Wildfire Wednesday #158: Benefits and Planning of Forest Restoration Treatments

Hello FAC Community,

It has been shown that, in the fire-adapted Southwest, forest restoration and fuel reduction treatments are the primary and most effective means of reestablishing beneficial fire regimes and protecting communities and ecosystems from devastating wildfire. However, these treatments need to happen at large scale, in the right places, and for the right price. Today’s newsletter explores two aspects of this challenge - how cost-effective forest and fuels treatments really are, and how planning and implementing them can be most efficacious when done collaboratively.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Best wishes,
Rachel

Forest Treatments Meta-analysis

In August 2024, Northern Arizona University's Ecological Restoration Institute conducted and published a meta-analysis of the cost benefits of fuel treatments including thinning and prescribed burns. This analysis evaluates and compiles the findings of the many studies which have been published on this topic in the past.

Forest restoration and fuel treatments, including thinning and prescribed burning, have become the primary approaches for reducing the abundance of overly dense stands and reestablishing natural fire regimes. Although there is a strong body of biophysical science supporting these approaches, little is known about their cost effectiveness. To evaluate forest restoration and fuel treatment benefits and costs, a team of researchers at the ERI and the Conservation Economics Institute conducted a meta-analysis of benefit-cost ratios for restoration benefit types documented in the literature for western US dry mixed-conifer forests at risk of uncharacteristic wildfires.  

The analysis is the first quantitative synthesis of the return on investments in forest restoration for the American West. A total of 120 observations were collated from 16 studies conducted over the last two decades. While researchers identified 17 different types of individual restoration benefits in the literature, including enhanced initial ecosystem services and avoided wildfire costs (AWC), many more benefits exist that have yet to be quantified. 

Key findings and recommendations:

  1. For every dollar invested in forest restoration in high risk, high-value forested watersheds where all quantified benefits are present, over seven dollars of benefit may be returned to investors. 

  2. Applying a financial type of return-on-investment to forest restoration, where only returns in excess (or below) of the initial investment are calculated, indicates the potential for a 600% return on investments in the most valuable at-risk forested watersheds. 

  3. Many other unique restoration benefits exist that have not been economically quantified and were not included in the meta-analysis, which indicates that the total returns on investments in forest restoration are likely greater than presented in this study.

  4. This approach may also be used to develop an economic measure for the value of a restored acre, which includes improved ecological conditions and wildfire resilience.

Collaboratives & Treatment Prioritization

The early 2000s signaled the start of an increase in cross-jurisdictional and cross-organizational cooperation, collaboration, and partnership through programs like the New Mexico CFRP, federal CFLRP, and integration of nonprofit flexibility into agency objectives. The 2020 New Mexico Forest Action Plan builds off this collaborative foundation by clearly stating the need for collective action to guide and meet the forest and watershed health and restoration goals laid out for 2020-2030. The strategy specifies that the work of the NM Forestry Division’s collaborative partners is closely integrated and important to achieving success. There are many forms that partnerships can take, but one of the most impactful is Landscape Collaboratives, like the Zuni Mountains Collaborative or the 2-3-2 Partnership, that bring together many individuals and organizations over a large geographic area to identify and work toward shared land management goals across multiple specialties and land ownerships.

The New Mexico Forest Action Plan (FAP) identifies multiple strategies to address the challenges facing our State’s forests, water, wildlife, and communities, but the first (Restore Forests and Watersheds) addresses what is arguably the most expensive issue facing forest management today— the legacy of fire exclusion and current land conditions. “In the absence of naturally occurring wildfires, forests have generated excessive fuels which has, in the past two decades, resulted in catastrophic wildfires burning much hotter than previously experienced. These ‘mega-fires’ are happening every year around the West and threaten water supply, lives and property. Experience has demonstrated that forest management treatments such as thinning, burning, and especially a combination of thinning and burning, can moderate fire behavior.” The strategy outlines a plan and identifies collaborative opportunities for addressing these fuel conditions and restoring forest stand densities to healthier conditions at large scale and across ownership boundaries to maximize ecosystem services and resilience to climate change and other identified threats.

Some of the strategies within the FAP that integrate collaboration:

  • Conduct appropriate treatments in collaboratively identified large-scale priority areas;

  • Conduct collaborative planning and build collective capacity to increase the pace and scale of forest and watershed restoration;

  • Develop collaborative strategies to promote a dynamic patchwork mosaic of riparian and wetland vegetation and habitat;

  • Support and expand public outreach and education to foster a society that supports watershed restoration activities and values resilient and healthy forest ecosystems.

If we want to increase the “pace and scale” of forest and watershed restoration in the state, we need to streamline the flow of putting money on the ground and add administrative capacity. We also need to ensure that all of our priorities match - state and federal agencies have put a lot of time, thought, and effort into planning like the strategies mentioned above, and there is a lot of room for alignment across collaborators. Mechanisms to make those partnerships official, like Good Neighbor Agreements, provide local entities a seat at the table when it comes to planning and implementing projects that improve ecological resilience, promote rural economic development, and improve community health and safety. Collaboratively written documents like Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) can meld and incorporate the priorities of communities and natural resource professionals into one document that clearly outlines actional next steps.

Once a project area is identified, all members of the collaborative can decide what “tools” from the “toolbox” are best suited to get work done on the ground to improve resources while accomplishing other priority goals. The collaborative can also agree on which funding source(s) are easiest for accomplishing that work.

Key takeaways:

  • Good planning means aligning federal, state, local, and hyperlocal priorities.

  • With solid plans in place, collaborative groups can move beyond relationship building and into detailed project development and implementation.

  • Streamlining the flow of funding and adding local government capacity may prove to be the key to achieving “pace and scale” at the landscape level.

To dive into a local example of collaborative partnership at work, view this presentation from Taos County and read about the work they have accomplished since then.

Additional Resources

Locations of 2024 Good Neighbor Firefighter Safety Program funds. To apply for 2025 funding, visit https://www.nvfc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025-SF-Application-Guidance.pdf

State Farm® and the National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC) are proud to team up for the Good Neighbor Firefighter Safety Program to help resource-constrained volunteer fire departments secure needed equipment. The program launched in 2024, and due to overwhelming demand State Farm doubled its initial commitment – awarding $1 million in grants to 100 departments. View the 2024 grant infographic.

In 2025, the commitment grows even further. State Farm will award a total of $1.5 million to 150 volunteer fire departments. Each will receive a $10,000 grant to help them secure essential equipment that will improve firefighter safety, effectiveness, and efficiency and enable them to better serve their communities.

The funder is holding office hours on Thursday, May 15 | 12:00 – 12:30 p.m. ET and Thursday, May 29 | 7:00 – 7:30 p.m. ET to answer questions and share additional information. Applications open on June 4 and close on June 6. To learn more and register, visit www.nvfc.org/good-neighbor-firefighter-safety-program/

In-person learning

Post-Fire Lessons Learned Panel Discussion: May 29, 5:30pm (Session 3 of the Enchanted Circle Wildfire Preparedness Series)
UNM Taos Bataan Hall, 121 Civic Plaza Dr., Taos, NM 87571

This series of panel discussions from UNM Taos, Taos County, Kit Carson Electric Coopertive, and Enchanted Circle Association of Realtors is dedicated to wildfire prevention and preparedness in the region. It is designed to equip community members with essential resources and information to enhance preparedness for potential wildfires, continuing on May 29 with a presentation about post-fire lessons learned. Previous topics in the series have included how to protect your home from wildfire and state of the forest.

Webinars

RMRS webinars on Behave7 software: May 20th (best for fire analysts) and May 22nd (best for prescribed fire planners) at 11:00am

These webinars are a two part series of trainings for the Behave Fire Modeling System. These webinars will go over changes in version 7 from the RMRS Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Science Program, as well as a look forward at future releases. Registration is required and the webinars will contain duplicate information since they are aimed at different users. To learn more and to register, visit www.swfireconsortium.org/2025/05/06/the-behave7-fire-modeling-system-is-here/

2025 Tribal Climate Resilience Webinar Series: June 3, July 1, and August 5 at 12:00pm

Throughout 2025, the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center is hosting a series of webinars on climate adaptation and resilience for tribal environmental and natural resources professionals. The Center has already hosted webinars in February - May, with three more in the series coming up in June-August. Upcoming topics include creating climate adaptation plans, climate resilience funding, and tribal climate resilience success stories. To learn more, visit www.swcasc.arizona.edu/events/sw-casc-tribal-climate-resilience-webinar-series. To revisit the earlier webinars in this series, visit www.swcasc.arizona.edu/tribes/2025-tribal-climate-resilience-webinar-series

Wildfire Wednesdays #157: Urban Conflagrations

Happy Friday, FAC Community!

You have seen the term “urban conflagration” in past FACNM newsletters, but what does it mean in the context of your personal wildfire risk? We’re seeing more and more examples of fires that start in an undeveloped natural area but quickly move toward and into urban areas, transitioning from consuming trees and vegetation to consuming homes, businesses, and other structures (click the links for lessons from the Marshall Wildfire - 2021, Lahaina Fire - 2023, Salt/South Fork Complex - 2024, Palisades and Eaton Fires - 2025). Today we’ll dive into how fires make this jump, their damage and cost statistics, who is at risk, and what you can do to lower your risk rating (including information on recently passed legislation that will help move the needle on risk mitigation and resources for New Mexicans).

This Fire Friday features:

Be well and have a happy national wildfire preparedness day this weekend!
-Rachel

Planning for and Learning from Urban Conflagrations

Defining the problem: what are ‘urban conflagrations"‘?

“With the Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire of 1991, built environment conflagrations returned to United States cities. Wildfire, which had been viewed as a wildland and rural community problem, now was a catalyst for conflagration. Over the next three decades, the most catastrophic wildfires were often those where fire entered communities of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) and spread into suburban neighborhoods as a conflagration of the built environment ensued. Structural conflagration is defined as fire encompassing all of a given structure. Here we will focus on the concept of a built environment conflagration resulting from wildfires, where fire spreads uncontrollably from structure-to-structure” (IBHS, 2023).

Image from Headwaters Economics report; data sourced from Wildfire Risk to Communities and analyzed by Headwaters Economics. This analysis shows that more than 1,100 communities in 32 states across the United States share similarities with communities recently devastated by urban wildfires.

In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, Headwaters Economics published “America’s Urban Wildfire Crisis: More Than 1,100 Communities at Risk,” using data from the Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities project. From the report: “the fires in Los Angeles follow a pattern starting to become familiar. As was seen in Hawaii’s Lahaina Fire, Colorado’s Marshall Fire, and Oregon’s Almeda Fire, wind-driven embers from nearby wildfires ignite homes, which spread fire rapidly to neighboring homes, becoming an urban conflagration. Also known as urban wildfires, these large, difficult-to-control fires may start as wildfires but, upon entering communities, buildings become the source of fuel. It is the building-to-building transmission that causes widespread destruction that can occur in communities of any size.”

Headwaters Economics has created an interactive map that shows communities with risk factors that put them in a similar hazard category as the neighborhoods that burned in LA.

Urban conflagration risk factors:

  • High likelihood of wildfire on adjacent lands

  • Many homes exposed (dense construction)

  • Extreme winds

  • Lack of ignition-resistant construction materials

  • Local risk factors, such as

    • predominant winds or local wind conditions,

    • ignition sources and locations,

    • fuel moisture,

    • firefighting resources,

    • housing arrangement, and

    • building design and construction

It is important to remember that urban conflagrations are characterized by fire moving from structure to structure in a densely built environment, but it’s not just cities that are at risk. Recent fires, like the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon Complex, show that many homes can burn in rural communities as well, especially when some of the same risk factors, such as extreme winds and a high likelihood of fire on adjacent lands, are present.

What is the cost?

Wildfires that become urban conflagrations are becoming more frequent and damaging, with some of the most destructive occurring in the past decade. A separate analysis found that, over the past several decades, wildfire risk and its associated costs and impacts on communities has been increasing across the United States. Between 2018 and 2021, wildfires in the U.S. were associated with over $79.8 billion in costs, and fire years (and expenses) have only inflated since then with the return of the urban conflagration. According to data from the First Street Foundation, 50% of all addresses in the lower 48 states face some degree of wildfire risk; in some rural states, more than 90% of properties face some risk. In 2022 when the data was released, more than 686,000 properties at risk of wildfire faced at least a 1% chance of burning that year. This means that over a 30 year mortgage period, those homes have a 26% chance of burning. (New York Times, 2022).

Source: First Street Foundation
The future projection reflects a warming scenario in which countries take measures to curb emissions over the next 30 years roughly in line with pledges under the Paris climate agreement. The future risk map reflects changes in temperature, precipitation and other climatic factors, but the model relies on historical weather, development patterns and other inputs.

To learn more about wildfire risk to homes and tools that can help encourage fire preparedness actions at the individual and community level, read Wildfire Wednesday #152 on Community Ordinances and Codes for Fire Protection.

What can be done to reduce urban conflagrations?

“Many well-researched actions can help reduce community wildfire risk, but they require a shift in local, state and federal approaches to wildfire management. Beyond fire suppression and vegetation management, construction of wildfire-resistant homes, neighborhoods, and communities must also be prioritized.

“A focus on the built environment helps address the fundamental causes of disasters... Urban conflagrations often begin with windblown embers flying ahead of a wildfire front, igniting spot fires that expose homes to flames and heat. The speed at which a spot fire becomes an urban conflagration can be influenced by construction materials, landscaping, and the proximity of homes to each other. Building and retrofitting homes and neighborhoods to minimize places where embers can ignite is not only necessary, research has shown it can be practical and cost-effective. Reducing wildfire risk communitywide can also help keep insurance markets accessible and potentially avoid billions in disaster recovery costs that often fall on taxpayers” (Headwaters Economics, 2025).

Resources

  • The US Fire Administration Wildfire Evacuation page has guidance for encouraging community members to plan, prepare and practice before a wildfire occurs. There are also tips for community-level actions, such as shareable evacuation planning toolkits, working to create healthy landscapes and defensible space, and consulting with local foresters.

  • The US Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities tool allows users to explore their local wildfire risk and take steps to reduce that risk with free resources. These resources are organized into categories such as ignition-resistant homes, land use planning, evacuation and readiness, vulnerable populations, and many more.

  • Simple techniques for home hardening, such as removing wooden fences within 5 feet of the home and replacing them with inflammable materials, in addition to creating defensible space, continue to be the best defense for individuals. Learn more about home hardening and improving your properties defensibility against wildfire in Wildfire Prepared Homes.

A WUI success story: Austin, TX

In 2020, Austin, Texas became a national leader when it comes to reducing the wildfire risk to homes and buildings in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). In this ten-minute video produced by Headwaters Economics, leaders from Austin describe how they came to realize the magnitude of the wildfire threat, and how they brought together diverse interests to pass one of the most forward-looking WUI codes in the U.S.

Forestry and Wildfire in the 2025 Legislative Session

Several Senate and House bills related to forestry and fire preparedness passed (in part or in whole) and were signed into law during the 2025 New Mexico legislative session. This body of legislation will impact wildfire preparedness resources and expectations for home and landowners as it is implemented over the next few years. The New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) - Forestry Division compiled a synopsis of the various bills and their biggest takeaways. Click on the image to view the synopsis in its entirety and read on for some highlights.


Senate Bill 33: Wildfire Prepared Act
Amends the New Mexico Fire Planning Task Force membership and duties to identify and map high-risk areas within the state, develop building code standards and defensible space requirements and ordinances to reduce wildfire threats, consider other fire suppression measures such as thinning, mitigation, prescribed burning, using wildfire-resistant, noncombustible or ignition resistant building materials to national standards for defensible space.

House Bill 553: Timber Grading Act
Allows for the creation of a structural timber grading certification program accessible to sawmill owners and their employees to provide training on structural timber grading and labeling by developing a state-specific system to grade and label structural timber.

Senate Joint Memorial 1:
Makes recommendations on 1. business opportunities, 2. reducing the cost of moving wood to mills for processing, 3. reviewing successful wood utilization programs out-of-state, 4. existing incentives for wood product industry expansion, and 5. efforts to ensure that healthy forests reduce wildfire risk to expedite forest restoration throughout economic development in New Mexico.

Senate Memorial 2:
Creates a wildfire study group to develop approaches to address and mitigate wildfire in NM. The study group will develop and make recommendations to the legislature on a statewide approach to address, avoid and mitigate wildfires including recommendations for necessary funding and proposed legislation.

House Bill 175: Amendment to the Forest and Watershed Restoration Act (FAWRA)
Prioritizes, maps, and allows for the creation of fire buffers in and around wildland urban interfaces. This will allow the Forestry Division to utilize FAWRA funding on private lands to implement or create fuel buffers around communities within the WUI, sets project eligibility requirements, and creates incentives to increase investments in watershed and community areas to manage forests and protect water sources.

Grants Tracking & Management Tips from FAC Net

Finding and sustaining funding for work across the FAC framework is a critical part of community wildfire resilience. The national FAC Network has launched a webpage that provides information and resources to help FAC practitioners identify, apply for, and manage funding for their work, with a particular focus on the specifics of federal funding sources. Visit www.fireadapted.org/funding-fac/ to view the grants database, learn about recurring funding opportunities for FAC work, and get tips and tricks for preparing for, applying to, and managing federal grants.

You can also learn about applying and reporting for federal grants by viewing the four-part archive of webinars hosted by FAC Net as part of their Community Navigator Project during the winter of 2024-2025. These trainings and resources can help communities better understand key requirements for successfully managing federal funding.

Additional Resources

Upcoming and recorded webinars

Fire Season 2024 Overview and 2025 Outlook - recording coming soon
On May 1, Dr. Zander Evans and Kerry Jones joined the Southwest Fire Science Consortium to review the facts and impacts of the 10 biggest fires in the Southwest in 2024 and to look ahead to the forecasted fire weather for 2025, with a focus on the spring - midsummer. Visit the Consortium’s ‘Products’ webpage to learn more and to view the recording (will be uploaded no later than 5/7)

Fire Smart Landscaping in New Mexico
In this webinar from FACNM, attendees will learn that reducing wildfire risk around the home doesn’t have to mean removing all vegetation cart blanche. With the right landscaping strategies, New Mexico residents can help protect their homes while still enjoying beautiful outdoor spaces. Speaker Angela Prada from New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service will explore:

  • Key traits of fire-resistant plants and recommended species for NM,

  • Strategic planting tips—like proper spacing and reducing density of flammable vegetation, and

  • Year-round maintenance practices to reduce wildfire risk

When: Thursday, May 22nd from 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Zoom, registration is required and the recording will be available following the webinar
Speaker: Angela Prada of NMSU Cooperative Extension Service

Funding opportunities

Last day to apply! FACNM Microgrant Program
Twice annually, FACNM accepts proposals for a small amount of seed funding (up to $2,000) to help Members and Leaders host events or educational opportunities to improve their community fire awareness and readiness. These proposals must demonstrate community benefit or FAC capacity building. The spring 2025 application period closes at midnight on May 2!

Ideal project proposals may include:

  • Wildfire preparedness events

    • Home hazard assessment day

    • Defensible space or home hardening community workday

    • Evacuation planning and education

    • Post-fire erosion mitigation preparation and information

    • SimTable hosting

  • Equipment rentals

  • Slash disposal

  • Proposal development/writing

  • Improving/expanding existing offering

Wildfire Wednesdays #156: Centering Renters in Wildfire Preparedness and Recovery

Happy Wednesday, FACNM community!

Historically, wildfire preparedness efforts have focused primarily on homeowners. Most publications and outreach materials emphasize defensible space and home hardening, both of which are critically important for increasing a home's resilience to wildfire. However, these strategies are often out of reach for renters, who may not have control over landscaping or structural changes to their residence. While existing resources may contain relevant information, very few are specifically tailored to the needs of renters. This has led to disaster researchers including renter status as an indicator of disaster vulnerability. Topics like evacuation planning, renters’ insurance, and post-fire recovery are all critical aspects of fire adaptation. Building wildfire resiliency occurs, before, during and after a fire, and you don’t have to own a home to engage in many meaningful steps toward resilience.

As of 2023, 30.7% of housing units in New Mexico were renter-occupied (U.S. Census Bureau). Additionally, according to the Pew Research Center, certain demographic groups—such as young adults and individuals with less formal education—are more likely to rent, and rental rates among these groups have increased nationwide over the past decade. To help promote wildfire preparedness for all New Mexicans, this week’s Wildfire Wednesday is focused on renters.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Hope you all are well!
Megan

Renter Experiences After Colorado's Marshall Fire (Dickinson et al.)

In their study, Renter Experiences After Colorado’s Marshall Fire, Dickinson and colleagues surveyed residents 11 to 15 months after the 2021 Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado’s history. Their research underscores the unique and often overlooked challenges that renters face in disaster recovery. The report explores key themes including disaster impacts, displacement, rent increases, access to resources, and renters’ participation in post-fire recovery decision-making.

Key findings include:

  • Renters often depend on landlords to repair damaged properties post-disaster. This dependency contributes to a higher likelihood of displacement and delays in returning to affected communities compared to homeowners.

  • Significantly more renters reported that they experienced damage to their home and were no longer living at the residence they occupied at the time of the fire; conversely, more homeowners reported that they were still living at the same property but had experienced fire damage. Among renters who remained in the same unit after the fire, 63% reported that their landlords raised the rent.

    • A year after the fire, 62% of surveyed renters had moved from their pre-fire residences. Renters were also more likely to have been displaced outside of the County compared to homeowners.

  • Renters reported greater financial need and impact and had higher rates of being uninsured than homeowners.

  • Renters were significantly less likely to be engaged in recovery decision-making. They participated less in activities such as attending fire-related meetings, contacting local officials, or submitting public comments.

  • Compared to homeowners, renters were significantly less likely to agree that local government decisions had taken their opinions into account and that recovery processes were fair.

A figure of quotes and key themes to open-ended survey questions with the headers 1. lack of financial support, 2. Lack of Policy and Research Attention, 3. Rent Increases, and 4. Challenges of Recovery

Figure 11. Quotes and Key Themes from Renter Responses to Open-Ended Survey Questions

These findings are critical for policymakers aiming to design inclusive and equitable disaster recovery efforts. The paper recommends several interventions, including preventing post-disaster rent price gouging, codifying landlords’ responsibilities for remediation following environmental public health events, and offering clear guidance on tenants’ rights to terminate leases when their homes are damaged in a disaster.

To explore the full findings and recommendations, see the full report here: Renter Experiences After Colorado’s Marshall Fire

A Guide for Long-Term Renters from Tahoe Network of Fire Adapted Communities

The Tahoe Network of Fire Adapted Communities created a guide specifically designed for long-term renters in the Lake Tahoe region. Released in 2021, the guide was developed with direct input from local renters through resident focus groups across the Lake Tahoe area.

Based on this community feedback, the guide offers practical, renter-focused information, including:

  • Instructions for signing up for emergency alerts in the four counties surrounding Lake Tahoe,

  • A map of evacuation routes and exit points out of the basin,

  • A checklist of essentials for long-term renters, such as preparing an evacuation go-bag, obtaining renter’s insurance, and documenting personal belongings, and

  • A recommendation to review leases with landlords and create a shared plan for defensible space and landscaping maintenance.

Inner pages of the tri-fold guide that discuss red flag warnings, evacuation, being prepared for wildfire, and long-term renter essentials.

Inner pages of the trifold “A Guide for Lake Tahoe Long-Term Renters”

This guide helps ensure long-term renters are informed, prepared, and better equipped to respond to wildfire threats. It also serves as a strong example of how county officials and community leaders in places like New Mexico can prioritize engagement strategies and support renters in their own wildfire preparedness efforts.

Guidance from Los Angeles County for Renters in Fire-Affected Homes 

1 of 11 social media graphics titled After the recent LA county wildfires, many rental units experienced substantial damage.

1 of 11 social media graphics provided by LA County DCBA.

The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) developed a set of clear, actionable steps for renters whose units were seriously damaged, but not destroyed, by wildfire following the LA Fires earlier this year. While landlords are responsible for ensuring the unit remains in livable condition, a tenant’s rights may vary depending on the severity of the damage, the location of the property, and the terms of their lease. These straightforward messages serve as a strong example for leaders in New Mexico and beyond, offering a model for effective, easy-to-understand communications that can be shared with renters in the aftermath of a wildfire.

DCBA’s guidance places particular emphasis on smoke-damaged properties. For renters dealing with issues such as ash, soot, or smoke damage, especially in HVAC systems, they recommend the following steps:

  1. Submit a written repair request to the landlord as soon as possible.

  2. Understand landlord responsibilities. The landlord is responsible for repairing damage to the structure (both interior and exterior) and any appliances that were included in the lease.

  3. Know what’s not covered. Landlords are not responsible for replacing personal belongings damaged by smoke or fire.

This type of concise, renter-focused communication helps ensure tenants know their rights and responsibilities during disaster recovery and can serve as a valuable template for local governments and organizations supporting renters in wildfire-prone regions. To see the full suite of graphics and steps outlined by DCBA, visit: https://recovery.lacounty.gov/renters/

Disaster Preparedness from NM Office of Superintendent of Insurance

The New Mexico Office of Superintendent of Insurance’s Disaster Preparation page features an interactive wildfire preparedness tool designed to support both landlords and tenants. This tool provides practical tips and resources to help prevent wildfires and prepare your family, property, and finances. It includes links to help renters determine if their area is considered high-risk and identify the primary hazards in their county. The tool also outlines actionable steps residents can take to reduce ignition risks and increase safety before wildfire strikes.

Resources and Upcoming Opportunities

Landowner Resources Guide

The New Mexico Forestry Division has released a comprehensive guide for forest landowners which offers a wide range of resources and available technical and financial assistance. The guide covers key programs such as forest stewardship, urban and community forestry, forestry and fuels grants, land conservation, and fire-related initiatives. It also clearly outlines which counties are served by each Forestry Division District Office and provides contact information to help landowners connect directly with District staff. Landowners are encouraged to reach out for personalized guidance or recommendations to help meet their land use and land care goals.

 

Weekly Natural Resources Career Newsletter

The New Mexico Forest and Watershed Research Institute (NMFWRI) and the Conservation Science Center have put together a weekly newsletter which is full of natural resource jobs, career tips, and more. To see opportunities included in past newsletters, visit online or sign up to receive the newsletter each week in your inbox by emailing shantinir@nmhu.edu.

 

LANDFIRE Office Hours

LANDFIRE is a shared program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior wildland fire management programs. It supports community and firefighter protection by identifying areas across the nation which are potentially susceptible to wildland fire. LANDFIRE assists with landscape assessments, analysis, and natural resource management and supports modeling of fire behavior and effects. LANDFIRE is hosting an upcoming series of office hours for existing or new users:

  • April 30: The Use of LANDFIRE Data in the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS)

  • May 28: Characterizing Ecosystems at Different Spatial Scales with LANDFIRE Data

  • June 25: LANDFIRE's Vegetation Update

 

FACNM Microgrant Proposals Open Through May 2

Twice annually, FACNM accepts proposals for a small amount of seed funding (up to $2,000) to help FACNM Members and Leaders host events or educational opportunities to improve their community fire awareness and readiness. These proposals must demonstrate community benefit or FAC capacity building. The spring 2025 application period is open now through May 2!

Ideal project proposals may include:

  • Wildfire preparedness events

    • Home hazard assessment day

    • Defensible space or home hardening community workday

    • Evacuation planning and education

    • Post-fire erosion mitigation preparation and information

    • SimTable hosting

  • Equipment rentals

  • Slash disposal

  • Proposal development/writing

  • Improving/expanding existing offering

Wildfire Wednesdays #155: Local Efforts Supporting Wildfire Preparedness Day 2025

Happy Wednesday, FAC Community!

National Wildfire Preparedness Day, the brainchild of the NFPA Firewise program, takes place each year on the first Saturday of May. The significance and impact of this day comes from the fact that it provides an opportunity for collective action - community slash disposal volunteer days, working with your neighbors to clear gutters and remove leaves from under the deck, and more. By pairing education with encouragement for community members to work on addressing both their individual and neighborhood risk on the same day, Wildfire Preparedness Day helps to build motivation, momentum, and relationships between neighbors to continue the good work year-round.

For this year’s Preparedness Day campaign, NFPA is highlighting the value and impact that preparing the first five feet immediately around the perimeter of the home, known as the immediate zone, or “Zone Zero”, can have on reducing the risk of home ignition.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Have a safe and happy start to spring!
Rachel

Wildfire Preparedness Day 2025

In addition to NFPA’s list of ideas, FAC Net has a user-friendly fact sheet to help you Improve Fire Outcomes in Your Community: Meaningful Projects You Can Complete in as Little as 10 Minutes (and all the way up to a full day).

Resources and ideas to get started

NFPA and State Farm provide a toolkit for community members to easily get involved in Wildfire Preparedness Day in three steps:

  1. PICK A PROJECT
    Prep Day projects are focused on how to prevent your home from igniting when a wildfire happens.

    • Review the project suggestions and select one that fits your needs.

    • Make a list of the tools or supplies you will need for your project.

    • Ask family members or neighbors to set aside time to help.

  2. SPEAK UP AND STAY SAFE
    Communication is key to spreading the word and having a safe, smooth project.

    • Promote your event locally with flyers and announcements, and invite others in your community to participate.

    • Review the safety tips and gear suggestions with everyone who will participate.

  3. POST AND PARTICIPATE
    Spread the word beyond your community by making your project visible to the greater world!

    • Take before and after photos of your project site.

    • Share your project details on the NFPA Prep Day Map!

    • Most of all, find a way to participate on Wildfire Community Preparedness Day! Don’t forget to take photos and video for all to see!

Defending the Home Ignition Zone (HIZ)

Illustration of a fire burning, right to left, through a green forest of pine trees. Purple smoke covers the sky in the background.

Research shows there are proven methods for preparing properties for withstanding the devastating impacts of a wildfire. This Prep Day, you have the power to protect the part of the community that means the most to you and your family by eliminating vulnerabilities in the HIZ, particularly the immediate 5-foot zone around your residence. Whether it's replacing wood chips with gravel or reimagining your entire landscape design, what you do on Saturday, May 3, really matters. Learn More About the HIZ.

To learn more about how firefighters triage structures during a wildfire, check out the new fact sheet Is This Structure Defensible? Understanding Wildland Firefighters’ Perceptions of Structure Defensibility from the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.

How Do Homes Burn in a Wildfire?

Contrary to popular belief, most homes do not burn down from direct contact with wildfire flames or radiant heat. In this episode of Learn Something New™, misconceptions about wildfires are too often perpetuated in media as massive walls of flame that scorch everything in their path.

 

Local Events

Porfirio Chavaria with Santa Fe Fire Department shows how the SimTable can illustrate how fire and fire and smoke travel with different weather conditions

Join Villages of Santa Fe and many other partners for a free day of educational workshops (10am-1pm) and family fun (12pm-3pm) for Wildfire Community Preparedness Day at the Southside Library.

  • When: Saturday, May 3, 2025 from10:00 AM 3:00 PM

  • Where: Santa Fe Public Library - Southside Branch (6599 Jaguar Drive, Santa Fe, NM; map)

Educational sessions will include a panel on homeowner’s insurance in addition to workshops about emergency preparation, simulated wildfire spread in the Santa Fe area, and wildfire risk reduction techniques for homeowners. Family activities will include Smokey Bear, fire trucks, and other children’s activities. This workshop is free and open to the public, with ample free parking available at the Southside Library. Download the flyer to learn more.

Colfax County Wildfire Community Preparedness Day (Angel Fire)

Join the Colfax County NM Firewise Communities to learn how to improve fire safety and readiness for your family and home.

  • When: Saturday, May 3, 2025 from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM

  • Where: Lowe’s Market, 3373 Mountain View Blvd, Angel Fire, NM (map)

A red firetruck parked in front of blue cloud covered mountains on a rainy day

This community event will provide attendees an opportunity to learn about Firewise USA, individual actions to take to create defensible space and harden homes against fire, how to get involved and start networking with FACNM, and much more. There will be fire personnel from Angel Fire and Moreno Valley Volunteer Fire Departments as well as representatives from the NM Forestry Division, Forest Stewards Guild, and Cimarron Watershed Alliance present to answer questions.

Stop by to meet Smokey Bear, see fire trucks, get free Smokey Bear and Firewise USA materials, and enter a raffle for a chance to win free door prizes!

Earth Day Celebration: Seed to Tree, Mountain to River (Las Vegas)

An interactive, hands-on Earth Day celebration at the NMHU Industrial Arts parking lot and building (indoors and outdoors).

  • When: Saturday, April 25, 2025 from 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM

  • Where: Highlands University Industrial Arts Building, 917 11th St, Las Vegas, NM (map)

Come enjoy a day of hands-on activities celebrating our forests, watersheds, and how they are connected. Tour the Reforestation Center seed cone processing lab! See how thinning forests affects fire behavior! Try your hand at reading tree rings! Join a nature treasure hunt! Learn ways to reduce fire risks around your home! And much more! Plus, enjoy free snacks and buy a grilled burger to support the NMHU Forestry Club! To learn more or to sign up as a presenter or supporting organization, email Christina Muniz at christina@nmhu.edu.

Upcoming Opportunities

FACNM Microgrant funding

Twice annually, FACNM accepts proposals for a small amount of seed funding (up to $2,000) to help Members and Leaders host events or educational opportunities to improve their community fire awareness and readiness. These proposals must demonstrate community benefit or FAC capacity building. The spring 2025 application period is open now through May 2!

Screenshot of a webpage announcing the F A C N M microgrant funding. Black text on a cream background and an embedded photo of cut tree branches on the ground in a clearing with live trees in the background.

Ideal project proposals may include:

  • Wildfire preparedness events

    • Home hazard assessment day

    • Defensible space or home hardening community workday

    • Evacuation planning and education

    • Post-fire erosion mitigation preparation and information

    • SimTable hosting

  • Equipment rentals

  • Slash disposal

  • Proposal development/writing

  • Improving/expanding existing offering

Other funding opportunities

The Network for Landscape Conservation has announced a request for proposals to its Catalyst Fund. The Fund makes strategic investments in strengthening the collaborative capacity of place-based, community-grounded landscape partnerships. The Fund seeks Partnerships at pivotal points in their development where modest investments in collaborative capacity can shift the trajectory of conservation and stewardship outcomes over time in the landscape. Specifically, the Catalyst Fund prioritizes the transition from collective vision to collective action. This year there is also support available to undertake climate-informed conservation planning. Proposals are due by May 16.

 

Webinars

Fire in the Southwest: Fire season 2024 overview and 2025 outlook
Thursday, May 1, 2025 at 1:00pm MT

A large plume of dark grey smoke rising over a dark green forest of pinyon and juniper trees with small dots of orange flame seen between the trees

To track the causes, consequences, and patterns of fire in the Southwest, the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and Forest Stewards Guild compile an annual report on the 10 largest fires of the previous fire season. Please join report authors and meteorologists for a webinar reviewing the top 10 fires of 2024 and looking ahead to the fire forecast for 2025. The presenters will provide historical context for these 2024 fire data, including trends and outliers in the timing, management costs, vegetation, and burn severity, and discuss the fire season outlook and summer weather forecast for the Southwest in 2025.

Wildfire Wednesdays #154: Welcoming a New Network Coordinator

Happy Wednesday, FAC Community!

My name is Megan Rangel-Lynch and I’m excited to introduce myself as the new FACNM Learning Network Coordinator and a new contributor to the Wildfire Wednesdays newsletter series. As I step into this role, I’m eager to deepen my understanding of the Network’s work and vision, connect with many of you who are leading fire readiness efforts across the state, and share what I know while learning from your experiences. I look forward to working together to continue building a culture of fire adaptation. 

In my previous role as Program Assistant Manager for Community Resilience with the Arizona Wildfire Initiative (AZWI), I was continually inspired by the many ways leadership manifests in fire adaptation work. Whether it was the local coffee shop owner placing wildfire information flyers next to his credit card machine, an HOA leader sharing her lessons learned from 16 years of experience running a Firewise program, or a southwest region researcher working to expand the concept of fire adaptation beyond the parcel level— I was inspired by how every contribution, big or small, is vital to building communities more resilient to wildfire. Leadership and mentorship emerge in many forms, and I am motivated by the opportunity to contribute to this network of collaboration, where shared knowledge and collective action can help us all learn to better live with wildfire. 

As I settle into my new role, I would like to share some resources from across the state line that I developed with community partners while working for AZWI. These tools, along with others that can support your wildfire preparedness journey, remind us that building fire resilience doesn’t always require grand initiatives. Small, consistent efforts—whether it’s a conversation with a neighbor, an educational event at a local school, or maintaining your own property's fire-safe defensible space—contribute to a broader culture of preparedness. 

I hope that, together, we can celebrate big successes in our communities while also supporting each other through shared resources, consistent engagement, and ongoing collaboration. I look forward to learning from and working alongside all of you!  

This Wildfire Wednesday features:  

All the best, 
Megan 

Advancing Community Resilience in Arizona: Insights from the Arizona Wildfire Initiative

This blog post, originally featured on FAC Net, highlights the work of the community resilience team of the Arizona Wildfire Initiative.  

Image of a Sonoran desert ecosystem with the title of the blog and the author's name overlayed.

Between the spring and fall of 2024, AZWI staff met with over 100 Arizona residents, leaders, and officials across several key communities which were identified by a board of state-level experts as having high fire risk. Through these conversations, the team identified strengths, gaps, opportunities, and areas needing attention — at both the community and state level. A blog post from the national Fire Adapted Learning Network (FAC Net) details the social science interviewing and analysis process of AZWI staff and shares overarching lessons and recommendations that emerged during the consultation process. Many of these lessons are applicable to communities in New Mexico. 

A few key recommendations that emerged from AZWI’s consultation process include: 

  • Be strategic when prioritizing wildfire risk reduction efforts - Many communities have access to cost-share grants for retrofitting or vegetation removal on a first come, first-served basis. While easier to administer and seemingly fair, this approach inadvertently may hinder work on high-risk properties where fuels management may produce a  higher net benefit for the broader community (e.g. properties along evacuation routes or adjacent to high-risk areas). Solutions could include tiered cost-share structures based on household income or prioritization of properties where treatment would have the greatest impact on community safety.   

  •  Include communities lacking formal, structured leadership in funding and partnership opportunities - Federal, state, and local entities and their collaborators should explore how to make partnership  and funding opportunities more accessible for communities early along in their adaptation journey, or those without Homeowners’ Associations or other defined leadership structures. Many formal programs and collaborations to support community wildfire adaptation are easiest to implement in pre-structured spaces, leaving communities with a more horizontal structure behind. This may indicate the need for funds that support community meetings, relationship building, and small scale planning as a precursor to larger awards, or the need to include mechanisms that support more fragmented communities, such as placement of grant coordinators within existing locally trusted entities.   

  • Use unknowns about wildfire as catalysts for collaboration - “Unknowns” about wildfire in different ecosystems can serve as collaborative catalysts for place based discussions about wildfire resilience. For instance, uncertainty around fuels management in Sonoran ecosystems where little guidance exists can spark productive discussions between communities and experts. 

Read the full blog and explore other recommendations that emerged: https://fireadaptednetwork.org/advancing-community-resilience-in-arizona/ 

Guide to Organizing a Community Chipper Day

A so-called “chipper day” typically involves residents removing flammable vegetation from around their homes, especially within the 5-foot zone (Zone 0), and getting the resulting material (called slash) chipped and hauled offsite to reduce the risk of wildfire to their home and community. Coordinating with residents and local groups or organizations to make this kind of vegetation removal happen collaboratively can help maximize the impact of community wildfire safety-enhancing work (read about a community chipper day in La Barbaria Canyon that kickstarted community defensible space for the Neighborhood Association). 

This four-page guide, How to Organize a Community Chipper Day, provides the essential information a community leader would need to organize a successful chipper day, including various organizational structures to ensure the event meets the unique needs of any given community. 

Image of the first page of the "how to organize a community chipper day" guide

Page 1 of 4 of the guide

Wildfire Preparedness Actions You Can Take in Just 10 Minutes

With widespread drought and red flag warnings occurring as early as February, wildfire season is increasingly becoming a year-round concern. This can make the prospect of wildfire preparedness, often associated with lengthy and labor-intensive checklists, feel overwhelming. To help individuals take action at their own pace, FAC Net developed a resource that organizes wildfire preparedness tasks by time commitment. 

While home hardening remains a crucial aspect of wildfire preparedness, making homes and businesses more resistant to embers and fire, this resource’s focus expands beyond an individual’s property. It offers a broad range of meaningful projects—some of which take as little as 10 minutes—empowering individuals to engage in ongoing preparedness efforts that fit their capacity and schedules. 

The Fire Ecology Learning Lab - Agency and Informal Educator Resource

The Fire Ecology Learning Lab, originally created as a middle school lesson series for students in New Mexico and Arizona to explore the fire ecology of the region, has since expanded to offer hands-on, interactive lessons for students from kindergarten through high school. Educators, including agency professionals, environmental educators, and informal instructors, can easily bring these engaging lessons into classrooms or the field using ready-to-use kits.  

All the materials needed for a hands-on, engaging classroom visit—covering topics such as wildfire management, fire behavior, fire ecology, or fuels—can be requested as a rentable as a kit. Kits are currently being hosted by partner organizations across the Southwest including New Mexico Highlands University, New Mexico State University, and USFS Region 3 Office.

Description of the different kit types, including K-2, 3rd-5th grade, middle school, high school. and en Español

Lessons are available in both Spanish and English and are tailored to different grade levels. Modules were all designed based on science standards. 

For a full overview of the kit contents, lesson plans, or to request a kit, visit: https://www.swfireconsortium.org/agency-and-informal-educators/ 

Additional Resource

In an effort to build public literacy of wildfire resilience solutions, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) launched a strategic communications campaign called Fix the Forest. With content vetted by wildfire practitioners and researchers, the campaign is grounded in science, traditional ecological knowledge, and the experience of on-the-ground managers.  

The EDF's ambition it to provide clear yet in-depth explanations of key wildfire resilience strategies (such as forest thinning, beneficial fire, community wildfire protection, and advanced firefighting techniques) to address the ongoing wildfire crisis. Resources on the webpage are accompanied by a glossary that provides definitions of essential terms related to forest and fire management, ensuring accessibility for all audiences. 

Pile burning from October Rio Trampas prescribed burn

This campaign is not associated with the Fix Our Forests Act, a congressional bill introduced in the House of Representatives in January 2025. That legislation focuses on federal forest management requirements, including requirements concerning reducing wildfire threats, expediting the review of certain forest management projects, and implementing forest management projects and other activities. 

Upcoming Events

Learning to Live with Fire – Lunch and Learn Webinar Series 

New Mexico State University logo

Join Doug Cram, Forest and Fire Specialist at the New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Office, for a series of informative one-hour webinars designed to help New Mexico residents prepare for wildfire season. Each session includes a Q&A segment, offering guidance on wildfire preparedness, evacuation strategies, and practical steps to protect your home, property, and community. 

The 2025 Lunch & Learn webinar series is tailored for homeowners and residents who want to enhance their wildfire awareness, improve their emergency readiness, and adopt proactive measures for living safely in a fire-prone environment—which includes all of New Mexico. 

Sessions begin at noon and will be recorded. 

2025 Webinar Schedule 

  • March 27th - Wildfire! You have 5 minutes to evacuate. What should you do? 

  • April 3rd - Steps to safeguard your home, yard, and neighborhood against wildfire. 

  • April 10th - Farm and ranch wildfire considerations. 

The Bear Truth: Black Bear Resource Selection and Response to Wildfire and Forest Restoration Treatments | Apr 9, 2025 at 11:00 AM Mountain 

An era of fire suppression, compounded by selective harvesting of large diameter trees and overgrazing, has altered historical fire regimes in the western United States. These fire and land management practices have left many western forests with increased fuel loads and high densities of small diameter trees. This increased tree density has been associated with decreased biodiversity, and reduced habitat quality for some species. 

Managers are attempting to mitigate altered fire regimes using restoration thinning and prescribed burns to reduce fuel loads and restore historical forest structure and fire regimes. As mitigation treatments become more common, there is a need to understand the effects of large-scale forest manipulation on wildlife and habitat. Using GPS locations spanning 2012-2022 within the Jemez Mountains, research sought to assess multi-scale seasonal resource selection functions to determine how black bears respond to wildfires and forest restoration treatments, including the effect of fire severity, time since the disturbance, and other environmental and topographic variables relevant to black bears. 

Presented by Matt Keeling from New Mexico State University, this presentation will provide valuable insights for managers seeking to reduce wildfire risk while maintaining or enhancing habitat for black bears or sympatric species in fire prone landscapes by explaining spatio-temporal responses of black bears to forest restoration treatments and wildfires. 

Pre- and Post-Fire Impacts of Beaver Dams and Beaver Dam Analogs | Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 10AM Mountain 

Given the increasing severity of wildfires and their associated impacts across the country, there is significant attention on the tools that are available to address these challenges. Recent research highlights that conservation and restoration of freshwater ecosystems may play an important, yet overlooked, role in wildfire management.  

Dr. Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota and Alexander Funk, Director of Water Resources and Senior Counsel at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, will touch on the role of beaver dams and their analogs in creating wetlands, the nexus between freshwater systems and fire, and how this information can be utilized to enact policy change to conserve these ecotypes. 

Wildfire Wednesdays #153: State Legislation for Forests, Watersheds, and Fire Resilience

Happy Fire Friday, FAC Network!

The New Mexico State Legislature convenes every year on the third Tuesday in January, holding 60-day sessions in odd-numbered years (such as 2025) and 30-day sessions (also called short sessions) in even numbered years. During these sessions, the chambers of the Legislature consider bills (the form of legislation used to propose laws), resolutions (a formal declaration of the Legislature concerning some subject that it either cannot or does not wish to control by law), and memorials (an expression of legislative desire that is usually addressed to another governmental body in the form of a petition or declaration of intent). Learn more about the State legislative process here.

In this year’s legislative session, several bills related to forestry, fire, and water are up for consideration. These bills making it to the floors of the House and the Senate indicates that New Mexicans — and their representatives — are putting wildfire and natural resource concerns first. Today’s Wildfire Wednesday discusses the implication of these bills being debated and considered for passage and looks at the details of several of the most impactful.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Stay fire safe as the spring winds start to blow,
Rachel

The Importance of Legislative Consideration

What it means for forests, water, and fire safety to be before the State Legislature

Photo by Andrew Weber for the Library of Congress.

The potential passage of the bills outlined below is important because, once passed, they become codified into statute and state law. This makes the objectives and directives in the law mandatory "must do" items for state employees, including those at the EMNRD Forestry Division. Creation of new programs and codifying amendments to existing law are one way to ensure new sources of state funding that can help protect residents against the next wildfire. 

While homeowners and residents are ultimately responsible for readying their land place of residence for fire, the State and its Agencies also have a responsibility to help residents establish defensible space and harden their homes. The State and partner organizations have historically done this through resident education and outreach with minimal financial assistance. Some of the bills mentioned below, if passed, will go a step further by providing residents with the financial incentive to do so (see SB33). In addition to establishing defensible space and home hardening, we should also be working to clear and thin the overgrown forest buffers that surround so many of our state's rural communities (see HB175). Passage of these bills — and even the consideration of them — really means that New Mexico is looking into its warmer and drier future and taking proactive steps to make sure that everyone is protected. 

Wildfire Prepared Act: SB33

When fire gets into an urban or developed area, it can spread from structure to structure rather than from burning vegetation to structure. For this reason, home hardening is an essential component of wildfire preparedness and is most effective when a majority of neighbors in a community individually harden their homes to collectively reduce their risk. The components of home hardening such as installing or replacing vents, siding, decks, roofs, and creating a ‘zero zone’ with no vegetation next to the house is necessary but financially out of reach for many residents.

Senate Bill 33 aims to increase home hardening efforts across the state three ways:

  1. Making grants available to residents and organizations who can assist with making structural modifications to homes to harden them to fire. This work, while essential, is typically ineligible for financial assistance through existing federal and state grant opportunities.

  2. Expanding the state Fire Planning Task Force to develop defensible space standards and develop standards that will make a property eligible for wildfire prepared certification, a step which may help landowners maintain or secure wildfire insurance.

  3. Creating a state Forestry Division-administered ‘Wildfire Prepared Fund’ to support staffing, administration, and implementation of the other two provisions of this bill.

Read more in the SB33 Fact Sheet below. For more information, please contact EMNRD Forestry Division personnel George Ducker (george.ducker@emnrd.nm.gov) or Laura McCarthy (laura.mccarthy@emnrd.nm.gov).

New Mexico lawmakers are advancing a bill to prevent wildfires, including by removing fuels in the forest, before the next one strikes. This is Senate Bill 33, the Wildfire Prepared Act, which will help New Mexicans defend their homes against wildfires and provide grants for defensible space improvements and home hardening. "We're not going to stop wildfires altogether, but we can reduce them," said State Forester Laura McCarthy. "SB33 gets us at the things that we actually can control -- and that is the vegetation around properties." Watch the video below or view this article from radio station KSFR to learn more:

Forest and Watershed Restoration Act Amendment: HB175

Creating Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Buffers

For communities situated close to or abutting natural areas (wildlands), unmanaged flammable vegetation and lack of buffer zones (strategic barriers between natural vegetation and residential areas) create a dangerous environment where wildfires can rapidly spread from natural areas into residential neighborhoods, putting homes, lives, and entire communities at critical risk. Creating Buffer zones can significantly slow the spread of wildfires and create safer, more defensible operational areas from which firefighters can combat approaching flames.

House Bill 175 seeks to comprehensively address wildfire prevention and close this gap in protection by making strategic amendments to expand the Forest Conservation Act. It will:

  • Introduce precise legal definitions for "buffer zones" and "high-risk areas", providing clear guidelines for implementing protective measures around communities vulnerable to wildfire threats.

  • Expand the definition of eligible projects to explicitly include the creation and maintenance of protective buffers around wildland-urban interfaces, ensuring that preventative measures can be legally and financially supported.

  • Enable funds in the Forest Land Protection Revolving Fund to be used for these critical preventative infrastructure projects, transforming potential vulnerability into proactive community protection.

Read more in the HB175 Fact Sheet. For more information, please contact EMNRD Forestry Division personnel George Ducker (george.ducker@emnrd.nm.gov) or Laura McCarthy (laura.mccarthy@emnrd.nm.gov).

Other Important Bills

Timber Grading Act & Rural Electric Cooperative Wildfire Liability

…………………………

House Bill 553, the Timber Grading Act

Many local sawmills source their raw material from trees harvested from New Mexico forests, often from forest health restoration thinning projects. Smaller-diameter trees can be made into products such as latillas, wooden shipping pallets, animal bedding, wood stove pellets, molding, and more. Trees that are large enough to be cut into structural lumber and beams (like those you might buy at a hardware store) also make their way into mills; however, in order for those products to be sold commercially or for weight-bearing purposes (such as in home construction), they must first be ‘graded’ by a professional who determines that they are of an acceptable quality. There are no qualified graders in-state, so if a sawmill wants to get their lumber graded and approved for sale, they must pay an out-of-state professional to travel to their wood yard. This is financially inaccessible for many small mills, meaning that they are not able to produce and sell this type of product and the people of New Mexico are not able to purchase locally sourced and produced lumber.

House Bill 553 seeks to eliminate this barrier by establishing the Timber Grading Act to create a state-specific structural timber grading certification system for in-state sawmills. The EMNRD-Forestry Division will develop a grading certificate program, likely through a public post-secondary educational institution, to train sawmill owners and employees in timber grading. Participants can receive a five-year certification after completing the program, with the division able to charge up to $250 for the certificate. The bill requires graders to create detailed labels for graded timber, including information like the sawmill location, timber species, cut date, and moisture content. Importantly, timber graded and labeled under this in-state program will be considered equivalent to timber grade-stamped by accredited lumber agencies and can be used in all residential and commercial buildings in New Mexico. The bill defines key terms such as "grader" (a certified sawmill owner or employee who can inspect, grade, and label timber) and "structural timber" (dimensional lumber, structural beams, and vigas milled within New Mexico).

…………………………

House Bill 334, Rural Electric Cooperative Wildfire Liability

Following decades of power line-sparked wildfires across the West, Electric Cooperatives are coming under increased scrutiny and pressure to ensure the fire safety of their infrastructure. House Bill 334 seeks to improve Electric Cooperative liability by requiring company wildfire mitigation plans and allowing for EMNRD-Forestry Division to review those plans for adequacy. In return for establishing wildfire mitigation measures, limits will be set on liability and damage awards and claim filing against participating Electric Cooperatives.

Elements that must be included in a company’s wildfire mitigation plan include:

  • A description and map of the service area and electric system within,

  • Methods that the company will use to assess wildfire risk,

  • Procedures and standards for vegetation management within the service area,

  • Electric system maintenance and inspection procedures,

  • The design, procedures, and standards for construction of the electric system,

  • Procedures used to monitor and forecast potentially hazardous weather and otherwise remain situationally aware,

  • Emergency response and operational procedures that will be used in the event of a wildfire or during wildfire conditions,

  • Procedures to restore the electric system in the event of a wildfire, and

  • A description of the potential impact of the plan's mitigation measures on public safety, first responders and health and communication infrastructure.

An electric cooperative's plan will be effective for five years upon the date of approval by the commission. The bill sets forth liability limitations or exemptions for Electric Cooperatives if they comply with their approved plan, while still allowing for those impacted by a fire to claim losses if said wildfire is caused by a powerline failure or otherwise caused by the company. In this way, public safety is improved, fire victims are protected, and electric cooperatives have the safeguard of limited liability and will stay in business.

Upcoming Events

Webinar on lessons from the Jemez Mountains

A Long-Term View of Collaborative Forest Management: The 15-Year Southwest Jemez CFLRP Report // Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 12:00 PM Mountain

Multi-party monitoring is a central feature of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and allows communities to assess the ecological, social, and economic impacts of these landscape-scale stewardship projects over a long period. The Southwest Jemez Mountains (SWJM) CFLRP, implemented from 2010-2024 in north-central New Mexico, was led by 40 agencies, organizations, Tribal entities or representatives, universities, contractors, and citizen volunteers. The goal of the SWJM project was the large-scale restoration of forest ecosystems and improvement of overall resilience to major disturbances, including fire, insects and disease, and a changing climate. 

In this presentation from the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, key Collaborative members Jeremy Marshall, Robert Parmenter, Steven Del Favero, and Jeremy Golston will present their lessons learned from 15 years of cooperative work and multi-party monitoring. They will discuss whether the goals of the CFLRP were met, focusing on the impacts of multi-decadal managed and prescribed fire, forest thinning, and the monitoring and computer modeling showing that forest resilience and restoration treatments ultimately reduced fire risk or severity in the treatment area. This presentation offers insight for land managers currently involved in landscape-scale restoration and wildfire risk reduction and is based on the SWJM CFLRP Final Monitoring Report, expected to be released in the spring of 2025.

Wildfire Wednesdays #152: Community Ordinances and Building Codes for Fire Protection

Happy Fire Friday, FAC Community!

According to Wildfire Risk to Communities, the majority of homes lost to wildfire are first ignited by embers and small flames. By reducing the susceptibility of the home and the immediately surrounding area, that structure’s chances surviving a wildfire are greatly increased. Creating ignition-resistant homes depends on actions to “harden” the physical structure against embers and flames (called home hardening) and actions to reduce flammability of the “home ignition zones” around the home (called defensible space). Neighborhood associations and local governments can create incentives and regulations, such as building codes, land development standards, and defensible space ordinances, to encourage ignition-resistant neighborhoods. Today we are digging into the current reality and efficacy of these incentive and enforcement mechanisms, including a local example of a newly-adopted ordinance in “in the news”!

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Take care,
Rachel

Defensible Space Ordinances and Building Codes

[The information below is partially excerpted from the Sustainable Development Code]

Over the past several decades, wildfire risk and its associated costs and impacts on communities has been increasing across the United States. Between 2018 and 2021, wildfires in the U.S. were associated with over $79.8 billion in costs, and fire years (and expenses) have only inflated since then with the return of the urban conflagration. According to data from the First Street Foundation, 50% of all addresses in the lower 48 states face some degree of wildfire risk; in some rural states, more than 90% of properties face some risk. In 2022 when the data was released, more than 686,000 properties at risk of wildfire faced at least a 1% chance of burning that year. This means that over a 30 year mortgage period, those homes have a 26% chance of burning. (New York Times, 2022).

Source: First Street Foundation
The future projection reflects a warming scenario in which countries take measures to curb emissions over the next 30 years roughly in line with pledges under the Paris climate agreement. The future risk map reflects changes in temperature, precipitation and other climatic factors, but the model relies on historical weather, development patterns and other inputs.

Because of the growing wildfire risk to communities and the history of devastation in many Western states, some local governments have enacted ordinances (i.e. a law set forth by a governmental authority, specifically a municipal regulation) such as ‘defensible space ordinances’ to minimize damage from wildfire in the built environment.

Defensible Space Ordinances

While it takes a comprehensive approach to adapt to and mitigate wildfires, a defensible space ordinance is an important step. This piece of legislation regulates the type and amount of combustible materials and vegetation allowed in designated areas around inhabited structures within a specific community or town. Requiring resident and landowners to thin the trees and remove the plants growing too close to their homes can help prevent or reduce the spread of fire to inhabited structures or other values at risk by reducing the prevalence of flammable materials or vegetation on a property. Establishing defensible space reduces the likelihood of a home igniting by direct flame contact or exposure to the radiant heat of a wildfire. Defensible space ordinances also help reduce ember production; this means that creating defensible space reduces the likelihood that embers will ignite a structure and spread to neighboring structures or surrounding vegetation. Finally, slowing the progress of an approaching wildfire can help keep firefighters safe while they access or defend a property.

When a fire comes to town, firefighters are often tasked with assessing structures on whether or not they would likely burn. As one firefighter said during the Los Angeles fires, “my job was to go inspect, do rounds through the neighborhood, see which [homes] had vegetation management, or at least try to get some sort of mitigation around the home before the fire came, and being able to mark off the houses that we think we can, and then we can’t save”(KSUT, 2025). Defensible space around your home, and especially defensible space required and enforced at a neighborhood scale, means that the home is less likely to catch on fire in the first place but also that it is more likely to be prioritized for protection by firefighters.

Building Codes

"It's really important that we design and build structures to resist ember exposures. What you do to the roof, what you do in that immediate five-foot zone around the home and underneath the decks is critically important" (NPR, 2020).

While California has mandated wildfire building codes for more than a decade in high-risk areas, other states have struggled to approve comprehensive codes that address wildfire risk mitigation. The problem is the perception that building to wildfire-resistant standards tends to be more expensive upfront that traditional construction, and this can lead to pushback from constituents and leaders. However, a study by Headwaters Economics found fire-resistant homes can be cheaper than traditional homes, thanks in large part to using more affordable fiber-cement siding (see the summary of the report here).

Building codes are sets of regulations, standards, and guidelines adopted by states and local communities to promote the construction of safe and durable structures. Building codes help safeguard people and property from hazards such as fires, electrical malfunctions, severe weather, and natural disasters. Wildland-urban interface (WUI) codes, and more widespread wildfire building codes (including roofing codes and more), can help reduce the potential for wildland fires to spread into or through the built environment. Fire-rated components and materials in home construction help control the spread of fire and limit damage to a burning building and surrounding structures. You’re probably familiar with some fire-related regulations - smoke detectors in your home or sprinklers in a commercial building - but building codes can go beyond those small additions, requiring home builders and municipalities to take a wider view of wildfire preparedness and be fire smart when they build or rebuild homes after a fire.

Regulation in the West

Few states have building codes that address wildfire. California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Utah all have statewide wildfire codes, Oregon’s new wildfire rules recently went into effect, and Colorado is working on creating a Wildfire Resilience Code Board. In many places, local communities can adopt their own building codes and wildfire building requirements. The idea behind these local measures is that effective wildland urban interface (WUI) fire risk management requires action by local communities and individual property owners; however, even though societal response to a natural hazard at the local level is where the greatest control over mitigation can be exercised, it is also difficult to motivate

Defensible space ordinances in the West are developed through a collaborative process involving fire agencies, local governments, land use planners, and community input. They take into account factors like wildfire risk, vegetation type, terrain, local building codes, and the specific needs of each region to create regulations that mandate geography-specific clearing of flammable vegetation around homes and structures, thus creating a buffer zone to slow the spread of wildfire and protect property during a fire.
Wildfire building codes are developed by incorporating state-level regulations, often based on model codes like the International Wildland Urban Interface Code (IWUIC), alongside input from local jurisdictions, fire agencies, and research institutions. These codes consider factors like fire risk mapping, vegetation types, topography, and specific construction materials to create standards for building design that can better withstand wildfires; they typically focus on fire-resistant materials for roofs, siding, windows, vents, and landscaping requirements around the structure to minimize ignition points.

WUI homeowners are more accepting of policies that are seen as both fair and part of a more comprehensive risk reduction strategy. Whether individuals voluntarily adopt policies - or only accept them because they are mandatory - depends on their perceived risk severity, views about the proper roles of government, and beliefs about alternatives to regulatory approaches (e.g. private insurance, education, ignition source reduction). Individual compliance with these policies, on the other hand, is related to the feasibility of home hardening and defensible space in terms of household costs and yard waste disposal options, neighborhood norms, competing land use objectives, insurance considerations, and whether or not the policy is mandatory (McCaffrey, 2009).

In the News

Angel Fire, led by FAC principles and leadership, passes new Defensible Space Ordinance

“The Village of Angel Fire Council took a critical step toward wildfire mitigation at its Jan. 28 meeting, voting unanimously to proceed with a Defensible Space Ordinance. The ordinance, aimed at improving fire safety for developed properties, is part of a broader push to help residents protect their homes—and their homeowners’ insurance policies.

Screenshot of the World Journal article announcing the adoption of the new defensible space ordinance, February 6, 2025.

“The plan, developed in partnership with the Fire Adapted Community Committee, will allow property owners to request an assessment from the Angel Fire Fire Department. Based on National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) guidelines, the evaluation will outline steps for creating defensible space around structures. Property owners who complete the recommended actions will receive a certificate to present to their insurance providers… With approval secured, the ordinance will now go through legal review and public hearings before taking effect, tentatively scheduled for April 1.” (World Journal, February 6, 2025)

This effort was led, in part, by FACNM leader Mike Overby and informed by his network of peers.

…………………………….

Prescribed Fire, Managed Burning, and Previous Wildfires Reduce Fire Severity

In this new peer-reviewed journal article, authors evaluated the association between previously implemented fuels reduction and forest restoration activities (including prescribed fire and managed wildfire), previous wildland fire, and fire severity in the 2022 Black Fire that occurred in southwestern New Mexico. This exercise analyzed the real-world impacts of treatments that, for years, scientific literature and professional knowledge have indicated will reduce future fire severity.

A section of Figure 1, Patterns of burn severity and previous treatment in the 2022 Black Fire, which burned in southwestern New Mexico, USA, from the article.

Over 54% of the >131,000 ha burned area had been previously treated, providing an ideal opportunity to examine the influence of extensive past treatments on fire behavior in a ‘gigafire’. In the landscape-scale analysis, previously treated areas were the most important predictor of both moderate- and high-severity fire, with data indicating that the proportion of area burned at high-severity decreased by an average of 51%. At a fine scale, when the fire front encountered a previously treated area, the observed burn severity decreased, regardless of whether the fire was burning at high, moderate, or low intensity at the time of encounter. The range of fuel conditions that existed on the landscape prior to the Black Fire, produced by many previous fires, made such a positive outcome possible. The findings show that burn severity patterns within the Black Fire were best explained by the presence or absence of previous fire, rather than fire weather or vegetation factors.

Chama District Fire Training Opportunities

This winter and spring, the Chama District of the NM Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department - Forestry Division is hosting wildland firefighter courses required for National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) certification. In-person classes will be held at Volunteer Fire Stations across northern New Mexico (see schedule for more details). Several of the courses, including an upcoming S-131 - Firefighter Type I training on March 5-6, are offered virtually and in the evenings to accommodate those who cannot attend midday or in-person trainings. These intended audience for these classes is volunteer firefighters; however, inquiries by others are welcome to ensure that each class has at least10 students.

View the full schedule of classes by clicking on the image; to enroll or get more information, contact instructor Pablo Montenegro at pablo.montenegro@emnrd.nm.gov.

The Wildfire Resilience Training Center (WRTC) in las Vegas, NM is also offering a handful of first responder and basic wildland firefighter courses this spring. Students who complete the full suite of classes will have the prerequisite training and may be eligible for hiring in the federal and local fire workforce.

View the full schedule of classes in Wildfire Wednesday #150; to enroll or get more information, contact WRTC Director Hank Blackwell at hblackwell@luna.edu.

Wildfire Wednesdays #151: Passing the Torch - Fire Learning for the Next Generation

Happy Wednesday!

Firefighters are a paradox in many ways - in children’s books and the eyes of their fellow community members, they are Local Heros dressed in brightly colored Nomex, wielding axes and hoses, off to save the day, the forest, or the town; however, this image often glosses over the years of training, rough conditions, high barriers to entry, and low wages that reflect a firefighter’s reality. These elements of the job can lead to difficulty recruiting and retaining trained fire personnel at a time when the demand is high and rising. This week’s newsletter is an in-depth look at one program aiming to teach and equip local New Mexico youth to be the next generation of fire managers.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Thank you to Andrew Pearson and Sarah DeMay of the Forest Stewards Guild who contributed their written reflections and photos to this Wildfire Wednesday.

Fire Learning for the Next Generation

The Forest Stewards Youth Corps

Not everyone is given the opportunity to travel across vast stretches of beautiful New Mexican landscape while getting paid, receiving extensive job and career training, and contributing to wildfire readiness and risk reduction in this fire-prone state, but for the Forest Stewards Youth Corps (FSYC) crews, that prospect is their reality for 13 weeks every autumn.  

For the past 30 years, the FSYC program has been a source of employment and education opportunities for New Mexico youth. The goal of the program is to put the forest first for the long haul, a key part of which is building the next generation of responsible forest stewards. By providing hands-on training and professional development, the program helps kickstart both interest and careers in forestry and natural resources management. The fall FSYC program, which focuses on fire and management of fuels (the flammable organic material which burns during wildfires), was established in 2018. It builds on the success of the FSYC summer program by providing recent high school and college graduates aged 18-25 with training and certification in topics related to forestry and wildland fire such as NWCG Basic Wildland Fire Fighting certification, Wildland Fire Chainsaw Use, Forestry and Timber Management, and more. 

Crew members learn about chainsaw safety, use, maintenance, and tree felling during their initial immersive two-week training.

The fall program kicks off with two weeks of intensive and immersive training, often hosted at the headquarters of longtime partner Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions in Thoreau, NM, during which crew members gain a strong and holistic foundational knowledge of wildland firefighting, safe chainsaw operation, leadership dynamics, and how to thrive as a member of a team. Once equipped with this crucial knowledge and experience, the crews return to their home locations (all crews are hosted by either a US Forest Service (USFS) Ranger District or Pueblo of Jemez Natural Resources Department (NRD)) to begin the landscape and community restoration and fire resiliency work for which they were trained. 

Benefitting the Land and the people who manage it

These crews provide an invaluable benefit to their host unit and to state fire management efforts as a whole: USFS Districts are chronically understaffed, a reality which sometimes leaves them without the personnel necessary to accomplish high-priority projects on the public lands in their charge. Pueblo of Jemez NRD similarly has a small staff and thousands of acres of forest to manage. FSYC crews’ time, funded by the New Mexico Youth Conservation Corps Commission, provides some relief from the immense budgetary pressures of personnel hiring, onboarding, and training seasonal staff so that the agencies can focus on making work happen on time and on the ground.

A crew member looks at the cloud of smoke rising from the North Joaquin Prescribed Burn.

One of the crucial but labor-intensive projects that requires a lot of training and capacity is prescribed burning. Prescribed fire or intentional burning is the controlled ignition of fuels such as downed branches, shrubs, grass, and needles under specific conditions and in a predetermined area to protect communities, water sources, and wildlife habitat by minimizing the material available to burn in future wildfires, reducing the likelihood of future ignitions moving from the forest floor to the tree tops, and benefiting the land through nutrient cycling. Intentional fire has been implemented across the world for millennia and is used as a tool on both public and private lands across the west to reintroduce fire to our fire-adapted landscapes.  To learn more about a successful collaborative approach to fire management and intentional burning for community and resource benefit, read about the All Hands All Lands Burn Team approach. 

Building careers and local capacity

In 2024, the FSYC crews joined with the USFS, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and All Hands All Lands to implement the North Joaquin Rx, a prescribed burn outside of Jemez Springs, NM. As many of the FSYC participants’ first real-world fire experience, the burn provided an opportunity to learn in real time how to work within a crew structure and within the burn organization as a whole, participating in holding operations (making sure that the fire doesn’t burn outside of the predetermined boundaries) and firing operations (lighting the fire in a controlled manner) for the duration of the entire 1,701 acre burn operation.

Crew members refill drip torches with fuel mix as part of firing operations.

This burn also provided a unique opportunity for the youth crews to work with and learn from FSYC alumni. Forest Service fire engine crew members from three different Ranger Districts all got their start as wildland fire professionals as members of the Guild’s fall youth crews. At a time when firefighting resources are stretched increasingly thin during severe fires or during the most fire-prone times of the year and the need for dedicated and trained personnel is high and rising, this clearly demonstrates the positive and long-term impact that FSYC crews have within local communities and the wildland fire workforce.  Building careers for local youth in forestry and wildland fire in New Mexico is a win-win situation: fire crews have better retention when they can hire locally, and wildland fire is a career option within rural communities where jobs are often otherwise scarce.

Collaboration is key

Snow White’s companions said to “whistle while you work”, a sentiment the fall FSYC crews take to heart as they bring some levity to a photo and a work day spent thinning the forest.

In addition to hands-on fire fighting and lighting, FSYC crews also learn-by-doing about collaborative work and relationship building. Throughout their season, crew members interface extensively with federal and local agency staff, private landowners, and Tribal land managers as they plan and discuss important collaborative land management projects. One landowner who stewards 45 forested acres adjacent to Santa Fe National Forest land worked closely with the Espanola-based FSYC crew to complete fuels reduction forest thinning work. This project provided a dual benefit to the community by reducing fire risk near the National Forest boundary and decreasing fuels for a new housing development nearby on the outskirts of Santa Fe. Treating large tracts of land like this that are not under the public domain, a reality made possible by FSYC crews, is an example of the work which is crucial to maintaining a healthy and sustainable wildland-urban interface. 

Looking back on another successful FSYC Fall season, it's encouraging to see so many young New Mexicans picking up the torch of conservation and improving their communities daily. Equipped with in-demand certifications and transferable job skills, these young crews are growing their own roots alongside the very forests they call home. 

But wait, there’s more!
Additional Youth and Employment Development Programs in NM

FSYC is not the only program seeking to equip local youth and young adults with the knowledge and skills to join the land stewardship workforce and contribute to their communities. Several other programs from across the State are:

  • Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps hosts Adult and Youth Crews, Local Placements, and more. Learn about their programs here.

  • Rocky Mountains Youth Corps 18+ program, in addition to their other youth programs, offers young adults a diverse set of hard skills training opportunities. Read about their fire experience in this 2021 news article.

Additional Resources

Research and Tools from the Southwest Fire Science Consortium

Grant Opportunity: 2025 Wildfire Risk Reduction Program

Click on the image to view and download the full grant application package.

New Mexico Counties is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 Wildfire Risk Reduction Program. The grant program assists communities throughout New Mexico in reducing their risk from wildland fire on non-federal lands. Funding for this program is provided by the National Fire Plan through the Department of the Interior/Bureau of Land Management for communities in the wildland-urban interface and is intended to directly benefit communities that may be impacted by wildland fire initiating from or spreading to BLM public land. 

 Funding categories include:

  • CWPP updates up to $25,000/project

  • Education and outreach activities up to $20,000/project

  • Hazardous fuels reduction projects up to $100,000/project

Applications are due to the local BLM field office for signature(s) by Friday, March 7, 2025. You can access the application package here or by visiting https://www.nmcounties.org/services/programs/ where you can view the application and checklist. For additional information, contact Hannah Kase Woods, Government Relations Specialist at hwoods@nmcounties.org or by calling 505-820-8102 (office) or 253-269-8025 (cell).

Wildfire Wednesdays #150: Resources from the Region

Happy Wednesday, Fire Adapted Community!

With a new year comes a lot of exciting upcoming opportunities and resources from across the region. From local classes and training opportunities to educational documentaries and resources for home hardening, winter is the perfect time to lean into the concept of Wildfire is Year-Round by learning more about risks and mitigation.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Stay warm and be well,
Rachel

Wildfire Resiliency Training Center Opportunities

The 2022 Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire Complex and its aftermath highlighted a need for a more comprehensive approach to wildfire resiliency. One prong of that comprehensive approach is local capacity - better training and opportunities for community members to become involved with fire and land management. In response, Luna Community College launched the Wildfire Resilience Training Center (WRTC) in las Vegas, NM. The Center offers classes, weekend trainings, and other hands-on opportunities for students to gain practical skills and knowledge, either furthering their current career or building the foundation to begin working in a new field.

This winter and spring, WRTC is offering a handful of first responder and basic wildland firefighter courses. Students who complete the full suite of classes will have the prerequisite training and may be eligible for hiring in the federal and local fire workforce.

View the full schedule of classes below; to enroll or get more information, contact WRTC Director Hank Blackwell at hblackwell@luna.edu.

Documentary

The Fire Problem

University of Montana - Wilderness Institute and USDA Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory

Lives are being impacted by extreme wildfires that threaten our communities and change our forests. What are the sources of this escalating problem, and can it be solved? This documentary draws from leading fire scientists, experienced land managers, and seasoned firefighters. The good news – in spite of climate change and the alarming fire trajectory, these experts make a case for a clear and effective path forward.

“We’re ringing the bell, we’re all in the struggle together. Everybody has a different role in this [path to a more fire adapted future].”

The Importance of Home Hardening

Click to view CalFire’s Home Hardening guide

Click to learn about IBHS’s Wildfire Prepared Home program

Research tells us that most homes ignite during a wildfire as a result of embers or small flames (National Interagency Fire Center). During urban conflagrations, fire does not spread from house to house via burning vegetation; rather, the energy released by one burning house carries the fire to the next one (NPR: Insights from an expert on large urban fires and how to prevent them). There are steps that homeowners can take to reduce the risk, with the most important efforts occurring on and immediately around the home.

Home hardening is the term used to describe vegetation management compliance and building materials used to resist the intrusion of flames or embers projected by a wildland fire. It can be applied to new construction or for retrofitting an older home. Home Hardening considers the relationship between your home and its exposure to nearby combustible features such as vegetation, vehicles, accessory buildings, or even miscellaneous structures like a fence.

Learn more about where to start addressing your home's vulnerabilities to better withstand wildfire with CalFire’s interactive Home Hardening guide and the Wildfire Prepared Home program from IBHS, a designation program which enables homeowners to take preventative measures for their home and yard to protect against wildfire. You can read more about IBHS’s program in Wildfire Wednesday #143.

Reflections from the National FAC Learning Network

In this blog post from FAC Net, staff and leadership reflect on what 2024 meant to them and what the FAC community was able to accomplish as seen through the lens of hindsight. “2024 was a busy and exciting year for the Fire Networks as we expanded our impact and continued to invest in people and place-based efforts to change our relationship with fire. Since the beginning of our 22-year partnership, our vision remains clear: to foster viable fire cultures across the country. We envision a future where fire once again plays its fundamental role as an ecological and cultural process. Where communities are empowered and prepared for wildfire. Where the workforce welcomes diverse viewpoints, skills and life experiences to address the complexity of the challenge. And where people who live within and depend on fire-adapted ecosystems have a role and voice, shared ownership, and where power and responsibility are distributed equitably.”

The reflection focuses on:

  • Supporting partnerships and collaborative approaches,

  • Facilitating and supporting learning networks,

  • Informing policy and funding environments at state and federal levels, and

  • Inspiring others across the globe

Read the full reflection and learn more about what comes next in 2025 on their website: www.fireadaptednetwork.org/fire-networks-2024-year-in-review/

Wildfire Wednesdays #149: Winter Roundup

Happy Wednesday - and happy New Year - FACNM community!

As everyone slowly returns from their holiday breaks and celebrations to the everyday work of creating fire adapted communities, we want to share a roundup of recent and interesting resources, research, and releases that are relevant to Network leaders, members, and affiliates. Today’s Wildfire Wednesday is a winter roundup of current events in fire learning and living.

We would also like to thank Gabe Kohler for the years of leadership and humor in his role as network coordinator. If you missed it, read his departing newsletter and remarks here.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Stay warm,
Rachel

Guidelines For Living With Fire

Fire-Resistant Landscaping

Colorado State University and the Colorado State Forest Service recently released a useful 8-page guidance document on fire resistant landscaping; while the fact sheet is geared toward CO residents, many of the tips and recommendations within are directly applicable to New Mexico and our wealth of wildland urban interface. The document goes through recommendations for vegetation and mindful landscaping in each of the home ignition zones defined in defensible space planning. Critically, it also recommends easy actions for long-term and annual maintenance.

Quick facts from the sheet:

  • Combined with structural hardening, a fire-resistant landscape can help a structure survive a wildfire.

  • A fire-resistant landscape considers both the amount and type of vegetation and the connections between vegetation and a structure.

  • Many native grasses, perennials, shrubs and trees are adapted to fire, and many require less water than commonly used non-native plants. When properly maintained, native vegetation can be used in landscaping.

  • Communities and neighbors in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) should work together to collectively reduce their risk from wildfire.

  • Maintenance should focus on keeping plants healthy and removing any accumulated debris and dead material within 30 feet of structures.

  • Certain drought-adapted plants can provide the balance between fire resistance and water conservation.

  • Landscaping needs frequent maintenance to effectively reduce wildfire risk

Read more about landscaping for fire resistance and download the full fact sheet.

Air Quality Mobile App

EPA's AirNow mobile app provides a simple interface for quickly checking current and forecast air quality information for planning daily activities and protecting your health. The app automatically displays the current AQI (Air Quality Index) for your local area or any area you wish to check, and allows you to store multiple areas for quick reference.

The app also includes the AirNow Fire and Smoke map, which the EPA produced in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service. It includes the most comprehensive information about wildfire smoke and air quality. You can view the Fire and Smoke Map by tapping the smoke icon on the bottom right of the screen.

Additionally, the interactive map includes data for air quality for PM 2.5, PM 10, and ozone monitors in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. You can view the interactive map by tapping the map icon at the bottom of the screen.

Upcoming Events and Engagement Opportunities

2025 New Mexico Tribal Forest & Fire Summit
March 4-6, 2025 — Mescalero, NM

The annual New Mexico Tribal Forest & Fire Summit brings together Tribal foresters, practitioners, natural resource managers, emergency departments, and experts to center the needs, challenges, and success of Tribal forestry and fire management. Join us in 2025 for “Roots for the Future: Strengthening Indigenous-Led Conservation” to find resources and training, build capacity, and collaborate in a network that’s focused on the healthy future of Tribal lands. The Summit is free for all participants.

Post-Fire Survey

Responses requested for Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon watershed restoration plan questionnaire

The New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (DHSEM), along with its partners, are gathering data to guide the long-term watershed restoration plan in areas impacted by the 2022 Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon (HPCC) fire and post-fire flooding.

Photo courtesy of the La Cienega Fire Department

This survey is intended to help managers identify flooding issues and/or flood-related damage in areas impacted by the fire. Those who have been impacted, live in the HPCC footprint, or work in this landscape are being asked to provide input about your watershed. The more feedback that the community provides, the better managers can understand and plan their watershed restoration efforts and prioritize areas to address.

Please submit your answers to the survey and help spread the word!

Related: the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a finding that additional actions are needed to address FEMA assistance challenges. Based on interviews with officials from 22 state, local, and tribal governments about their experiences with FEMA assistance, the report outlines 6 key recommendations.

Wildfires have increased in size and severity in recent decades and there are more new homes and other buildings in fire-prone areas. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided over $3.8 billion in wildfire-related assistance in FY 2019-2023. That paid for work such as debris removal and utility repairs but left many gaps in coverage. Challenges with accessing FEMA assistance include delayed help with post-fire erosion control work that could reduce future damages, confusing rules and complex paperwork, and more. Read the full GAO report here.

Winter Pile Burns

The Santa Fe Canyon Preserve pile burn is set to take place on a 12-acre parcel of land owned by The Nature Conservancy once conditions are right. This winter slash pile burn, led by Sam Berry of the Forest Stewards Guild, will complete a 2024 project to reduce wildfire fuels east of the city of Santa Fe. Organizers only made the decision to proceed after months of community meetings and a successful pile burn last winter.

Phase I of the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve pile burn happened without incident in early 2024. Qualified crews lit previously built piles of thinning slash along both slopes and drainages within the preserve and patrolled the area for months afterward to ensure that there were no problems with the fire reigniting or escaping.

“Will Joy, prescribed fire specialist for The Nature Conservancy, said the area, outside the Randall Davey Audubon Center and Sanctuary, is overgrown. The goal, he said, is to reduce fuel for catastrophic wildfires and improve forest health. ‘Healthy forests lend themselves to better water quality, being at the lower end of the Santa Fe watershed,’ Joy said.”

Read more about the Preserve Prescribed Burn, and other prescribed fire news from around the state capitol, in this article from the Santa Fe New Mexican.

In the News

The Growth of Fast Fires

Several recent articles from The San Franciso Chronicle and UC Merced Newsroom have focused on an aspect of fire which, while not often explicitly stated, has played out over and over in the news: a rapid increase in the rate of spread of wildfires as the climate has become hotter and drier over the past two decades. A study published in the journal Science, led by University of Colorado - Boulder, UC Merced, and UCLA scientists, finds a nearly fourfold increase in wildfire growth rates in California since 2001. The research highlights a critical gap in hazard preparedness across the United States: National-level fire risk assessments do not account for fire speed or describe how people and communities can better protect against rapid fire growth events.

Between 2001 and 2020, wildfire growth rates increased by 249% across the Western U.S. — defined as a group of 11 Western states — and 398% in California alone. The fastest fires identified in the study were in grassland-dominated ecosystems, which are abundant throughout California. Sixteen of the 20 fastest-growing fires across the continental U.S. during the study period burned in primarily grassland ecosystems.

This figure from the study, the fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020), illustrates the frequency and intensity of rapid fire growth across the west, especially the Pacific states.

Prior research has found California wildfires are getting larger, but the study authors conclude that speed dictates the severity of fire destruction. Fast-growing fires - defined as wildfires that burn more than 4,003 acres per day - were responsible for nearly 90% of fire-related damages despite being relatively rare in the United States. These “fast fires", which thrust embers into the air ahead of rapidly advancing flames, can ignite homes before emergency responders can intervene. The study shows these fires are getting faster in the Western U.S., increasing the risk for millions of people. "We've been transfixed by so-called megafires because of their massive size, but it turns out that the most destructive fires are ones that grow so fast they can't be stopped," said Professor Crystal Kolden, director of the UC Merced Fire Resilience Center and a co-author of the study. "Fast fires are the ones that destroy homes and lives." (UC Merced, October 28, 2024)

Although scientists don’t yet know if California weather is becoming windier, statewide fall temperatures have increased on average by about 3.1 degrees since 1896, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This provides greater opportunity for downslope winds to overlap on dry grasses and produce explosive growth rates. Fire risk tends to be further amplified following heat waves and during drought conditions.

Photo courtesy of the City of Santa Monica

Many home insurance companies have pulled out of California for fear of being overwhelmed by claims following damaging wildfires. Several wildfire-prone cities across the state have banned or are considering banning vegetation within 5 feet of homes to reduce fire risk.

The takeaway? These fast fires are causing the majority of home losses and fatalities, highlighting how important it is to increase mitigation activities that we know are effective, such as defensible space and home hardening.

Wildfire Wednesdays #148: New Year, New Network Leadership

Hi FACNM Members and Leaders,

I hope your holiday season is off to a great start. The New Year will be bringing new ideas and new energy into the coordinator role of the Fire Adapted New Mexico learning network.

I am reaching out with the bittersweet news that I will be leaving the Guild and my role as network coordinator for the Fire Adapted New Mexico learning network in the New Year to pursue my dream to practice Spanish and travel in Central and South America. I am incredibly grateful for last 6 years of work with the Guild and the Fire Adapted New Mexico learning network and I have learned so much from all of you. I will continue to reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico upon my return and I look forward to staying in touch in whatever role I take next in my career path of community forestry and wildfire resilience.

We have been working to make this transition as seamless as possible, and still, I know that it may take some time for the program to get back up to speed after the transition. I thank you all in advance for your patience and commitment to the Fire Adapted New Mexico learning network during this time.

I want to give a special thanks to Rachel Bean for her support of the learning network over the years and all of the ideas and energy that she has contributed to making this effort what it is today. I also want to thank Teresa Rigby and the New Mexico BLM for their continued support of FACNM.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me with any questions or just to say hello at my personal email address or my phone 509-844-3048.

In the spirit of Wildfire Wednesdays, I share some highlights and successes from my time as a coordinator:

It has been a joy to work with you all and I am excited to see the network change and grow with new leadership in the coming years.

Thank you,
Gabe

Wildfire Wednesdays #147: Risks and Solutions for Open Burning

Happy Friday, FAC Community!

We hope that you enjoyed your short week - the newsletter took a brief hiatus for the holiday celebrations as well, so please enjoy this Wildfire Wednesday alternative, Fire Friday!

While walking around the yard recently enjoying clear skies and sunshine on a crisp fall afternoon, my eyes couldn’t help but drift to the garden bed full of frost-killed plants, the side yard covered in tree leaves, and the tall weeds along the driveway. Even on a small residential plot, vegetative yard waste builds up over the course of the year. For folks with many acres, agricultural plots, or those living in the WUI who have to thin and prune trees and bushes, this waste can seem unmanageable. Where do we start, what do we do with all of this organic matter, and how do we stay mindful of our community and wildfire risks and readiness throughout?

This Fire Friday features:

Take care and be well,
Rachel

The Risks of Open Burning

What is open burning?

"Open burning" means the burning of any materials wherein contaminants resulting from combustion are emitted directly into the ambient air without passing through a stack, duct, or chimney. Mobile cooking devices such as manufactured hibachis, charcoal grills, wood smokers, and propane or natural gas devices are not defined as “open burning.” In simple terms, open burning [excepting recreational fires and “backyard burning” (burning of rubbish and other hazardous waste)] refers to burning flammable material, such as agricultural or yard vegetative debris, in an uncontained manner, such as burning fields or piling and burning yard waste. New Mexico’s Open Burn Program regulates open outdoor burning in order to limit pollution, decrease the chance of fire damage to property and injuries.

How do people start fires?

Some common ways that people start fires which can grow rapidly include:

  • Burning Debris - Escaped embers from burning piles of debris or vegetation from yard clean-up can carry for many miles without extinguishing on a windy day. Pay close attention to weather conditions and take caution to burn debris safely. Follow local ordinances and state laws which are designed with prevention criteria.

  • Unattended Campfires – Many people associate camping with happy memories. Keep it that way by not setting up under trees or near houses, and not setting up on a windy day. Take extra care to extinguish the fire completely by pouring water, stirring, pouring more water and stirring until its cold to the back of your hand. 

  • Cigarettes - A single cigarette butt carelessly discarded is all it can take to ignite and destroy thousands of acres of land. As cannabis is legal in New Mexico, it’s also a good idea to maybe just finish that joint. Whatever your preference, stub it out or step it out and throw it in the nearest trashcan.

  • Vehicles – Fires can be started by both driving and parking your vehicle on a hot day. When driving, make sure your tow chains are tight and not dragging on the concrete. When pulling over or parking, avoid dry grass. The heat from your car’s undercarriage can ignite the grass. Only park over gravel, dirt or sand. All vehicles should carry a fire extinguisher.

  • Tools and Equipment – working outside with tools and equipment on a hot, dry, and windy day is one of the leading causes of human wildfire starts in the state. Be careful with chainsaws, circular/portable saws, and even table saws set up over dry grassy areas. Use your equipment’s  spark arrester as designed. A welding blanket or screen can keep sparks contained.. When working outside, keep a fire extinguisher and shovel nearby.

  • Powerlines – Dead or wind-fallen trees on powerlines pose a danger to communities.  Landowners should always make sure to allow utility companies to do their work and thin within utility rights-of-way. 

Keep these in mind as you venture forth into the great outdoors this summer and fall. Take a little time to be smart in your surroundings and remember that New Mexico’s hot and dry conditions can turn small mistakes into huge catastrophes. 

Why is open burning risky?

Open burning has many cultural ties and traditional uses in New Mexico; however, it has been linked both health and wildfire risks.

Smoke impacts: Smoke can cause respiratory issues, reduce visibility, and contribute to health problems for residents. Particle pollution from the burning of organic material can affect everyone, but people with lung disease, including asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), or people with heart disease are the most vulnerable. Particle pollution can trigger asthma attacks, increase symptoms of COPD and cause coughing, wheezing, and chest tightness. For people with heart disease, particle pollution is linked to heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, heart failure, and stroke. This is especially concerning during periods of poor ventilation or when smoke accumulates in populated areas.

Distribution of human-caused ignitions sources by percent of total ignitions.

Fire risk: Wildfires typically start due to a combination of dry vegetation, hot conditions, and an ignition source. Human ignitions, or human started fires that become wildfires, are to blame for ~97% of wildfires that threaten homes in the U.S. and ~84% of all wildfires. Research points to debris and open burning as the origin of around 40% of all human ignitions, the largest single source. With the wrong weather conditions, burning yard debris can be caught in a wind gust, causing the flames to spread to unwanted, unprepared, or highly flammable areas, starting new fires. Insufficiently extinguished fires also pose a fire risk. Smoldering embers can persist in piles or underground for days or longer, appearing “out” only to catch in the wind and start a new fire elsewhere.

Proper administration of open burning, notification of local fire fighting resources, and following all regulations and recommendations are ways that residents of the state can continue to utilize open burning in the safest manner.

How to Burn Safely

View the full program: SM_OBBrochure.pub

The following guidelines are taken from the New Mexico State regulations 20.2.60 NMAC – Open Burning and 20.2.65 NMAC – Smoke Management. The Open Burning Regulations apply if you burn no more than 10 acres or 1,000 cubic feet of piled vegetative material in a day; Smoke Management applies if you plan to burn more than 10 acres or 1,000 cubic feet (if piled) in one day.

Some local resources are listed at the end of this section. Always contact your local fire department or Forestry Division office if you are unsure of the regulations and requirements for open burning in your area.

Best practices

  • Notification: Check your local regulations - some counties and cities require that individuals obtain a burn permit and give advance notification to their local fire department or appropriate firefighting authority before burning. If the burn is larger than 1 acre or 100 cubic feet of piled material, notify neighbors within 1/4 mile. 

  • Time of day: Burn between one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset. 

  • Distance from neighbors: Maintain a minimum distance of 300 feet from neighbors. 

  • Distance from structures: Generally, no burning is allowed within 50 feet of structure or combustible materials.

  • Hazardous waste: Only burn hazardous waste if authorized by RCRA rules or permits. 

  • Fire extinguishing equipment: Have a charged water source or fire extinguisher readily accessible. 

  • Wind: Generally, winds may not exceed 10 miles per hour. This varies across the state; for example, in Albuquerque, winds must not exceed 15 mph.

  • Burn pile size: Check your local regulations; in Albuquerque, burn piles must be no larger than 3 feet in diameter and 3 feet or less in height, while in Taos, piles may not be larger than 10 x 10 feet with 1,000 cubic feet being burned at any one time.

  • Fire attendance: Continually attend the fire until it is completely extinguished. 

  • Air quality rules: Follow state air quality rules and local ordinances.

Exceptions

  • Open burning of household waste (not including yard waste, weeds, etc.) is prohibited.

  • Recreational and ceremonial burning, campfires, fireplaces, and other types of burning are unrestricted, with one exception: burning of explosive materials that cannot be safely removed are covered by a section on emergency burning.

  • Restrictions on burning issued by fire safety authorities to prevent wildfires will supersede any permission to burn in the Open Burning regulation.

  • All burning of vegetative material has the same requirements, regardless of the purpose or who is doing the burning. This includes small-scale prescribed and agricultural burning as well as burning of yard waste by individual householders.

    • This rule applies to burning of vegetative material when 10 acres or less of non-piled material is burned per day, or when the amount of piled material burned per day is 1,000 cubic feet or less of pile volume.

Regional resources

Visit the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department's (EMNRD) Forestry Division’s website to view current fire restrictions.

Local resources

Santa Fe County open burning pamphlet and terms and conditions/permitting

Albuquerque Open Burning guidelines and Bernalillo County Open Burn Permit

Taos County open burning information

Las Vegas legislation on open burning

San Miguel County Fire Ordinance and Burn Permit

Mora County and Moreno Valley guidelines and permitting

Lincoln County Open Burning Ordinance and additional resources

Doña Ana County Fire Ordinance and Best Practices

McKinley County Fire Ordinance and Burn Permit

Alternatives to Open Burning

Image courtesy of San Jose Environmental Services

An alternative to burning is any method of removing or reducing fuels by mechanical, biological, or chemical treatments that replaces the use of fire. There are many alternatives - chipping, shredding, composting, and other methods all help reduce yard trimmings. Many cities have curbside pickup of green waste, especially if they have a No Burn perimeter. Visiting Earth 911 is a good step to help you find your local options and alternatives for disposal.

  • Chipping/grinding/shredding: Chipped or masticated (shredded) vegetation can be used in mulch or compost. The smaller pieces of organic material break down (decay) more quickly than whole tree limbs or logs, reducing the amount of time during which they pose a fire conduit. As mulch, chips provide moisture retention, temperature moderation and weed control. As compost, the chips return nutrients to the soil. Some communities may offer chipping services, often in the form of Fire Adapted Communities Chipper Days, or allow residents to drop off yard waste for chipping. Chipping is best applied to larger yard waste, such as logs and branches, while grinding (e.g. tub grinder or horizontal grinder) is best for material that may contain dirt or other contaminants such as leaves and root balls.

  • Compost: Composting is a great way to dispose of yard trimmings and food scraps, while creating a natural, free fertilizer. If you have an interest in personal composting, many communities offer weekend classes on how to compost, and some even provide composting bins at a reduced cost or show you how to build your own. Municipal compost centers, or privately-owned centers that partner with local municipalities, may also offer compost pick up or have a listing of locations where green waste is accepted for drop off. Be aware that some facilities which accept food scraps may not accept vegetative waste and vice versa.

  • Mechanical mixing: Plowing and tilling of vegetation left after harvesting in an agricultural field, or application of approved herbicides in conjunction with mechanical removal of vegetation can reduce standing dead vegetation while enriching the soil into which it is mixed.

  • Commercial green waste disposal: Many municipalities offer curbside yard waste pickup services in the late autumn, making disposal convenient. Check local guidelines for timing (typically late November - mid-December) and bagging requirements as yard waste may be required to be placed in biodegradable bags or specific bins for collection. Many municipalities also have Transfer Stations which accept a variety of household waste, including green waste, or dedicated green waste convenience centers. The material obtained by municipalities is typically processed into mulch to be used in city/municipal landscaping or erosion control projects.

  • Livestock grazing: Livestock grazing, something which has gained traction as a fire control alternative in recent years, can be considered a form of green waste disposal when managed properly, as animals (e.g. goats) consume unwanted vegetation, cleaning up the area while simultaneously providing manure that acts as a natural fertilizer, improving soil health and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers. However, overgrazing can have detrimental and unintended impacts, so careful management practices are crucial to utilize grazing as a sustainable waste disposal method.

  • Contained burning: Incinerators, such as air curtain burners, burn vegetative debris in a partially enclosed space with an open top over which a high-speed flow (or ‘curtain’) of air is directed. The result is an almost smokeless burning activity, with nearly complete combustion of all debris. Container burners may be available for rent from your local Soil and Water Conservation District, and more information may be available from your local Forestry Division office.

Funding Opportunities

FACNM Microgrant Funding

FAC NM Microgrants are available to help you fund your community fire preparedness event!

FAC NM Leaders and Members are eligible to apply for grants awards of up to $2,000 to provide financial assistance for:

  • convening wildfire preparedness events,

  • enabling on-the-ground community fire risk mitigation work,

  • developing grant proposals for the sustainable longevity of their Fire Adapted Community endeavor, or

  • other events or efforts related to community wildfire adaptation.

Round 4 of funding is open! Applications will be accepted October 30 - December 15. Successful applicants will be notified of their award by early January 2025. Apply for a microgrant now and/or join the network to be eligible for funding.

Community Wildfire Defense Grants

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service is accepting applications for the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program to assist at-risk communities, including tribes and Alaska Native Corporations, with planning for and mitigating wildfire risks. Now in its third year, this competitive program is funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Investing in America Agenda.

Out of the up to $200 million available, individual grants of up to $250,000 can be used to develop and update community wildfire protection plans, while individual grants of up to $10 million can be used for wildfire resilience projects that implement community wildfire protection plans. Projects must be completed within five years of the award. The number of projects selected will be determined by available funding, which is up to $200 million.

Start your CWDG application journey by visiting the FAC Net Primer on Community Wildfire Defense Grants. Notices of funding opportunities are available on Grants.gov. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 p.m., Eastern Standard Time on February 28, 2025. Applicants are strongly encouraged to develop proposals in consultation with state or Forest Service regional cooperative fire contacts listed in the Notices of Funding Opportunity.

Wildfire Wednesdays #146: Resources for Members and Leaders

Happy Wednesday, FAC NM family!

Today’s short and sweet Wildfire Wednesday focuses on two upcoming opportunities for Network Leaders and Members. As we wind down from wildfire season and transition into reflection and preparation for making our communities more fire prepared in 2025, we invite you to consider taking advantage of these opportunities to connect with others in the Network and to secure funding to kick off or advance your fire readiness work. If you are not yet a Member or Leader but would like to become one to be eligible for these opportunities, please consider joining the network today!

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Be well,
Rachel

Autumn 2024 Microgrants

Looking to fund your community fire preparedness event?
Apply for a FAC NM Microgrant!

Applications are now open!

Click on the image to learn more about microgrant eligibility, preferred events, and more!

FAC NM Leaders and Members are eligible to apply for grants awards of up to $2,000 to provide financial assistance for:

  • convening wildfire preparedness events,

  • enabling on-the-ground community fire risk mitigation work,

  • developing grant proposals for the sustainable longevity of their Fire Adapted Community endeavor, or

  • other events or efforts related to community wildfire adaptation.

Round 4 of funding is open!

Applications will be accepted October 30 - December 15.
Successful applicants will be notified of their award by early January 2025.

Click the buttons below to apply for a microgrant and/or join the network to be eligible for funding.

Bi-monthly Connection Call

Join us on November 26, 2024!

Are you a Member or Leader within the FAC NM Network? One perk of membership is access to a bi-monthly open floor connection call with other members and leaders throughout New Mexico, held on Zoom and facilitated by a Network Coordinator. These meetings provide a time for members to learn from one another, share what they are working on, ask questions of the Network Coordinator and each other, and dive into specific fire adapted topics and upcoming events. This is a time for networking and learning.

Our next FAC NM bi-monthly members and leaders connection call will be held on Tuesday, November 26, 2024 from 12:00-1:00pm MST. During this call, we will be discussing the microgrants program, including previously funded projects, ideas for the current round of funding, and addressing questions or concerns about applying. We will also have time for a round robin where attendees can share updates, goals, and assistance requests. Come prepared to share!

Please save the date - a calendar invitation will be sent to all Leaders and Members shortly! To receive an invitation to attend the connection call, please join the network now!

In the News

The cost of retrofitting a home for wildfire resistance

Click on the image to download the full report.

“A growing body of research has shown that a new focus on wildfire resistance in the built environment—in our homes, buildings, and other infrastructure—could substantially reduce the risks facing communities in wildfire-prone areas. Many developers are already beginning to incorporate materials and methods into new homes to meet the wildfire challenge without a significant impact on building costs. However, how do we upgrade millions of existing homes that are currently in wildfire-prone areas?

“Headwaters Economics examined the costs for improving the structure and design of existing homes to increase their wildfire resistance... The results are detailed in a report, ‘Retrofitting a Home for Wildfire Resistance,’ and show that some of the most effective strategies to reduce the vulnerability of homes and neighborhoods to wildfire can be done affordably.”

Key takeaways:

  • Simple and effective retrofitting costs between $2,000-$15,000 for actions such as installing flame- and ember-resistant vents, placing metal flashing along a deck, keeping gutters clean, or using noncombustible mulch in the yard.

  • A full retrofit to the highest level of protection could cost nearly $100,000, but in many cases that approach is not necessary.

  • When paired with policy reforms and financing strategies, retrofitting existing homes can make communities safer while avoiding billions in disaster costs; preparing communities before a disaster occurs is the best way to avoid damage to homes and neighborhoods.

Retrofitting assistance in New Mexico

In September, the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) launched its Home Electrification and Appliance Rebate program.

This initiative, backed by $43 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, aims to advance clean energy adoption across New Mexico. The Home Electrification and Appliance (HEAR) program offers rebates to help low-income New Mexico residents—homeowners and renters alike—seeking to upgrade their homes with energy-efficient technologies, including insulation, heat pumps, and Energy Star-certified appliances.

Eligible participants can receive up to $14,000 in rebates per household, significantly reducing the financial barrier to making energy-efficiency upgrades.

Wildfire Wednesdays #145: Post-Fire Effects and Lessons Learned

Happy Wednesday, Fire Adapted Community!

This year’s wildfire season will soon come to a close across the west, but that doesn’t mean that the impacts of recent wildfires are no longer a concern. As many people in New Mexico know, the fire itself is just the start of a much longer post-fire recovery journey. Today’s Wildfire Wednesday offers some interesting research on post-fire landscape effects and highlights an ongoing educational webinar series which aims to answer some of the most challenging questions related to post-fire recovery and management.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Take care and enjoy these last warm days of autumn,
Rachel

Events

Post-fire webinar series from NWFSC and WA-DNR

Click on the image to access the full webinar series flyer with interactive registration links.

The Northwest Fire Science Consortium and Washington State Department of Natural Resources are hosting an ongoing informational webinar series on post-wildfire recovery featuring speakers and lessons learned from across the West. All webinars take place on Wednesdays through October/November from 12-1pm PT / 1-2pm MT. Presentations will be recorded, so if you miss any in the series you can watch them at a later date on the NWFSC YouTube channel.

Webinar #1: 10/9: RECORDED
Fire Scars on the Landscape: The Science and Management of Debris Flows
Recently burned areas are at increased risk of flooding and debris flows, or rapidly moving landslides. Learn more about the science behind why debris flows happen, and how managers use that science to mitigate these hazards, even ahead of the fire.
Recording: https://youtu.be/qrhYsTCmTW4?si=s5Ms9kpY958ynhZs

Webinar #2: 10/16: RECORDED
Exploring Diverse Community Pathways to Recovery
After a fire, communities have to work together to organize their recovery effort. Local governments and community groups are on the front lines of figuring out what this looks like in their local contexts. A social scientist and a long-term recovery group leader describe the social and organizational processes through which recovery can happen, and how communities may proactively plan for recovery.
Recording: https://youtu.be/oPRQEA27gKs?si=q39cRByMk_uc_tHx

Webinar #3: 10/23: HAPPENING TODAY
Post-Fire Restoration Infrastructure: Adjusting our Systems to New Patterns of Runoff
We reengineer and rebuild after wildfire through a range of treatments, trying to match our built infrastructure to new, amplified patterns of runoff. A national wildfire practitioner speaks to how leaders and policy makers are increasingly recognizing the need to manage the built environment to accommodate these changes, and an environmental engineer shares a powerful story of transformation in the face of repeated wildfire events.
REGISTER: https://tinyurl.com/PostfireRunoff

Webinar #4: 10/30
The Reforestation Pipeline: Ensuring Equitable Access to Replanting
The science behind reforestation is not new, but in a changing climate, new challenges are rising around what to plant, where to plant, and who has access to planting opportunities. Two nonprofit practitioners review the science of reforestation and how we can develop effective governance systems for implementing planting programs that match the scale of fires and fairly meet the needs of the impacted landowners.
REGISTER: https://tinyurl.com/ReplantingPipeline

Webinar #5: 11/6
Recreating and Relating to the Land After Fire
Wildfires reshape recreation access and experiences over the short and long term. A researcher shares emerging science that is revealing how people return to and perceive wildfire-affected landscapes, and a manager shares how they navigate decisions about supporting recreation in these contexts.
REGISTER: https://tinyurl.com/RecreatingPostfire

The REBURN Model

How post-fire landscapes react to and burn under future ignitions

Historically, past fire effects limited future fire growth and severity. These reburn dynamics from cultural and lightning ignitions were central to the ecology of fire in the West. Over millennia, reburns created heterogenous (ecologically and spatially diverse) patchworks of vegetation and flammable fuels that provided avenues and impediments to both 1. the flow of future fires and 2. feedbacks to future fire event sizes and their severity patterns.

These dynamics have been significantly altered after more than a century of settler colonization, fire exclusion, and past forest management, now compounded by rapid climatic warming. Under climate change, the area impacted by large and severe wildfires will likely increase — with further implications for self-regulating properties as described above. An in-depth understanding of the ecology of reburns and their influence on system-level dynamics is necessary to provide a baseline for understanding current and future landscape fire-vegetation interactions.

In a metanalysis by the authors, recovery intervals for forest fuel amount and distribution ranged from 30 to 334 years, indicating that in the context of an active fire regime, it requires nearly two centuries on average to recover pre-fire conditions following the largest fire years.

Conclusions from two 2023 papers (The REBURN model and System-level feedbacks of active fire regimes in large landscapes) found that long periods of fire exclusion during 20th century suppression efforts were unprecedented for relatively frequent fire landscapes, creating large swaths of uncharacteristic decadent mature forest, particularly at higher elevations. The lack of ‘ecological memory’ normally associated with past fires strongly influences subsequent fire behavior and effects, leading to large patches burning with stand replacing fire, followed by generally abundant post-fire regeneration of fast-growing shrubs or conifers. This abundant vegetation and fire-killed tree snags and logs, all of which are readily available to burn, increases the chances of secondary and tertiary severe reburns, with additional implications on carbon storage, emissions, and smoke impacts to surrounding communities.

The biggest takeaway is that unless active fire management is applied to break up forest continuity, future drying trends across the West and the potential for increased lightning activity suggest that burned areas will continue to reburn at mixed - including high - severity, and fire will play an increasingly important role in this synchronized and compositionally simplified landscape as it recovers. A return of prescribed fire or managed wildfire to previously burned areas will start the process of introducing temporal variation and increasing resilience to future wildfires, whereas complete suppression will predispose the landscape to future large and severe wildfires. This means that much of the landmass which is burned and in some stage of post-fire recovery acts as a fire buffer, making it critical for the rest of the forest to remain forest. Burned and recovering vegetation mosaics provide functional stabilizing feedbacks, a kind of metastability, which limit future fire size and severity, even under extreme weather conditions.

Unexpected Post-Fire Effects

Fire scars inform weather and continue to reshape the landscape

In late 2021, William R. Cotton, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at Colorado State University sat down with The Conversation, an independent collaboration between editors and academics that provides informed news analysis and commentary to the general public. He provided a think piece based on research by himself and his colleague Elizabeth Page on how large fire scars can impact the frequency and severity of post-fire thunderstorms, accelerating the post-fire impacts on the landscape. Read the full article here.

Debris Flow in Cedar Creek near Ruidoso, NM following the 2024 Salt/South Fork Fire Complex. Photo courtesy of the South Fork and Salt Fires Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team.

“Wildfires burn millions of acres of land every year, leaving changed landscapes that are prone to flooding. Less well known is that these already vulnerable regions can also intensify and in some cases initiate thunderstorms. Wildfire burn scars are often left with little vegetation and with a darker [often hydrophobic] soil surface that tends to repel rather than absorb water. These changes in vegetation and soil properties leave the land more susceptible to flooding and erosion, so less rainfall is necessary to produce a devastating flood and debris flow than in an undisturbed environment.”

What is perhaps more interesting is that research has shown that burn scars can affect the microclimate within and above the scar, “initiating or invigorating thunderstorms, raising the risk both of flooding and of lightning that could spark more fires in surrounding areas”. This happens through several mechanisms:

  1. Surface temperatures and heat flux increase significantly over burn scars due to lack of vegetation, reduced soil moisture, and lower surface albedo – essentially how well it reflects sunlight. When burned soil is darker, it absorbs more energy from the sun.

  2. “The temperature difference can drive air currents, causing convection – the motion of warmer air rising and cooler air sinking. When that rising warm air draws in more humid air from surrounding areas, it can produce cumulonimbus clouds and even thunderstorms that can trigger rain and flooding.” This leads to burn scars enhancing both updraft winds and precipitation from storms developing overhead by ~15%.

“[For] how long burn scars will continue to fuel storms depends on how arid the region is, how quickly vegetation recovers, [and how the local climate and climatic patterns are changed by global warming]. Forecasters, emergency responders and people living in and near wildfire burn scars need to be aware that these areas are at risk for potential major flooding and debris flows and invigorated storms with a potential for heavy precipitation”, oftentimes for years or decades after the fire has burned. This is exemplified by the experience of Santa Clara Pueblo with Santa Clara Canyon, an area hard-hit by the Las Conchas Fire which is still experiencing highly destructive floods nearly 15 years post-fire.

A photo compilation of post-fire flooding impacts to the canyon. Photos were taken in June 2024, 14 years after the Las Conchas Fire. Photos are the property of Santa Clara Pueblo, Office of Govenor: CCF_000027.pdf

An excerpt from the letter from the Office of Govenor to the Santa Clara Pueblo Community describing the June 20. 2024 storm and impacts to the canyon.

4th Southwest Fire Ecology Conference

Register for the opportunity to learn and network this November!

The Southwest Fire Science Consortium, Arizona Wildfire Initiative, and the Association for Fire Ecology are hosting the 4th Southwest Fire Ecology Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico from November 18-22, 2024. With the conference theme, The Southwest Fire Science Journey: Lessons from the Rearview, New and Unfamiliar Routes, and Promising Horizons, participants and organizers seek to gain a better understanding of the past, present, and future of fire in the Southwest, including the roll of burned landscapes and lessons that can be learned from the post-fire environment and applied to future recovery and protection work. This conference will bring together professionals to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and discuss the latest advancements in fire ecology research and management with a focus on the southwestern United States.  Register now for a unique opportunity to connect with fellow professionals and engage in stimulating discussions that will shape the future of fire ecology in this region.

Wildfire Wednesdays #144: Fall Prescribed Fire Season

Hello FACNM Community,

It’s Fall and there is smoke in the air — and not just from the green chile roasting. Fall is a time when prescribed fires are commonly implemented. With Winter on the way and temperature and humidity dropping steadily, the mild weather conditions of Fall in New Mexico are supportive of the lower intensity prescribed fire that land managers want to see more of on the landscape. Lower intensity prescribed fire allows land managers to accomplish a wide range of ecological and public safety objectives.

Through carefully planning and implementation of prescribed fire, land managers are able to reduce the severity of future wildfires by influencing the residual densities and fuel loadings of forested areas while at the same time supporting nutrient cycling, regeneration, and understory diversity of many fire-adapted forests across New Mexico. The reduction in fire severity that prescribed fire generates not only protects forests from being converted to shrublands by high severity wildfire, but it also supports a more effective fire response from land management agencies, keeping our communities and water resources safer.

So, as you may be smelling smoke in the coming weeks, read on for a better understanding of the rationale and context surrounding the use of prescribed fire on both public and private lands in New Mexico.

This week’s Wildfire Wednesdays, includes:

  • Prescribed Fire 101

    • NM RX Fire Council

    • NM Certified Burner Program

  • Prescribed Fire Information - NMfireinfo.com

  • Smoke Exposure Mitigation

  • NM Wildland Urban Fire Summit - Next week in Taos!

Prescribed Fire 101

Over a century of fire exclusion and suppression has led to negative impacts for fire-adapted ecosystems across New Mexico through the increasing prevalence of uncharacteristically large and severe fires that threaten lives, property, forests, wildlife, and clean water. Wildfires can be reduced in severity and made easier to manage by reducing the density and connectivity of trees within forests and reducing the prevalence of dense forests across landscapes. The pace and scale of forest management needs to increase in order to reduce the threats of large, high severity wildfires, most notably within the wildland-urban interface (WUI) and on private lands.

Both the need to reduce the threat of wildfires by changing fire behavior, and the need to return fire as an ecological process, are addressed through prescribed burning. It is called prescribed burning because land managers carefully prescribe the weather conditions that will support the fire behavior they need to meet their objectives and only ignite the prescribed fire if the current and forecasted conditions match the prescription. Within the WUI, where homes are interspersed throughout naturally vegetated areas, prescribed burning is more difficult and complex. Liability and insurance are two elements that make prescribed burning on private lands difficult, especially within the WUI.

NM RX Fire Council

New Mexico has what is called a Prescribed Fire Council (PFC). These councils are generally statewide organizations that often work in tandem and share many common goals with localized prescribed burn associations. PFCs allow private landowners, fire practitioners, agencies, non-governmental organizations, policymakers, regulators, and others to exchange information related to prescribed fire and promote public understanding of the importance and benefits of fire use.

A map showing which states have Prescribed Fire Councils, from the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils, Inc.

PFCs date back to 1975, when the first council in the US was created in Florida in response to rapid development in Miami. Shortly thereafter, the North Florida Prescribed Fire Council was created in 1989 and more explicitly focused on prescribed fire. Neighboring states observed the success of Florida’s programs and began adopting the council model to incorporate federal, state, and private interests. Eventually, prescribed fire councils started to spread beyond the Southeast and across the country. Today, most states have established councils.

For those who want to get involved in New Mexico, membership in the New Mexico Prescribed Fire Council is open to anyone who has a passion for utilizing beneficial fire as a land management tool. Visit the website to become a member or to learn more about the resources provided by the council.

For more information about prescribed fire councils, view this FAC Learning Network webinar recording for a brief overview!

NM Certified Burner Program

New Mexico EMNRD Forestry Division (‘State Forestry’) launched a free publicly available prescribed burning curriculum in autumn 2023. This training, required by the passage of the 2021 Prescribed Burning Act, is accessed through their website. Both primary training and certification waivers are offered through their Canvas portal, where interested individuals can create a free account using the code provided on the Forestry Division - Prescribed Burning webpage. You can choose to sign up for pile burning or broadcast burning courses and progress through the interactive modules which cover topics such as safety, public relations, fire behavior, techniques, etc. Learn more about the Act, and the Curriculum available to landowners and individuals interested in learning how to conduct prescribed burns in a safe manner, by viewing the recording of the FACNM webinar on Supporting Prescribed Fire in New Mexico.

Prescribed Fire Information

NMfireinfo.com

NMfireinfo.com is an interagency effort by federal and state agencies in New Mexico to provide timely, accurate, fire and restriction information for the entire state, including updates about prescribed fires across the state. The agencies that support this site are the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, State of New Mexico, and US Forest Service.

This site is updated as often as new information is available from the Southwest Coordination Center, individual forests, national parks, state lands, tribal lands and BLM offices. The aim of NMfireinfo.com is to provide one website where the best available information and links related to wildfire and restrictions can be accessed.

Smoke Exposure Mitigation

One of the best ways to reduce the impact of smoke is by reducing the amount of smoke that enters your building and filtering harmful particles from the air. If you have a central air conditioning system in your home, set it to re-circulate or close outdoor air intakes to avoid drawing in smoky outdoor air.  Upgrading the filter efficiency of the heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system and changing filters frequently during smoke events greatly improves indoor air quality.  

Smaller portable air cleaners are a great way to provide clean air in the areas where you spend most of your time. Essentially these are filters with an attached fan that draws air through the filter and cleans it.  These cleaners can help reduce indoor particle levels, provided the specific air cleaner is properly matched to the size of the indoor environment in which it is placed, and doors and windows are kept shut. They should be placed in the bedrooms or living rooms to provide the most effectiveness. 

When air quality improves, such as during a wind shift or after a rain, make sure to use natural ventilating to flush out the air in your building. 

The Winix 5300-2 and 5500 is what FACNM uses for our HEPA loan program

The Winix 5300-2

Selecting a Filter - For either portable filters or HVAC filters make sure to select a filter that is true HEPA or has a MERV rating of 13 or higher. These ratings refer to the size of particles that the filter will remove from the air and in this case they are certified to remove particles down to .3 microns in size. This is the minimum needed to remove the small harmful particles in smoke.

When selecting a portable filter, the other rating to pay attention to is CADR or Clean Air Delivery Rate. This refers to the volume of air that passes trough the unit. A CADR of 200 means the unit provides 200 cubic feet of clean air per minute, and often this number is equated to the room size that it will effectively purify the air in. In a 300 sq foot room a filter with a rating of 200 CADR will cycle the air through the filter 4-5 times per hour. While any filter will provide clean air those with lower CADRs will simply work more slowly. Lastly, make sure to avoid filters that claim to produce ozone to destroy pathogens, as ozone is a respiratory irritant. 

More information about filters and guides to selecting one can be found in the Resources section below.  

Face Masks - Face masks can be an effective way to reduce your exposure to smoke when they are fit correctly and are the proper rating. Make sure the mask you use is rated at least N95 or N100 and that you take care to fit it properly. These masks will filter out the small particles that are the most hazardous to your health. Paper masks only filter out large particles and will not provide the filtration needed to protect you from smoke. 

HEPA Filter Loan Program

With support from the New Mexico State University, the national Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network, and the Forest Stewards Guild, FACNM is pleased to offer this pilot HEPA Filter Loan program. These filters are available to smoke sensitive individuals during periods of smoke impacts in some areas of Northern New Mexico, but we hope to expand to more areas soon. We have a small amount of portable air cleaners that will filter the air in a large room such as a living room or bed room. These will be distributed on a first come- first served basis for predetermined time periods. You will need to provide contact info and come to office listed for your area to sign for the filter and pick it up.  Please look over the HEPA Air Filter Check-Out Contract.

To view contact information for the HEPA loan program in your area, visit the FACNM smoke page.

For general information about the program contact Gabe Kohler at the Forest Stewards Guild at gabe@forestguild.org.

Upcoming Events

NM Wildland Urban Fire Summit - Oct. 8-10th in Taos, New Mexico!

October 8th-10th in Taos, NM at the Sagebrush Inn

Join us next week in Taos County for the Wildland Urban Fire Summit! WUFS is New Mexico’s leading event for wildfire preparedness and planning. Join your peers, community leaders, fire service professionals, and federal, state, tribal, and local governments for this in-person event. Community members will share regional history and discuss living in and adapting to the Wildland Urban Interface. Learn the latest techniques, strategies, and resources for wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. Expand your network of peers and experts to assist you in your fire/disaster resiliency goals. This event is open to the public, and we encourage everyone to attend.

Summit highlights:

  • Welcome from NM State Forester Laura McCarthy

  • Property insurance & home mitigation 

  • Taos-region focus & field trip (Wednesday)

  • Emergency communications

  • Finding and using funding

  • Ruidoso 2024 events

Wildfire Wednesdays #143: It Takes a Village to Save a Village

Happy Wednesday and happy autumn, Fire Adapted New Mexico!

As summer comes to a close, western skies continue to be filled with wildfire smoke from blazes in California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and other hot and dry forested states. Wildfires continue to follow the trend of igniting earlier and burning later into the year, breaking out of what we have traditionally thought of as ‘wildfire season’ and blurring the lines of property ownership and fire response decision jurisdiction as they race across entire landscapes. What can we do in response to ensure that our homes, businesses, and communities are ready for wildfire year-round?

Emerging guidance from the Institute for Home and Business Safety, United Policyholders, and others suggests that the best protection is strength in numbers. While single parcel defensible space and home hardening has been shown to work, it works a lot better when neighbors meet and do the work together, creating fuel breaks that protect the entire community, designing their defensible space together, and investing in neighborhood-wide protection plans, home hardening upgrades, safety ordinances, and more.

Today’s Wildfire Wednesday features:

Be well and enjoy the equinox,
Rachel

Updated Fire Preparedness Guidelines

Expanding beyond individual parcels to encompass community readiness

The history and drivers of wildfire

For much of the West, fire is part of the natural landscape. However, wildfires become catastrophes when they burn at historically high severity, frequency, are driven by extreme weather, and move into our built environment. This can lead to uncontrollable structure-to-structure fire spread where an urban conflagration unfolds. Urban fire follows humans (population), drought, and wind. New Mexico has these all of these conflagration conditions:

  • The state has experienced the same population boom as the rest of the West, especially since 2020.

  • Almost all of New Mexico is in some state of drought and has been since 2019.

  • The state regularly experiences high wind, which often coincides with and exacerbates dry periods.

Urban firestorms have been a part of cities and their evolution across the globe for centuries. They have been applied as weapons of war as well. The 1666 London Fire was one of the first well documented urban conflagrations. It had similar characteristics to what we see in today’s wildfire-driven built environment conflagrations: drought conditions, human causation for ignition, and a high structure density with fuels between buildings. From the 1600s through the early 1900s, urban fire plagued cities globally (IBHS, The Return of Conflagration in Our Built Environment). Over the last century, we have solved this problem in our city centers but have recreated the risky conditions in our suburban and WUI areas.

The importance of community-level preparedness

The Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) and other prominent fire preparedness organizations recommend using WUI code requirements to increase resilience, in addition to encouraging cities to make different individual, community, and policy choices. In this way, fire science can inform resilient thinking.

Critical elements of fire resilience:

Click on the image to view a full-size version.

  • Individual

    • A non-combustible “zone 0”.

    • Impenetrable vents and roofs.

    • Combustible elements between properties - find ways to break those connections.

  • Community

    • Parcel-level measures must be implemented at scale (such as fuel buffers along roads) so that communities can break the chain of conflagration and act as fuel breaks, not fuel sources.

  • Policy

    • Clustered financial incentives from the State to implement resilient retrofits (treat an entire neighborhood at once).

    • Require defensible space and fire-resistant design of new homes.

Most buildings are not designed to resist intense flame contact, and once ignited, they contribute as additional fuel to the fire. Therefore, to stall this “domino effect,” maintaining a proper separation between buildings is crucial in a resilient community. High fuel continuity, where fuels are densely distributed and interconnected, can promote the rapid spread of fire, as flames can easily move from one fuel source to another. The concept of fuel connectivity observed in vegetation fuels, such as grass and pine needles, can also be extended to structural fuels such as fences, sheds, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and other similar objects. The underlying mechanism driving fire spread remains the same: when these structural fuels are closely spaced or connected, heat transfer between burned and unburned occurs at a high rate, leading to rapid fire spread.

It is important to thin, create defensible space, and implement home hardening measuring in and around your own home. It is equally important to talk to your neighbors about their fire risk, and hazards that you share, such as a coyote fence which separates your property but which would act as a connective wick for both homes during a wildfire. It takes action at all levels to prevent a fire becoming a conflagration.

Learn about these and other recommended actions as part of the new Wildfire Prepared Home program from IBHS, a designation program which enables homeowners to take preventative measures for their home and yard to protect against wildfire.

Wildfire Preparedness in Action: success stories from the frontlines

Home hardening, defensible space, and fire ordinances: lessons from the South Fork Fire, NM, 2024

Dick Cooke, Forester for the Village of Ruidoso and FACNM Leader, has been working for a long time to prepare the village for a wildfire. Those preparations were tested when, in June 2024, the South Fork Fire exploded to 15,000 acres in its first 24 hours and rapidly approached the community with ember showers falling a mile in front of the crowning flaming front.

A federal firefighter assigned to the South Fork Fire stands at a property boundary. Image credit: INCIWEB.

As Dick recounts, when the fire hit the village boundary, it almost immediately dropped from the tree crowns to the ground, creating a more favorable environment for firefighters to work around structures. He credits this to a thinning program that community leaders put in place decades ago. Ruidoso has a fire ordinance that requires all residents and landowners to thin the natural spaces around their homes and businesses to reduce the likelihood of fires spreading, either up or out. In most of the village, the South Fork burned as a ground fire with relatively low flame lengths, allowing firefighters to save numerous homes. However, firefighting personnel still had to contend with extreme weather, a wind-driven flaming front, and the ember storm which preceded the flaming front, with some saying that embers the size of basketballs landed on porches, roofs, and throughout the community.

After evacuation orders were lifted, village leaders started looking around at which houses survived and which burned. They noticed that most of the houses that burned didn’t meet home hardening recommendations. Some had wooden fences that caught on fire and were connected to a wooden deck or some part of the structure that was flammable, causing the fire to spread to the house. There were a lot of homes that use railroad ties in landscaping or as supports under decks, or that had fabric cushions on porch furniture - those ties and cushions caught on fire during the ember storm, which then spread to the house. Even with the ordinance in place requiring residents to thin around their houses, not everyone was following the rules or hadn’t done the work to protect their houses from embers through home hardening. When homes did survive, it’s because they were hardened from embers and flames and the neighborhood vegetation was mitigated (defensible space and forest thinning).

Image showing a patchwork of fire severity and structure loss in the Village of Ruidoso following the South Fork Fire. Courtesy of Dick Cooke, Village of Ruidoso.

The village is one of the only places in New Mexico with a fire preparation ordinance, so Dick believes that community level preparation made a big difference. 95% of properties in the village have been thinned to get into compliance with the ordinance, with properties being revisited every 10 years to ensure they stay in compliance. The intent of these rules is exactly what Dick saw happen in real time - putting the fire on the ground and preventing it from climbing back into the crown.

The final incident map from the Salt and South Fork Fire Complex, dated 7/3/24, shows the extent of both fires and the area within the Village of Ruidoso which was affected. Image credit: INCIWEB.

Dick believes that the work would have been a lot more effective if the area around the Village of Ruidoso had been treated in a similar fashion. However, the County, which has jurisdiction over the surrounding communities, doesn’t have a similar fire ordinance, and forest treatments on the surrounding National Forest System property were patchy, leading to a mosaic of thinned and unthinned land in the greater Ruidoso area. While each individual subdivision needs to do the work together, they also need to work with surrounding communities to create a cohesive landscape of fire prepared homes, businesses, and wild areas.

Hear about Ruidoso’s efforts from Dick and learn more about safety ordinances, Home Hazard Assessments, and fire preparedness in this archived webinar from Fire Adapted New Mexico.

A neighborhood saved: Circle Oaks, CA, 2017

Cheryl Lynn de Werff was certain her Napa County house was going to burn when she was forced to flee as a massive fire sped toward her Circle Oaks community. It was 1 a.m. and she had just gone to sleep in her second-story bedroom when a sheriff’s deputy pounded on her door. “I came running to the door and he says, ‘Get out! Get out now, there’s a fire coming!’” de Werff recalled. Over the next few days, the Atlas fire burned more than 51,000 acres, killed six people and destroyed more than 300 homes. A week after the community was evacuated, de Werff and her neighbors got the best kind of news possible: all of their homes were safe (Los Angeles Times).

The community of Circle Oaks survived the 2017 Atlas Fire due, in part, to their yearslong defensible space efforts. Photo from United Policyholders.

United Policyholders looked into what saved this community when so many others in the surrounding area burned during a rash of intense fires in California’s North Bay in summer of 2017. They concluded that “Circle Oaks in Napa, though evacuated, was largely spared alleged ‘due to vigorous fire prevention programs conducted by residents.’” Several contributing factors aligned to spare the community:

  • In 2005, a law spurred a change to the Cal. Pub. Res. Code sec. 4291, changing the defensible requirement from 30 to 100 feet. According to CalFire, “proper clearance to 100 feet dramatically increases the chance of your house surviving a wildfire. This defensible space also provides for firefighter safety when protecting homes during a wildland fire.”

  • The community had spent years installing fire breaks and brush clearance on public land near neighborhoods, which helped to slow the fire.

Neighborhood Ambassadors leading the charge

After the FAC Ambassador Workshop in Spring 2019, Firewise Resident Leaders began gathering quarterly, providing an opportunity to learn from regional experts, and to get updates from Ashland Fire & Rescue. Photo by Ashland Fire & Rescue.

Firewise Resident Leader! FAC Leader! Spark Plug! Firewise Ambassador! Road Ambassador! Fireshed Ambassador! Neighborhood Ambassador! Volunteer neighborhood leaders who lead wildfire preparedness in their neighborhoods and beyond, regardless of their name or title, can provide great benefits. A wealth of knowledge, skill, tools, and social capacity exists within most neighborhoods, official or not, and working within Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) neighborhoods are a critical scale to improve fire outcomes. Residents in many WUI neighborhoods see firefighters and professional foresters as reliable sources of information; however, these professionals have limited capacity and must focus in high-risk areas where their efforts are likely to yield results. Enter the neighborhood ambassador - because neighbors notice what their neighbors are doing and will often listen to them as sources of information and ideas.

The home of Philip and Linda Walters who were serving as Neighborhood Ambassadors when the Weber Fire approached their home in 2012. Note the red retardant line just above the house and the mitigated area between the house and the road. Photo by Rich Graeber, Division Chief in East Canyon on the Southwest Colorado Incident Management Team during the Weber Fire.

In 2012, the 10,000+ acre Weber Fire blew through a wilderness study area and into the canyon of a neighborhood where wildfire preparedness was being supported through neighborhood ambassadors. The residents’ defensible space and roadside thinning enabled firefighters to protect every structure and build a fire line along their dead-end road and defensible spaces, a feat which would not have been possible a few years earlier. “We ALL had been collectively thinking about THIS fire for a long time.  I have told many people that there have been a lot of dedicated folks who have been fighting this fire in their mind, on paper, and on the ground for a decade or more,” wrote Philip Walters, Wildfire Adapted Partnership Neighborhood Ambassador.

Read the full article from 2020 to learn about the origins of the FAC Ambassador Guide, the role that FACNM played in its creation, the importance of neighborhood ambassadors, and real-life examples of neighborhood organization leading to better fire outcomes.

Additional Resources

Upcoming Events

September 24th, 9:00am-3:00pm MT; Rociada, NM: Survivable Space Workshop

It is hard to imagine the possibility of more fires within the HPCC burn scar, but we know it is a reality. What are some simple ways to reduce wildfire risks to homes?
Hank Blackwell, chief consultant for the Wildland Resiliency Training Center, will lead a workshop teaching attendees how to protect structures in the HP/CC burn scar that are now vulnerable to new wildfires. Learn about fire risk myths vs. facts at this in-person event which will include property visits to gain hands-on experience assessing wildfire risk on sample properties.

Space is limited, register now! To learn more, email team@pvca.life or call 505-425-3019.

In the News

Navigating wildfire smoke damage: Insights from the 2021 Marshall Fire
Catrin Edgeley | Northern Arizona University

Dr. Cat Edgeley is a natural resource sociologist interested in social components of forest management. As a wildfire social scientist, she conducts research about how human communities adapt to wildfire. In this presentation she shares research on navigating smoke damage after the Marshall Fire.

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Practitioner Paper: Prescribed Fire Planning and Implementation Capacity of Non-governmental Organizations

In 2022, the U.S. Congress made historic investments in wildfire and fuels management through passage of the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Researchers from the Public Lands Policy Group at Colorado State University recognized that federal agencies need a better understanding of the community-based capacity available to support and implement prescribed burn projects if they hope to be successful in strategically deploying these funds across ownership boundaries and at scale (i.e., a large enough spatial extent to achieve fuels and fire management objectives). Additionally, there are many unknowns with how the widespread loss or unavailability of prescribed fire insurance policies has affected prescribed fire practitioners and will therefore affect prescribed burn operations in the future.

To answer these questions and inform effective policy solutions for prescribed fire challenges, the PLPC conducted a national online survey for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who plan, support, and conduct prescribed fire. They had four goals in mind when designing and conducting the survey:

  1. Describe the organizations that support, plan, and/or implement prescribed fire in the U.S.

  2. Identify their capacities and resource needs.

  3. Gauge how they may be impacted by the current scarcity of prescribed fire insurance.

  4. Determine how federal resources could be invested to support these organizations’ workforce.

The resulting report finds that NGOs across the West are generally well set up to conduct outreach to landowners, residents, and natural resources practitioners, to administer grants and manage funds, and assist with or lead prescribed fire implementation. There is room for improvement with educational programming, outreach to disadvantaged communities, outreach to Tribal governments, providing trainings and technical support, and improving direct community outreach before and after burns. The report’s key recommendation for scaling and supporting grassroots prescribed fire efforts in the West include:

  1. Establish dedicated and long-term funding streams to provide security for partners to offer training and support capacity building.

  2. Improve the availability and quality of prescribed fire/smoke liability insurance.

  3. Enhance and invest in prescribed fire workforce Invest in a national prescribed fire claims or catastrophe.

  4. Invest in a national prescribed fire claims or catastrophe fund for third parties negatively impacted by prescribed burn activities.

  5. Identify and support opportunities to reduce implementation barriers related to air quality and weather.

Wildfire Wednesdays #142: Diversity of Perspectives in Wildfire Preparedness

Happy Wednesday, Fire Adapted Community!

Over the past decade, the wildland fire community has been experiencing a paradigm shift from thinking of wildfire resilience in simple terms to recognizing the complexities of risk. An emerging theme within this shift is that simple conceptualizations of risk do not account for the social and ecological diversity of fire-prone areas. From international organizations to grassroots efforts, those groups working to address our wildfire dilemma and work for better fire outcomes are working together to better account for diversity of perspectives and experiences in wildfire preparedness.

Today’s Wildfire Wednesday features:

Be well,
Rachel

Wildland Urban Fire Summit

The 2024 New Mexico Wildland Urban Fire Summit (WUFS) is happening October 8-10 at the Sagebrush Inn in Taos, NM! This is a space for community members, fire service volunteers and professionals, non-profit conservation groups, and federal, state, and local government representatives to gather and discuss challenges, innovations, and solutions for engagement in fire adaptation. During the in-person event, local community members will share regional history and discuss living in and adapting to the Wildland Urban Interface.

This year, the summit will focus on strengthening partnership through diverse perspectives – taking action in the WUI, including how new partners are developed, revitalizing or strengthening existing partnerships, and how the perspectives and resources they can provide help us to take action in our communities.

Agenda highlights include:

  • Welcome from NM State Forester Laura McCarthy

  • Property insurance & home mitigation 

  • Taos-region focus & field trip (Wednesday)

  • Emergency communications

  • Finding and using funding

  • Ruidoso 2024 events

View the full draft agenda and learn more now!

Diversity in Fire Adaptation: a Review

Researchers and practitioners from across the management spectrum have begun considering and making recommendations for how to make fire adaptation more diverse and reflective of physical communities, and therefore more effective and innovative, in recent years. Below is a brief collection of challenges, considerations, and recommendations for improving inclusion.

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Vulnerability to Wildfire: Going Beyond Wildfire Hazard Analysis

Massive wildfires, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change and a long history of fire-suppression, have strikingly unequal effects on minority communities. The Nature Conservancy recently highlighted a study which integrates the physical risk of wildfire with the social and economic resilience of communities to see which areas across the country are most vulnerable, a complexity acknowledged in their resulting “vulnerability index”. The results highlight the difference between wildfire hazard potential and wildfire vulnerability, showing that racial and ethnic minorities face greater vulnerability to wildfires compared with primarily white communities; in particular, Native Americans are six times more likely than other groups to live in areas most prone to wildfires. These findings “help dispel some myths surrounding wildfires — in particular, that avoiding disaster is simply a matter of eliminating fuels and reducing fire hazards or that wildfire risk is constrained to rural, white communities.”

The map on the left considers socioeconomic considerations to show wildfire vulnerability as a measure of how likely an area is to adapt and recover. The map on the right only shows wildfire potential across Washington, considering factors such as burnable fuels on the landscape, vegetation, weather and historic fire activity.

The takeaway is that “ultimately it’s about connections, building relationships and breaking down cultural barriers that will bring us to a better outcome.”

Read the overview and dive into the study here.

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Incorporating Social Diversity into Wildfire Management

Characteristics influencing differential adaptation to wildfire among diverse communities (adapted from Paveglio et al. 2012).

While research suggests that adoption or development of various wildfire management strategies differs across communities, there have been few attempts to design diverse strategies for local populations to better “live with fire.” Building on an existing approach, managers can adapt to social diversity and needs by using characteristic patterns of local social context to generate a range of fire adaptation “pathways” to be applied variably across communities. Each ‘pathway’ would specify a distinct combination of actions, potential policies, and incentives that best reflect the social dynamics, ecological stressors, and accepted institutional functions that people in diverse communities are likely to enact. This inclusion can help develop flexible scenario-based approaches for addressing wildfire adaptation in different situations.

Examples of unique pathway components for advancing fire adaptation through adaptive or collective action include:

  • Ways to promote property-level residential adaptation

  • Governance model/structure of collaborative processes

  • Fuels mitigation focus

  • Adaptation leadership and relationships

  • Incident Command teams and outside response

  • Wildfire impacts/short- or longer-term recovery

  • Mitigation aid or grants

  • Resource management focus

  • Means of communication, message framing

Read more about the pathways approach.

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More Effective Fire Adaptation Through Comprehensive Risk Analysis and Collaboration

Defining risk

The primary goal of simple risk approaches is to minimize the costs associated with hazards and their management. Simple risk approaches have their roots in actuarial insurance, risk management, and rational choice models.

The pri­mary goal of complex risk approaches is not to minimize or eliminate immediate risk (as in simple risk approaches), but to adapt to the risk over time. Concepts of complex risk stem from scholarship on wicked problems, risk governance, and Second Modernity Risk. The complex risk framework accounts for and expands on simple risk ideas and approaches by explicitly considering the multi­plicity of contexts, knowledges, and definitions regarding a particular hazard.

Moving from simple to complex and from exclusionary to inclusive

There is a prevailing tendency of wildfire management agencies and institutions to rely primarily on simple risk approaches to wildfire hazard management that focus on technical risk assessments, such as questions of probability of wildfire event occurrence, but do not reflect the complexity of contemporary wildfire risk. These insufficiently complex conceptualizations of risk do not incorporate and account for the social and ecological diversity of fire-prone areas, reducing options and creativity for addressing risk by disregarding the varied experiences and concerns that influence collective adaptation.

Approaching wildfire as a complex risk can increase adaptation to and coexistence with wildfire by recognizing and accounting for the complexities of wildfire governance amongst a variety of stakeholders who may operate at various scales using different knowledge systems. Such efforts are more likely to yield socially relevant and legitimate strategies for building wildfire adapted communities.

Although centralized simple risk approaches are an often-necessary part of addressing wildfire risk, greater emphasis on wildfire as a complex risk brings atten­tion to the reality that wildfire response and consequences are interconnected - that is, that decisions and outcomes at various temporal points, including mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, are linked to place-based networks, processes, activities, decisions, and outcomes of other temporal points.

Five principles to increase adaptation to and coexistence with fire through complex risk consideration

  1. Embrace knowledge plurality and purposefully integrate perspectives other than technical expertise.

    Including other types of expertise (and thus complexity), especially local definitions of risk and key values of concern, can increase the local relevance and legitimacy of the risk analysis which can be critical to local uptake and implementation.

  2. Use inclusive, accountable, and transparent engagement strategies that incorporate collaborative learn­ing processes.

    Effectively implementing the first principle requires participation by a suite of interrelated public and private individuals in an iterative process to find pathways to desirable and feasible situational improvements.

  3. Include underrepresented groups in collaborative processes and wildfire risk governing networks.

    By forgoing assumptions that experts fully understand the experiences or abilities of underserved populations ( e.g., Latine, Black, Indigenous and People of Color), more inclusive processes invite more diverse perspectives and, by so doing, can better reflect the differential adaptation abilities of populations and organizations.

  4. Account for potential uneven distributions of risk and resources to address risk.

    Existing funding models for natural resource and associated wildfire management efforts tend to favor organizations with resources and capacity to pursue grants or whose views on wildfire risk match predominant policy priorities. As a result, groups or communities who have less access to resources and capacity may find their opportunities unchanged or even diminished, furthering an already uneven distribution.

  5. Re-focus or re-balance investments across spatial, institutional, and temporal scales.

    Wildfire investments which are currently concentrated on hazardous fuels reduction, preparedness (hiring and training firefighters), and response (incident management) could be re-focused to provide more resources to a wider range of pre-fire mitigation work and rapid post-fire adaptive recovery for those affected by fire. This means investing in systems of wildfire governance, the social architecture that will support collective action and innovation in ways that are more likely to be responsive to the changing circumstances of on-the-ground fire risk.

Learn more about recognizing complexity, and its inherent diversity, in fire management.

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Living with Fire: the Influence of Local Social Context and Need for Diversity

One element of meeting our contemporary wildfire challenge must be accepting fire in the landscape and working with instead of against it; essentially, to change our management paradigm from fire resistance to landscape resilience under the umbrella of Living with Fire. Achieving this integrated fire management approach will require a) understanding the intersecting drivers of fire impacts and risks and b) designing creative and effective risk reduction/management and communication strategies. The integrated fire management model that we are collectively moving toward must include innovation through exchange, adoption, and adaptation.

Living with fire rests on four essential pillars of diversity:

  • cross-geography (information and knowledge exchange between communities and countries);

  • cross-risk (learning from water and flood management);

  • cross-sector (connecting science and practice); and

  • social diversity (diversity of voices).

With regard to social diversity, there is a growing recognition that human adaptation to wildfire risk is a contingent exercise that may vary across diverse communities. A long history of social science indicates that any effort to improve adaptation is more likely to succeed when it adopts a holistic view of wildfire management that is tailored to emergent patterns of local social context. The unique combination of local history, culture, interpersonal relationships, trust in or collaboration with government entities, and place-based attachments that human populations develop in a given landscape all can have a large bearing on variable efforts to create fire adapted communities. These fundamental differences between and unique characteristics of individual communities can make a big impact on how planning documents (e.g. Community Wildfire Protection Plans), policies (e.g. homeowner risk  mitigation requirements), mitigation implementation activities (e.g. home hardening), and education or assistance approaches are written or designed and how, or if, they are adopted by the local community in a meaningful way. Who is at the table and how space is created for everyone to engage matters.

Overall, fire researchers, practitioners, managers, and affiliates must better understand and design diverse strategies for fire adaptation that reflect the social diversity of human communities at risk from wildfire.

Learn more about one team's proposal for a set of methodological practices and empirical verifications that constitute a next step in systematically tailoring wildfire adaptation at the community level across diverse populations.

In the News

Porfirio Chavaria, the Santa Fe Fire Department's wildland-urban interface specialist, speaks to Patty and Mark Johnson during a home inspection. Image credit: Gabriela Compos, The New Mexican.

An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, “Preparation for Wildfires in Santa Fe Starts at Home” recently highlighted the fire department’s community wildfire preparation services - and its wildland-urban interface specialist, Porfirio Chavarria (pnchavarria@santafenm.gov). It focuses on how individual actions tie into landscape-level preparation, saying “fires affect communities, not just individual properties,” and showcases some of the work that Santa Fe has done to improve wildfire outcomes for residents, including community education, wildfire mitigation agreements, home hazard analyses, the fire and weather alert system Alert Santa Fe, and future improvements such as rapid wildfire start detection.

Read more about these services and their success in the article.

Wildfire Wednesdays #141: Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire

Hello Fireshed community, 

Today marks exactly two years since firefighters at last contained the historic Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire on August 21, 2022. 

Families, communities, forests and watersheds in Northern New Mexico are still recovering from the destructive wildfire. In fact, the Santa Fe National Forest is hosting two public meetings next week to present and gather public input on recovery efforts and long-term recovery planning.

Meanwhile, forest, water, and fire managers are rebuilding support for prescribed fire as an essential land management tool – one not without risk, but key to reducing future risk of catastrophic wildfires.

This Wildfire Wednesday features a review of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, including: 

Best, Maya 

How the Fire Began

Hermit’s Peak, April 10, 2022. Source: U.S. Forest Service

A map of the HPCC wildfire boundary.

HPCC Wildfire Boundary. Source: Inciweb

In April 2022, a Forest Service prescribed fire just outside of the Pecos Wilderness area of the Santa Fe National Forest became the Hermit’s Peak wildfire when erratic winds carried embers outside the boundary of the planned burn area and ignited multiple fires in surrounding forests dried out from severe drought.  

About two weeks later, the Calf Canyon Fire began spreading on National Forest land nearby when a pile burn ignited by the Forest Service in January resurfaced. The pile had smoldered underground for months through several snowstorms, an event “nearly unheard of until recently in the century-plus of experience the Forest Service has in working on these landscapes,” Forest Service leaders wrote in a review of the escaped prescribed fires. 

The two wildfires merged due to unprecedented wind events and historically dry fuels and soils and burned more than 530 square miles over four and half months, until firefighters contained the blaze in late August.

The Costly Road to Recovery

Mora Valley, June 28, 2022. Source: Inciweb

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, triggered evacuation orders for more than 27,000 people and destroyed over 900 structures, including 433 homes. Most of the land burned – 58% – was privately owned. 

Because the Forest Service was responsible for igniting the fire, Congress and President Joe Biden allocated almost $4 billion to compensate victims of the fire and subsequent floods. As of July 2024, while still processing and receiving additional claims, the federal government had paid out 5,633 claims totaling $926.7 million.  

Payments covered economic damages, up to five years of flood insurance coverage, and natural resource restoration projects for landowners. Additional recovery efforts in years following the burn have included aerial seeding of the burn scar and flooding prevention work by federal agencies and local organizations. 

Post-fire Flooding: A Prolonged Disaster

High-severity wildfires burn not only vegetation but also soils, changing the chemical and physical properties of soil such that it becomes hydrophobic, or water-repelling. This reverses forests’ sponge-like ability to soak up rainfall and instead makes burn scars susceptible to debris flows and flash floods.

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire damaged soil in over half the burn scar, causing floods that killed at least three people, washed out buildings and infrastructure, and contaminated the city of Las Vegas’s water supply with ash and debris in 2022. The National Weather Service received over 75 preliminary reports of flash floods and debris flows in the burn scar from June 2022 to June 2024. For multiple years following the fire, surrounding communities expect to be at elevated risk for flooding.  

Prescribed Fires Remain a Crucial Tool for Reducing Wildfire Risk

The Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire spurred the Forest Service to pause all prescribed burns pending a 90-day review of its national prescribed burn program. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said the decision “reflected the growing recognition that extreme conditions resulting from drought, weather, dry fuels, and other climate change effects were influencing fire behavior in ways we had never seen before." The prescribed burn that became the Hermit’s Peak Fire had been ignited in “much drier conditions than were recognized,” the review found.

“We cannot guarantee that prescribed fires will never escape, but the alternative to using this proven tool is larger, more destructive wildfires.”
— Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor Shaun Sanchez

The review underscored the necessity of prescribed burns as one of the most effective tools for forest, fire and water managers to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, protect watersheds, and increase the resilience of forests. Over a century of fire suppression in fire-adapted forests of the Southwest has, in combination with climate change, created conditions for high-severity wildfires that threaten people, property and drinking water sources and threaten forests’ ability to regenerate. Prescribed burns, on the other hand, facilitate a return to low-severity fires that promote forest health and increase firefighters’ success in safely managing fires. Of the about 4,500 prescribed burns conducted by the Forest Service annually, 99.84% have gone according to plan, the review noted.  

The Forest Service resumed prescribed burning with updated guidelines aimed at further reducing the risk of escaped prescribed fires. New requirements include daily, higher-level review of prescribed burn plans; more localized weather data; heightened consideration of drought conditions in burn plans; long-term monitoring of burns; and more extensive public outreach about prescribed fires, among other changes. 

Additional Resources

  • View this blog post in an easy-to-read PDF format on the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition’s Briefing Papers webpage. Other briefing papers on the webpage cover topics including: 

  • Stewarding the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

  • Source Water: Fire and the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed 

  • Containing Wildfire: The Medio Fire Success Story 

  • Pollinators and Wildfire 

  • Post-fire Impacts 

  • Forest Type Conversion 

  • Fire History in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

  • NEPA 

  • Insect Defoliation in the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed 

  • The Intersection of Bird Habitat and Forest Restoration in the Southwest 

Wildfire Wednesdays #140: Wildland Fire Workforce

Hi! I am Maya Hilty, a new Fireshed Coordinator with the Forest Stewards Guild. In this role, I support the Greater Santa Fe Fireshed Coalition; conduct home hazard assessments; facilitate fuels reduction projects on public and private lands; and grow our Fireshed Ambassador program, where neighbors influence neighbors to make communities better prepared for fire. I will also be contributing to Fire Adapted New Mexico Learning Network into the future, including authoring Wildfire Wednesday blog posts. 

Hello Fire Adapted Community, 

As of today, almost 28,000 firefighters across the U.S. are battling 95 large fires burning over 3,400 square miles. 

For the past five years, an annual average of ~59,100 wildfires, including both natural ignitions and human-caused fires, have burned almost 12,000 square miles across the nation each year. That includes roughly 2,800 fires per year in Arizona and New Mexico – more than 7 ignitions per day on average, if the fires were spread evenly throughout the year – which have annually burned 1,150 square miles, or approximately the size of Bernalillo County.  

Many of us take for granted that, where fires ignite, firefighting resources will quickly follow. However, for reasons explored below, those resources are stretched increasingly thin during severe fires or during the most fire-prone times of the year. 

This Wildfire Wednesday features an overview of the wildland fire workforce, including: 

Best, Maya 

The Wildland Fire Workforce: A Who's Who

From the local to federal level, here’s who fights wildfires.

As outlined by the Santa Fe County Community Wildfire Protection Plan as well as U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior materials, the wildland firefighting workforce includes responders at the: 

  • Local level. This includes, for example, the Santa Fe city and county Fire Department Wildland Divisions. 

  • State level. The New Mexico Forestry Division created two full-time crews in 2024 and trains additional firefighters for hire in an emergency. The Division also collaborates with a state prison in Los Lunas to run the Inmate Work Camp Program, through which the state trains and hires four to six crews of people who are incarcerated to respond to wildland fires alongside other professional firefighters.

  • Federal level. This year, the federal wildland firefighting workforce includes roughly 11,300 firefighters in the Forest Service and 5,750 firefighters employed by four agencies in the Department of the Interior: the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service. Half the federal wildland firefighting workforce is only employed seasonally, for a maximum of six months, according to data from 2022.

In 2023, costs to suppress and contain wildfires amounted to nearly $3.2 billion in federal firefighting costs alone. Still, the Forest Service, which employs most federal wildland firefighters, needs more funding to meet their capacity needs to address the “ongoing wildfire crisis,” agency leaders say. 

Firefighters have a wide range of specialties, from members of handcrews and hotshots, who construct and patrol firelines; engine crews; smokejumpers, who parachute out of airplanes to reach fires in remote areas; helitack crews, who reach fires by helicopter; equipment operators; dispatchers; and other support staff. For more info, visit this Forest Service webpage about firefighting jobs. 

Collaboration is key

Thanks to mutual aid and joint powers agreements between tribes and local, state, and federal government agencies, the geographically closest firefighting forces often respond to the initial report of a fire regardless of their jurisdiction over where the fire started. 

Firefighting agencies also share an Incident Management System that enables initial responders to more seamlessly scale up a response. In the Santa Fe area, that means soliciting help from a Southwest Area Incident Management Team. 

This figure shows the 10 Geographic Area Coordination Centers in the U.S.

If a wildfire grows beyond the capability of teams in the Southwest Area (one of 10 wildfire Geographic Areas across the U.S.), the Boise, Idaho-based National Interagency Coordination Center assumes responsibility for mobilizing more resources from elsewhere across the nation. Because there is often a greater need than there is availability of firefighting personnel and equipment, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group comprised of state and federal fire management leaders ultimately oversees where to allocate firefighting resources.

In addition, the United States has ever-evolving agreements with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Portugal that enable the countries to share firefighting personnel and equipment. The U.S. considers requesting international help when ~60% or more of domestic wildland firefighting personnel are committed to fires, and the U.S. has received assistance in the form of aircraft or up to 600 personnel from Canada, Australia or New Zealand most years over the past two decades, as detailed in this 2022 paper in the journal Fire. 

Challenges in Wildland Fire Management

"Over the last few decades, the wildland fire management environment has profoundly changed. Longer fire seasons; bigger fires and more acres burned on average each year; more extreme fire behavior; and wildfire suppression operations in the wildland urban interface (WUI) have become the norm.” ~ U.S. Forest Service

Growth in fire seasons and severity

This figure shows the annual number of fires and acres burned in the Southwest Geographic Area from 2013 to 2023. A linear trendline of acres burned shows a steady upward trend.

Due to factors including climate change, fuel build-up from fire exclusion, and expansion of the wildland-urban interface through continued construction of the built environment in previously undeveloped areas, wildfires have become larger, more severe, and more destructive. For example, the land area in the U.S. burned annually by wildfire has doubled over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, fire seasons have become longer – more than 80 days longer in the western U.S. – straining seasonal and regionally shared firefighting resources.

“We all recognize now we have a fire year, but we continue staffing for a fire season,” fire managers reflected in a review of the destructive 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.

Resource strain and scarcity

As we transition out of the months traditionally considered the Southwest fire season – from April to July, when monsoons typically begin – more state and federal firefighting resources will flow to California and the Northwest, and fewer will be readily available to county and community fire managers in the Southwest.

Changes to the workforce

Agencies of varying sizes across the country are struggling to retain and recruit firefighters. In March, the investigative news organization ProPublica reported that the Forest Service has had an attrition rate of 45% of its permanent staff in the past three years. ProPublica and other news outlets reported several factors contributing to attrition in the Forest Service, including low pay, with starting wages of $15 per hour that do not reflect the demands of the job; inadequate attention to physical and mental health problems faced by firefighters; and the growing difficulty of the job as severe fires and extended fire seasons translate more frequent deployments. 

This figure shows 7 barriers to recruitment of federal wildland firefighters: Low pay, limited career advancement, poor work-life balance, mental health challenges, remote/expensive duty stations, limited workforce diversity and the hiring process.

A 2022 Government Accountability Office report similarly identified low pay as the primary barrier to the recruitment and retention of federal wildland firefighters, among other barriers such as a poor work-life balance; mental health challenges; and limited workforce diversity.

Enacted and Proposed Policy Changes

“The existing wildfire management system has not kept pace with demands.”
— National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, 2023 addendum

Bolstering the wildland firefighting workforce

Federal agencies have made some headway in recent years to address challenges facing the wildland fire workforce, including raising the pay of wildland firefighters. In 2022, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law raised the minimum wage of federal wildland firefighters from $13 to $15 per hour and provided firefighters with a temporary pay increase of at least $20,000 per year, which lawmakers extended through September 2024. 

For the upcoming FY25 fiscal year that begins October 1, the Biden administration has proposed a permanent pay increase for wildland firefighters, along with investments in firefighter mental and physical health and increases in the number of permanent (rather than seasonal) positions. Those proposals are currently making their way through Congress. 

A 2023 update to the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy recommended additional solutions, such as ensuring that recruitment efforts reach firefighters of diverse backgrounds and identities. In 2022, 84% of federal firefighters were men and 72% were White. Increasing the representation of women and marginalized groups will not only make the wildland firefighting world more just but will grow the dwindling applicant pool for firefighting positions. 

As outlined in the national strategy, the nation ultimately needs a larger permanent firefighting workforce to tackle the year-round work of wildfire mitigation, preparedness, prevention, and postfire recovery, in addition to what we typically think of when we hear wildland fire workforce: wildfire response and containment. 

Additional Resources

For more information about the rewards and challenges of a career in wildland firefighting, check out this Preparedness Guide for Wildland Firefighters and Their Families from the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

Wildfire Wednesdays #139: Proactive Home Protection Against Wildfire

As monsoonal rains impact the Southwest, post-fire debris flows and flooding are a major and ongoing concern for those affected by and adjacent to the recent South Fork and Salt Fires. Visit Wildfire Wednesday #138 for information and links to support the community.

Happy Wednesday, Fire Adapted NM!

Over the past year, news about advancements in wildfire protection and hazard reduction has been coming out faster than most of us can keep up. One common theme that runs through all of the new research is the emerging importance of approaching fire adaptation from a community, rather than an individual, perspective. From the 2018 fire in Paradise to the 2023 fire in Lahaina, this community of practitioners is seeing, in real time, the shift from wilderness wildfire to urban conflagrations.

Today’s blog focuses on resources from organizations such as the Institute for Business and Home Safety which can help residents, neighborhoods, communities, and cities better align their fire preparedness efforts with the latest science.

This Wildfire Wednesday features:

Living with Wildfire

Challenges across the American West

Wildfire disasters occur when wildfire flames and embers enter communities and destroy hundreds or thousands of homes. Multi-billion-dollar property losses in single wildfire events have become recurrent in the American West over the past three decades. An estimated 45 million residential buildings across the US are at risk of destruction from wildfires. This is a result of a combination of factors, including:

  • Historic population growth

  • Unregulated building in wildfire-exposed areas

  • Overgrowth of forests and rangelands

  • The effects of climate change

These disasters affect not only lives and property, but the safety and effectiveness of the fire service, the ability of businesses and local governments to recover, and the insurance industry’s ability to provide a financial safety net that makes it possible for people to rebuild their lives and livelihoods.

In a new report from the Institute for Business and Home Safety and National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), some key findings from an investigation into fire vulnerability of communities and measures of wildfire readiness in the WUI include:

  • Few states and counties with the greatest risk of wildfire disasters are using sound regulatory approaches backed up by consistent enforcement. Outside of California and Utah, there are no enforced, statewide codes addressing wildfire exposures to residential and commercial property; code use and enforcement at the local level remains limited.

  • The separation of wildfire safety elements from traditional building codes has resulted in limited use by state and local officials. This includes the absence of clear guidance on how such elements can be integrated into building codes. At the state-level, New Mexico has a state-wide and enforced building code, but elected to exclude any WUI code provisions.

  • A majority of counties and local communities largely fail to address wildfire risks to life and property in a comprehensive manner. These stand in sharp counterpoint to the few local jurisdictions have taken proactive approaches across a range of wildfire safety concerns.

  • Despite incentives to financially support wildfire mitigation and response capabilities in areas adjacent to national forests and rangelands, one in four high-risk counties have no Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs), while 17% of counties have not updated their plans in over ten years.

  • Data on fire service capability, response, and outreach activities in the wildfire arena is difficult to obtain and is highly variable in its form. These inconsistencies make it difficult to compare or evaluate the effectiveness of these activities in a meaningful way.

  • While local fire departments serve as a vital and trusted communications link for communities to understand how to reduce risk, support for inspection and outreach programs is highly variable across the West because local fire departments often lack both trained staff and financial resources.

  • There is no correlation between the amount counties spend on wildfire related activities and the use of WUI codes or community wildfire preparedness plans in those counties. Put simply, the investment of public dollars does not necessarily equate to strong codes or planning efforts.

Defining Wildland Fire vs. Wildfire Driven Urban Conflagrations

According to a recent public safety blog from ESRI, wildland fire refers to fires within natural landscapes such as forests, grasslands, and other undeveloped areas. These regions play a crucial role in ecosystem health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. However, when fires ignite within these wildland areas, they pose significant threats to nearby communities, infrastructure, and lives.

Photo of the 2018 Carr Fire approaching a neighborhood in the WUI. Photo credit: Brenna Jones, US Forest Service.

The distinction between wildland fire and urban conflagration lies in their context: wildland represents the untouched natural environment, while urban conflagration signifies an uncontrolled fire that spreads rapidly through communities. A recent article available on USDA’s website, “WUI Is Not a Wildland Problem,” emphasizes that these urban conflagrations present unique challenges requiring tailored solutions beyond traditional risk reduction, mitigation, and firefighting approaches.

Policy lessons for improving wildfire readiness

According to Living with Wildfire, policymakers at all levels should work to establish much greater levels of wildfire readiness by:

  • Using and enforcing the most recent model WUI codes for new residential and commercial construction.

  • Requiring frequent updates of community wildfire mitigation plans.

  • Incentivizing and encouraging wildfire risk reduction activities at the parcel and community level.

  • Providing firefighters with the training, equipment, and other resources they need to be safe and effective in response, and serve as a valuable source of education for their communities

What can be done to improve readiness?

Resources for Home and Business owners and community planners

Wildfire researchers at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) have spent years researching wildfire through both field and lab studies. Now, in collaboration with other wildfire community experts, IBHS has identified the mitigation actions critical to reducing your wildfire risk. While we can’t stop wildfire, there are some steps from the Wildfire Prepared Program that can guide you through required actions to help protect your property. For those who are interested or who require one for insurance purposes, the program provides a pathway to receive a wildfire prepared designation certificate.

The program offers step-by-step instructions for where to start with your home or business preparation process, including a checklist of preparatory items that correspond to different levels of designation (Base, Plus, etc.).

For those seeking a Wildfire Prepared designation, the program provides a quiz to ensure applicants are familiar with the Homeowner Guide and taken the steps necessary for their home to meet all the requirements of this program before paying the application fee for an inspection. This increases the chances of properties passing inspection and being properly designated.

Keeping your designation comes with the requirements of an annual review and a three-year recertification.

The Southwest Fire Science Consortium and Arizona Wildfire Initiative have produced a fact sheet, adapted from the National Volunteer Fire Council - Wildland Fire Assessment Program training course, with a plethora of resources for learning about and protecting your home from wildfire. They suggest starting with a home hazard assessment to determine your wildfire weak points and opportunities for improvement, prioritizing you hazard reduction options, creating a list of all the steps involved to get to a point of being fire prepared, and identifying potential evacuation options as part of your Ready! Set! Go! preparation.

Additional Resources

Understanding community acceptance of fuels treatments

“Public support is crucial for successful fuels management, but vocal opposition can mask broader yet quieter community acceptance. It is helpful for land managers to have a picture of all perspectives, not just the most vocal ones. And what do communities think about fuels treatments? To answer this question, researchers from Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) and Wildfire Research (WiRē) considered data about public acceptance of fuels treatment from studies of 13 communities in the Western US.”

Key findings and management implications of the study included:

  • Surveys of 13 communities at risk of wildfire showed that public acceptance varies not only across types of fuels management practices but also by community.

  • Planning and implementation of fuels treatments can benefit from understandings of public acceptability.

  • Systematic social surveys can provide managers with representative data to complement existing methods for gathering public comments related to acceptance of fuels management projects.

  • Detailed data can show not only who accepts or doesn’t accept fuels treatment, but whose acceptance could shift towards support or opposition, providing a fuller picture.

  • Understanding the fuller picture can provide the opportunity for managers to be more strategic with communications and engagements.

Fire in the desert: an overview of a changing landscape

In the hot shrub-dominated deserts of southern New Mexico and Arizona, unprecedented large-scale fires in recent years have been driven by the exponential expansion of introduced invasive plants. A new fire mosaic is being established in the region whereby wildfires can spread from fire-prone forested mountains to the desert valleys, and vice versa, carried by greater connectivity of invasive grass patches. In the Sonoran Desert and other mid-elevation shrublands, an ecological transition from desert scrub to grassland has begun, which creates management and societal challenges as fire becomes a part of the ecology.

Increased urbanization at foothill elevations put tens of thousands of residents and billions of dollars of infrastructure in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in jeopardy. The increasing likelihood of the alignment of fire-ready conditions (dry fuels, low relative humidity, wind) that can lead to loss of life and infrastructure in the Sonoran Desert at a scale similar to that seen in the 2023 Lahaina, Maui wildfire. To boot, the cost of wildfire mitigation and control efforts available today is orders of magnitude smaller than the economic impact of the grassification of the foothills ‘viewsheds’ and recreation areas, meaning that mitigation is actually cheaper than the true cost of doing nothing. In this report from the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, the authors summarize the history and trends of fire and discuss future conservation strategies.

In determining what land managers can do, the report provides a management toolbox specific to fire in the desert:

  • Fuel break methods for the desert

  • Wildfire operation tactics for the desert

  • Identifying and protecting refugia

  • Fuels control

  • Public policy

  • Restoration