Wildfire Hazard Identification and Mitigation System
In 1991 the Boulder County Wildfire Mitigation
Group formed a technical team to begin development of a hazard rating
system to identify and rate areas of Boulder County for their relative
wildfire hazard. By 1992 this had evolved into the geographic information
system (GIS) Wildfire
Hazard Identification and Mitigation System (WHIMS). WHIMS identifies
local wildfire hazards and assesses the risks to communities. It
is used to assist land managers and planners in making appropriate
decisions about land management and development in fire prone areas,
to assist local fire protection districts in pre-attack planning,
to assist local emergency management and disaster relief agencies
with disaster assessment and emergency response, and to educate
and motivate homeowners and private landowners to increase community
involvement with wildfire awareness and preparation.
City of Boulder Wildland Fire Mitigation Program
The
City of Boulder
oversees 50,000 acres of various lands including open space, mountain
parks and all city owned properties. Consequently the city has a
wildland fire mitigation crew to reduce hazardous fuels on these
properties. The crew consists of a crew boss plus 4-5 members. They
undertake mechanical thinning and prescribed fire. On average, they
will burn 100 acres in forested areas, 200-300 acres in grassland
and 100 acres of mechanical treatment per year. When doing prescribed
burning, they notify the public via the newspaper first and then
will follow up with neighborhood meetings and open houses. A week
before the actual burn, they will distribute leaflets to each house
in the burn area, letting residents know about the approximate date
of the planned burn.
Boulder County Parks and Open Space
Boulder
County Parks and Open Space manages 80,000 acres of land in
the county, including 20,000-forested acres and some 60,000 acres
in grasslands. Boulder Open Space began its prescribed burning program
in the mid 1990s and has used fire as one of their main hazardous
fuel reduction tools. On average, they mechanically treat 80-120
acres and burn 100-250 acres per year. They treat their high priority
areas that are most accessible, close to subdivision or homes, have
high wildlife habitat value or are in watersheds. They have three
foresters and use volunteer crews, the sheriff's office and jail
crews. AmeriCorps
also helps in the summer. They also contract out some work and receive
about $75,000-100,000 a year from Boulder County to assist in contracting
out. Burning is getting tougher in the area due to air quality issues,
so increasingly they have to chip more, which also is creating problems.
One of the biggest challenges is to find something to do with the
slash.
Colorado State Forest Service (CSFS)
The
communities at greatest risk in Boulder County are Pinebrook Hills,
Boulder Heights and Carriage Hills, based on topography, housing
density, water available, and access. The bulk of hazardous fuels
reduction takes place on private lands and so CSFS leans toward
individual defensible space treatments to address this threat. In
addition to the communities where they are focusing their defensible
space work, they are also engaged in the Winiger
Ridge landscape project, which has been on-going since 1998.
Money for hazardous fuel reduction comes from
three pools-the wildland urban interface pool (private property
defensible space), the competitive grants (private property defensible
space, fuel breaks, chipping and slash disposal) and the Forest
Land Enhancement Program (private property defensible space). In
FY 2001 Allen Owen, CSFS District Forester, acquired $376,000 in
National
Fire Plan money to work on hazardous fuel reduction. In FY 2002
he acquired $521,000. The National Fire Plan money has been helping
fund full time mitigation crews in three different fire protection
districts (City of Boulder, Cherryvale Fire and Boulder Mountain
Fire). Some money also goes to slash disposal sites and a chipping
cost share program. In 2003, some money went to fund pre-planning
for wildfire hazard assessments through the Student
Conservation Association. This is a program that does individual
home assessments throughout the county. Keeping up with demand for
defensible space and fuel breaks has been a challenge. In 2002,
CSFS had $900,000 in requests and were able to fund $400,000. In
2003, they had $939,000 in requests and were able to fund $502,000.
In 2003, CSFS also treated 128 acres with $15,000 worth of FLEP
money.
CSFS in Boulder County tries to take a dual approach.
Fragmented homeownership patterns mean they need to work with individual
property owners, while also trying to address the landscape level
challenges. CSFS works with USFS to coordinate their work at more
of a landscape and individual level. The Winiger Ridge (40,000 acres),
Sugarloaf (23,000 acres) and James Creek (40,000) projects are examples
of this landscape approach. As the USFS is doing Environmental Assessments,
CSFS identifies the communities that fall within those landscapes
to coordinate treatment and work across the public-private property
boundaries. Landscape level treatment means they still have to meet
with people one-on-one. According to CSFS employees, "We meet
with the community as a whole and try to educate, but when we go
to mark trees on the ground and do a layout
it's one-on-one."
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Winiger Ridge Ecosystem Management Project
An important project for hazardous
fuel reduction in Boulder County has been the Winiger
Ridge Ecosystem Management Project. Winiger Ridge is a
collaborative effort designed to manage natural resources
across boundaries on a landscape-scale in southern Boulder
County. The 40,000-acre landscape of the Winiger Ridge project
is dominated by rich ecosystems of ponderosa pine, lodgepole
pine, Douglas fir, mixed conifer, aspen, mountain meadows,
wetlands, and riparian areas. The partners include: USFS,
CSFS, Boulder County, City of Boulder, Denver Water, Eldorado
Canyon State Park, local fire protection districts, and private
landowners. Their motto is "Stewardship Across Boundaries."
The Winiger Ridge landscape was chosen due
to its land ownership mix, an active community group, and
a range of forest types and conditions. The land ownership
mix is 29% private, 25% federal, 22% city, 14% county, 2%
state, and 8% other (such as Denver Water Board). Approximately
2,500 full time residents inhabit the region with an additional
4 million recreationists annually visiting the area. The watersheds
provide drinking water to hundreds of thousands of metro-Denver
area residents.
Reducing
the risk of catastrophic wildfire at the landscape scale is
implemented by strategically placing the treatment units across
the landscape with the consideration of other agencies' treatments.
Of the almost 40,000 project acres, USFS analyzed 9,500 acres
of national forest lands. Of the acres analyzed, 2,475 were
cleared for treatment by the USFS. Within the 2,475 acres,
1,800 acres were planned to be mechanically thinned with the
remaining 600-700 acres prescribed burned. An additional 2,000
acres were planned to be treated by other participating agencies.
NEPA work was completed in July 2000 when the Decision Notice
and Finding of No Significant Impact were signed. Project
work began on partnership lands in 1997 and on USFS lands
in 1999. Winiger Ridge will be completed in 2007, when the
last piles will be burned and the roads will be slashed over.
Most of the major work is completed now.
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are
key components of the project. The local monitoring team for
the Winiger Ridge project includes USFS and CSFS personnel,
Rocky Smith of Colorado WILD, Pete Morton of the Wilderness
Society and Scott Reuman of Preserve Upper Magnolia Association
(PUMA) a local homeowner's association. The four components
monitored are the biologic, economic, social and administrative
aspects of the project. As of 2004, over 28 field tours have
been conducted.
From the outset of the Winiger Ridge Project,
information and education has been a significant component
of the cooperative effort. Numerous tools have been used to
keep cooperators, publics and stakeholders informed, including
a yearly newsletter, informational workshops and tours, informational
kiosks, projects signs, self-guided tours, information and
demonstration fairs, information packets for landowners, news
releases, and an interactive and informational web site. A
project newsletter gets mailed to everyone in the Winiger
Ridge landscape-approximately 2,600 people and the information
kiosk is updated 2 or 3 times a year.
Several tools and
participants contribute to hazardous fuel reduction on the
Winiger Ridge project. Federal contracts, stewardship contracts,
cooperative and Good Neighbor agreements between the USFS
and CSFS, fire crews, forest service employees and CSFS all
contribute to accomplishing the goals for Winiger Ridge. These
tools and participants have been necessary to deal with the
various situations in which hazardous fuel reduction projects
occur.
Cooperative agreements between the USFS
and CSFS have been one tool to facilitate treatment. The fragmentation
of land ownership has necessitated getting access to adjacent
National Forest lands through the use of Rights-of-Ways across
private roads. CSFS has been instrumental in contacting local
landowners, and working out cooperative agreements with the
USFS and "access agreements" with local landowners
to allow limited use of private roads for removal of products
such as firewood, or for crews to drive and park along their
road for access to the treatment unit. 366 acres were treated
through two cooperative agreements between the USFS and CSFS.
As
of January 2004, the USFS has treated, or has in contract,
1,556 acres for treatment. The USFS has contracted out all
four of the stewardship contracts. The mechanical thinning
costs between $400-$800 per acre. Estimated total cost to
implement the USFS portion of the project is $2,150,000, with
a timeframe of 3-6 years, from 2002 to 2005/2008. $1.8 million
has been spent to date, which includes almost $1 million for
the planning and NEPA that came from special funding because
it is a stewardship pilot project. The funding for 2001, 2002
and 2003, for the USFS portion of the project, has come from
the NFP.
In
addition to the work completed or in progress by the USFS,
other agency partners began treatment work in 1997 and have
completed treatments on 829 acres in the Winiger Ridge project
area. The treatments by all agencies have made a difference.
During the 2000 Walker Ranch fire, firefighters used Winiger
Ridge project treated forest area to protect homes. The Walker
Ranch/Eldorado fire charred 1,062 acres of primarily county
open space just west of the city and could have been a lot
worse without the forest thinning that had been completed.
"During that fire a lot of areas we thinned really saved
the day," said Randy Coombs, senior resource specialist
for Boulder County Parks and Open Space Department.
Sugarloaf Fuel Reduction Project
The next landscape level project for Boulder
County is the Sugarloaf Fuel Reduction Project. The project
area contains approximately 25,000 acres of public and private
land. Of this amount, approximately 14,000 acres is in the
Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and 11,000 acres are
privately owned or managed by the city or county of Boulder.
The primary objective of the project is to reduce the risk
of crown fire initiation and spread by thinning forest and
reducing the amount of surface fuels and ladder fuels necessary
for ground fire to reach the tops of trees. In January 2004,
the Sugarloaf EA comment period closed. The Sugarloaf Fuel
Reduction Project Decision Notice was signed on January 30,
2004. No appeals were filed. This decision will apply mechanical
vegetation treatments to approximately 4,234 acres, prescribed
fire on approximately 569 acres and a combination of thinning
and prescribed fire on another 172 acres. It is expected to
take between 3 and 5 years to complete the entire project.
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