Wildfire PREsponse: Closing the Gap With Mitigation

Wildfires are not only in remote backcountry areas anymore, and they never have been restricted to “the West.” The 2025 fire season began with the devastating Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles County that were sparked a mere week after New Year’s Day. Almost 1.2 million acres had burned by June. The deadliest wildfire in United States history remains the Peshtigo Fire, which occurred in Wisconsin, October 8-10, 1871, claiming 1.5 million acres and over 1,200 lives. The same year, the Great Michigan Fire consumed 2.5 million acres and claimed an estimated 500 lives.

A Recipe for Wildfires

The author’s simple, practical definition of “wildfire” for clear communication with the public and cooperators is: any uncontrolled fire burning vegetation of any kind: grass fire, brush fire, or forest fire. In spring 2025, wildfires had serious impacts in New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Oklahoma, to name just a few locales where “large wildfire incident” has become an increasingly familiar phrase. In October 2022, a fast-moving wildfire forced hurried evacuations and destroyed nearly half the town of Wooldridge, Missouri, leaving behind scorched foundations and burned vehicles, reminiscent of scenes from the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California.

Two common contributing factors emerged among these fires: (1) drought, usually severe or extended, and (2) strong, gusty wind events, especially when correlated with low relative humidity and warmer temperatures. In the U.S. Midwest and Southeast, surface soil moisture deficit, measured by the Keetch-Byram Drought Index, provides a fairly accurate assessment, in the author’s experience, for estimating the availability of “live fuels” and “heavy dead-down fuels”—logs and tree trunks—that burn and contribute to fire intensity.

Compounding the issue, a de-urbanization movement—by those seeking an escape from busy, crowded city life to a more rural or outlying-suburban existence—has exploded the size and complexity of the “wildland-urban interface.” Many rural areas have smaller, often partly or fully volunteer fire departments that lack wildland fire mitigation or response training and capacity. Some of these departments are fortunate to have a nearby federal cooperating agency with wildland response and mitigation capabilities upon whom they can lean for support.

What This Means for the Next Fire Season

To predict what a fire season might be like, many point to year-to-date fire statistics, predict smoky, angry, orange skies, and proclaim the “worst fire season ever” that may or may not end before the end of the year. Regardless of any prediction, however, the value of presponders, helping citizens and first responders prepare for and mitigate fire risk, cannot be overlooked.

Coalitions and Collaboratives

In partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado-based nonprofit Coalitions and Collaboratives has created programs in support of wildfire mitigation, such as the Action, Implementation, and Mitigation program; Community Mitigation Assistance Teams (CMAT) program; and the Community Wildfire Mitigation Best Practices Training Program, which maximizes wildfire mitigation. These programs have been in place since 2019 and have resulted in $5.7 million in grant awards to 115 organization; 40,231 acres of hazard fuels reduction treatments, including thinning and prescribed fire; and 4,673 buildings, homes, and critical infrastructure sites “hardened” by removing flammable material and vegetation, screening vents, and sealing crevices to reduce the homes’ susceptibility and vulnerability to damage by wildfire flames or embers.

Members of CMATs primarily work in the protection and mitigation phases of the National Preparedness Goal framework, facilitating communications and interactions within a community to assist with the formulation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans and sustainable mitigation measures. They may also be useful during the response phase of a large wildfire incident to assist with “just in time” mitigation measures. In 2024, during the Wapiti Fire near Lowman, Idaho, Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team 1 ordered a CMAT to support and assist with structure hardening and mitigation expertise and to provide wildfire risk evaluations and rapid risk assessments for communities and landowners adjacent to the fire. This helped spark new efforts in collaborative, cross-boundary wildfire mitigation approaches between responders and communities, which continue to this day.

International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC)

IAFC’s Wildland Fire Division and “Ready, Set, Go!” programs have partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to provide subject-matter expertise and a broad spectrum of support for community wildfire protection plans, hazardous fuels reduction plans, and plan implementation under the National Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy and other federal grants.

The “Evacuation Management for Fire & Law Leaders” course within IAFC’s “Ready, Set, Go!” program has already made a difference. It is a two-day course created by Undersheriff Joe Shellhammer of Larimer County, Colorado, and Battalion Chief David Wolf of the City of Golden, Colorado. After serving together in leadership roles on some of Colorado’s largest and most destructive wildfires (the Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, and Marshall Fires), Shellhammer and Wolf collaborated to create a training program that addresses crisis leadership, the incident command system, and principles of evacuation communications and operations that apply to any risk-informed response requiring evacuations, not just wildfires. In November 2024, the author observed this class when it was presented to statewide leaders in emergency management, fire, and law enforcement in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Four months later, not far from Guthrie, the Stillwater and 33 Road Fires destroyed a combined 362 structures, but not a single fatality was reported.

The National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC)

NVFC has played a critical role in this field as well. As mentioned above, most rural fire departments are either a combination of paid and volunteer firefighters or are fully volunteer, and they are increasingly on the frontlines, where wildfires, homes, and lives all intersect. To assist these responders, NVFC created its “Wildland Fire Assessment Program,” consisting of online and in-person courses designed to “train the trainer.” This program benefits firefighters and other first responders—regardless of paid/career or volunteer status—interested in helping with and leading home hardening and defensible space assessments within their departments and communities.

“Wildfires continue to increase in severity and destruction each year, impacting communities across the country. It is imperative that residents understand how they can protect their homes before a wildfire strikes,” said NVFC CEO Sarah Lee in personal correspondence in May 2025. “Mitigation programs like the NVFC’s Wildland Fire Assessment Program create more resilient and fire-adapted communities that can bounce back quicker in the aftermath of a wildfire.”

The NVFC’s in-person training is delivered by instructors with significant wildland fire experience. It consists of four hours of classroom instruction on the following: the wildland fire and urban interface environment, the ways in which wildfires destroy homes, and defensible space and home hardening principles. That is followed by four hours in the field doing practice assessments on homes volunteered by area residents, who are often local firefighters themselves. The online-only training consists of videos of the classroom portion and quizzes to check knowledge.

As of the time of this writing, 625 people have completed the online-only training. The in-person training has reached an additional 789 people through 46 course deliveries in 18 states across the country—California, Nevada, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, and Missouri, to name a few—since the program’s inception in 2013.

What This Means for State and Local Agencies

These and many other efforts are dependent on funding from federal grants—most notably the National Wildland Fire Cohesive Strategy grant program and the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program, which are administered by the U.S. Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service under the Department of the Interior.  These grant programs were temporarily frozen as part of the February 2025 federal funding pause and review, but were resumed by mid-May. Spring is the prime time for wildfire mitigation work, as the Southwest typically experiences its peak fire season from May through June, followed by the rest of the western U.S., generally from south to north. Any lapse in funding can negatively affect wildfire mitigation planning and implementation work, though the impacts of this lapse will likely not be seen or counted until the fall of this year.

Adding to the mix of challenges, the federal government’s proposal to integrate all wildland firefighting efforts under one federal wildland firefighting agency raises questions:

• Will these wildfire grant programs currently housed under the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service move to the new national wildland fire agency as well?
• If so, how will that move affect grant applications, deadlines, evaluations, awards, and administration processes?

Regardless of how future grant funding and potential reorganization of federal wildland fire agencies unfold, it is well-advised for state and local governments, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, community organizations, and citizens to take steps on their own to reduce their reliance on federal funding for wildfire mitigation planning and implementation and focus on becoming more self-sufficient. Here are a few key ways for state and local governments to accomplish that:

• Create a budget line item for wildfire prevention, mitigation, and defense. Oregon charges a “Forest Patrol Assessment” for forested lands where the Oregon Department of Forestry provides wildfire protection and response, to help offset the costs of these services.
• Appropriate funds, float bond measures, and consider other funding sources to finance the new line item. If federal grant funds are available, these can serve as matching funds for grant requests. If not, they can be used directly toward wildfire prevention and mitigation plans and projects. Either way, funding will be specifically allocated to planning and implementing wildfire mitigation projects.
• Create county, multi-county, or regional cooperatives based around wildfire prevention and mitigation. Bring relevant government, public, private, and nonprofit decision-makers and stakeholders together (e.g., fire departments, law enforcement agencies, emergency management, disaster relief, and ecological specialists) to coordinate policy and messaging, create cross-boundary relationships and project proposals, and potentially aggregate funding and personnel to implement projects. Costs to start and operate a wildfire prevention–mitigation cooperative are minimal and consist largely of staff time, sharing the burden among all participants.
• Create and support citizen cooperatives, for example, FireSafe Councils and FireWise Communities. Bringing neighbors together to help implement home hardening, reduce hazardous fuels, and spread the word about wildfire mitigation is a proven strategy. Prescribed burn associations can be leveraged to help with fuel-reduction burning in locales where private-land burns are allowed.

No matter what the future holds, wildfires are a foreseeable part, and it falls upon responsible citizens and leaders to take action to unite people in protecting homes and one another, becoming presponders in their own neighborhoods.