St. Louis County Community Wildfire Protection Plan

We hope that this StoryMap will help share our knowledge about wildfire risk in St. Louis County and how a Community Wildfire Protection Plan can help protect your community from the worst of wildfire season.

A Community Wildfire Protection Plan, or a CWPP for short, is a community based plan developed collaboratively amongst community members and land mangement agencies to achieve a common goal. The main goal of a CWPP is to help a community be more wildfire resilient. CWPPs address a variety of issues, including wildfire response, hazardous fuels, community preparedness, and structure protection.

1. Identify wildfire concerns and values at risk in a community
2. Identify and prioritize risk reduction actions
3. Identify partnerships and needs to implement action
4. Implementation of actions to increase wildfire resiliency

Completion of a CWPP can help a community tap into various funding resources to assist in implementing their identified action plans. Federal funding agencies must first consider fuel reduction project implementation plans identified in a CWPP. Implementation of fuels reduction and hazard mitigation projects informed through a CWPP must also take into consideration county, state and federal land management plans, policies and procedures.

According to the St. Louis County Hazard Mitigation Plan, wildfire is one of the largest threats in the county in terms of loss of life, property, timber, and wildlife. This risk is now greater than it has ever been due to increased development in forested areas, decreased forest health, and recent blowdown events. As seen in the interactive maps below, the majority of SLC is directly exposed to wildfire risk.

Your facilitator will help you create a community wildfire risk assessment based on the outline pictured below.

This risk assessment will help you analyze important areas within your community that you can address to make your community more fire-adapted, helping you reach the goals of your CWPP. In this work, Dovetail will help guide you in identifying top wildfire concerns, such as:

• Dense balsam, or dead and dying balsam
• Road access issues (ex: one road in and no way out)
• Blowdowns

And we will assist you in prioritizing the wildfire concerns that your community wants to work on.

There are many potential strategies that your community can use to decrease the risk of wildfire. In your meeting, Dovetail will help guide you through the steps for creating a plan for implementing these strategies. The  St. Louis County CWPP  identifies multiple actions communities can take to help increase their wildfire resiliency. These actions can be broken down into three key strategies: Education, Engineering and Implementation.

• Host a workshop on safe burning requirements, techniques, and weather conditions.
• Have a booth at a community event with Firewise information
• Have a designated fire prevention presentation in schools at all age levels
• Host a workshop on evacuation planning – personal and pet evacuations
• One on one Firewise evaluations by a Firewise specialist

• Provide the public with information on recycling and composting materials.
• Work with communities on pilot programs such as brush disposal sites or starting a burn barrel amnesty program
• Incentive programs to encourage fuels reduction activities
• Create fuel breaks

• Identify and foster partnerships with community members, business’, fire departments, non-profits, township, city, county, state, federal and tribal nations when identifying and developing hazardous fuels mitigation measures.
• Identify assets available and additional needs needed to implement action plans
• Develop a system to show actions and results of implemented actions. Ex. Reduction of wildfires caused by burn barrels, unattended campfires, etc.

Within these strategies, there are a variety of tools that can be used to mitigate wildfire risk within your community. Community mitigation strategies aimed at protecting values at risk will be addressed in this planning process. The following is a list of many of the most commonly used fire protection and mitigation tools that are often used in CWPPs. To see the full list and read descriptions, visit Page 92 of the  SLC CWPP. 

Firewise assessments Improve ingress/egress Evacuation Routes & Procedures Dry hydrants Homeowner Firewise mitigation measures Sprinkler systems Prescribed burning Firewise communities Chipper Days Harvesting/Thinning Crushing Biomass removal Pile and Burn Under burn Patch burn

At your meeting, you will meet with Gloria Erickson, Dovetail Partners, who is presently the contracted St. Louis County Firewise Coordinator. Gloria will lead you through the steps of identifying wildfire concerns within your community and possible ways to address those concerns.

Community engagement is one of the most important aspects of creating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan. In order to achieve that community engagement, we suggest that key community members are present, including but not limited to:

• Fire Chief
• Police Chief
• Mayor
• Township supervisor
• Tribal Council member/leadership
• Public Works employees
• Other respected members of the community

1. Identify wildfire risk
2. Prioritize concerns
3. Develop actions plans to address these concerns
4. What steps have already been taken by the community?
5. What more needs to be done?
6. What resources are available to support these efforts?
7. What additional resources are needed to support these efforts?

 Read the entire Saint Louis County Community Wildfire Protection Plan for 2021 

 Visit the Minnesota Arrowhead Region Fire Adapted Communities Website 

 Visit the national Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network Website 

 Work through the Fire Adapted Communities Self Assessment Tool 

 Visit Dovetail Partners' Website