New Beginning for Awareness

By Chuck Bushey

I can remember being taught that “fire prevention” and all it encompassed was one of the three legs of the stool, along with “detection” and “suppression,” of successfully developing a wildland fire program for any wildland fire organization. If any leg of the stool was missing, your fire program would collapse.

Over the years, I have seen the “fire prevention” leg of this stool get progressively shorter as money and emphasis shifted. The IAWF has decided to try to help regain some of the local to global momentum that wildland fire awareness and prevention education deserves. We are establishing our first Global Wildfire Awareness Week, not so much as a single-week event but as 365 days of practice. Our plans are to have two dedicated weeks: one for the Northern Hemisphere (May 1-7) and another for the Southern (October 1-7; http://wildfireworld.org/). We will provide a theme and materials for both prevention specialists and homeowners that can be used to support local programs. This is a beginning and something different for us at the IAWF, and I would hope that you will help us by both participating and contributing to its development and signing on as supporting organizations and groups.

Our two dedicated weeks are not intended to replace currently established local efforts. However, we hope to be able to provide materials from around the world that will help enhance your established fire educational programs. We realize that there are many scattered periods that groups have chosen to use as their education week, commonly tied to local weather patterns and fuel types. Just in the United States, I know of 15 states that have dedicated prevention/awareness weeks, spanning mid-March to late-May. Similar circumstances occur all around the world.

While I realize that you most likely will be reading this after our initial week has gone by, that doesn't mean you can't continue to use our selected theme if you like and provide input to us online. Our theme for May is “Your Home … Your Responsibility” with four objectives:

Raise awareness about the global wildfire reality, its evolution and the changes in the fire scene worldwide. This should be done at all levels, from citizens to professionals and administrators.
Increase citizen awareness about the emerging reality that multiple wildfires under extreme conditions often exceed the capacity of firefighting mechanisms to protect them, which means they need to prepare themselves and their properties for such a scenario.
Help citizens realize the importance of their active contribution to prevention as an alternative to ever-increasing costs for increased firefighting capacity.
Contribute to the international exchange of knowledge, examples, ideas and educational resources on the role of wildland fire, the characteristics of the wildfire problem and the methods to mitigate it.

Each year, more people around the world in the wildland-urban interface zone are affected by wildfire. Each year, people have to decide how to best protect their homes from fire, as well as whether to stay and protect their homes or evacuate as early as possible if a wildfire does occur.

We are encouraging people to perform their own home assessment if they don't have a qualified expert available to do it for them. We encourage you to submit your sample home assessment forms and other tools that professionals and homeowners can use as examples, and we will create an online global map that will help you find materials from your region. Additionally, we ask that you identify where, such as a regional fire authority, the general public can go to seek answers to any questions on their particular home assessment form.