Community Health and Safety

Introduction

Population growth, expanded development in the WUI, local land-use planning decisions, and failure to make hard choices, like restricting development in high-risk areas and mandating strict zoning regulations, exacerbate the risk caused by the increase in wildfire and other extreme events. Hazardous fuel management around communities, particularly in the WUI, is one component of creating safer communities, but by itself is not enough to protect communities from increasing wildfire risks. Equal focus must be placed on preparing communities for the impacts of extreme events, through thoughtful planned actions that create a roadmap for what to do before, during, and after a disaster.

Preparing for extreme events requires not just home hardening to decrease the risk of ignition, but also relies on protecting key infrastructure for community health and safety. Key infrastructure includes water and wastewater, energy, transportation, and communications. All of this infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme events like wildfire, but also can contribute to risk, such as the risk of wildfires sparked by power lines, or road-related ignitions. The short-term response to this risk, initiating power shutdowns during Red Flag Warnings, has a negative impact on affected communities and is not an adequate long-term solution. Rural and economically disadvantaged communities in the North Coast region, including Tribal communities, are disproportionately affected by and vulnerable to destruction of key infrastructure and disruption of the services they provide.

Many communities in the North Coast region are vulnerable to wildfire and extreme events due to their locations in and near forests and their economically disadvantaged status. These communities need federal and state support to prepare for and recover from disasters. Creating safer communities requires both planning, such as creating community-level preparedness plans and ensuring adequate evacuation routes, and action, such as developing multi-function buffers and shaded fuel breaks, creating hardened homes and defensible spaces around them, hardening critical community infrastructure, and reducing road-related ignitions by managing roadside vegetation. Adapting communities to be able to live alongside beneficial fire while reducing the impacts of destructive fires is a major challenge of the 21st century.