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Posts Tagged: fire management
Study: Regional approach to wildfire more comprehensive, equitable
Pilot program in Santa Barbara County shows promise for bolstering resilience
After a rash of wildfires across Southern California in 2003, many counties, cities and neighborhoods adopted Community Wildfire Protection Plans to improve their preparedness and fire response. But Rob Hazard, fire marshal for Santa Barbara County, has noticed that CWPPs and resources are unevenly distributed across areas at high risk of wildfire.
“Communities that are more affluent, more white, they are the ones that end up getting the grants, they're the ones that end up getting the projects to mitigate risks,” Hazard said, “whereas more disadvantaged communities…often don't have the organization to make that happen, or maybe it's not the most pressing issue of the moment.”
Mapping those underserved communities – and ensuring they have a more equitable share of attention – are some of the goals of a new, more comprehensive approach to wildfire, currently being piloted in Santa Barbara County. This “Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program” aims to fill in many of the gaps left by CWPPs, which tend to have a more narrow focus on fuel reductions for a specific locality.
“They certainly have their role and benefits, but CWPPs are pretty limited in scope,” said Max Moritz, University of California Cooperative Extension's statewide wildfire specialist. “They're really focused on modeling and prioritizing fuel breaks, and they leave all of these other aspects of our fire problem – our vulnerabilities, our potential losses – unaddressed.”
Moritz is the lead author of a recently published research article that describes the Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program's three key areas (or “domains”) for wildfire mitigation work: the built environment (pinpointing and addressing needs in buildings/infrastructure), landscape (creating buffers through land use policies and management choices), and community (educating the public on home hardening and other issues).
“It's this holistic approach that combines all of these elements, and each one of those elements speak to each other – they can't be independent,” said Hazard, a study co-author.
Seeking a better way
After the Thomas Fire devastated the region in 2017-18 and triggered deadly mudslides in Montecito, Moritz – an adjunct professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management – sought more encompassing risk mapping and mitigation solutions that could complement CWPP efforts.
He got together with Hazard, who began his career as a “hotshot crew” firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service and has been with Santa Barbara County Fire Department for nearly 25 years.
“Both of us believe: Yes, it is home hardening – but it's also defensible space, but it's also some fuel treatments, but it's also some prescribed fire, but it's also some agricultural belt (to create a buffer),” said Hazard. “We looked at it objectively, and in every community in Santa Barbara County there's something that either works – or doesn't.”
By the end of the pilot program along the south coast of Santa Barbara County, the team hopes to have refined a “decision support system” that other communities across the state – and perhaps around the globe – could use. The framework would incorporate their localized risk assessment data and conditions to help generate lists of prioritized projects across the three “domains” of wildfire mitigation.
The ability to adapt to new data and continual changes in ecosystems, communities and climate is another advantage of the RWMP. Unlike a “plan” that tends to be a one-off with a defined start and end date, this wildfire mitigation “program” is designed to pivot and evolve as conditions change. The goal is to motivate and guide implementation of risk mitigation activities in each domain.
“The program is a living program, so it's not going to be some PDF that sits on a server somewhere,” Hazard said.
One of the early lessons from the RWMP pilot has been that – aside from funding – a crucial factor in maintaining the momentum of a wildfire mitigation program is the presence of a dedicated group of community members.
“In each community, we'll need a group that is ready to take this on and spearhead it and run with it,” Moritz said. “In many communities, that will probably be the Fire Safe Council.”
Building ‘Firewise' communities
Local Fire Safe Councils are “grassroots, community-led organizations that mobilize residents to protect their homes, communities and environments from catastrophic wildfire,” according to the California Fire Safe Council.
And while Moritz, Hazard and other experts serve on the volunteer Board of Directors for Santa Barbara County Fire Safe Council, they soon realized that they needed to hire staff to perform the “community domain” work of educating and reaching out to residents.
A $5 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for the RWMP project helped build the capacity of the council, which hired its first staff member, Anne-Marie Parkinson, last fall.
“A lot of people underestimate how important it is to have community activists or leaders who take on the role and responsibility of organizing people, being the point of contact, rallying people to do activities or work days,” said Parkinson, a graduate of UCSB's Bren School and a co-author of the RWMP study.
Parkinson has been working to get communities recognized by Firewise USA, a program of the National Fire Protection Association to organize residents in bolstering wildfire preparedness and reducing risk.
Although she has been encouraged by the awareness and activism among the community members she has met, Parkinson also hears from residents about the need for more resilient power and communications networks – concerns that could be better addressed by consolidating those requests with a regional approach.
“As we work with more and more communities, you can start to map which communities want better telecommunications, and which communities would benefit from a fuel break around them, and then we could write a grant that benefits five communities, instead of one small grant for one community,” Parkinson said.
Moving forward
There are many communities in fire-prone environments that are in need of help, and climate change makes their situation increasingly urgent, Moritz said, and a new and comprehensive framework – the RWMP – now exists for assessing and mitigating multiple risks.
“Every community has its own unique fire hazards and its own unique spatial layout of neighborhoods and vulnerabilities inherent to those neighborhoods,” he said. “But despite the uniqueness of each community and each region, I'm hoping this will provide a somewhat systematic way to approach making progress and mitigating a whole suite of risks.”
Other authors of the article are Kelly Johnston, Molly Mowery and Katie Oran of the Community Wildfire Planning Center; Marc Mayes of Spatial Informatics Group-Natural Assets Lab and UC Santa Barbara Earth Research Institute; Graham Wesolowski of Spatial Informatics Group-Natural Assets Lab; and David Schmidt of Spatial Informatics Group. The article is published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.848254/full.
People interested in learning more about the RWMP approach are encouraged to contact Graham Wesolowski at gwesolowski@sig-nal.org or Max Moritz at mmoritz@bren.ucsb.edu.
Women learn to burn and lead in fire management in Northern California Oct. 19-28
Workshop aims to spark women's ambition to become leaders in fire management
Shortly after her son was born, Jeanne Pincha-Tulley was promoted to fire chief of a national forest. For the first six months, she brought the baby to work.
“Most of my colleagues were men between 40 and 50. I was 31,” recalled Pincha-Tulley, who was the first woman to achieve the rank of U.S. Forest Service fire chief in California. “My second son was 6 weeks old and nursing. They had no idea what to do. They absolutely freaked out.”
While great efforts are being made to recruit women into fire management, women hold only 10 percent of wildland fire positions and 7 percent of leadership roles. A new training focuses on grooming women to lead in fire management.
To encourage to women build stronger networks and pursue leadership roles in fire management, Pincha-Tulley, who retired in 2015 after 36 years with the U.S. Forest Service, will be speaking from experience on gender roles at the Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (WTREX) in Northern California. She will also serve as deputy incident commander for the event.
WHO: Participants from 12 states and four countries, including 38 women and six men, who work for federal and state agencies, non-governmental organizations, tribes and universities. Organizers include Pincha-Tulley, Lenya Quinn-Davidson, UC Cooperative Extension wildland fire advisor and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council; and Amanda Stamper, The Nature Conservancy fire management officer in Oregon, among others. Guest speakers include Sarah McCaffrey, USDA Forest Service research social scientist; Johnny Stowe, forester/biologist/yoga teacher/fire manager of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; Gwen Sanchez, deputy fire chief for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, and many more.
WHAT: WTREX participants will serve in qualified and trainee firefighting positions to implement prescribed burns throughout the region. They will complete pre- and post-fire monitoring, train with equipment, practice fireline leadership skills and learn about local fire ecology and fire management.
WHERE: The training will take place in Trinity and Shasta counties. Sites include open prairies, oak woodlands, mixed-conifer forests and chaparral. Field trips will be made to areas burned in recent wildfires and to prescribed fire and fuels treatment project sites.
WHEN: Oct. 19-28, beginning in Hayfork, ending in Redding. Burning and other outdoor activities will depend on the weather.
DETAILS: The 12-day hands-on prescribed fire training, modeled after prescribed fire training events that take place across the country, will include beginners to seasoned professionals. The difference is that most of the participants are women.
“I'm excited for this event because it will transcend the usual TREX emphasis on cooperative burning and learning,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, UC Cooperative Extension wildland fire advisor, who is part of the team organizing the event. “It will explicitly recognize and reinforce the importance of female perspective and leadership in fire management, and provide a supportive environment for women and men to understand and elevate the need for diversity in fire management—not only in numbers, but also in approach.”
Based at the Tahoe National Forest, Pincha-Tulley oversaw 1.6 million acres, including fire suppression, prescribed fire and aviation operations.
As the only woman among the 17 national Incident Commanders, Pincha-Tulley looked for allies and mentors. In 2005, the year she was promoted to Type 1 Incident Commander, she led her team to Mississippi to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She was essentially invisible to the Air Force generals and Navy admirals until she put general stars on her uniform. A NASA director, a man, coached her, saying, “Are you going to let them take over the meeting? You're their peer, make yourself one.” He proceeded to mentor her, based on NASA's training for women in management.
“When you look for those people who can help, you begin to attract them,” Pincha-Tulley said. One of the primary goals of the Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange is to connect women who work in fire, providing them with new networking and mentoring opportunities.
WTREX is co-hosted by eight primary partners as well as additional collaborators. These include the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, the Fire Learning Network, the Cultural Fire Management Council, the Watershed Research and Training Center, the Bureau of Land Management, the USDA Forest Service, the California Fire Science Consortium, University of California Cooperative Extension, and other collaborators.
WTREX is supported by Promoting Ecosystem Resiliency through Collaboration: Landscapes, Learning and Restoration, a cooperative agreement between The Nature Conservancy, USDA Forest Service and agencies of the Department of the Interior.
