By Stephen Smoot
“We’re glad you’re here,” said Doug Mongold at last week’s Hardy County Local Emergency Planning Committee’s quarterly meeting. He issued his greetings to Rosie Santerre, C. J. Kesner, and Roger Osborne of the West Virginia Division of Forestry, special guests of the committee who came to address attendees about a persistent problem.
In recent years wildfires have ravaged the Potomac Highlands, especially when winds whip through areas beset by high temperatures and low precipitation. Last spring, wildfires engaged every fire fighting unit in the Potomac Highlands. Pendleton County saw five separate blazes break out in separate locations within an hour during an event with 60 mile per hour winds.
Mongold explained that “in the spring, we had some really challenging times” and added that “we learned some things that we could do better,” especially in terms of preventing unnecessary damage to residences and other structures.
He also discussed the Division of Forestry’s efforts to integrate its capabilities more effectively into the response of fire departments and other first responders. He mentioned the augmented equipment received by the DoF office recently by order of Governor Jim Justice and said “I’m encouraged by the direction your group is going in.”
Emergency officials agree that land and homeowners can do more to ensure the safety of their homes and outbuildings. The West Virginia Division of Forestry aims to help.
Osborne retired after nearly four decades with the Division of Forestry, but returned to work with a special project. He opened by going over the nearly quarter century old Firewise program. Firewise deployed the DoF to “go into the community and do all the work,” as Osborne put it.
Firewise sent DoF personnel into a community or development to assess each lot and structure, create a detailed plan of action, then see few of them implemented when responding to fires.
Now a grant from the Community Wildfire Defense Act focuses on education that informs property owners on simple steps they can take to protect their structures.
“If they will do certain things,” Osborne stated, “they give their houses a better chance of survival.”
The program also has DoF personnel engaging with local emergency responders, often posing the question “think about the number one thing that you guys worry about.” With each county having different industries, different resources, and different levels of access (or lack thereof) to remote areas, maintaining a local focus is vital.
Firewise survives in this incarnation of wildfire safety efforts through bright illustrated pamphlets that easily explain how to keep a structure as safe as possible from wildfires.
The pamphlets break down distances from the structure into “extended zone 30 to 100 feet,” “intermediate zone five to 30 feet,” and “immediate zone zero to five feet (including the structure itself).” Each zone has recommendations of steps property owners can take, including the most fire resistant materials, such as types of shingles.
