A crowd of some 60 people gathered on May 16 at the Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District (CRFPD) firehouse in Marble to hear a presentation on wildfire behavior, mitigation and preparedness and evacuation strategies in the event of a wildfire.
The Saturday-morning gathering was a follow-up to a planning meeting on March 31 at the Carbondale Fire Station involving officials from Gunnison County (in which Marble lies), Pitkin County, CRFPD and others who discussed such evacuation planning for the town.
Both events featured Dr. Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University, who has developed a highly sophisticated computerized wildfire modeling program that has been applied to Marble and vicinity. This week’s meeting was the public rollout of the project’s results, which began late last year with a comprehensive survey of Marble property owners, followed by months of data analysis and modeling by Dr. Mahmoud and his team.
The presentation began with CRFPD Chief Rob Goodwin outlining the process leading up to that point. He emphasized the particular vulnerability of Marble’s residents, saying, “There’s one way in and one way out of Marble, and that’s a problem.” He continued, “[This modeling] is going to help us by verifying areas of refuge to the east [and] the best way to evacuate, hopefully, to the west,” utilizing evacuation plans being developed under the leadership of Gunnison County Emergency Manager Lisa Bickford.
Goodwin introduced Angie Davlyn, executive director of Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley, who has been at the forefront of coordinating wildfire mitigation efforts in the greater Roaring Fork Valley region. She recruited and has been working with Dr. Mahmoud on Marble and other regional modeling projects.
“She’s fantastic,” Goodwin said, “and really has led the mitigation charge.”
Davlyn began by saying, “I want you to know how special Marble and the Crystal River Valley is to us,” noting that Marble was the first municipality in the region to do the wildfire modeling. She went on to describe a system of highly sophisticated cameras that can accurately detect smoke and its location and quickly alert first responders.
“These are an incredible tool, and we’re really lucky to have them,” Davlyn said. She described CRFPD’s firefighting response as exceptionally rapid and effective, saying, “We truly have some of the best and most capable and prepared firefighters.”
She continued, “The collaborative really focuses on community resilience, which means living with fire. You can’t prevent it from happening, but we can really focus on reducing its destruction.”
This was the reason she brought in Dr. Mahmoud and his Asynchronous Graph Nexus Infrastructure for Network Assessment of Wildland-Urban Interface Risk (AGNI-NAR) modeling program, which is nearly 90% accurate at predicting how fire can run through a populated area, the extent of structural damage it can cause and mitigation measures that can reduce vulnerability.
The floor was turned over to Dr. Mahmoud. Over the next hour-plus, he described in great detail the various modeling scenarios the AGNI-NAR program created based on factors such as weather analysis, wildfire behavior, smoke movement, vehicular traffic and human behavior. He acknowledged, “Any one of these is so complicated and has so many uncertainties. Nevertheless, if we want to start somewhere and get an idea of what would happen in a fire, we have to include these elements.” He believes, though, in the accuracy of the AGNI-NAR modeling, saying, “Because of that, we can use it for many things, including evacuation.”
The presentation included dozens of slides and animated simulations of various factors. Notable among the latter were several depicting how both fire and smoke move over time based on wind direction and speed. Others showed the survivability of structures in an encroaching fire depending on the type of mitigation performed, with the modeling identifying areas of optimal vegetation mitigation.
Of particular interest to the crowd was a long discussion of evacuation, including simulations depicting evacuation rates depending on factors such as fire direction and speed, smoke, traffic flow and factors causing delays. After an audience member mentioned that the prevailing wind in the area was from the west, rendering the exit highway unusable, Dr. Mahmoud showed what the analysis has identified as optimal areas to shelter in place. (It was reiterated later that evacuation and sheltering planning were still underway and would not be ready until the fall.)
Dr. Mahmoud concluded his presentation by taking questions from the audience that included asking about using buses for evacuation (not yet addressed), setting up an evacuation drill (possibly to come), and how notification is performed (answered by Chief Goodwin).
Tim Pinnow, chief executive officer of the nonprofit West Regional Wildfire Council, then discussed more specific wildfire-mitigation strategies. His organization offers free site visits to property owners to assess mitigation steps and helps owners engage companies to do that work, which can make them eligible for a Wildfire Ready Home Certificate of Completion. “This certificate,” Pinnow said, “meets [the state mitigation] code and says that insurance companies have to take it into account … in terms of renewal and cost.”
All of the morning’s presenters kept emphasizing the importance of mitigation, which was echoed by Pinnow when he said, “If you take nothing else away from today, understand that if you mitigate, you reduce the chance of structural ignition tremendously.”
More information on wildfire prevention and mitigation can be found at carbondalefire.org/wildfire-prevention and cowildfire.org