Educated Guests
Conservation districts across the state of Washington are spreading the word about the Firewise program, and communities are listening.
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For the past 2½ years, conservation districts in counties that have Community Wildfire Protection Plans in place have worked to bring the Firewise program to communities at high risk for wildfires. With funding from the Western States Fire Managers Grant provided through the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (WADNR), conservation districts have been able to educate landowners and help them put Firewise concepts on the ground.
Conservation districts are political sub-divisions of Washington state government that operate on a varied mix of grant funding and tax assessments. They work with landowners voluntarily, providing incentive-based conservation assistance on private lands and matching local needs with technical and financial resources to help landowners solve on-the-ground conservation issues.
The goal of the districts under the grant was to help communities and individuals reduce the wildland fire threat to property and life by developing community and individual Firewise plans that incorporated defensible space and fuels-reduction measures, as well as participation in the Firewise Communities/USA program.
Conservation districts established their role in the Firewise program through the connection between healthy forests and wildfire safety. With the mission of protecting natural resources and providing technical expertise and financial assistance to landowners, the districts were a perfect fit for bringing this program to communities. The natural relationship between forest/tree health and wildfire risk opened the door for district staff to educate their communities about the importance of forest stewardship and healthy forests in relation to wildfire safety.
"The conservation districts want to put people in position to help themselves," says a Skagit Conservation District staff member.
Washington state conservation district involvement in the Firewise program began during a 2005 pilot project when WADNR recognized the districts' powerful local connectivity along their wide geographic distribution across the state. During the pilot project, the Skagit Conservation District led Firewise efforts with conservation districts in northwestern Washington. Skagit provided training and technical assistance to district staff, in addition to managing the grant with oversight from the Washington Conservation Commission and the State Department of Natural Resources. The program coordinator of the Skagit Conservation District Firewise took the lead on this pilot project before assuming the lead role of the most recent Firewise efforts throughout the state.
As a whole, participating conservation districts have had an enormous impact on communities across the state. The capacity of district staff to work one-on-one and in community-level settings to distribute important information has proven successful. Their impact can be measured by the number of home risk assessments provided. In the last two years, more than 400 landowners received on-site Firewise technical assistance, and hundreds more participated in workshops and outreach events.
In addition to education, outreach and technical assistance, the Firewise program offers implementation services that include fuels-reduction projects and Firewise Communities/USA recognition. It was definitely more challenging for the districts to meet these deliverables. The difference between educating people and convincing them to change their behavior is significant.
In some cases, the two years of effort educating communities is just now resulting in action. Often, action requires the right person to take the lead before a good idea begins to take hold and proliferate. Demonstration fuels-reduction projects proved helpful in this regard. Sometimes a fuels-reduction project as small as a half-acre on one person's property led to larger projects and greater community involvement.
In a letter to the Okanogan Conservation District, a landowner thanked the district and the partnering DNR crew for a successful project: "The work was completed to our absolute satisfaction in three days, and now, not only does the property look 100% better, but it is much more defensible against fire than it ever was."
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