Two weeks ago, The Mountain-Ear published an article detailing the community engagement efforts involved in the formation of Nederland’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). This coverage continues with a focus on the many collaborative partners involved in this plan, and what each, specifically, contributed.
The Town of Nederland, Boulder County, City of Boulder, Colorado and U.S. Forest Services, Nederland and Timberline Fire Protection Districts, United Power, The Ember Alliance, and Coalitions and Collaborations Inc. all offered their expertise and worked for two years to draft the CWPP.
The result is a 263-page document that encompasses everything, from broad but definitive information such as the tenets of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, to more localized topics, such as recommendations for each specific zone of the surrounding fire protection district on how to become fire-adapted.
“They are part of the healthy forest national cohesive strategy, not mandated, but encouraged, that counties put in place in fire protection districts,” Meg Halford, Wildfire Partners Forest and Grasslands Project Coordinator for Boulder County, told The Mountain-Ear, describing the purpose of a CWPP.
“They help us come together and partner with different agencies to do hazard assessment and really identify management recommendations and actions.” Halford has more than 25 years experience developing such plans on a county level, as well as consulting on the drafting of local plans.
Halford’s role offered a county perspective, which helped to create a framework on which the Nederland CWPP could be built.
“These plans, especially the county ones, always cover the entire county but with emphasis, in Boulder’s case, on everything from 36th and West,” Halford said. “But because of population growth and more events happening in urban areas, we didn’t just mention the East, we really integrated the East in our hazard assessment and really focused on them equally, and that’s normally not done.”
On the local level, Nederland Fire Protection District (NFPD) Fire Chief Charlie Schmidtmann and Fire Marshal Andrew Joslin offered their knowledge and concerns regarding the district, life safety during an emergency, and building defensible spaces.
“We’re there to bring up our concerns regarding every aspect of the CWPP,” Joslin told The Mountain-Ear, regarding the NFPD’s role in the development of the plan. “Whether it’s about how people are mitigating, how well are the homes being constructed, do we have access to water, our concerns for evacuations, and our concerns about access with fire apparatus.”
“The first thing is always life safety,” Schmidtmann explained to The Mountain-Ear about a firefighter’s priorities in a fire emergency. These are life safety first, then incident stabilization, and property preservation listed last.
“I’m living proof that you can most likely replace your stuff,” Schmidtmann said, having lost his home in the 2016 Cold Springs Fire. “We’re not going to jeopardize our volunteers’ lives, or anybody’s life, to protect somebody’s house if they can die doing it, it’s not worth it; but we’re going to do everything we can up to that point.”
“The CWPP takes some of this into consideration, like with ingress and egress routes and what work needs to be done for clearance along roadsides and major roadways.”
Specifically, insights from the NFPD inform the CWPP and the recommendations that are offered within. These are recommendations on how Nederland, and other areas in the surrounding district, can align with the tenets of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, which includes becoming a fire-adapted community, ensuring safe and effective wildfire response, and building resilient landscapes.
A fire-adapted community is defined as populations that are prepared to handle all aspects of a wildland fire, from home hardening, routine maintenance and safety measures, to building defensible spaces.
“We look at these big forest mitigation projects to figure out if we can get a large area where there are not a lot of trees that we can go for refuge in case we get in trouble,” Schmidtmann spoke of the strategy behind wildland mitigation.
“I think the Forest Service gets a really bad rap about the cutting and the prescribed burns, but they’re working on creating a firebreak all the way across this range, across the Peak to Peak.
“A firebreak gives us an area that we can burn off and take the fuels away, so when the big fire comes you can control it and it goes down,” Schmidtmann said.
Recommendations listed in the CWPP that focus on becoming a fire-adapted community include increasing fire ban signage, implementing a Community Leader Program, requiring fuel treatments along public roadways, and expanding the sort yard’s availability.
Safe and effective wildfire response is defined in the CWPP to mean “all jurisdictions participate in making and implementing safe, effective, efficient risk-based wildfire management decisions.”
To ensure a safe and effective wildfire response, the CWPP recommends mitigating evacuation routes, improving ingress and egress routes, offering training for local emergency response agencies, and funding a Type 3 engine for the Nederland Fire Protection District.
The recommendations for building the fire protection district into a resilient landscape include “cross-boundary forest management,” planning fuel treatments, and drafting a Nederland-specific recovery plan for how the Town should rebuild after a wildfire.
“We live in an area where historically there have been wildland fires,” Joslin said, explaining the intricacies of building resilient landscapes. “Lightning would strike and we would get big fires just rolling through, and it created a cyclical ecosystem.
“What we’ve done by residing here is that we’ve put homes in these places that are prone naturally to these events; and what we need to take into account is, if we’re not going to let forest fires roll through here and destroy all our property, then we need to manage the forest in a way as if those things were occurring naturally.”
The Ember Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping communities live with wildfire, provided their expertise in wildfire mitigation and prescribed fire work for Nederland’s CWPP.
“Our role in this project was facilitation and wildfire planning knowledge,” Kenzie Hartt, Project Manager for The Ember Alliance, told The Mountain-Ear. “We brought together the partners to share their knowledge and expertise, review the data that we were working with, and make decisions about priority treatment areas based on that data and community feedback.”
“Part of our work with CWPPs is helping map and interpret wildfire risk across a landscape,” Hartt said. “We used vegetation and fuels data from the Colorado State Forest Service’s Forest Atlas and combined it with local weather data and topographic data to model fire behavior.”
Hartt detailed the areas of focus in The Ember Alliance’s research, including the length of flame of a wildfire in the area, the burn probability of the general landscape, and which type of fires are most likely to occur. These include low surface fires, passive crown fires (burning in the tree canopies), and active crown fires (flames jumping from treetop to treetop).
“We also perform a few additional analyses to help understand the impact that the expected fire types could have,” Hartt continued. “We looked at where radiant heat from burning vegetation is likely to affect nearby homes, critical infrastructure, and where embers produced from crown fires might disperse and land on homes and infrastructure.
“We also looked at where radiant heat from burning vegetation could intersect with roads, and where on the roads there might be extra traffic during an evacuation.”
Much of the analysis that The Ember Alliance delves into is utilized to create fire behavior modeling, to show how different scenarios of wildland fire – the size, type, and direction the fire is moving in – impact the community. Hartt was sure to reiterate that such information is not ascertained from just one source.
“What’s just as important is making sure that what we see on the maps matches what we see on the ground, and that we are looking at the risk factors that computer data cannot give us,” Hartt explained how she visited Nederland’s neighborhoods in person with Fire Marshal Joslin, to note the differences in each area in order not to paint Nederland’s CWPP with too broad a stroke.
“For example, some plan units (neighborhoods) had better home hardening but the road might be inaccessible for a fire engine during a wildfire; whereas others had many evacuation routes and hydrants but almost none of the homes had defensible space.”
The Ember Alliance worked directly with the Boulder Watershed Collective, who are the overall facilitators of the drafting of Nederland’s CWPP, to form recommendations specific to each neighborhood and their priorities and proclivities. Though, as determined by Hartt, an underlying message remained true through assessing all of the Town’s distinct areas.
“Every neighborhood needs better home hardening and defensible space,” Hartt said. “And each neighborhood can benefit from a collaborative group that works together on their defensible space and road maintenance.”
The Mountain-Ear’s coverage of Nederland’s CWPP will continue with a deep dive into how the plan encourages programs about wildfire resilience that can be, and already have been, implemented, such as volunteer mitigation events, joint efforts between fire districts, and community education programs.
To view the full 263 page CWPP, go to: https://tinyurl.com/CWPP2024.
