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Subdivisions asked to help create Community Wildfire Protection Plan
  
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By Norma Engelberg
Partners in the Woodland Park Healthy Forest Initiative met June 23 with representatives of 21 subdivisions surrounding the city to begin the development of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan.
Creating a protection plan for the greater Woodland Park community will free up more grant money to mitigate heavy forest fuel loads and protect homes from catastrophic wildfires, said Teller County Commissioner Jim Ignatius, who has been instrumental in creating the Woodland Park Healthy Forest Initiative.
“In January 2004 we started the Teller County Community Wildfire Commission,” he said. “Teller was the first county to complete a wildfire protection plan. We had plans in place two years ahead of everybody else.”
The county plan identified and prioritized areas most susceptible to wildfires. All that work paid off when the county, especially the Woodland Park area which sits in the middle of a dangerous wildfire “red zone,” was chosen as a state demonstration project.
That designation allowed county grant applications to float to the top but now, as other areas are coming online with plans, the competition for grant money is increasing.
“Teller County is about 50 percent federal land but it is 100 percent in the Wildland Urban Interface,” Ignatius said. “We don’t want to have the same vulnerability to wildfire as we did before the Hayman Fire. We will focus our efforts on Woodland Park but other projects are going, too.”
To make local forests and the people who live in them safer and healthier, overly dense forests, a product of 100 years of fire suppression, Ignatius said, need to be thinned from as many as 1,000 trees per acre to no more than 50 to 100 per acre.
One audience member, who needs to remove approximately 4,000 trees from his property, said thinning costs more money than he can afford.
After creating a community wildfire protection plan, more money will become available to help, Ignatius said.
“We need to get individuals involved in taking care of their properties,” he said. “We need to remove ladder fuels and create defensible space in priority areas.”
One part of the initiative is to find markets for all those trees to offset the costs.
The initiative recently made a deal with Colorado Springs Utilities to provide about 130,000 toms of woody biomass for the Drake Power Plant, which has been converted to use the wood to generate at least 10 percent of Colorado Springs’ power in 2010.
“That is 35 semi-truck loads a day,” Ignatius said. “Finding markets for all the biomass will make the projects cost neutral.”
Dave Root, assistant forester for the Colorado State Forest Service Woodland Park office, showed participants how to create, not defensible, but survivable space, around their homes.
“Most people think that when the fire comes — and it will come — they will have a fire engine parked in their front yards protecting their homes,” he said. “That’s not going to happen. There just aren’t enough fire engines. Your home is going to have to survive on its own. ... Creating survivable space reduces fuels so your house doesn’t become just another log on the fire.”
Northeast Teller County Fire Protection District Chief Nick Lauria also gave information about thinning private forests.
“It’s not about cutting all the trees down or creating defensible space just once,” he said. “You also have to maintain it. There is a different kind of yard work in the mountains. We can kill of a ton of that red area on the map two ways — we can thin it or we can let God do it for us and we’ll have more Haymans.”
Information about forest fuels reduction on private property is available at the forest service office, 113 S. Boundary, Woodland Park or online at www.colostate.edu/Depts/CSFS. Information also is available at most fire stations, the Colorado State University Extension Office in Cripple Creek, the CUSP office in Lake George and the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Woodland Park.
Jonathan Bruno of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte explained that both the state forest service and CUSP personnel will come at the homeowners’ request and show them how to thin their forests.
CUSP also brings its chipper to neighborhoods and streets and chips, free of charge, the slash created by thinning work. Information about that and other CUSP programs and projects is available at 719-748-0033.
John Chapman, wildland fire coordinator for the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance, said the community wildfire protection plan has reached the third step of development — community member implementation.
“We get to decide what we want to protect,” he said. “This is kind of like neighborhood watch. Neighbors work together to keep out the riff-raff only in this case the riff-raff is fire. The money is there, the opportunity is there — if we create the community wildfire protection plan we will be able to get that money.”
At the end of the meeting he said the initiative will be contacting representatives from each of the subdivisions involved. Initiative members hope to have the plan finished by the end of September.
Ignatius said any homeowners association that wants a presentation on the plan can call him at 719-689-2988. CUSP and the state forest service also can give presentations on forest thinning and fuels mitigation.
Creating a protection plan for the greater Woodland Park community will free up more grant money to mitigate heavy forest fuel loads and protect homes from catastrophic wildfires, said Teller County Commissioner Jim Ignatius, who has been instrumental in creating the Woodland Park Healthy Forest Initiative.
“In January 2004 we started the Teller County Community Wildfire Commission,” he said. “Teller was the first county to complete a wildfire protection plan. We had plans in place two years ahead of everybody else.”
The county plan identified and prioritized areas most susceptible to wildfires. All that work paid off when the county, especially the Woodland Park area which sits in the middle of a dangerous wildfire “red zone,” was chosen as a state demonstration project.
That designation allowed county grant applications to float to the top but now, as other areas are coming online with plans, the competition for grant money is increasing.
“Teller County is about 50 percent federal land but it is 100 percent in the Wildland Urban Interface,” Ignatius said. “We don’t want to have the same vulnerability to wildfire as we did before the Hayman Fire. We will focus our efforts on Woodland Park but other projects are going, too.”
To make local forests and the people who live in them safer and healthier, overly dense forests, a product of 100 years of fire suppression, Ignatius said, need to be thinned from as many as 1,000 trees per acre to no more than 50 to 100 per acre.
One audience member, who needs to remove approximately 4,000 trees from his property, said thinning costs more money than he can afford.
After creating a community wildfire protection plan, more money will become available to help, Ignatius said.
“We need to get individuals involved in taking care of their properties,” he said. “We need to remove ladder fuels and create defensible space in priority areas.”
One part of the initiative is to find markets for all those trees to offset the costs.
The initiative recently made a deal with Colorado Springs Utilities to provide about 130,000 toms of woody biomass for the Drake Power Plant, which has been converted to use the wood to generate at least 10 percent of Colorado Springs’ power in 2010.
“That is 35 semi-truck loads a day,” Ignatius said. “Finding markets for all the biomass will make the projects cost neutral.”
Dave Root, assistant forester for the Colorado State Forest Service Woodland Park office, showed participants how to create, not defensible, but survivable space, around their homes.
“Most people think that when the fire comes — and it will come — they will have a fire engine parked in their front yards protecting their homes,” he said. “That’s not going to happen. There just aren’t enough fire engines. Your home is going to have to survive on its own. ... Creating survivable space reduces fuels so your house doesn’t become just another log on the fire.”
Northeast Teller County Fire Protection District Chief Nick Lauria also gave information about thinning private forests.
“It’s not about cutting all the trees down or creating defensible space just once,” he said. “You also have to maintain it. There is a different kind of yard work in the mountains. We can kill of a ton of that red area on the map two ways — we can thin it or we can let God do it for us and we’ll have more Haymans.”
Information about forest fuels reduction on private property is available at the forest service office, 113 S. Boundary, Woodland Park or online at www.colostate.edu/Depts/CSFS. Information also is available at most fire stations, the Colorado State University Extension Office in Cripple Creek, the CUSP office in Lake George and the Natural Resources Conservation Service office in Woodland Park.
Jonathan Bruno of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte explained that both the state forest service and CUSP personnel will come at the homeowners’ request and show them how to thin their forests.
CUSP also brings its chipper to neighborhoods and streets and chips, free of charge, the slash created by thinning work. Information about that and other CUSP programs and projects is available at 719-748-0033.
John Chapman, wildland fire coordinator for the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance, said the community wildfire protection plan has reached the third step of development — community member implementation.
“We get to decide what we want to protect,” he said. “This is kind of like neighborhood watch. Neighbors work together to keep out the riff-raff only in this case the riff-raff is fire. The money is there, the opportunity is there — if we create the community wildfire protection plan we will be able to get that money.”
At the end of the meeting he said the initiative will be contacting representatives from each of the subdivisions involved. Initiative members hope to have the plan finished by the end of September.
Ignatius said any homeowners association that wants a presentation on the plan can call him at 719-689-2988. CUSP and the state forest service also can give presentations on forest thinning and fuels mitigation.
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