Risk Assessment and Analysis

This report focuses on a critical aspect of working towards community fire adaptation: analyzing effective land use policy and regulatory solutions in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The WUI is any area where the built and natural environments create a set of conditions that allow for the ignition and continued spread of wildfire.

Wildfire is an annual threat for many rural communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. In some severe events, evacuation is one potential course of action to gain safety from an advancing wildfire.

Supporting wildfire management activities is frequently identified as a benefit of forestroads. As such, there is a growing body of research into forest road planning, construction, andmaintenance to improve fire surveillance, prevention, access, and control operations.

Optimized wildfire risk reduction strategies are generally not resilient in the event of unanticipated, or very rare events, presenting a hazard in risk assessments which otherwise rely on actuarial, mean-based statistics to characterize risk.

Large and severe wildfires are an observable consequence of an increasingly arid American West. There is increasing consensus that human communities, land managers, and fire managers need to adapt and learn to live with wildfires.

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments.

Because wildfires don’t stop at ownership boundaries, managers from governmental and nongovernmental organizations in Northern Colorado are taking steps to pro-actively “co-manage” wildfire risk through the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative (NCFC).

Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leading some fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solely on the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI)communities.

The global COVID-19 pandemic will pose unique challenges to the management of wildlandfire in 2020. Fire camps may provide an ideal setting for the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virusthat causes COVID-19. However, intervention strategies can help minimize disease spread andreduce the risk to the firefighting community.

Our results suggest that weather is a primary driver of resource orders over the course of extended attack efforts on large fires. Incident Management Teams (IMTs) synthesize information about weather, fuels, and order resources based on expected fire growth rather than simply reacting to observed fire growth.