NFPA Journal - September/October 2012 - (Page 64)

AFTER WALDO CANYON Home Safety (IBHS), and the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC)—toured the city in the wake of the Waldo Canyon Fire to determine the impact of mitigation and preparedness tactics initiated by the Colorado Springs Fire Department (CSFD) more than a decade ago. Officially launched in June through a partnership between NFPA and the USFS, FAC aims to turn entire communities—residences, businesses, infrastructure and utilities, and natural areas and open spaces—into wildfireresistant areas through a series of principles and practices developed by nine participating organizations. Participants in the July trip will release an investigation report on their Colorado Springs This Colorado Springs home survived a near miss from the Waldo Canyon Fire. The CSFD estimates that more than 35,000 homes in Colorado Springs are at risk from wildfire. devastation that occurred in Mountain Shadows. “Our loss was bad, and we can’t forget about the two lives lost,” says CSFD Fire Marshal Brett Lacey, who sits on the committees for NFPA 1031, Professional Qualifications for Fire Inspector and Plan Examiner, and NFPA 1730, Organization and Deployment of Code Enforcement, Plan Review, Fire Investigation, and “The Waldo Canyon Fire will provide us with takeaways we can share with other communities—what worked, what perhaps could have been approached differently, and what a long-term process it truly is to become fire-adapted.” findings, along with related videos, later this year. Molly Mowery, NFPA’s program manager for Fire Adapted Communities and International Outreach, says she hopes those findings will serve as lessons for the other 70,000 communities across the country that exist in wildfireprone areas. “The Waldo Canyon Fire will provide us with takeaways we can share with other communities—what worked, what perhaps could have been approached differently, and what a long-term process it truly is to become fire-adapted,” she says. By many measures, Colorado Springs epitomizes the idea of fire-adapted—13 communities within the city are recognized by NFPA’s Firewise® Communities Program, and other neighborhoods have embraced mitigation; efforts are underway to safeguard the city’s utilities from fire hazards; and mitigation saved an entire neighborhood from the Public Education Operations to the Public. “But our community needs to be proud [that] we saved 82 percent of the homes that were legitimately threatened by this wildfire event.” Getting Colorado Springs wildfireready, however, was a test in patience that spanned a decade. And as the Waldo Canyon Fire made evident, that effort is still very much a work in progress. Prep work In a darkened room in the CSFD headquarters, nearly a dozen FAC representatives are getting a crash course on the city’s decade-long wildfire mitigation effort. A video screen in front of them displays a topographic map in a tapestry of green, yellow, orange, and red. Christina Randall, wildfire mitigation administrator with the CSFD and one of only two full-time employees who handles the city’s mitigation work, explains to the group that the map identifies the more than 35,000 homes in Colorado Springs that are “at risk” to wildfire. The structures are colorcoded based on physical characteristics and surrounding topography: dark green is low risk, red is extreme risk, and the other colors are somewhere in between. This data collection, which was officially released in 2002 and has been updated periodically since then, was the first in a series of steps taken by CSFD to inform the community that wildfires are a real threat. At first, community response to this free information was mixed, Randall tells the group. “During initial community meetings [about the data], people would say, ‘I want my risk assessment to be password protected. I don’t want my neighbors spying on me,’” she says. “We said, ‘We want your neighbors to spy on you.’ They were taken aback, but the point is if you’re green and your neighbor is red, that influences your safety.” An additional push for more serious wildfire preparation came in the form of the nearby Hayman Fire in 2002, which burned an estimated 138,000 acres (55,847 hectares) and damaged more than 130 homes just 35 miles (56 kilometers) from Colorado Springs, according to The Gazette, the city’s newspaper. For some residents, who could see and smell smoke, the Hayman Fire was a wake-up call that wildfire could pose a genuine threat to the community. Colorado Springs’ landscape—a picturesque assortment of mesas, bluffs, mountains, and ridges—is also a cause for concern. Of the more than 415,000 residents in the city, according to 2010 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, 64 NFPA JOURNAL SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012 Photograph: David Kosling/USDA

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - September/October 2012

NFPA Journal - September/October 2012
Contents
First Word
Mail Call
In a Flash
Perspectives
Firewatch
Research
Heads Up
Structural Ops
In Compliance
Buzzwords
Outreach
Electrical Safety
Wildfire Watch
Lessons of Comayagua
After Waldo Canyon
Catastrophic Multiple-Death Fires in 2011
Fire Loss in the United States in 2011
Section Spotlight
Research + Analysis
What’s Hot
Looking Back

NFPA Journal - September/October 2012