Presentation reveals Leavenworth ranked No. 1 for fire risk

    Leavenworth, with its cozy village paired with the picturesque backdrop of the Cascade mountains, attracts a lot of attention due to its reputation as an ideal landing spot for vacationers. Unfortunately, Leavenworth also has attracted attention for its high probability of a disaster in the form of wildfires - Leavenworth is ranked number one out of 50 Washington communities that have the greatest cumulative housing units exposed to fire.
    Rick Stratton, from United States Forest Service, came to the April 9 city council meeting to talk the logistics of fire risk in a broad sense and to this community specifically. According to Stratton, over 100 different specialists weighed in on this fire risk assessment.
    "One of the biggest things I've worked on is this fire risk assessment," said Stratton. "How do these wild and urban fire disasters occur? First we have to have those extreme weather conditions, the topography then you have to have the ignition, the fire. Once you have those things, you bring in the urban component to it, the homes. With that, when you have a disaster like that you have too many homes exposed."
    Stratton broke down how a fire can cause destructive structure damage and fatality in a community with high house exposure. When a large fire moves in and ignites many houses at once, it will overwhelm the resources to combat the fire. As the fire ravages the homes, the burning home can catch the other homes on fire - leaving these houses burning with no protection.
    "A house to house destruction occurs and then you have a disaster," said Stratton. "Then you end up with hundreds, thousands of homes and people perishing. But we can avoid this."
    With visual aids, matter-of-fact historical references (including as recent as Paradise, California) and explaining the causes to the tragic effects (i.e. topography) - Stratton effortlessly translated the technical terminology and research into simplistic language, making the presentation move fluidly and easy to follow.
    "It looks at where fires historically occurred, how big the fires were..then we took where are the communities and their exposure. All this looks at is burn probability and where the home is.  This does not mean 4,000 (4,025 housing units in Leavenworth exposed) homes are going to be destroyed. Home loss is highly correlated with the home and its immediate surroundings," explained Stratton.   
    Despite the eye catching number of housing units exposed and stomach dropping number one ranking placement, Stratton slapped a comforting disclaimer that the house number isn't a concrete estimate of loss.
    "We're not inferring that somehow this would be the number of homes destroyed if a fire burned in the greater Leavenworth area," said Stratton. "But it does say this amount of homes could be impacted from a fire."
    He emphasized that combating the inevitable will need federal agencies, local agencies and even individual homeowners to take on responsibilities.
    "Leavenworth lives in a fire environment, you have to accept that. You're going to have large fires and there's nothing we can do about it. Leavenworth resides between bad and ugly. Chumstick, this corridor here, in the simulation modeling, there is a high probability of burn and high probability of fire movement and we live in it," said Stratton.
    Stratton wasn't all doom and gloom, but blanketed the presentation with the comfort of being able to mitigate the fire with some preventative action. Homeowners should be aware of the homes immediate surroundings (vegetation near the home), the material of roof (metal is a smart roof whereas shingles is something to avoid) and looking at what is up against the siding.
    "The fire problem is way bigger than one agency. And collaboratively, is where you'll have the most success. The key person here is the home owner," said Stratton. "If we make resistant ignition homes, we will not have a wildfire disaster. We can't control the topography, we can't control the weather, we live in a fire environment."
    His expertise on the subject was apparent as he broke down how the destruction happens, destruction pertaining to the Leavenworth area and how to prevent it from happening to individual homes.