More Communities using Community Wildfire Protection Plans to Prepare for Fire

A fire chief once told me that most wildfire prevention plans end up as a pile of papers on a shelf, despite the best intentions of all involved. So last year, when I helped Missoula County in western Montana build a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP), I began thinking about the CWPP movement sweeping the United States. Would it really help us better protect structures and people from wildland fires when they arrive in our backyards?

What Is a CWPP?
Born through the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) of 2003, the CWPP process is nurtured by the National Fire Plan and its grant monies, which are funneled to community entities and fire districts in at-risk-from-wildfire communities in the wildland/urban interface (WUI).

In addition to identifying the specific boundaries of the local WUI (according to the HFRA and subsequent CWPP guidelines), community groups must also meet three standards: 1) consultation with interested parties and the federal agencies managing land in the vicinity of the at-risk community; 2) identification and prioritization of areas for hazardous fuel-reduction treatments and recommendations for the types and methods of treatment on federal and non-federal land that will protect one or more at-risk communities and essential infrastructure; and 3) recommendation of measures to reduce structural ignitability. Many CWPPs developed today also contain communication and evacuation plans and shelter routes, among other documents.

According to Don Artley, chair of the National Association of State Foresters (NASF) and a member of a NASF ad-hoc committee that developed the national guidelines for community wildfire risk assessment, 46 states have identified some 30,000 at-risk communities in the WUI. As of March 2006, only about 2,700 of these communities were covered by a CWPP. Local entities have created some 650 plans (representing single communities to entire counties), with more than half in the 17 western states.

Additionally, there are many communities at risk (CAR) with fire plans pre-dating the HRFA; an unknown number of those are being modified to meet CWPP criteria, Artley says. The NASF is currently conducting an informal survey of CWPP progress; results are slated for release in the December HFRA newsletter.

A wildfire burns near a home on July 11 in Pioneertown, Calif. AP PHOTO/DESERT SUN, RAMON MENA OWENS

Community Control
Kelly Hawk, a community protection specialist for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), says the process of developing a CWPP puts communities back in the driver’s seat. “[Community members] don’t have control over a fire that starts 10 miles away. You don’t have control over the embers generated,” she says. “You do have control over, more or less, whether your home is combustible. But if the community isn’t maintained in a Firewise manner, the odds are against you. [The] community really is part of the puzzle.”

However, the first step for any community is writing the CWPP. Artley says the key is simplicity; in fact, he has told community groups that a CWPP could be written on a napkin. “Keep it simple so you can implement [your plan],” he explains. “There’s a perception that if you want to compete, you must write the most sophisticated, thorough and complete plan … This is really more about self-sufficiency.”

Artley says that implementation of these plans, rather than their criteria, is the primary driver of this process. “After we developed the CAR list, we next had to figure out what we needed to do to reduce that risk in a broad sense,” he says. “The Healthy Forest Restoration Act, in many ways, was a direct result of that concern about how do we make progress?”

One answer was to provide incentives for fuels-reduction work on private lands. Specifically, communities that build CWPPs are prioritized for federal grants that can be used to create defensible space around individual homes and fuel breaks around subdivisions, travel corridors and other critical infrastructure. Additionally, if a nearby community has identified a landscape as a high priority for fuels reduction, this can streamline the requirements of the National Environmental Protection Act. Essentially, land-management agencies can offer one “preferred alternative” for public consideration if it’s based on the findings and the treatment directions spelled out in the local CWPP. Here in Montana, the first test of this process is now in litigation due to concerns about soil and old-growth degradation.

Matthew Koehler, director of the Missoula-based WildWest Institute, and a litigant in the case, explains that he supports the CWPP concept and logging around communities, but charges that the current process creates plans so vague that they can be co-opted by forest managers who “want to get the cut out” more than reduce the probability of catastrophic fire to nearby communities. “We’d like to see the responsibility start with the homeowner and the neighborhood associations and developers building more homes and communities in the WUI,” he says. “Once you go out from [the home], you get into the local officials, the local emergency responders and the city officials, and then it goes out to the county officials. Really, it’s at the end of [this concentric circle], that we have the federal land-management agencies. It makes zero sense to us to do logging 2 to 3 miles away from the community and, meanwhile, have the homeowners doing nothing, nothing being done adjacent to the home and think the problem is solved.”

A witness before the U.S. Senate this past August about fire planning, Koehler also questions the flexibility in defining the interface. “By comparison, state by state, for better or worse, there doesn’t seem to be a uniform way to develop these plans,” he says.

“We see some CWPPs extending 4 miles from the nearest home and community, and when something like that happens, you’re looking at rural parts of the West having a wildland/urban interface area essentially taking up half a million to a million acres.” As such, Koehler advocates limiting the boundary to 400 meters from structures, given the time and expense to treat even that much landscape.

In Grant Creek, a rapidly growing wildland/urban interface area in Missoula County, an increasing number of homes are being built on the hills, within reach of wildfire. PHOTO GLENDA WALLACE

Fuel-reduction work initiated by the Missoula County Fire Protection Association helped reduce the area's wildfire risk. PHOTO GLENDA WALLACE

Landscape-Scale Treatment
Paula Rosenthal, fire prevention and national fire plan supervisor for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, describes the process of creating a CWPP as a balancing act between encouraging homeowners to protect their property and encouraging the larger community to protect its valuable resources. She explains that the collaborative process considers a number of factors, including local hazards, history and resources at risk. “Reducing structural ignitability doesn’t equal community fire protection. Just because you’ve reduced the chance of flames and embers on an individual property, that’s good news for the homeowner, but in itself, it’s a compromise.” She continues, “What if the watershed is burned? That affects a lot more people. It’s about compromise. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number. A lot of times landscape-scale treatment, a fuel break for homes, is best for the community. It’s proven time and time again: When wildfire gets to a treated area, fire behavior is abated. Appropriate forest management does make sense.”

Hawk also comments on the importance of communities looking at the CWPP process on a larger scale, especially in the West. “A lot of western communities depend on tourism. [They depend] on ski areas or hunting and fishing areas. Fires are disastrous for the local economy,” she says. “The CWPP process gives [communities] a chance to steer their destiny. What it really comes down to is that we at the BLM, Department of the Interior, are looking to assist communities and empower them through technical and financial assistance. So we sit down with our cooperators and come up with a plan that allows [communities] to be more self-sufficient, to better protect themselves against fire.”

CWPPs in Action
Flagstaff (Ariz.) Fuel Management Officer Paul Summerfelt praises the CWPP process for helping his fire district make, and track, fuel-mitigation progress. “The CWPP process is very beneficial in not only having a constructive dialogue with agencies and your partners on needs for wildfire reduction, but it also [is helping] focus attention on areas where that work is needed,” he says. “Our process here went for 8 months and involved a large outreach effort throughout the community.” 

According to the Council of Western State Foresters’ (CWSF) March 2006 report, “Community Wildfire Protection Planning in the West,” Nevada is the only state with its original CARs covered by CWPPs. Nevada Division of Forestry (NDF) Community Protection Specialist Kacey KC says the state’s decision to commission one local contractor to write CWPPs for each of its 17 counties has given it a uniform statewide assessment, strong financial support and community buy-in, particularly for large mitigation projects that cross ownership boundaries. “As communities are treated, and their status changes from Extreme or High to Moderate—also as new communities are being built in the [interface]—it’s important that all involved in this process, our government and non-profit partners and homeowners, be active in updating these working documents,” she says. “We’ve got a statewide Fuels Committee, with all agencies represented; our hope is to form local sub-groups for our updates.”

The Granite County Conservation District partnered with the Missoula Ranger District, the Missoula Rural Fire District and local non-profit groups to create Firewise landscaping around the Rock Creek drainage, a growing interface area about 20 minutes east of Missoula. PHOTO COURTESY USFS

Florence (Mont.) Rural Fire District and local homeowners completed a hazardous fuel-reduction project funded by National Fire Plan grants. PHOTO COURTESY FLORENCE RURAL FIRE DISTRICT

CWPP Challenges
Although national guidelines clearly give authority to community leaders, Koehler worries about the potential influence of federal and state players. “You need to have true collaboration,” he says. “Of course, [this] not only involves fire chiefs and emergency services and local government officials, but we would like to see neighborhood councils involved. We [have] to get scientists and researchers involved in [creating] these CWPPs that are used to justify management activities across millions of acres of national forest.
We also need to have the conservation community at the table.”

But getting communities to actively participate alongside federal and state players isn’t an easy task. In its March 2006 report, the CWSF says that many respondents have found it “very difficult to get communities to take the lead, so the state ends up with that role.” The report notes that there’s “ultimately … little value in developing a national [CAR] list, as the geographic and socio-political variables differ so vastly in each state.” Further, it mentions problems “measuring increases in community safety because there’s not a one-to-one ratio of plans to communities protected.” For example, there are 11 CWPPs in Arizona covering 58 CARs, while there are nine CWPPs covering nine CARs in Washington. The report also points out that “individual communities have tremendous variability in development and implementation capacity, including level of citizen skill and awareness … and access to technology.”

Availability of finances is another challenge, the report finds. Artley admits NFP funding today is flat, and even though the HFRA directs that no less than 50 percent of the federal fuels-reduction funds be spent in the interface, he says, “there’s never really been any funding to implement [CWPPs], per se.” Instead, he views CWPPs as helping “identify fuels treatment [needs] on federal ground, for which there is fuels money available.” This explains why CWPP development is slower in the South and Northeast, where there are fewer federal grounds. 

In these areas, many communities do embrace the Firewise Communities/USA program. Launched in 2003 through a long-standing partnership of federal agencies and national organizations, the program lists 166 sites in 33 states. Communities range in size from subdivisions to townships. Further, the FireSafe Council program—borne from the ashes of the 1991 Oakland Hills fires—also prepares American communities for wildfire.

Hawk says she uses these non-profit groups to fund projects on non-federal ground. “When we look at a CWPP project or equivalent, we can say this project came from a plan where there was some thought and coordination and consideration for priorities within the community,” she says. “In areas where private and public lands meet, we get a lot of benefit for efficiently doing a [joint] project. It’s a great way to prioritize and make sense of multiple hazards and resources at risk.”

Hawk and Rosenthal, like many of their colleagues, admit a preference for “larger-scale” umbrella documents, as long as they are more detailed where appropriate. Faced with receiving hundreds of CWPPs during Montana’s first tier of planning, Rosenthal says she liked the idea of reviewing only 65 county-level documents. “With an umbrella plan, we can drill down to the community or even the subdivision level,” she explains. “They come up under the county plans, and that’s where the real challenge is.”

She continues: “Take a county like Yellowstone. There are a lot of moving parts, getting down to the city of Billings or the community of Lockwood. There are lots of ownership layers the further down you go, more non-traditional people. You may not think of [a riding group such as the] Backcountry Horsemen at the county level, yet they have a vested interest in how adjacent areas are managed by our partners. They come out [to the local meetings] when they make these connections.”
 
Making Progress
Forging community connections may be what the CWPP creation process is doing best. According to the CWSF’s report, “Despite the challenges … the West is clearly moving toward increased community protection.” In 1995, when the Federal Wildland Fire Policy was launched—with its goal of recognizing the value of protecting natural resources as much as the more politically loaded nearby rural/urban sites—community fire chiefs feared they were “on their own” to fight and pay for wildland fires at their borders. Over the last decade, this has largely proven unfounded. Instead, public lands managers have formed even stronger partnerships with community leaders/responders. And in many cases, this is allowing them to make an increasing difference in wildfire risk ratings. By anyone’s measure, that’s more than a pile of papers.

Glenda Wallace is a writer/editor and Firewise communications specialist based in Missoula, Mont. With a bachelor’s degree in mass media and a master’s degree in writing, she has spent more than a dozen years working with local, state and federal agencies and other cooperators engaged in community fire preparation and awareness. A creator of the Missoula County CWPP in 2005, Wallace also served as editor of HOME & Fire magazine from 2003–-2005 and is a regular contributor to the Firewise Newsletter, News & Notes, among other publications.