Community Wildfire Protection Plans should be clear and actionable. The Ember Alliance strives to create CWPPs that everyone from career firefighters to new homeowners to HOA presidents can read and know what their next action step is.
It’s not a simple task; people from all backgrounds have different relationships with wildfire. We must balance the urgency of starting to take action to protect lives and property for the next wildfire season with the endurance of wildfire adaptation as a lifelong process, not an outcome. To add to that, everyone is managing stressors in their own lives, and adding local wildfire mitigation can seem overwhelming in the face of problems such as pandemics, social injustice, and other effects of climate change.
Getting people to take action starts by listening to the community. Everyone in the has their own perspective on needs and barriers to mitigation, and our first goal during a CWPP is to understand what those are. By combining this community input with scientific fire behavior modeling, we can outline the next steps for a community to take in the first five years to address these needs.
Glacier View Fire Protection District is a remote community in the Poudre canyon in northern Colorado. They are no stranger to the devastating effects of wildfire after more than 50 houses burned down in the 2012 High Park Fire. TEA worked with GVFPD over the past year to write a CWPP and are proud to share that it was signed and completed this month! Not only that, but the community has already begun implementation. One HOA has initiated overdue slash removal and are planning for long-term solutions for resident slash. Another HOA has created a committee to work on roadway mitigation this summer and build relationships to increase emergency access. These communities are successfully applying for funding and eager to see results.
Individual landowners are taking part as well – resident Henry Hudson attended a community meeting about the CWPP results and discovered that his whole neighborhood needed mitigation work. He helped form a loose knit group of neighbors that were ready to take action (affectionately called the Lickety Splitters) who have cleared at least 46 pickup truck loads of standing dead and down trees in their area already and turned it into wood for locals to use as firewood. Another goal they have this year is to start clearing evacuation routes in their community.
While the entire process of becoming a fire adapted community can be daunting for any one person to look at, residents and community groups taking action like this is how it gets accomplished, and we are proud to work alongside communities like Glacier View FPD!