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About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (July 1, 2021)
Applegater Summer 2021 Fire in the Applegate: Progress toward fire resilience BY RICH FAIRBANKS AND ALEXI LOVECHIO If you live in the Applegate Valley, you know we live in a fire-prone environment. Fortunately, engaged local residents are doing all they can to prepare for wildfire. Many have moved from making their own property fire resilient to working on wildfire issues at the community level. Three examples illustrate how we are moving forward on these issues. Prescription for Safety Introduced in the fall Applegater, Prescription for Safety (P4S) is a community-led group in the Little Applegate, focused on implementing fuels treatments along critical evacuation routes in the area: Highway 238, Griffin Lane, and Sterling Creek Road. To make these evacuation routes safe, vegetation must be maintained to reduce fuel buildup. Having well-managed roadside vegetation makes wildfire suppression more efficient and controlled burning safer, reducing the potential for high-severity wildfire. This is strategic fuel treatment: providing egress, facilitating safer fire suppression, and encouraging more prescribed fire. Through a wildfire planning strategy known as PODs (Potential Operational Delineations), Oregon State University scientists have identified roads in the Little Applegate that could be used to help contain wildfires. Working with fire practitioners, scientists have worked up a preliminary “Atlas of Potential Control Lines” for a portion of the Rogue Basin. Prescription for Safety has taken these lines, combined them with some local knowledge about possible evacuation routes, and come up with priority roads for treatment. Prescription for Safety’s goal is to have most of this work funded through grants, so the landowner pays little. P4S has applied for a federal grant and has ■ AVFD FLEET Continued from page 1 from Medford or just to Jacksonville for a few groceries. No thanks! Same thing for our fire district’s older apparatus—heavy, long, and not quite as responsive as the firefighters might need. Especially if someone’s home or life is threatened! This type-six engine also has more water capacity, better pump capacity, and a hose size that allows firefighters to “pump and roll” (yes, just as it sounds—apply water to a spreading fire as you roll along the edge of the fire). It also has a unique feature that is invaluable: there is a Cascade system in the vehicle, which allows firefighters to refill their breathing apparatus on the scene of a structure fire, so that they can get back to the fire more quickly. The new #8563 is also easier to operate, maneuver, and drive. (Not to mention to train new firefighters as drivers!) Our fire district was established in the 1980s. The goal was to provide timely responses to both structural and forest fires in the Applegate. Today our fire district has seven stations across the Applegate Valley. Staff and volunteers respond to fires, accidents, injuries, illness, and other emergencies. With #8563 now in service out of headquarters, the plan is to have an identical new type-six engine stationed on the west side of our district in the coming months. (But don’t jump out of your seats! tentative approval for $80,000. After our first virtual community meeting in February 2020, 35 landowners who live on the main evacuation roads signed up for a free property assessment. Pairs of skilled fuels assessors conduct assessments on each property to determine what treatment is needed. To complete the assessments, P4S has teamed up with the OSU Extension’s My Southern Oregon Woodlands and their peer mentors. Peer mentors are already doing property assessments and are generally graduates of the Certified Master Woodland Manager. To summarize, P4S is working to make certain roads play these roles: evacuation, fire lines and anchor points, strategic fuel treatment, and safer for an increase in controlled fire. P4S has received help, advice, and major staff time from Jackson County Extension, KS Wild, Oregon Department of Forestry, OSU School of Forestry, and the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative. To learn more about P4S or to get involved, contact Rich Fairbanks at richfairbanks3@gmail.com. Regional fire specialist Oregon State University Extension’s new regional fire specialist for southwest Oregon, Chris Adlam, PhD, will work toward the following goals: • Conduct outreach and education around prescribed fire and individual wildfire preparedness • Tackle obstacles to prescribed fire and landscape-scale forest restoration by supporting agency partnerships, advancing policy change, and addressing smoke- related concerns • Support the formation of community- based Prescribed Burn Associations such as the one recently launched in the Applegate Valley 11 • Build a more fire- adapted culture in southwest Oregon by supporting indigenous cultural burning and ecological fire management, with local input through forest management collaboratives. Forest and Fire Toolkit Partners of Prescription for Safety recently released the Forest & Fire Toolkit, Oregon State University scientists have worked up a preliminary a “one stop shop” for Atlas of Potential Control Lines for a portion of the Rogue Basin a l l t h e re s o u r c e s showing the best places to stop a fire (blue) with somewhat less residents need to effective places (green). These control lines are almost always acquaint themselves roads. This zoomed-in detail of the Sterling Creek Road area shows w i t h t h e f o r e s t s a blue area at the upper right, which is the relatively nonflammable of the Siskiyou streets and landscaped yards of Jacksonville. Running from the region. The toolkit upper right towards the lower left is Griffin Lane and provides information Sterling Creek Road (highlighted in green). on how to prepare your family, home, and community for a wildfire emergency. In section two of the Toolkit you will find: • A how-to guide on preparing your property for wildfire: defensible space and home hardening A treated stand with piles ready for a controlled burn. There’s a • F u n d i n g low load of surface fuels and a high canopy base height. oppor tunities for Photo: Rich Fairbanks. home defense • Post-fire checklist Applegate community members are and financial assistance • Steps to plan and be ready for a coming together to better prepare the area for a wildfire emergency and to restore fire wildfire emergency and evacuation • Resource directory of national forest resilience to our forests. As we come into what looks like another severe fire season, districts, fire districts and more! There is so much residents can do to we hope that more people will get involved prepare their property and community for in making our communities safer. Rich Fairbanks wildfire season. To learn more about the richfairbanks3@gmail.com Forest & Fire Toolkit and how to download Alexi Lovechio a free copy, check out the KS Wild website alexi@kswild.org at kswild.org/forest-fire-toolkit. Wildflowers, gifts of the road BY CHRISTINA AMMON The new engine has plenty of room for medical supplies. Photo: Sandy Shaffer. Blankets, hoses, and other supplies in their new engine niches. Photo: Sandy Shaffer. By purchasing a second type-six engine at the same time, the cost was 50 percent of the full price. And best of all, some of the cost was covered by a grant, and the remainder was matched by generous donations!) Way to go, team! Sandy Shaffer sassyoneor@gmail.com peas that grow along our The native wildflowers country highway in June. in my valley mark time When I see them, I carefully like a calendar. The first slow my car, find a pull-off, purple larkspurs and and pick to my heart’s shooting stars indicate the content. This particular start-line of spring, and L. latifolius is somewhat then the blooms progress invasive, crowding out toward summer like a slow- native plants, so in picking motion fireworks display: it you might even feel you red Fritillaria, white are doing nature a favor. trillium, purple lupine, and The sweet pea is then blazing red Indian “Gifts of the Road” originally from Sicily. paintbrush. by Christina Ammon. The annual variety was I get to know these flowers on my daily hikes on the brought here from England, intentionally Jacksonville woodlands and even feel cultivated, and even sold in the Burpee bonded to particular ones, like the singular catalogs. As pretty as sweet peas are, mission bell that grows each May in an old gold-mining ditch. I feel as protective over they are considered simple and unspecial. the blooms as a parent and fume when According to a poet named Junkin, I pass a hiker carrying a bouquet of the sweet peas are “built of common earth” rare and endemic Fritillaria—or worse, and grow “in lowly place beside see the flowers plucked and then dropped village lanes.” But for me, these roadside flowers are as on the ground. Nothing gives me a more pessimistic view of humanity than a rare magnificent as any store-bought bouquet, flower smashed into the dirt—a small and when every tableside in my house is transgression perhaps, but one that feels adorned with a splash of magenta, I know for sure it is June. deeply symbolic of something larger. Christina Ammon That said, there is one flower I allow christinaammonwriter@gmail.com myself to freely harvest: the magenta sweet We want your letters to the editor! Email to gater@applegater.org.