How you can help others
Preparing for wildfire isn’t just for individual residents or state policymakers – community-level planning is crucial to wildfire mitigation, response, and recovery.
Local leaders like you can improve your community’s resilience. Learn how to access funding and tools already designed for communities, and get help developing emergency plans and risk-reduction strategies that work for your area.
Let’s ensure everyone survives if and when wildfire arrives.
1. Become a Firewise Community
Throughout Oregon, neighbors and local leaders have put their heads together to establish a Firewise Community in their area, joining the national Firewise USA® network. The benefit? Becoming more resistant to the structural damage caused by wildfire.
Each Firewise Community participates in ongoing events and planning activities that maintain collective readiness to respond to wildfire, including completing risk assessments and creating a community action plan. Communities with as few as eight dwellings or as many as 2,500 can participate.
Some excellent resources:
Wildfire risk to communities
Find a Firewise community site near you
Active wildfire dashboard
2. Participate in Fire Adapted Communities
Supported by a robust network, Fire Adapted Communities focus on the unique circumstances and needs of their area to comprehensively prepare their surroundings in order to live better with wildfire.
Participants get access to extensive publicly available resources in order to make fire-smart changes – to the landscape, public-health services, neighborhood partnerships, business practices, policy, and more. A self-assessment tool should help community leaders learn how prepared their community is and identify ways to improve wildfire resilience.
Some excellent resources:
Wildfire preparedness webinars
Wildfire Adapted Communities Recommendations Report
3. Establish a Community Wildfire Protection Plan
If there’s a theme when it comes to wildfire preparedness, it’s that every community’s needs are unique. Community Wildfire Protection Plans respond to this reality, offering frameworks for local wildfire-risk mitigation that are flexible to a community’s specific priorities, developed in partnership with public agencies.
Establishing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan is an important step to turning resilience goals into action. In addition to enhancing safety and reducing risk to structures and environments, they’re even known for helping build community capacity, social networks, and knowledge.
Some excellent resources:
Firetopia: land use planning
County-level risk reports
Forest & fire toolkit