National Wildfire Awareness Month dedicates the month of May to prevention and preparedness. While wildfires may not be prevalent in all states, we all need to be aware and alert. Wildfires can occur in every state, and as mobile as our lifestyles have become, we all need to be prepared.
In many communities across the country, people fear the potential return of wildfires each year. They watch green spaces dry out and share stories about how they saw flames on a distant ridgetop in previous years and wondered how close they would get to their home. These communities often proactively prepare for the onset of the wildfire year and work hard to enhance their wildfire defenses.
In other parts of the country, people watch wildfires from the safety of their living room on television, miles away from the places where wildfires happen often.
Although sympathetic, they are free from the annual concerns of being evacuated from their homes, the health impacts of wildfire smoke and the general worry of, “Will our home be next?” The people who live in these communities barely give wildfire preparedness a thought. Until recently.
The wildfire landscape is changing
As public information officers on the Southern Area Complex Incident Management Gold Team, we’ve spent many assignments sharing information about nearby wildfires in communities like the first one outlined above.
But, more recently, we find our team is getting sent to areas that have never suffered the impacts of wildfires. For them, these events are frightening experiences for which they are often unprepared.
Earlier this year, our team was assigned to a group of wildfires, known as a complex, in western Virginia. As the team was getting briefed, we heard multiple times, “People here just aren’t used to this kind of thing.” Interestingly, we’d worked on a wildfire in Virginia last fall, less than a hundred miles away, where the reaction was the same.
“We’ve just never seen anything like this.”
Sadly, with the growing impacts of climate change, the ever-increasing development in the wildland urban interface, and a historical lack of wildfire in many areas, understanding how to prevent and prepare for wildfires is becoming more and more relevant nationwide.
May is National Wildfire Awareness Month.
That’s right, national.
Although wildfires may not often happen where you live, we are all responsible for understanding the wildfire risks where we live, where we vacation or travel for work, and what we can do to prevent and be prepared for wildfires.
Learn about wildfire risk to your community at wildfirerisk.org Start at home by visiting wildfirerisk. org.1Using this web-based tool, you can enter the name of your community, tribal area, county or state and find out your wildfire risk.
You can also explore your community’s wildfire likelihood in the interactive data viewer and learn how to reduce your community’s wildfire exposure by taking actions such as modifying your home ignition zone, hardening your home, effectively applying land use planning tools, and learning about wildfire preparedness.
More web-based tools about how to prepare for and prevent wildfires Several other tools are available to help us understand what we can do to prepare for and prevent wildfires, no matter where we live.
FEMA’s www.ready. gov/wildfires has multiple resources on how to prepare for wildfires, stay safe during such an emergency, and what to do after a wildfire strikes. The site also has information on other disasters and emergencies such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, avalanches and more.
FEMA also has an app you can download to receive emergency alerts and warnings for your area. Visitwww.fema. gov/ipawsto learn more.
The Firewise USA program www.firewise. org, co-sponsored by the Forest Service, U.S.
Department of the Interior and National Association of State Foresters, provides simple, effective steps to help communities reduce wildfire risks through their Band Together Program.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be right to talk about wildfire preparedness and prevention without mentioning icon Smokey Bearwww. smokeybear.com who turns 80 later this year.
Don’t wait.
Start today.
You can start by visiting wildfirerisk. orgto understand the risk of wildfire to your community. The answer just might surprise you.
– Contributed
