Inside Arvada

Inside Arvada's Community Wildfire Protection Plan

• City of Arvada • Season 1 • Episode 38

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This September, in honor of National Preparedness Month, we’re doing a two-part series with our partners at Arvada Fire. Part 2 focuses on Arvada's Community Wildfire  Protection Plan (CWPP) with Arvada Fire's Wildfire Mitigation Specialist, Chris Warren, and the City of Arvada’s Emergency Manager, Brian Wilkerson. In case you missed it, you can go back and listen to Part 1 of the series, Arvada Fire 101, with Fire Marshal Steven Parker.

During Part 2, Arvada's emergency management experts explain how the Marshall Fire changed our understanding of wildfire risks in suburban communities and outline how the CWPP will help prepare residents for emergencies.

In this episode:

  • The City's Emergency Manager (Brian Wilkerson) and Arvada Fire's Wildfire Mitigation Specialist (Chris Warren) discuss their roles in preparing Arvada for disaster situations
  • Get an overview of the drafted Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) up to this point and what to expect next 
  • How the CWPP establishes customized strategies for addressing wildfire threats across different neighborhoods
  • How grasses and wind — not forests — drive most destructive wildfires in the Front Range, including the Marshall Fire
  • How embers in combustible materials near homes cause most structure ignitions during wildfires, not direct flames
  • How Arvada's primary wildfire season runs September through April, not during summer months
  • How individual responsibility is critical for emergency preparedness —  start by signing up for Lookout Alert, having evacuation plans ready, and preparing go-bags with essentials
  • Arvada Fire offers free home ignition zone assessments to help homeowners identify and address vulnerabilities

News and Events:

Visit us at ArvadaCO.gov/Podcast or email us at podcast@arvada.org.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Inside Arvada. I'm one of your hosts, katie Patterson, and I'm here with Sean Starr, as always, and we have two great guests on today. First up is Brian Wilkerson, the emergency manager for the city of Arvada. He has over 30 years of experience in public safety, emergency management and public administration, both as a leader and a consultant. He specializes in advanced planning techniques and speaks extensively on topics like strategic planning, innovation and organization effectiveness.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it was a two-guest episode and our other guest was Chris Warren, and he is the wildfire mitigation specialist for Arvada Fire. Chris started with Arvada Fire in 2022, and he moved into his current role when it was created Actually just recently it's past April to focus on wildfire hazard in our area. Chris started in his career in wildfire in 2002 in California and has experience as a hotshot helicopter and engine crew member, as well as 12 years in investigation as a hotshot helicopter and engine crew member, as well as 12 years in investigation. Chris Brian, welcome to Inside Arvada. Thanks so much for joining us. Let's begin by getting to know you a little bit better and telling us what your favorite part of your job is, chris. We'll start with you first.

Speaker 3:

Okay, yeah, so I'm Chris Warren. I'm the wildfire mitigation specialist with Arvada Fire. This is a new position that the Arvada Fire Protection District created in the spring of this year and it's kind of created, for you know, several focuses. One is the recognition of the wildfire risk that does exist to the Arvada Fire Protection District, you know, and another is the fact that statewide there's been a larger recognition of that as well and there's a code coming out that all new homes will have to be built to and we're trying to define that on what we want to do inside of the state. But there will be a statewide code that we will have some responsibility in the enforcement of for new construction. So we're kind of getting ready for that as well, as well as just being engaged with the community and the questions that they're asking of us and how they start addressing their HOAs and other places where we can prop things up and start building out an atmosphere towards wildfire safety For me.

Speaker 3:

You know I've got a long career in wildfire. I did investigations for a while and have been to several of the large conflagrations, including Marshall Fire, parts of Camp Fire, glass Fire when Fort McMurray burned down in Canada and saw all these things. So this is a problem that is impacting us in multiple locations across the West, if not globally, and we've got solutions for it. We believe that we've got a real option to have license over the outcomes of these fires, and so I'm really excited to be here to be part of getting that solution, getting the community protected and to stop these occurrences that we've experienced and have personally witnessed on landscape scale of loss of homes.

Speaker 2:

And Brian tell us a little bit about your job and what your favorite part is.

Speaker 4:

Sure, I'm the emergency manager for the city of Arvada Really focus on three big things One, getting the city prepared for any kind of disaster through planning, training, things of that nature, working with the neighborhoods in order to help them better prepare and get them ready for any kind of disaster that might hit. And third, helping to manage our response and work with the other agencies, partner agencies like Revatafire, jefferson County, et cetera. So that's the main focus of the job. My favorite part of it really is solving complex problems. I really enjoy having to work with a lot of different stakeholders, with a lot of different agencies and try to tough solutions to the tough problems for the community.

Speaker 3:

I'm glad that's your favorite part because it's probably the most challenging part too, I would imagine, god, you like the complexity of that it is a challenge, that's for sure, and so we wanted to bring you both on today to talk about the community wildfire protection plan that's underway the CWPP as we'll call it because it's a mouthful and that work's been underway for really quite some time now, and so, chris, can you kind of give us a little bit of that is custom built for our district, our neighborhoods, our people and whatever different types of threat and risk we've got going on out there right, and especially for us, because we do have some federal land ownership inside of our district.

Speaker 3:

We've got some county land ownership. We cover most of Arvada and a little bit of Wheat Ridge, and then all these different HOAs, so we've got all these different stakeholders that we're looking to that have the same level of risk, essentially from the wildfire question. So the CWPP is being crafted by third-party experts that are out there looking at all these things and breaking this down on what actions and what neighborhoods we need to focus in on what our priority levels are and then bringing those stakeholders together and start having a conversation about here's what the risk looks like for your neighborhood and here's some measures that we think you can employ to start reducing that risk and protecting the community. The stakeholders are going to come back with what they can do, what they can't do and how we work together to reach that middle ground of what meaningful protection looks like. So the plan is really just kind of built out with the it's baselined, the simple philosophy of keeping wildfire from intruding on the built environment.

Speaker 2:

And Brian, what role has the city had in participating in the plan and having it developed?

Speaker 4:

We've really worked as a close partner with Arvada Fire, as we do on many things, and the city focuses heavily on how to engage the neighborhoods, what kinds of mechanisms, such as code and our own mitigation, that we do with parks and open space and things of that nature, in order to address some of these conditions that the CWPP is coming up with. It's really a critical part of our overall emergency planning and preparedness for the city.

Speaker 1:

And what was some of the impetus for starting to create this plan? I know we talked a little bit offline about like from a community perspective. I think the Marshall Fire was something that really hit home for people because there was areas of Arvada and kind of a pre evacuation mode and so just it literally hit close to home and so was that a part of the conversation for coming up with this plan, or was it already kind of in the works? How did that kind of start?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think Marshall was really the big wake up. There was really no refuting the fact that there is a wildfire risk that exists in Starvata. I think historically people have kind of looked to the range lanes and the grasslands and been a little bit dismissive of the level of fire threat that that brings to the table. We look to the news and we hear about wildfire in the news and it's always the forest environments, really large crown fire, dramatic footage of these huge sheets of flame that are coming down the mountainside, and that's not the ecosystem that our neighborhood is built in. So Marshall Fire was able to really reshape people's perception that there is a very legitimate hazard and a very legitimate risk that exists in these areas.

Speaker 3:

And part of the irony of that is, if we really start looking at what drove the Camp Fire or the fire at Lahaina or Marshall Fire, all those fires were carried by the grasses that existed. So it's really the grasses the fuel there. And then the driving factor behind the fire behavior is wind. So when you look at Marshall Fire and when you put those pieces together, it's grasses and wind that are driving all of these conflagrations and what it is is. It's important to kind of recognize that these are two separate issues.

Speaker 3:

We've got the wildfire that is blowing out and developing and moving across the landscape and that wildfire ignites the structures and then we have a structural conflagration. So it's a wildfire that becomes a structural conflagration and we have these two separate incidences going on here. So I think really kind of with martial fire, looking at that and realizing that the fire behavior that we're going to experience, as well as to how deeply that fire can actually penetrate into the neighborhoods, I think some people think that they're fairly far off of that two-dimensional boundary of where the interface is, and the interface has kind of become a bit of a misnomer on what the risk is. So they're thinking that if they don't immediately live on that front, that the risk isn't there for them. And then we start looking at the footprint of Marshall Fire and that really shows us how deeply these fires can penetrate into the neighborhoods and what the risk actually looks like.

Speaker 2:

And there's a draft of the plan out there on our Battlefires website that we can link to. People can kind of explore to get a little bit better idea of exactly what is in the plan. But what about the status of the plan, Brian? Where are we at right now and what are some upcoming milestones people can look?

Speaker 4:

forward to Well. As you noted, we have a draft of the plan created. A lot of the expert work in terms of fire modeling, risk assessment, et cetera, has been done and is reflected in that plan. There's also a lot of prescriptions and strategies for homeowners in that plan. So certainly encourage people to go out and look.

Speaker 4:

We're at the stage of gathering stakeholder feedback and that's going to happen a few different ways. We have a series of meetings that are kicking off now with different stakeholder groups, from governments to neighborhoods etc. Who are going to be able to provide input on the plan and help us refine what's in there, both from a standpoint of the risk assessment as well as the mitigation strategies and what we're going to do following the plan. So it's important that the public, if they want to comment on it, go to the Arvada Fire website and we'll link to that and you can see and provide comments there but also for these neighborhoods and for the different agencies to participate in the stakeholder process. And then, as we get towards the end of the year, we'll be refining the plan based on that stakeholder input and hopefully take it for approval to both Arvada City Council as well as the Arvada Fire Board next year.

Speaker 1:

And then there's also kind of a state role in that process. Right, they're kind of helping to inform and set this plan up as kind of a model for Colorado.

Speaker 4:

The State Forest Service is responsible for oversight of these plans, whoever's doing them in the state of Colorado, and they're really focused on increasing the quality of these plans because it is such an important piece for these communities. Because it is such an important piece for these communities and so we're working with the state closely to continue to push the boundaries and really create as good of a plan as we possibly can that is going to be implemented and that's going to make a real difference in the community.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's a good segue. So once the plan is completed, what are kind of the goals for how that gets used?

Speaker 3:

That's going to depend on what it looks like when it is completed. But you know, the goal is that the community will have had involvement community being, you know, not necessarily individual members, but HOAs and there is stuff for individual members in there, but the HOAs and OpenSpace and some of these other groups they're going to have these targets of what mitigation looks like for, you know, the vegetation, the combustible environment, all those things. So it'll lateral us over into a series of meeting and planning with these individual groups on how we're going to achieve this goal. That has now been outlined for us, that we all participated and agreed on. So it just goes from being the prescription to the actual application of what it is that we need to achieve to make sure that we have meaningful protection throughout the community.

Speaker 4:

In addition, we have some policy elements that will go into that as well. Chris mentioned earlier the statewide code that needs to be adopted. We have to look at how it's going to change our building code and a lot of our regulations as well. So it will inform a number of things, from practical mitigation strategies to policy input.

Speaker 1:

And what about the funding piece? There's some ability, when you have a plan like this, to get more, maybe grants that can go towards different things. What does that look like?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So you know, one of the things that traditionally a lot of these grants are required is that you have a CWPP in hand, so that's really going to open up the doors to start pursuing some of that money.

Speaker 3:

You know, the other thing that I'm actively doing right now is engaging the community and having community members invite us out to do a home ignition zone assessment. So we are looking at what's going on at the individual community member level. But that is, you know, the issues that they have at their individual homes is common throughout most of the district. So when we're out there looking at and talking to homeowners, we're also talking to them about engaging with us and providing us with data to really start looking at what the needs are so we can start targeting the grants that are built around a specific need, that have specific requirements and we know where we need to be going to get that money for those functions as well, as we now have CWPP in hand to be better prepared to go get the most bang for our buck for grant funding applications. Aaron Powell Jr.

Speaker 2:

Nice, trevor Burrus Jr, and this is a second part of a two-part National Preparedness Month episode that we're doing for the podcast. The first one was with Steven Parker and sort of our Rat-A-Fire 101. And so this episode is more focused on community wildfire protection plan, and so we wanted to ask about maybe some need-to-know information or misconceptions that individual homeowners should remember when it comes to emergency preparedness specific to wildfire mitigation, chris, and so what are those things that homeowners should be most aware about and what can they do to be most prepared when it comes to wildfire mitigation and preparedness? I think one of the things that homeowners should be most aware about and what can they do to be most prepared when it comes to wildfire mitigation and preparedness.

Speaker 3:

I think one of the things that probably is a good idea to start with and it's one of the common questions we get is people are very concerned about the evacuation process there, and what we want to do is make sure that they understand that in the event of this fire, we're going to be busy with the fire our VATIFIRE Protection District, so it really comes down to law enforcement, and those are the ones that are going to be guiding the evacuation efforts there, and I think what they need to look at and we can possibly provide links for this on your guys' website, but look at alert is how we're going to notify people. That is going to be the quickest, fastest way for people to be made aware that there is an incident, as well as provide them with some direction on how to evacuate, what roads they're going to take. The challenge that we have right now is that we don't know when the fire is going to occur, where it's going to occur or what the weather is going to be doing when that happens, so it's hard to project what the evacuation route is going to look like at the time of the event. Now that's why we're doing training closely with the city is to start building out our understanding of what's going to work, what's not going to work. So when this does occur, we've really shortened up the process of how we make decisions. We've already trained a little bit, we've already got some ideas of what does and doesn't work and we can close that window pretty quickly.

Speaker 3:

Where the community can really help out, along with getting that look out alert that's going to tell them when, where and how is start looking at ready set go program. And that is something that is start building the plan out now so they can become more responsive to this thing when and, if it happens, what they're going to do to be able to leave quickly. So things like your medications, your passport, you know spare credit card that are all just kind of centralized in one location where you can grab and go. Because if we think about how quickly the Marshall Fire moved from ignition to being in the neighborhoods, there's a really limited window for evacuation there and if you're not home you may not even be able to get back home. So you know, also be thinking about do you have a mother-in-law or somebody that's living with you or a pet that maybe isn't there, and have you built your plan around? Do your neighbors have a part of this plan as well that can be responsive if you're out of town? So I think those are kind of the first pieces. That we really want to look at is making sure that people understand how they're going to be notified, how they're going to evacuate and what they can do to prepare for the evacuation process.

Speaker 3:

Moving into the fire piece of that, that's where the home ignition zone assessments are becoming critical. This is where the CWPP, as well as the code, is going to start leaning on people a little bit is the way these fires are moving into these neighborhoods. It's not this large flaming front that comes in and immediately ignites homes. It's the ember cast that blows up against the home. When we say embers, that's just the small little pieces of glowing combustion that have come off some of their burning material. If you've ever seen video of this on the news, it almost looks like rain. It's not a very large piece that comes through, but what those embers are doing are blowing up against the houses and getting lodged in the lightweight combustible such as a leaf litter, some mulch, decorative vegetation that's out there, and getting that going and then it extends into the house from there. So these home ignition zones assessments are really built with the philosophy of understanding how it is.

Speaker 3:

The majority of these homes are igniting and we come out there and we look at the individual house and what the individual circumstances are, with that understanding of the ignition chain, and start talking to the homeowners about how we break that chain.

Speaker 3:

That's action that has to be taken now because you're just not going to have the amount of time that you need when the fire actually starts. So taking that preventative action right now really helps protect your home as well as really, really really helps us as the fire department, because when we show up we're not going to have the time to do all that stuff for you either. If you have set your home up where it has relatively low risk number one that makes us feel safe and confident that we can even be there to begin with. Number two, if there is some sort of small trivial ignition next to the house that unmitigated would extend to the household it's very quick and efficient for us to be able to get in there and suppress that small fire. It really helps the homeowner and we really want to push this with. The action they take is massive towards protecting their property, and then that's just for them, but it also helps us out with our safety and our efficiency. So those are the pieces that we really want people to be aware of.

Speaker 2:

That's interesting about how the fire can spread to your house, because I guess you know I have this picture in my mind of the flames just engulfing, like your roof or something like that. So the way you describe it is something maybe not a lot of people may have realized. Brian, when it comes to emergency preparedness, you know we probably can't reiterate this enough about how much it is the individual's responsibility. The city has plans and is always prepared for any number of emergencies, but how important is it for the individuals, for them to be responsible for their own actions and their own preparedness?

Speaker 4:

It's critical. We work with a number of the neighborhoods on safety fairs and different events that they have to better inform the neighbors about what they can do, and we're always happy to come out and support those. Arvada Fire does the same. We're often partnering together on those and what we're talking about is everything from you know the importance of the kind of mitigation things that Chris talked about to getting prepared not just for evacuation but any kind of emergency right, even if it's something where you have to help your neighbors because there's potential flood or something of that nature. Neighbors, working with neighbors is such a critical component of it, and we're out there supporting the neighborhoods and helping them inform the neighbors about what they can do really to get prepared, because it is a partnership. As a city, there's a number of things that we can do and we're constantly practicing and preparing for that, but it has to start with the individuals.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that reminded me of one that's a little bit. Maybe more common is the just kind of like Excel rolling outages that happen sometimes now, and those are happening maybe for a variety of reasons. Wildfire being risk being one of them, but that happened in my neighborhood last year and I have quite a few elderly neighbors and you know your car is stuck in your garage, those sorts of things Certainly.

Speaker 4:

Like you need something.

Speaker 1:

If that's 12 hours, like do you have enough? I don't know food to get through that and stuff. So while not maybe like a traditional emergency, still, some of those same facets still apply.

Speaker 4:

It still counts Absolutely. So even things like medications, people who are on oxygen, things of that nature, it's really important to think about any kind of an extended outage. Unfortunately, a 12-hour outage is not unheard of these days, and so, when you think about it, knowing what you can do to help yourself, even in those shorter-term emergencies, is really critical, and we have a lot of resources to help people with that, as does our VATIFIRE.

Speaker 2:

And, as I mentioned, always happy to go out and support the neighborhoods. In that respect, never a bad idea to get to know your neighbors more. I mean, we can be so siloed, I feel like these days and kind of not even know the people that live right next to us.

Speaker 1:

But there's so many good reasons.

Speaker 2:

Emergency preparedness is one of them to at least exchange contact information and get to know them so they can cover your back and you can do the same for them when maybe you're not around. So certainly this is the part of the interview where we ask anything that we didn't mention you can bring up, or any misconceptions. If not, we can, we can wrap it up, but, chris, I'll ask you first Is there any thing we didn't mention that you wanted to touch on, or misconceptions?

Speaker 3:

No, I don't think so Offhand. I think you know just kind of reiterate that you know that first letter C, the CWPP is community Right and so that's one of the things where, again, we're just really enforcing that we get the individual members out there. And you know to the point of is that, as a reminder, the city of Arvada and the Arvada Fire Protection District are separate governing bodies. We're not the same, but you know you go to these events. You'll often see Brian and I standing side by side because it is community and we are part of that.

Speaker 3:

The city is part of it, the fire department is part of it, the police department is part of it, HOAs and, again, the individual community owner. So you know, as people are exploring and listening to this, if this is something they have a curiosity for, we encourage them to reach out and we'll come out and we'll do the home ignitions, on assessment, at their house and start talking about the options that are available to them. You know some of them have more work than others but for the most part there's a lot of small steps that people can take that provide significant advancements and protection for what they're with. It's just again, kind of getting back to educating and shaping that perception of what the threat actually looks like. So you know that's a free service that Arvada Fire provides. So we definitely want to see people start reaching out and having those conversations and getting that community motion going with all the individual levels, Absolutely.

Speaker 4:

All right, september is just a great month to remind everybody about preparedness and the kinds of things that they can do personally. There will be a lot of resources that will be coming out from the city, from the fire department, from the county around that, so I just encourage people to take advantage of that additional education and those opportunities to get involved.

Speaker 3:

Brian, he just mentioned September, which just triggered something else in my mind, you know. Getting back to misconceptions, I want to talk about what our fire season looks like in the front range here. You know, we always see the fires occurring during the summer months on the news and again, that's what shapes our perception. The reality of it is is that here in the front range, down on the plains, is that our fire season is just starting. Ours runs from about September to March, april. The reason behind that is because our fuel type here, as we discussed earlier, is the grasses, and they go into green up, you know, in March and they're not going to ignite. Then.

Speaker 3:

There's two different species that go into green up at different times. So there's one species that comes up earlier, another species that goes out a little bit later. That inhibits that fire spread. They're both going dormant right now. And again, focusing on the fact that these are wind-driven grass fires, august is our lowest windy month. The winds start in September, so we have our grasses going dry and dormant right about the same time the winds start picking up across the front range. So that's when people really need to be thinking about taking those steps to provide themselves with protection is from September to probably April.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a great point, because what Marshall Fire was December right. I mean, who would have thought that In?

Speaker 3:

the dead center of what is actually our fire season. And, yeah, it snowed the next day. It's counterintuitive to how we perceive fire, but that's the reality of it in the front range. Yeah, great point.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, with that, thank you both so much for coming on and we really appreciate all the information and look forward to more with the CWPP.

Speaker 4:

Thank you, thanks, thank you much.

Speaker 1:

And always, we love to hear from our listeners. You can stay in touch with us by texting us at the link at the top of the episode. Email us at podcast at arvadaorg. We love to hear your feedback, what you're enjoying, any questions you might have about fire safety or the wildfire protection plan and some news and events coming up, like we've mentioned a few times now, and some news and events coming up, like we've mentioned a few times now, the Arvada Fire Safety Day is Saturday, September 27th, 10 am to 2 pm at the newly remodeled training center out there on Indiana. It's a free, family-friendly event with our first responders will be there some safety vendors and all types of education for the community, and so you can learn more at arvadafirecogov.

Speaker 2:

And our final Movies Around Town event of the year is coming up on Friday, october 3rd, at Michael Northey Park. This is an event hosted by the Arvada Festivals Commission. They'll be hosting a free showing of Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice, it's a sequel to the 1988 classic. This is a rescheduled event from July, when it was originally postponed due to weather. We'll have live music by Tony Medina starting at 6 pm, following the movie, beginning at approximately 7.15.

Speaker 2:

And then, finally, our Snow Buddies program is gearing up for the winter. It's a city-led neighborhood program where we match residents unable to shovel snow for their sidewalk and driveway with a caring volunteer. So we're always looking for more Snow Buddy volunteers. For more information, you can visit the webpage at arvadagov slash snow dash buddies. Thank you to our guests today, chris Warren and Brian Wilkerson. Be sure to catch our next episode with Municipal Inspector Jim Greer. Today's podcast was recorded and edited by Arvada Media Services and today's fun fact was, when you put together your go bag and you're not sure what to put in it, remember the eight P's, that's, people and pets, pictures and photo albums, pcs, papers, prescriptions and medications, plastics, personal devices and passports, slash IDs.

Speaker 1:

Whoa.