Wildfire managers and policy makers in Oregon and Washington often evaluate a community’s wildfire risk based on environmental factors such as the probability of wildfire exposure or the number of threatened homes and buildings.
They can also take into account a community’s social vulnerability, or a set of demographic characteristics that includes household income, educational attainment and racial and ethnic minority status.
For the first time, researchers at Oregon State University have created a tool that integrates both social vulnerability and wildfire hazard measurements to help inform the distribution of resources needed to reduce wildfire risk.
The study found, for example, that more than 450 communities in Oregon and Washington face increased wildfire risk when their social vulnerability is included in risk assessments.
Communities such as Warm Springs in Central Oregon and Mosier in the Columbia Gorge with high levels of social vulnerability, for example, could be prioritized for educational outreach, home hardening or fuels reduction programs.
Joining us for more details is Andy McEvoy, a faculty research assistant in the College of Forestry at OSU.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. When we’ve talked in the past about a community’s wildfire risk, we’ve often talked about things like defensible space, building materials, and proximity to fire-prone land. All of those are important factors, but they don’t explicitly take into account how likely a community will be to withstand and recover from a wildfire. In other words, they don’t tell us that much about a community’s social vulnerability. Now, a new tool created by researchers at Oregon State University aims to integrate wildfire hazard measurements and these more social measures. They hope it could lead to a better distribution of limited resources. Andy McEvoy helped create this new tool. He is a faculty research assistant in the College of Forestry at OSU, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Andy McEvoy: Yeah, thanks so much, Dave. Pleasure to be here.
Miller: Why did you start this project?
McEvoy: This project really started in response to conversations with managers across Oregon and Washington. And when I say managers, it’s really a broad group of people that are responsible for making decisions around wildfire. It includes land managers and state and federal agencies, but it also includes community level emergency planners and people that prepare community wildfire protection plans, as well as legislators and policymakers. And they have been tasked for a long time with officially or unofficially accounting for social vulnerability when they’re making decisions about where we’re going to invest those resources. We just don’t have the resources to invest everywhere equally all at the same time. So they’ve got to make tough decisions and social vulnerability is a part of that.
Miller: So this is something they were all, you said, officially or unofficially, they were supposed to be thinking about this already, but how able were they to do that in a way that was informed by data?
McEvoy: It was a real challenge for them, which is why they approached us in a research capacity to do that. For a long time, they’ve been using wildfire risk assessments that account for environmental hazards, so the likelihood of fire or the intensity of fire. So they’ve got wildfire risk assessment products on one side, and then they also were able to access social vulnerability indices or measures of social vulnerability that come out of the public health world and that kind of thing. But they’re two separate products and they face challenges in deciding how to balance those two when considering wildfire risk. To what degree does social vulnerability matter more or less than environmental hazard? And that was why it was important for us to create a tool that integrated those two into one product.
Miller: So what is the connection between social vulnerability and wildfire risk?
McEvoy: The connection between social vulnerability and wildfire risk is complex, and it changes over space. So, like any good scientist, I’ll say it depends. But what history has shown us is that communities are differently impacted by wildfire, and a lot of that comes down to or is explained by the socioeconomic characteristics. Communities that have more resources, that have higher levels of income, higher educational attainment and that sort of thing, often have more capacity to generate their own mitigation resources to conduct the work they need to do. They have the sort of professional staff, they’re in charge of this kind of planning and implementation and are responsible for accessing the funds and making sure they’re used wisely.
Miller: Even like applying for grants, for example?
McEvoy: Absolutely, yeah, it’s a great example.
Miller: The rich are able to get more money?
McEvoy: In a lot of cases, yeah, better resourced local governments are able to either have on staff or contract wildfire professionals who can use science in a really savvy way to demonstrate the need that they have, to demonstrate that they will be a safe investment, that they will do good work with the money they receive. And it’s true that a lot of mitigation dollars come through competitive processes.
Miller: So what about the opposite? I’m curious, if there’s a fire in the last decade or so in the Northwest that you think illustrates this, in terms of a place that would be higher on the social vulnerability metrics, and what a fire meant in that community.
McEvoy: Sure. So I’m probably not the best person to speak to what it means in that community because just to be frank about it, I’ve not lived in one of these communities and experienced that fire firsthand. So I don’t identify with those communities. So I want to be careful about sort of my association there, but there’s a number of fires we could talk about.
Miller: I appreciate that.
McEvoy: Last year we had the Rowena Fire, which surprised people for a lot of reasons, but it was early in the season, but it was tragic. I want to say it was 60-some-odd structures that were destroyed, the numbers are a little rough in my memory, and that’s a community that’s in the Central Gorge, it’s somewhat agrarian. There’s a fair amount of mobile home and sort of low income development in that neighborhood, and the effects were tragic.
We could also think back to the Almeda Drive fire in 2020. Despite the headlines about these giant fires in the West Cascades, the most destruction happened in Talent and Phoenix, and there’s a lot of low income development there. Those are communities that are experiencing social vulnerability.
Miller: So just to be clear, higher social vulnerability, it’s not that it makes a fire more likely necessarily, but it makes it more likely that a fire could be more damaging to a community. Is that a fair way to put it?
McEvoy: Yeah, that’s really accurate. Regardless of how likely a community is to experience wildfire, when communities experiencing social vulnerability are impacted by fires, the level of destruction tends to be higher. The interruption of critical services like healthcare, education, drinking water, are interrupted more severely. And the pathway to recovery is a lot more uncertain. And there’s myriad factors that explain that, but we’ve witnessed that disparity in impacts within Oregon, as well as across the West. If we think to the Eaton and Palisades fires in L.A., Lahaina, the Marshall Fire in Colorado, we have numerous examples that show us that disparity in impacts.
Miller: When you use this new tool to look at communities in the Northwest, in Oregon and Washington, and to assess the wildfire risks, what changed? How does the picture look differently when you integrate social vulnerability into existing maps?
McEvoy: When we integrate social vulnerability into what I’ll call conventional risk assessments, we see that certain communities sort of pop out, they become highlighted, compared to those past assessments. And importantly, it’s those communities that are at the intersection of high hazard, so they’re experiencing high wildfire hazard as a result of where they are, and they’re experiencing high social vulnerability. And depending on how you sort of rank these communities or how many you want to call a priority, a number of them pop out, say 25 to 50 new communities pop out across the region. It’s like, oh, these weren’t prioritized, weren’t necessarily prioritized in those conventional methods, but now would appear to be a priority.
Miller: What are some examples in the Northwest?
McEvoy: They tend to be in landscapes that we all think of as fire prone: Southwest Oregon, Central Oregon, up through sort of the Cascades. But within those fire prone landscapes, they tend to be small and rural communities, and examples would be down in Southwest Oregon, south of Roseburg, we have the community of Riddle [that] shows up as a new priority, or in the gorge, Mosier and parts of The Dalles show up as new priorities and then down in Southern Oregon, Bonanza. And so they tend to be these relatively small communities and fire prone landscapes. And more often than not, they’re actually not in forested landscapes. They tend to be shrub and rangeland kind of environments.
Miller: So if some of these are now bumping up in terms of the wildfire risk, are some other communities that are also in fire prone areas bumping down?
McEvoy: For sure. When we account for social vulnerability, social vulnerability and the socioeconomic characteristics can either mitigate risk or they can exacerbate risk. That’s how they work, in this way, in a relative sense. And so there are communities that compared to past risk assessments will have a lower relative risk than before.
Miller: So what are you hoping that the land managers of various kinds who came to you and said, hey, we want a risk tool that incorporates social vulnerability, you’ve created that. How do you want them to use this tool?
McEvoy: The lowest hanging fruit is to keep doing what they’re already doing, right? You keep using this set of analytics and tools to make the decisions that we have to make around grant eligibility. We discussed that, who’s eligible for a grant, which communities are considered priorities. So keep making those decisions, but use this updated set of tools to do that. So you have a more complete sense of the impacts. Decisions around workforce capacity and staffing are really important. How can we preposition our fire service professionals, whether they’re in a response capacity or whether they’re outreach and education professionals? How can we use that staffing to increase our preparedness across the state?
Miller: To the extent that some of these local agencies or state agencies are getting federal funding, do you think that the Trump administration would provide funding at the state or local level to agencies that are prioritizing social vulnerability in the way they’re spending that federal money? I ask it because I can easily imagine the Trump administration saying this is just wokeism. You’re picking winners and losers based on various social determinants, and you can’t do that.
McEvoy: Sure, I can imagine that critique as well. What I would say is that we’re not ranking solely based on social vulnerability. All of this is balancing those socioeconomic considerations with the actual environmental hazard that communities face. But more importantly than that, social vulnerability is directly related to the actual impacts that communities experience. And so there is a way of talking about this that focuses on the impacts and efforts to reduce future impacts moving forward. And I think that speaks to everybody, and hopefully that narrative can make its way through.
Miller: What was it like putting this map together after the major backlash to the state’s wildfire hazard map a few years ago, and that’s something we talked about a lot. These are very different things. There was a lot of misinformation about what that map was going to be used for, what that map even meant. But nevertheless, there was enough backlash that after first tweaking it, then eventually that entire project was sort of scrapped. It was a big deal. I’m curious what it’s like to work on a similar kind of map now?
McEvoy: Sure, in some respects it’s business as usual because myself, my colleagues, a lot of scientists and managers around the state have been doing this long before the hazard map project ever existed and will continue doing it because these kind of science-based strategies are essential to working our way out of this wildfire problem. So in some ways it’s just a return to the way we’ve always done business and there’s obviously clearly still a demand from policymakers, from land managers, for science-based information. So in some ways I think of them as just very different processes, and I hope that this product will not be viewed in sort of the lens of the hazard mapping legacy.
Miller: Andy, thanks very much.
McEvoy: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Take care.
Miller: Andy McEvoy, faculty research assistant in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University.
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