Community Fire Preparedness

FUSEE promotes a partnership between firefighters and the citizens they serve. Homeowners and residents must do their share to keep everyone prepared for fire.

Protecting Your Community

The majority of homeowner wildfire prevention education focuses on individuals, but wildfires pose risks to entire communities. It requires all hands working on all lands, working from homes outward, to be prepared for the fires we cannot prevent and cannot put out.

We need to think collectively to prepare for fire as a community. As the size of wildfires and the WUI continue to grow, open spaces like public parks and greenbelts can be managed as Community Fire Resilience Zones (CFRZs). These CFRZs offer defensible space for firefighters, but they can be managed for multiple community uses and also offer anchor points for reintroducing prescribed fire and cultural burning to nurture fire-adapted communities.

CFRZs can be a complex of meadows with scattered trees or woodlands with trails. They can offer multiple social and ecological benefits such as outdoor recreation, community gardens, habitat for fire-dependent native plants and animals, nature centers for education, Indigenous cultural burning and prescribed fire sites, as well as defensible space for firefighters, when needed.

FUSEE participates in prescribed fires with Eugene City Parks as part of their open space and habitat stewardship program. This work is funded by the BLM Community Assistance Program. It offers one example of a potential CFRZ that helps protect the city from wildfire while returning beneficial fire to steward the area’s native fire-dependent ecosystem. CFRZs can help protect communities from fire and restore ecosystem resilience with fire.

Protecting your home protects your neighbors

Your home is more likely to catch on fire if your neighbor’s home is on fire and vice versa.

Homes are much more likely to burn due to small flying embers than by contact with large flames. Embers may be burning leaves, twigs, pine needles, or shingles from wood shake roofs. Pushed by winds, burning embers often get inside attic vents – and ignite homes from the inside. They may smolder in sawdust, newspapers, or insulation for hours before starting to flame and spread. Sometimes those fires aren’t visible from outside until several hours after the main fire passes. If no one is present to put out these fires while they are small, the home will burn down. This is a major reason that so many homes are lost in wildfires.

National Fire Protection Association

What you can do:

Cover all vents with metal mesh with openings of 1/8” or less, to keep embers out. This is the single most important, and least expensive, way to save your home from burning due to intruding embers. Vents designed to trap embers are also available.
Keep your roof and gutters clear. Gutters and roof valleys full of dead leaves, needles, and twigs are major culprits for carrying fires to flammable sub-roofing materials. Keep your deck, and the area under it, free of all flammable materials at all times.

Keep the area within 5 feet of your foundation and walls free of flammable materials. This is crucial. Separate wooden fences from your house by wide metal gates: a burning fence can ignite your house. Large tree trunks close to your house are not a fire hazard – think how long it would take a green log to ignite in your fireplace! But the leaves, needles, and twigs that trees drop are a major problem. Keep your big trees, but prune branches back from your roof, and clean your roof and gutters frequently.
Understand the Home Ignition Zone (Learn more here).
If your budget allows, make fire resistant upgrades to your home. Read Building a Wildfire-Resistant Home: Codes and Costs.

(Source: Hard facts about how homes burn: How to save your house and your life by Julie Rogers, Fire-Adapted Communities Specialist)

Research on Home Ignitions and Risk to Communities

Jack Cohen, a retired Research Scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, spent his career learning about how and why homes burn and offering this education to communities, journalists, and policymakers. Below is a selection of relevant articles written by Cohen. Click to read more.

Community Wildfire Preparation with the Oregon Conservation Corps

Climate change is increasing wildfire activity around the world, resulting in more frequent and prolonged "Red Flag" weather conditions that fuel extreme fire behavior and large-scale wildfires. Focusing efforts on reducing ignitions within the Home Ignition Zone (or HIZ, an area approximately 100 feet radius around built structures) can prevent home losses and urban fire disasters even during extreme wildfire events. Wildfires are inevitable, but home fire losses are avoidable.

The following programs and projects in Oregon provide working models for other states and communities to replicate:

Oregon State Bill 762 (SB-762)

The 2020 Labor Day firestorms were a wake-up call that people living in rural homes and communities and suburban neighborhoods in western Oregon need to be prepared for wildfire. FUSEE played a major role in helping include creation of the Oregon Conservation Corps in passage of SB-762 that addressed several wildland fire issues. Out of this conservation corps, the Community Wildfire Protection Corps was established and funded with $11 million from the Oregon Department of Forestry for Fiscal Year 2022. This is a program that should be replicated in other states to help prepare rural residents to live safely with wildland fire. Learn more.

Oregon's Community Wildfire Protection Corps

The Community Wildfire Protection Corps (CWPC) is a youth workforce program dedicated to improving residential wildfire safety through developing Defensible Space and reducing combustibles within the Home Ignition Zone. The program has an equity screen that prioritizes youth crews working with underserved populations lacking capacity to do this work themselves (e.g. elderly, disabled, low-income, and communities of color). The CWPC is a workforce career development program that pays crewmembers a living wage, gives them job skills training and experience, and is fundamentally about nurturing the next generation of fire management workers. Learn more here and here.

Oregon Wildfire Workforce Corps

The CWPC went through several iterations as we promoted it through the legislative process. Here is an earlier flyer promoting creation of the "Wildfire Workforce Corps" that was the precursor to the CWPC. Learn more.

Northwest Youth Corps WUI Fuels Work

FUSEE partnered with the Northwest Youth Corps (NYC) to pass SB-762 that authorized and funded creation of the CWPC. NYC has a proven track record of doing ecological fuels management within the Wildland/Urban Interface of Eugene, Oregon. As an alternative high school for at-risk youth, NYC provides both job skills training and forestry education including fire ecology. They are a model educational institution for managing crews for the CWPC, nurturing the next generation of ecological fire and fuels management workers. Learn more.