By Gerard Mann

The wildland urban interface (WUI) risk is increasing around the world due to climate shift. This has resulted in wildland fires impacting communities where, historically, a wildland risk has either not existed or been very low. This increasing risk is leading to more traditionally urban fire services moving into WUI firefighting, thrusting them into a steep learning curve and testing their decision-making processes around strategic priorities.

The WUI defines the area where the built environment meets the natural environment. This can range from isolated buildings such as homes, farms, and small rural-based industries to suburban streets backing onto undeveloped land. The WUI encompasses many different landscapes including forests, grasslands, and sparse, arid areas. The wildfire environment is driven by the local combination of fuel, weather, and topography and will affect the urban environment on the WUI accordingly. These complexities make strategic decision making a difficult task for incident commanders (ICs) and responding firefighters at these challenging, dynamic, fast-paced incidents.

As an Australian firefighter, I am no stranger to the difficult decision-making process that surrounds asset protection when we’re fighting fires that affect the WUI. As an urban firefighter from a large fire brigade, I prefer most of my calls to have an over-assignment of resources to ensure that we have more than enough to achieve our mission of protecting lives and property. Unfortunately, because of the large impact area, dynamic nature, and speed of fires impacting the WUI, over-resourcing is rarely a luxury fire services are afforded. This will undoubtedly lead to losses, sometimes substantial, to the impacted community. We need to base strategies not only on the protection of property but also on that which decreases recovery and increases resilience for communities. Therefore, it is important to have a sound decision-making process around strategic asset protection. This will lead to more favorable and achievable outcomes that focus on both response to and recovery from these devastating natural disasters.

Strategic Priorities

In this article, I will share a list of strategic priorities to help guide you in the difficult decision-making processes involved in asset protection. This list has been constructed by Emergency Management Victoria, a state government agency responsible for working with communities, government, business, and emergency services to strengthen planning, response, and recovery from emergencies. While I did not author the following strategic model, I hope it helps firefighters, officers, and ICs in their decision making and asset prioritization. The strategic priorities are outlined in order below.

Protection and Preservation of Life

Protection and preservation of life are paramount. This includes the safety of community members, including vulnerable individuals and visitors/tourists. The priority always is and always will be life of people. Life cannot be replaced and is the most precious gift we have. We should aim to protect as much life as possible and risk a lot to save a lot where necessary. In prioritizing life, it is important that emergency services personnel consider helping more vulnerable community members while providing the needed support and intelligence for able-bodied individuals to self-evacuate from the area.

ICs and officers should prioritize early evacuation decisions, considering the potential risks and vulnerabilities of these communities. By initiating evacuations in a timely manner, ICs and officers can minimize harm and reduce the potential for adverse outcomes. It will also allow the reallocation of resources to assist in protecting the subsequent priorities.

Protection of life may also involve prioritizing places and buildings where life risk is high—for example, a retirement village or a hospital. In such cases where vulnerable communities or lives are put at risk, ICs and fire officers may detail resources to protect these people over protecting infrastructure and property. This approach acknowledges the importance of preserving human life and ensuring the safety of those who are most vulnerable.

In the protection of life, it is vital that fire services gather intelligence of the life risk of the area that they have been detailed to defend. On arrival, officers should gather information on the number of people evacuated, identify defendable structures, and prioritize resources to defendable structures based on the strategic priorities focusing on resilience and recovery.

In some jurisdictions, landowners may have the right to remain and defend their property from fire. Once these people have been identified, responding personnel need to assess the chance of them defending their property by assessing their strategies, tactics, and equipment. Personnel can help by advising on successful strategies and tactics. Try and build these homeowners into the communication plan and develop a scenario-specific fallback. After the fire front has moved through the impacted area, prioritize contacting these individuals while ensuring that the structures in the area have not been impacted by fire. It is our duty to do everything we can to assist them and keep them safe.

Issue Community Information and Warnings

Detail incident information that is timely, relevant, and tailored to help community members make informed decisions about their safety.

As a result of the royal commission into the Black Saturday bushfires that claimed the lives of 173 people and burned 1.1 million acres in 2009, it was decided that some of the human impact could have been minimized if early community broadcasts were given to communities in the predicted impact zone. The hope is that the communities would have the information and intelligence to start self-evacuating or preparing for the impact of the wildfire before it affects them.

Community information can be broken into two streams: community information and warnings. Community information messages relate important information to communities about the potential for incidents and fires around them. They encourage communities to stay informed with changing conditions as well as suggest relevant actions to prepare for evacuations. Community warnings will let people know when to evacuate the fire or incident. They will also tell people when it is too late to safely evacuate and that they should shelter in place or in a “bushfire safer place” (an area in a community where the impact will be lessened, such as a purpose-built structure or sports field).

If fire is likely or predicted to impact a community based on fire modeling, local knowledge, or forecast weather conditions, emergency services should broadcast early community warnings on all forms of media, including social media. As an IC or officer, you should broadcast community information and warnings to any actual or perceived impacted communities as early as possible. This information and warning system should encourage people to leave early.

As part of preplanning exercises, fire services should identify a neighborhood safer place for people to evacuate as a last resort if the community is impacted by fire without enough time to allow for evacuations. These places are not substitutes for leaving early. They should be easily defendable or where the fire service has the best chance of defending life. Ideally, they should be free of vegetation, have good access to water supplies (either town or tank), and be on flat land (minimizing the impact of fuel and topography). Due to the nature of wildfire fire fronts, these places may not guarantee safety but rather maximize the fire services’ chances of protecting people. These places of last resort should also be the fallback point of fire services personnel and be identified early, before deployment of resources.

1, 2, & 3. Fire services in Victoria, Australia, protect residential homes on the wildland urban interface. (Photos by Blair Dilligen.)

Protection of Critical Infrastructure and Community Assets That Support Community Resilience

While prioritizing human life is paramount, safeguarding essential infrastructure and community assets increases the recovery and resilience post fire. Critical infrastructure can be deemed as any infrastructure that if destroyed or degraded would significantly impact the social or economic well-being of the community. These critical assets can be anything necessary for the function of the community and include transportation networks, power grids, communication systems, water systems, hospitals and care facilities, and emergency services systems. Vital systems like water, power, and healthcare should be prioritized.

When preparing to fight a WUI fire, ICs and officers need to take measures to protect the critical infrastructure from damage. This will involve sizing up the viability and likelihood of successful defense and then calling for sufficient resources and personnel to carry out a defense. It is important that resources are used effectively and efficiently and that their deployment will provide successful outcomes. Underresourcing can lead to failure, resulting in a longer period of recovery for the affected community.

Critical infrastructure also extends to community assets that contribute to resilience. These assets may include community centers, shelters, places of multiple employments, and schools that will provide the required infrastructure while the community recovers and rebuilds. Preserving and protecting these assets will help maintain a sense of normalcy and community while providing staging areas for care and relief.

Like all the strategic priorities, ICs and officers must make their decisions based on the specific circumstances of the fire and the risks involved. Preplanning and ensuring assets are easily defendable before, during, and after fire season will ensure that protecting critical infrastructure is an achievable task and may allow for more resources to be placed in protecting lesser priorities. Effective coordination, risk assessment, and resource allocation are crucial to ensure the safety of both people and the infrastructural and societal elements that underpin community resilience.

Protection of Residential Property as a Place of Primary Residence

It may seem counterintuitive or go against the grain for a home to have lesser priority that a large place of employment, a power station, or a high school hall, as we are so invested in our homes. However, it is important for the resilience and recovery of the community to have critical infrastructure and services to regain normalcy. People can live in a tent but can’t live without access to food, water, or critical services.

After we preserve life and critical infrastructure, we can begin prioritizing people’s residences. Preserving primary residences helps maintain stability, security, and normalcy for affected people in the community.

Work from the most defendable to the least defendable residential property. Size up the viability of defending a structure based on its risk profile. Take steps prefire to help defend those who are less defendable. Engage with communities throughout the year to teach them about the importance of making their residence defendable by keeping tidy yards, cleaning gutters, and trimming vegetation. In areas of high risk, firefighters should advocate for gutter and vent guards.

Post fire front actions can also help with minimizing damage. I have firsthand experience of buildings burning down post fire front as crews have moved on before checking for fire extension and dealing with resistant post fire front that, if left unchecked, can extend to buildings. A quick yet thorough search for fire and risk assessment should be conducted prior to releasing resources for reallocation.

Protection of Assets Supporting Individual Livelihoods and Economic Production That Supports Individual and Community Financial Sustainability

Assets that support individual livelihoods and economic production include small businesses, farms, factories, marketplaces, and other economic infrastructure that contribute to local economies or provide smaller employment opportunities. Protecting these assets will minimize the negative impact of wildfire on people’s livelihoods and support a resilient community.

It is important to note that the protection of economic assets should be balanced. For example, most primary producers in Australia would prefer to lose their residence than their machinery sheds, barns, or livestock. This will allow the primary producers the chance to make an economic comeback after a fire. Again, it is also important to focus on the saveable. Sometimes it may be easier to protect a defendable economic asset than a street with high vegetation on top of a hill.

Protecting individual livelihoods and economic production is important to communities. By minimizing the impact on a community’s economic infrastructure and supporting recovery of businesses, individuals and communities can work toward achieving financial sustainability in the face of adversity.

Protection of Environmental and Conservation Assets That Considers the Cultural, Biodiversity, and Social Values of the Environment

It is essential to recognize the importance of the environment and the cultural, biodiversity, and social impacts it has on our day-to-day life. We need to value this importance when planning and responding to WUI fires. If the aforementioned assets are protected or defended, ICs should look at ways to prevent or minimize the impact of fire on ecosystems and cultural heritage sites.

If we can preserve biodiversity, it will increase the sustainability of the ecosystem. If an endangered species of flora or fauna resides in the local area, an effort should be made with any available resources to protect that ecosystem from significant impact.

Cultural and historical sites that hold significant value to the community should also be prioritized with any available resources. These sites often carry spiritual, cultural, or social importance to local communities, in turn contributing to their identity and well-being. If all assets have been accounted for and there are available resources, these resources should be used for safeguarding these significant sites from the impact of fire, ensuring their preservation for future generations. Assisting communities to stay connected to their environment helps with the resilience and recovery from the disaster.

Early Planning Is Key

If your department or region has a significant WUI risk, it is important to start planning early. The biggest factor that increases positive outcomes in protection of communities from wildfire is preparedness. The more prepared a community is to protect itself from wildfire, the easier response and recovery are.

Fire services must engage with the community and stakeholders prefire season to discuss asset preparedness including land management. On bad fire days, encourage people to exercise extreme fire care. On catastrophic fire days where fire behavior will be the most intense, fire services should actively encourage people to evacuate even before a fire starts to remove the protecting life priority.

Crews should engage in developing local knowledge, identifying areas of defendable space as set out by the International Association of Fire Chiefs. Draw up preplans for communities and infrastructure and share them with likely mutual-aid departments. Offer mixed training that highlights the different strategies, tactics, and techniques. Identify areas of safer places and disseminate the information to the community. Community engagement should focus on wildland fire safety and reducing risks. This will help ICs in exercising the strategic priorities to reduce the impact, response, and recovery to any WUI event.

Whenever you devise a plan to protect strategic priorities, account for the likely fire behavior, considering the area’s fuel, weather, and topography. If resourcing people, tools, and equipment is insufficient to save a hard-to-defend priority, ICs must have the courage to acknowledge what is lost and move onto the next priority to lessen the fire’s impact on the community and surrounding region.

In WUI firefighting, it is essential to prioritize objectives by their strategic importance. The reality of not being able to save every impacted structure should affect decision making. Planning should be adjusted to minimize the impact, response, and recovery on the community. It is therefore vital that fire services work before the fire season to plan and prepare for the impact of a wildland fire on the WUI. Community engagement and preparedness are paramount in fostering successful outcomes.

Gerard Mann is a leading firefighter from Victoria, Australia. With three years of volunteer experience in New South Wales and 12 years of career experience in Australia’s most wildfire-prone state, he is experienced in the complexities of WUI firefighting.