FireSmart urban and forest management protection zones with approximate time for fire to reach town boundaries during extreme conditions.
“Roof to region” wildland fire management is an approach that reduces fire risk to residence and communities by integrating towns and other human infrastructure into surrounding park lands and forests. The Bow Valley communities of Banff and Canmore, surrounded by Banff National Park and Alberta’s Kananaskis Country parks have a long history of recognizing fire risk, developing suppression tools such as fire pumps, and creating landscape-scale protection through fuel breaks and prescribed burning. Ironically, the success of reducing fire risk around the towns is, over time, creating continuous blankets of dense forests fuels that can burn with rates of spread and intensities that overwhelm suppression efforts. Repeat photographs of Banff and Canmore both show the magnitude of the biomass accumulation over time that can fuel extreme fire behavior.
The priority in a “roof to region” approach is for individual property owners to use “FireSmart” standards to protect their buildings and immediately adjacent landscaping, and work with their neighbors to obtain broader protection from ember showers, fire impingment, and mass infrastructure conflagrations. With this work done, managers of adjacent lands can safely proceed with the planning, clearing, operations and maintenance of fuelbreaks surrounding communities, varying fuels management by risks due to distance, types of fuel, terrain, and predominant weather patterns during high fire risk seasons.
Ultimately, much of this work will likely be formalized through a community forest and foundation where local citizens and businesses take a much greater role in not only protecting their own buildings and property, but also support (both financially and politically) the necessary vegetation and fire management work on nearby public and park lands.
A regional “roof to region” approach is described in the following sets of webpages.
