Excellent story from the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network. While some of us think that NEPA via plan amendments would be good, the work that the San Juan is doing without a plan amendment is also good.
Assessing local fire danger, weather data, and utilizing Risk Management Assistance (RMA) analytical tools, the Forest developed a plan to bring the fire out to the prescribed fire unit/POD boundary. The local team conducted a structured risk-based conversation using the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) framework, where agency administrators and local stakeholders collaboratively evaluated critical values at risk, developed strategic actions, documented risks to responders, and determined the probability of success.
The story is worth reading in its entirety, I just excerpted the lessons learned below.
Key Lessons Learned
Identify windows of opportunity: Fuel and weather conditions and resource availability are dynamic. Thinking outside the box can help realize opportunities to manage wildfire differently. Additionally, this year’s large incident can be used as the next fire’s best holding feature – as demonstrated during Trail Springs. Incorporating new disturbances into pre-response planning can help maximize their potential as holding features.
Provide clear leader’s intent: Without clear intent from agency administrators, firefighters and IMTs default to their experience and often suppress fires at the smallest possible size and earliest possible opportunity. Clear intent is required to consistently execute an alternative approach, and ensure we leverage our highly skilled fire workforce in pursuit of strategies that will more effectively reduce long-term ecosystem, community and firefighter risk.
Invest in stakeholder engagement: Working with partners and local collaboratives well before a fire starts is imperative to fostering a sense of shared responsibility. Ongoing communication and dialogue with stakeholders before, during, and after fires is critical to a successful, long-term fire management strategy. These efforts build social capital to better support complex decisions both now and in the future.
Leverage analytics and facilitate risk-based dialogues: Using analytics to facilitate strategic, risk-informed, and transparent dialogues can improve alignment between incident leadership, land managers and firefighters on the ground, resulting in higher quality decisions and increased trust.
Be prepared: Facilitating and participating in collaborative pre-season strategic planning efforts, such as Potential Operational Delineations (PODs), can help prepare a landscape to manage fires more proactively by creating a common operating picture and institutionalizing local fire knowledge. Additionally, actively preparing for long-duration events, anticipating, and mitigating late-season workforce fatigue, and building local fire management programs with the needed skill sets to manage long-duration fires can help develop local capacity and evolve the fire management paradigm.
Communicate the “why”: Good decisions may come with considerable institutional and personal risk, but with thoughtful, inclusive, and transparent processes risks can be considered more holistically. Understanding the “why” behind decisions provides critical context and can help create alignment between land managers, incident teams, firefighters, and the local community.
Over all I think the San Juan NF does an excellent job with their fire management. They tend to be fairly aggressive with managing fires rather than suppressing them right away, which I believe is the right way to go in this area that doesn’t have nearly the human development density of the Front Range of Colorado. Still, unplanned things can happen as it did with the West Fork Fire in 2013. Who could have predicted the winds that were clocked at 60 mph on the ridge tops in mid-June that drove that fire over the Continental Divide and onto the Rio Grande NF. A combination of a change in fuels and wind direction saved South Fork, CO. That fire primarily burned through beetle-killed spruce killing all the young trees that were going to be the next forest. Now, it will take centuries for the spruce-fir forest to come back naturally.
The one minor criticism of the article I have is the writers need to learn their Smokey Bear history.
“collaborative pre-season strategic planning efforts, such as Potential Operational Delineations (PODs)”
This puts PODs in a different light. If this is an annual exercise, since fuel and vegetation conditions may change rapidly over time, then I would not say that PODs need to be in forest plans. I had the impression that they are something “designated” for a duration comparable to a forest plan, based on stable geographic features and values at risk, in which case this is long-term management direction for areas that should be in the plan, with that level of NEPA and public involvement. If not, there might still be a question about whether this shorter term “strategic planning” is where project NEPA should be done for management of wildfires.