Wildfire protection plan calls for individual responsibility, awareness
Martin Kidston
(Missoula Current) Amid a changing climate and a long history of suppression, living with wildfire will continue to be a constant companion in Missoula and the Rocky Mountain West.
Missoula County is updating its Community Wildfire Protection Plan in a push to prepare for the inevitability of wildfire. The effort, last completed in 2018, also comes with a message rooted in reality and individual responsibility – fire will always be present on the Western landscape, so deal with it.
“This is part of recalibrating expectations and rethinking mitigation from a full-on fire suppression model to how we can live with the reality that there has always been smoke and will always be smoke in the air,” said Missoula County Commission Dave Strohmaier. “It's how we live with the natural realities of living in the Rocky Mountain West.”
Community Wildfire Protection Plans were created under federal law to include several elements, from reducing fuels to creating safer homes. But with a changing climate, a growing population and more homes built in fire-prone areas, the risk of catastrophic wildfires continues to grow.
While some look to government for protection, local officials are also calling for individual responsibility and working to dampen expectations regarding wildfire response.
“If you chose to purchase a piece of property at a dead-end road out of in the sticks, that brings with it a host of challenges,” Strohmaier said. “From an infrastructure standpoint, we're not going to be building a bunch of ingress and egress for folks to use in the case of a fire. There's a matter of coming to peace with reality. Living in certain places will inherently bring more risk.”
In recent decades, the Northern Rockies has seen an increase in the number of fires, along with their severity and acres burned. The skies across western Montana were notoriously dark with smoke for nearly the entire summer of 2017 and other recent fires, including Rice Ridge near Seeley Lake, have prompted intense response.
But even so, county officials have seen expectations among some residents rise to unrealistic levels, including new residents in fire-prone towns tucked deep in the forest. One recent meeting with Condon residents drove the point home.
“It was surprising to me to find that most of the people there had only been there for three to five years,” said Commissioner Josh Slotnick. “They were recent migrants from major America metropolitan areas, where they had a high level of service expectation and hadn't been through anything like the summer of Rice Ridge.”
The county's wildfire protection plan gives residents advice in building a fire-adapted community and protecting one's home by creating a fire buffer, or the home ignition zone. Despite the advice, however, fire expects still see areas at risk.
The updated plan will continue to deliver that message, said Karen Hughes, director of county planning, development and sustainability.
“When people are thinking about wildfire they're often thinking about landscape, the Forest Service and different agencies,” said Hughes. “We intentionally report a lot of information about individual responsibility and what homeowners can do, and what the home ignition zone means, to start priming that conversation.”