Note: In addition to what is written below, I’ve written two blog posts regarding the Almeda fire, which are here and here. I am honored to serve as the Council Liaison to the Wildfire Safety Commission where much good work has been done to reduce our wildfire risk.

What We Need: Hardening structures has been shown to be the most effective way to protect homes when wildfire comes to town. We must expand the good work being done at the City to help residents do the work necessary to prevent their homes from igniting during a wildfire and ensure that Ashland Fire & Rescue has enough funding to do what we need them to do.

What we know from our experience in southern Oregon is that in the right conditions (high heat, dry landscape, windy) anything will burn - and it will burn fast. We also know that the climate crisis will continue to drive extreme fire weather and we must scale up efforts to protect our community from the increasing risk of wildfire.

This article by the Union of Concerned Scientists offers a good overview of climate change and wildfire: https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/impacts/global-warming-and-wildfire.html#.W6yBymhKiyI

Ashland has invested significantly in reducing wildfire risk to the community, and we should be proud of that foresight and effort. The Ashland Forest Resiliency Project has thinned trees and reintroduced fire through prescribed burning in Ashland’s wildland urban interface, which makes it easier to get a fire under control.

As residents, we need to remember that it is not possible to fireproof a forested watershed. That means we share personal responsibility to protect our community. The Ashland Fire Department is doing a great job helping to prepare Ashland to deal with wildfire through the FireWise program and recently received a $3 million grant to help 1,000 of the highest risk homes in Ashland reduce that risk.

The City of Ashland passed ordinances to include the whole community in a single fire-risk zone, and address building materials and flammable vegetation in new construction and major remodels/additions.

Prior to serving on Council, I was a member of the Wildfire Mitigation Commission, which is doing great work to help individuals and the City reduce wildfire risk. I now serve as Council Liaison to that commission and continue to be very impressed with the work City staff and the Commission are doing to protect all of us. Additional efforts that have been completed by the City of Ashland or are underway:

The City developed a volunteer program that trains wildfire inspectors to offer free wildfire risk assessments to Ashland resident and launched an effort in partnership with local realtors to engage realtors and help them understand and communicate fire risk to both buyers and sellers as a means of raising awareness of the risk of wildfire. Training programs and materials have been developed and the programs are seeing positive results.

The City was able to work with Oregon Department of Transportation to build an emergency on-ramp to I-5 if needed during an evacuation. It has also completed an Evacuation Traffic Study, divided the City into 10 evacuation zones, and conducted public education programs so that Ashlanders will Know Their Zone.

The Wildfire Safety Campaign celebrated its fourth year this past spring and our staff continues to work to secure grants to help expand our staffing and provide for additional needs. Recent budget adjustments have allowed us to create a position at the City for an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) manager who will be responsible for emergency management planning and running the EOC during emergencies. We now also have a dedicated communications person on staff at the City who will help with communications during emergencies as well as with day-to-day community engagement.

Just before the pandemic, the City called on a number of residents to participate in an evacuation drill to test our local processes and command structures. It was a great learning experience and City staff are incorporating that learning into our formal plans. Ongoing work is needed, but we are making progress.

The City also assisted the Ashland Chamber of Commerce in developing its Emergency Preparedness and Resilience Toolkit. I was pleased to serve on the Advisory Committee that helped the Chamber develop this important resource for local businesses.

Going forward, we need to build on all of this good work through programs that educate the community and assist landowners in addressing fire risk on their property so that we have the best chance of stopping a wildfire that gets into town before it destroys homes and businesses.

We need to remember that large fires can shoot embers out several miles ahead of the fire line. Our dedicated local fire fighters, who we can count on to be at our homes in regular situations within a matter of a few minutes, may not be able to respond to our calls for help.

Therefore, we must prepare ourselves, our neighborhoods, businesses, and city operations for the very real likelihood that wildfire will come to our community. Doing this preparation work is how we build community resilience to this very real threat. Re-doubling our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution is how we limit the eventual extent of climate change, which is the primary force behind the increasing threat of wildfire in Ashland.