the fire and did not make sure it was out.) At 3:22 p.m. fire jumped Lahaina Bypass and at 3:51 p.m., a Lahaina resident texted, “We are trapped.” At 4:13 p.m. fire spread across total area. Emergency managers chose not to activate the siren system, fearing people would evacuate TOWARD the fire. (Evacuate uphill toward a fire pushed by 70 mph winds?) 4:16 p.m. officials issued an evacuation alert via cellphones. But by then, the fire had already burned through the evacuation zone — 20 minutes earlier.

By 4:19 p.m. the fire had crossed Front Street. Roads were blocked. At 4:35 p.m. a caller to 911 said, “The roads are closed, I can’t turn out.” Roads blocked by downed powerlines, but Hawaii Electric said that the powerlines had been de-energized for hours. No one told the police who were blocking the escape routes. (No coordination between agencies.) 4:45 p.m. gridlock. Front Street blocked. Firefighters said they were losing water pressure. (Water and hoses against a wildfire pushed by 70 mph winds?) 6:00 p.m. Maui County mayor said he was “happy to report” the opening of the roads that had been blocked.

Honolulu Civil Beat: Maui County has known the town of Lahaina and its neighboring communities were the island’s most at risk for wildfires for years, with alarms being raised at least as far back as 2018. According to the county’s hazard mitigation plan developed in 2020, West Maui had a 90 percent chance of annual wildfires. Lahaina and the area around Maalaea were identified as being of highest concern.

Hawaii News Now: HNN obtained the report as part of an ongoing investigation of the county’s actions before, during, and after the wildfire that leveled Lahaina. Two months after the disaster, which claimed at least 99 lives with six others still unaccounted for, it’s clear that the wildfire threat was well-documented — the result of poor land management, inadequate planning, and drought. Escape routes blocked: As a reader, you can go to youtube and see videos taken by residents trying to escape Lahaina. Cars are backed up on Front Street, side by side and not moving. If the north end of Front Street had not been blocked by law enforcement, cars could have easily moved to safety in the large parking lots at Safeway — or driven farther north to safety. Some people drove around the blockage, but that didn’t help those trapped in line a mile back.

Associated Press (8/23/23): As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety. And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30. During a news conference on Tuesday, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said, “So the police were blocking roads, the exit, some of the exit roads out. And I’m assuming it’s because there’s been some downed powerlines or some downed trees.”

In another news report: This week, Maui’s police chief explained why barricades were set up. “Downed powerlines, which would kill you if you drove over them,” said MPD Chief John Pelletier. Danger from downed powerlines: We know or should know that downed powerlines present a danger. The rule: Do not exit the vehicle, stay inside. Other references: A powerline is the source (electricity), so the only place it will want to flow is to ground. A vehicle sits atop rubber tires which provide an insulator, so the occupant would be insulated. Since the vehicle does not provide a path to ground, driving over a powerline would not pose a risk for the insulated occupant. (Trained officers and the Fire Chief should know this.)

Common sense is uncommon: We have a situation where a town is engulfed by a 70 mph wind-driven fire. Exit roads are blocked, and cars are jammed and not moving. Even as a law enforcement official, if you did not know that a vehicle could drive safely over downed powerlines, could you see the alternative — being burned to death by a wildfire? People with off-road vehicles ignored the barriers and drove around them to safety. Was there any power in those lines?

“By 6:40 a.m., there was no power to Lahaina or West Maui, according to Darren Pai, a spokesman for Hawaiian Electric.” (Honolulu Civil Beat)

Bottom line: There was plenty of advance warning, some back as far as 2014, that this wildfire would happen. Whoever was at the top of the food chain should have put fire, law enforcement, medical, and Hawaiian Electric into a room and devised a plan to coordinate all these agencies.

After the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which destroyed a town of 26,000 people in a matter of hours, all of Maui should have been aware of the need to shut down powerlines during high-wind events. Coordination between fire and law enforcement is also at the top of the list. Each seemed to be operating independently of the other in Lahaina. I still cannot understand how law enforcement officers could block escape routes. That is like locking people inside a burning building.

Maui should have had trained wildland firefighters. Anyone thinking that the loss of water pressure was a factor here does not have much knowledge of wildfire. You don’t face down an advancing wildfire pushed by 70 mph winds with a hose. Time spent spraying water on a burning house, surrounded by 30 other burning houses, is a waste of time. Forget the houses and concentrate on evacuating people.

How many eventual victims could have been saved if those roadblocks were removed? After the Camp Fire in Paradise, I’ve championed the establishment of “safe zones” rather than road evacuation. It didn’t work in Paradise, and it didn’t work in Maui. There is a concrete parking garage at the north end of Lahaina. I would bet that 500-600 people could have sheltered in place there. Athletic and play fields at the schools were other possible safe zones. There are many experts in planning and coordinating wildfire efforts. Because the local officials on Maui, with years of advance warning, couldn’t properly prepare for a disaster, bring in some experts from the mainland.

Best description of the Maui wildfire — fiasco!

National Smokejumper Association — smokejumpers.com

Chuck Sheley (Cave Junction ’59) graduated from Chico State University in 1960. He taught Physical Education for 36 years and coached track and cross country in Chico for 53 years. After two seasons on an engine crew on the Lassen National Forest, he jumped at Cave Junction 1959-66, then out of Fairbanks 1967-1970. Sheley was the organized crew coordinator for the Mendocino National Forest for 19 years, where he recruited and trained 300 new firefighters each year. He finished his fire career with 34 seasons in wildland firefighting, and he’s still coaching and officiating Track & Field and has served as editor of Smokejumper magazine since 1999 — he’s also the vice president of the National Smokejumper Association.

foresight Lahaina Maui prevention safe zones

Pre-colonial frequency RxFire needed to save Western forests, study confirms

In 1993, District Manager John Koehler was in the midst of a shift in popular fire management practices. In his position with the Florida Forest Service (then the Division of Forestry) he’d noticed a new trend developing among the country’s wildfire managers, but he found there was little data to support their claims. So he decided to conduct a study to either verify or debunk the usefulness of prescribed burns.

Koehler wasn’t the first to gain interest in whether the historical practice of prescribed burning was as effective as people claimed. Fire Scientist Robert Martin, in his 1988 study, found that prescribed burning reduced the number of acres burned per wildfire, but said the practice’s effect on wildfire occurrence was “at best, speculative.” Forester James Kerr Brown, in his 1989 study, said a prescribed burning program would not have prevented the disastrous Yellowstone fires that had burned the year before.

Koehler was less than impressed by either study. He wanted to learn whether prescribed fires held quantifiable, tangible benefits – which neither study supplied. To compile hard data, Koehler used nine years’ worth of Florida Forest Service fire statistics to determine whether prescribed burns were affecting the frequency and size of wildfires at all. His study would go on to produce the hard data he was looking for, concluding that in every area where prescribed burns occurred, decreases were recorded in the total number of wildfires, the number of acres burned, and the average number of acres burned per wildfire.

“Prescribed burning will not eliminate wildfires, but this practice does reduce the threat posed from wildfires,” Koehler said.

At the end of his study, he recommended more research focused on quantifying benefits of prescribed burning as a prevention tool. Fast-forward 30 years, and Koehler would get his wish after a team of researchers on the other side of the country completed one of the most comprehensive examinations of prescribed burns’ effect on future wildfires.

The new research, “Low-intensity fires mitigate the risk of high-intensity wildfires in California’s forests,” was published in the journal Science by Biostatistician Xiao Wu from Columbia University and a team of Stanford researchers. In the study, the team analyzed 20 years of satellite data on fire activity across more than 62,000 miles of California forests to determine whether intentional low-intensity burns mitigate the consequences of the increasing frequency of severe wildfires.

Their conclusions were the same that Koehler had heard wildfire managers espousing decades before: prescribed
burns help prevent future wildfires.

In conifer forests, they found, areas that have recently burned at low intensity are 64 percent less likely to burn at high intensity in the following year relative to unburned synthetic control areas – and this protective effect against high-intensity fires persists for at least 6 years.

The study not only found prescribed burns widely successful in California, but also showed that they’re a necessary practice vital to conifer forests’ health, something Native American tradition has known for centuries.

The study does not shy away from referencing previous case studies that indicate frequent and low-intensity fires were the norm before the forceful removal of numerous Native American tribes from California. Previous research from Ecologist Alan Taylor shows that fire regime changes over the past 400 years likely resulted from socioecological changes rather than climate changes. Fire Scientist Scott Stephens found around 4.4 million acres of California had burned annually before 1800, in part helped by Native American cultural burning. Geographer Clarke Knight determined that indigenous burning practices promoted long-term forest stability in the forests of California’s Klamath Mountains for at least one millennium.

“The resilience of western North American forests depends critically on the presence of fire at intervals and at intensities that approximate presuppression and precolonial conditions that existed prior to the extirpation of Native Americans from ancestral territories in California,” Wu wrote.

RxFire training, Grand Canyon National Park ~ NPS photo

The research led the study’s authors to recommend a continuation of the policy transition from fire suppression to restoration – through the usage of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire. The maximum benefits a prescribed fire program can yield, however, are dependent on whether the practice becomes a sustained tradition. If sustained, prescribed burning could have an ongoing protective effect on nearly 4,000 square miles of California’s forests.

Getting to that point would require many more resources. As pointed out in Fire Scientist Crystal Kolden’s 2018 research, management practices in the West have still failed to wholeheartedly adopt and increase prescribed burning despite calls from scientists and policy experts, including the 30-year-old call from Koehler.

The result is the continual compounding
of the ongoing fire deficit.

“Federal funding for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction activities has been drastically depleted over the past two decades as large wildfires force federal agencies to expend allocated funds on suppression rather than prevention,” said Kolden.

She also gave a well-deserved shoutout to fire managers in the Southeast U.S., crediting them with accomplishing double the number of prescribed burns compared with the entire rest of the U.S. between 1998 and 2018. “This may be one of many reasons the Southeastern states have experienced far fewer wildfire disasters relative to the Western U.S. in recent years,” Kolden said.

Even as the USFS and other federal agencies continue to tout prescribed burns in their national strategies, it won’t be until the agencies collectively create policy changes and budgetary allocations sufficient that prescribed burning is used at a scale in which it can create meaningful prevention. Without those meaningful changes, the wealth of prescribed burn research clearly shows that more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable.

Native Americans prescribed fire prevention

Utah wins Bronze Smokey for prevention

Utah burned much more than usual in 2020 and, more than ever before, humans were to blame. The state had its worst year of human-caused wildfires on record that year, when 1,500 wildfires burned more than 100,000 acres of land across the state. Officials say 1,143 of those fires were caused by humans, beating the state’s previous single-year record by more than 250.

Utah launched a statewide campaign called “Fire Sense” to reduce human-caused wildfires, and it was incredibly effective. The state marked a 60 percent reduction in human-caused wildfires in the two years following the start of the program. In 2023 that number has gone down even more, with only 295 of Utah’s 772 wildfires recorded as human-caused as of October 6.

The program was recently awarded a Bronze Smokey, which is a national award for statewide service, for its by-the-numbers success.

“This is a great honor for Fire Sense,” said Kayli Guild, the Fire Prevention and Communications Coordinator for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands (FFSL), after receiving the Bronze Smokey. “We launched this campaign to raise awareness surrounding the impact our behaviors as humans have on wildfire starts. Over the past two years, we have seen a drastic decrease in human-caused starts as we have seen Utahns implement Fire Sense.”

Fire Sense is basically a PSA package geared toward educating Utah’s residents about how they can help avoid starting wildfires throughout the state. All of the usual bases are covered, including telling people to put out their campfires, not drag chains, and not fire guns on hot and windy days. The execution of the project, however, seems to be what made it so effective.

“This strategy worked because Fire Sense is common sense!” according to FFSL . More details on the Fire Sense program are available from the utahfiresense.org website.

Smokey Award Levels:

Gold: This is the highest honor given to organizations or individuals for outstanding wildfire prevention service that is national in scope over at least a two-year period. A maximum of three Gold Smokey Bear awards may be given annually.

Silver: This is the highest honor given to organizations or individuals for outstanding wildfire prevention service that is regional (multistate) in scope over at least a two-year period. A maximum of five Silver Smokey Bear awards may be given annually.

Bronze: This is the highest honor given to organizations or individuals for outstanding wildfire prevention service that has impact within a state over at least a two-year period. A maximum of 10 Bronze Smokey Bear awards may be given annually.

Bronze Smokey Fire Sense prevention Utah

Biden Administration announces new community funding for prevention

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced on Sunday more than $21 million in new funding for wildfire risk reduction; she spoke during a press conference with Senator Jeff Merkley at the Oregon Department of Forestry Southwest District headquarters, according to a report by KEZI-TV News in Eugene, Oregon.

She said fire management agencies plan fuel management work on more than 170,000 acres in Oregon this year.

District Forester Mike Shaw said there’s good news with better snowpack this year. “I do project that we’re going to have another challenging fire season,” he said. “All hands on deck is the approach that we’re taking and all wildland fire agencies are working together.”

Senator Jeff Merkley, chairman of the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, joined Haaland and Shaw to emphasize their collaboration on wildfire prevention. “We’re really focusing on the front end of forest treatment and on the back end of having the resources to fight the fires,” Merkley said. “The key word here is collaboration.”

Aside from the millions in federal funding allotted from his bipartisan infrastructure law, Haaland said that President Biden is also supporting increased pay, better housing, and more full-time jobs for firefighters.

Vice President Kamala Harris joined other national leaders in the nation’s capitol to announce the new funding to help protect high-risk communities. “Our acres of burned land have doubled,” Harris said. “We need to change how we think about how we respond to fires. We need to prevent them, not just respond after they’ve started.”

KRDO News reported that $197 million in federal funding will be made available this year to 100 communities in 22 states and 7 Native American tribes. “There were 36 states and 45 tribes that applied for the funding,” Harris said. “This is the result of legislation I started years ago while I was in the Senate.”

She said she was motivated by recent destructive fires in her home state of California. “This will be the first of many grants,” she said. “We’re committing $1 billion over the next four years and $7 billion over the next ten years.”

community grants prevention

Community near Heppner, Oregon first in Morrow County to earn Firewise designation

A bolt of lightning struck a tree just outside Bruce Wilcox’s home in Morrow County, Oregon last year, sending shards of wood flying 40 yards away. “It didn’t start a fire,” he said. “It just hit that tree and went to ground. But we were lucky.” Lightning-ignited fires are common in north-central Oregon, and Wilcox lives about 16 miles south of Heppner — home to the nearest fire department. Wilcox is helping his community, known locally as Blake Ranch, become the county’s first to join Firewise USA. He told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the Firewise program could be the key to protecting nearby homes from the next big wildfire.

Firewise is sponsored by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) manages the program at the state level. Through training and local fire prevention projects, Firewise encourages property owners to take proactive measures to prevent fires from destroying their homes and businesses. Many of Oregon’s small and isolated communities have achieved Firewise designation.

Jessica Prakke with ODF said these sparsely populated communities are among the target areas for the state. “We’re definitely trying to reach those smaller communities that are in the wildland/urban interface, because they can be the most susceptible to wildfire.”

In Blake Ranch, Wilcox contacted ODF after he read about a community in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County that was participating. Since then, ODF has sent foresters to assess Blake Ranch properties for fire readiness, and some residents have taken a wildfire prevention class. Prakke said ODF doesn’t usually initiate the process of turning communities into Firewise sites, because the agency needs community buy-in to make the program work. Wilcox noted that some local residents are a little skeptical — they suspect the program might require them to remove trees they want to keep. But Wilcox thinks they’ll come around.

The Firewise program has an interactive map on the NFPA website with details about designated sites and their locations across the country, and it’s interesting to compare locations with known fire-danger areas. There’s a cluster of sites, for example, north of Paradise in northern California. One of the sites, Falcons Pointe Drive, is near Upper Bidwell Park in Chico. That community’s participation in the Firewise program began in September of 2022.

There are very few sites in Nevada and zero in North Dakota; about half of Colorado’s map is covered with little Firewise icons. While Oregon’s west side is not really known for severe wildfires, that side of the state surely proved the exception over the last few years, and it’s crowded with Firewise sites, while the east side of Oregon, no stranger to major fires, has only a few. Blake Ranch was just added to the list in December, and the numbers grow as people learn about neighborhoods and towns devastated by wildfires.

“The number of conversations I have had since Paradise has skyrocketed,” said Chris Chambers, Forest Division Chief in Ashland, Oregon. Residents and local officials in and around Ashland tend to be a little more fire-savvy than in many areas; they have a history with interface fires. Jefferson Public Radio reported, about a year after wildfire leveled the town of Paradise, that Chambers spoke to a throng of people at a sold-out screening of the documentary Fire In Paradise at a theater in downtown Ashland, just north of the California state line. Although the Camp Fire was more than 200 miles south, Chambers says it alarmed Ashland residents; it’s a small, woodsy town that, like Paradise, is tucked into forest.

“People have really become concerned,” Chambers said. “I just hope that translates into lasting awareness in the sense that people take responsibility for the condition of their property.”

Blake Ranch FireWise prevention

New fire prevention print ads

In addition to the two new Smokey Bear fire prevention videos, the Ad Council has created three new print ads featuring artwork made of the ashes of wildfires.

You can download higher resolution versions here.

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fire prevention prevention

USFS bans exploding targets in their Northern Region

The U.S. Forest Service has banned the use of exploding targets in their Northern Region, which includes all lands administered by the USFS in the states of Montana and North Dakota, and in parts of South Dakota and northern Idaho. The ban, signed last week, will be in effect for a year, until May 9, 2015. This is considered a stop-gap measure while a longer term prohibition is being considered that will be incorporated into Title 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations, part 261.

The decision by the Northern Region is in concert with other USFS areas that have banned the dangerous devices, including national forest system lands in the states of Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The announcement about the ban, issued by Jonathan L. Herrick, Special Agent in Charge and Faye L. Krueger, Regional Forester, included this statement:

The purpose of the order is to enhance public safety, and to protect our natural resources and property by restricting the use of explosives and exploding targets. The widening use of exploding targets on our National Forests and Grasslands has led to serious injuries, catastrophic wildfires, destruction of property and a significant loss and/or damage to our natural resources. This order provides authority for FS law enforcement officials on all Forests/Grasslands in Region 1 to enforce this restriction and to enhance our ability to protect our natural resources and the people who use them.

On April 20 the Bureau of Land Management issued a ban on exploding targets on BLM lands within the state of Idaho, to be effective between May 10 and October 20, 2014.

Exploding targets have become popular in the last two years with shooters who get a thrill from seeing the explosion when their bullet hits its mark. We have documented numerous wildfires that have been started by the exploding targets. They are sometimes called “binary exploding targets”, since they are completely inert until two powders are mixed by the target shooter. After they are combined, the compound is illegal to transport and is classified as an explosive by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and is subject to the regulatory requirements in 27 CFR, Part 555.

In June, 2013, a man attending a bachelor-bachelorette party in Minnesota was killed by an exploding target. After someone shot the device, shrapnel struck 47-year-old Jeffery Taylor in the abdomen causing his death.

We have written about exploding targets numerous times, and applaud this decision by the USFS Northern Region. Hopefully the Regional Foresters in California, and Regions 4, 8, and 9 have the courage to take the same step. (See the map below to decode the region numbers.)

Thanks and a hat tip go out to Steve and Chuck.

exploding targets prevention

Success story in the Klamath Mountains

Facnetwork.org has an interesting article about how residents in the northern California community of Butler successfully prepared for and responded to the Butler Fire, part of the Orleans Complex, in August of 2013.

…A significant investment in fire prevention work from the community, the US Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service during and after these fire events allowed firefighters to safely defend the 10 structures there during the Butler Fire.

Butler folks had faced this event before and were prepared, with the help of the local community and firefighters, to defend their homes once again. An old ditch line constructed by miners in the 1800’s was identified after the 2008 fires as the place to hold future fires upslope of the homes. Thirteen acres of prescribed burns had been conducted by the Orleans Somes Bar Fire Safe Council between this ditch and the homes below, since 2008, and in the past two years, the Salmon River Fire Safe Council had brushed more than 10 acres along the ditch line.

Burnouts on the western flank of the 2013 Salmon River Complex in Murderer’s Gulch caused thousands of acres of plantations to burn at high intensity.

As the fire approached, 40-plus community members who had just mobilized to help save the town of Orleans from another arson fire, came up to see how they could pitch in. While some crews prepared the homes for fire, others established perimeter firelines and brushed along the main water line. Still others organized an emergency evacuation plan for volunteers. Some people brought food, and supplies like brass fittings to get hydrants online. And Rebecca Lawrence, a Facebook pro, whipped up the Salmon River and Orleans Complexities Open Group that allowed people to communicate and organize even when phones were out and roads were closed. When the agency hotshot crews showed up a couple days later, they were grateful for the prep work already accomplished that allowed them to focus on bringing the fire safely past the homes with minimal use of burnouts…

Below is a map that we published in an August 4, 2013 article about the Orleans and Salmon River Complexes of fires in northern California. The Butler Fire was in the eastern section of the Orleans Complex, 7 miles east of Orleans and about 49 miles northeast of Eureka.

3-D Map of Salmon River and Orleans Complexes of fires August 3, 2013 (click to enlarge)

California prevention