Wildfire season is nearly upon us. September is National Preparedness Month, and this year Haw Creek is taking wildfire preparedness seriously.
On Sept. 4, neighborhood residents filled the public meeting room of the East Asheville Public Library, where local wildfire experts led the group through a series of exercises intended to elicit the community’s hopes, fears and assets when it comes to wildfire preparedness.
The meeting was timely. Asheville has a split fire season, meaning that the risk of wildfires is elevated at two times during the year, spring and fall. These are the periods when conditions are ripe for fires to start and spread due to factors such as low humidity and abundant fuel in the form of dry vegetation. Fall fire season typically ramps up in late September.
But the Sept. 4 meeting was not just a lecture on fire safety — although the speakers list was chock-full of current and former firefighters and local risk mitigation experts. It was also a community exercise intended to engage residents in the neighborhood’s broader efforts to become a certified Firewise USA community.
The national Firewise USA program provides a collaborative framework to help communities get organized and take action to reduce their wildfire risks. Any community that meets a set of voluntary criteria on an annual basis and retains an “In Good Standing Status” may identify itself as being a Firewise site. The program is administered by The National Fire Protection Association and is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters.
Since 2019, over a million residents across 42 states have collectively undertaken the voluntary requirements to become certified under the program. Nearby examples include Montreat and Creston near Black Mountain and the Drovers Road Preserve in Fairview. Haw Creek is trying to become the first community in Asheville to receive the certification.
Empowering local residents
On Sept. 4, neighbors heard from experts like Jen Gustafson, a community fire adaptation professional at Wooden Eye Resource Management, about the risks presented by wildfires and how Haw Creek can tackle them in order to become a fire-adapted community.
The process, Gustafson said, is not about eliminating fires. “It’s about learning to live with fire in a way that keeps us safe.”
In our changing climate, wildfires are occurring with increasing frequency and magnitude. While it’s impossible — and even counterproductive — to eliminate fires entirely, taking preventive measures to mitigate risk can go a long way toward helping to protect your home, neighborhood and loved ones, experts say.
Gustafson shared a graphic of a wheel depicting the different wedges that contribute to building a fire-adapted community. Key to Haw Creek’s risk management plan are three of these wedges: partnerships and community engagement, resident mitigation, and safety and evacuation.
Partnerships, like the ones the Haw Creek Community Association (HCCA) has forged with the City Asheville, the Asheville Fire Department and local experts such as Gustafson, can help communities get access to the knowledge and expertise needed to identify risks and strategies for mitigation. Similarly, opportunities for community engagement, such as the Sept. 4 workshop, empower residents to get involved.
Resident mitigation involves activities such as home hardening, debris and vegetation removal and the creation of “defensible zones” that are free of combustible material around homes — all of which help to prevent the ignition and spread of wildfires.
Safety and evacuation involve creating and disseminating evacuation plans and incident management strategies so that neighbors know what to do and where to go if there is a situation that requires evacuation. “Evacuation planning is essential,” Gustafson said.
For each of these three wedges, Gustafson said, it’s helpful to think through what steps can be taken to mitigate risks before, during and after a fire event. For more wildfire preparedness tips, follow the Asheville Fire Department on social media.
Climate migrants
According to Haw Creek resident Doug Baughman, who is leading the neighborhood’s fire preparedness efforts, the initiative came about from a conversation among neighbors with personal experience with fires.
“We have a number of folks that have moved to Haw Creek that I would consider climate migrants,” Baughman told me. These individuals, many of whom moved here from fire-prone states like California and Texas, first raised concerns about fire safety in the Haw Creek valley in the wake of the historic 2016 fire season.
Two years later, the City of Asheville’s 2018 Climate Resilience Report indicated that the majority of Haw Creek was at moderate risk of wildfire as a result of its sloped topography, proximity to forested areas along Town Mountain Road and the Blue Ridge Parkway, as well as the limited number of exits from the valley. Tropical Storm Helene further fueled concerns by exacerbating the amount of dead and drying vegetation available.
In response to these concerns, the HCCA put together a grant request to the City of Asheville’s Neighborhood Matching Grants program, which helps Asheville’s neighborhood-based organizations fund various improvement projects by providing a dollar-for-dollar matching grant of up to $5,000. The HCCA was awarded the full $5,000 to conduct a Firewise risk assessment and develop a mitigation strategy for Haw Creek.
From there, the HCCA created a committee of neighbors, including Baughman, to shepherd the program and brought on a number of fire mitigation consultants to provide educational outreach and conduct an initial risk assessment of the valley. The Sept. 4 meeting included the preliminary results of this assessment, which featured an evaluation of the valley’s landscape, topography, housing density, housing materials and road access.
Moving forward, there will be a series of recommendations for mitigating the identified risks at the community level, which may include activities such as debris and vegetation removal, the creation of neighborhood fire ambassadors, development of incident management strategies and further education and collaboration. The HCCA is also anticipating providing an option for individual families to have their homes and landscapes assessed for fire risks, with the eventual goal of achieving Firewise certification for the community.
Former U.S. Forest Service firefighter Riva Duncan, who is serving as a volunteer consultant for the neighborhood, said that she hopes Haw Creek is just the beginning of the wave: “My hope is that other communities look at what Haw Creek is doing here and decide they want to do this, too.”
This story was originally published in Mountain Xpress.