Wildfire Hazard Assessment and Prevention Program

About the Program

Category: Risk and Emergency Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2015

Santa Fe County is a large county with diverse topography and ecosystems that make for challenging wildfire response, mitigation and education. Our forests have become overgrown and unhealthy primarily due to the last 100 years of wildfire suppression and the last 50 years of relatively wet conditions. As a result, the communities within these areas are both threatened by and are a threat to the surrounding public lands and watersheds. A county Community Wildfire Protection Plan, completed in 2008, defined these broad areas of wildfire risk and made general recommendations for mitigating them. In response, Santa Fe County Fire Department obtained grant funding to create a Wildland Division to implement these recommendations. By March of 2010, an inexpensive, creative and somewhat unconventional, parcel-level Wildfire Hazard Assessment and Prevention Program was created and has resulted in over 2200 individual parcel assessments collected. A database created for the collection and storage of the data has been utilized, with its ability to aggregate this data, to spark educational outreach and action in communities, pre-plan high-risk communities, train and educate firefighters, focus fuels reduction funding, and solidly justifies the need for, and proves the positive results of the outreach efforts in funding requests.