Cohesive Wildfire Strategies: A Big Tent

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Understand the key features of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy and access online contacts, tools, resource persons, and resource materials discussed in the session.
• Explore the key roles of planners and identify their department resources and agency partners necessary to develop community plans and possible codes for wildfire mitigation, resilience, evacuation, and recovery.
• Develop ways to engage community partners and stakeholders in a dialogue of readiness for wildfire and identify next steps in becoming fire-adapted. Engage the public in taking individual action to live with fire.

MORE SESSION DETAILS

The NPC 18 session "A Team Approach to Wildfire Planning" emphasized the increased frequency and severity of wildfires, and the increasing role of planners in community readiness. The NPC 19 session advances that discussion with new mitigation approaches. Although FEMA has always included a strong planning component in incident response and command, community wildfire planning in the late 1990s and early 2000s was largely done by individual governments, agencies and NGOs without a unifying framework of goals and objectives. Many planners were at the fringe of wildfire planning until leaders of high-risk WUI communities looked to them for support in developing plans for resilience and recovery.
The U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have long sought to develop a cohesive intergovernmental strategy for wildfire planning and resilient landscapes. The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy (NCWFS) emerged from this effort and has active partners in all regions focusing on the goals of:
• fire adapted communities
• resilient landscapes
• effective wildland fire response.
Learn about NCWFS resources, notable fire adapted communities and their public engagement process.
Also learn about the Ready, Set, Go program of the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) emphasizing household readiness and evacuation.
 

Session Speakers

Adrian P. Freund, FAICP
Organizer and Speaker
FA-Northwest Planning?Codes/Strategic Management ,LLC
Beaverton, OR

Bob Roper
Speaker
Roper Consulting
Ojai, CA

Dave Driscoll
Speaker
International Association of Fire Chiefs
Hemet, CA

James C. Schwab, FAICP
Speaker
Chicago, IL