In the first part, fire behavior scientist Jack Cohen compared the December 30 fire in Superior and Louisville, Colorado, to other urban fire disasters to identify causes and suggest solutions for communities wishing to avoid the same fate. Here in Part 2, Missoula County begins looking at what it can do to challenge the potential wildfire threat to Grant Creek residents.
Missoula County Changes
The new zoning proposal tends to gain public opposition. Some people don’t like being told what they can’t do with their property. Building codes aren’t common either.
However, Missoula County Commissioner Dave Stromer said there is a high probability that the county will create new building codes and zones this year to deal with wildfire risk, based on recent lessons in Colorado, Denton and Lytton, BC.
“What we’ve learned over the years is the critical nature of the home’s ignition zone to avert societal catastrophe,” Stromeyer said. “We have done ourselves no great service in focusing our attention on areas beyond the first 100 feet of one’s home. Because in the end, that will determine whether or not the structure is to be preserved. It is not whether you conduct fuel treatments away from the community.”
Since the county had not yet discussed what zoning would be applied and what building codes might be required, Strohmaier couldn’t go into much detail, particularly with the codes. The challenge with building codes is that the county has enough staff to enforce the codes.
But commissioners and staff have already considered the possibility of creating a “donut” to zoning around more densely populated areas where regulations will change to prevent an urban chain reaction of simultaneously burning homes.
“There may be areas in the heart of the urban areas that are a few miles away from the showers, but we will not include those areas in the regulations. Then you go out a little bit and there is this area that has close enough to wildland fuel and enough density for development that once the fire starts, it can It spreads from property to property, unless property owners have treated the home’s flare-up area.”
Outside the cake, Stromeyer said, would be the “live and let live area,” where homes are so scattered that they can burn without setting fire to their neighbors’ homes.
The county will also begin work on updating the Community Forest Fire Protection Plan, although it was last revised in 2018. The protection plan outlines the risks of wildfires in county areas and the actions that agencies and landlords must take to first prevent and then respond to wildfires. Forests. But the bushfire risk map is a bit limited, as it is based on the length of the flame, which is a more applicable measurement for trees than grass.
“It is not yet decided how we will use the existing maps,” Strömer said. What ignites people’s homes? Not the wall of fire that we see in the dramatic pictures. Although it looks very scary and cool, this is not what causes structures to catch fire. Fires often cause fires to erupt in the ignition area of a home, whether we’re talking lawn fires or heavy forest fuels. We got lost in focusing on the intensity of the fire.”
County refers to protection plans that are being used elsewhere, including, ironically, Boulder County, Colorado, to get ideas about what to update in the Missoula County plan.
Case Study: Grant Creek
The Missoula County Community Fire Protection Plan is a useful guide for the county. But there is too much space for the plan to cover to get to the nitty-gritty of what individual neighborhoods or small communities must consider if they are to address risks.
This is where the Wildfire Risk Task Force comes to Friends of Grant Creek, a local organization. A year ago, Friends of Grant Creek recruited a handful of neighbors, some with firefighting experience, to form a task force to assess drainage and propose a bushfire protection plan designed for Grant Creek.
Mike Cole, the Wildfire Risk Task Force leader who works with Type 1 Wildfire Incident teams in the summer, said the task force spent the summer inventorying property throughout the drainage period, looking at forest booths and the condition of the property. Now, it’s time to sit down and work out the details of the plan.
“If you have a site-specific plan, you have more options for working with agencies,” Cole said. “The city and county don’t have the resources to do something like this for every sanitation, so it’s up to the locals. We had enough concern from the residents that we volunteered to do it.”
Some concern arose when Ken Ault of KJA Development purchased a former rock quarry at the bottom of Grant Creek and announced in February 2020 his intention to build four-story apartment buildings with 960 units on 44 acres. However, the current zoning will only allow three-story buildings with 500 units.
However, Friends of Grant Creek were concerned about adding at least 500 more vehicles to traffic at the bottom of Grant Creek Road. The big problem is that Grant Creek Trail is one way, one way and one exit. If a wildfire breaks out along Grant Creek, particularly a wildfire in extreme conditions, could evacuation be hampered by a traffic jam or accident near the project?
Is this a possible scenario? Cole said yes.
“If you look at the lower end of Grant Creek, you’ll find a lot of grass surrounding the subdivisions,” Cole said. “Then you look at Louisville and the surrounding grasslands. Compare that to (the Prospect Drive development). Is this like your neighborhood? It sure is.”
When Cohen read about the proposed high-density apartment development, he immediately hoped it would have internal sprinklers and non-flammable sides on the outside, including porch roofs and alcoves.
Pointing to the remains of the four-storey Element Hotel and the two-story complexes in Superior, Kullu, he said such buildings often burned in separate parts during firestorms. Each unit catches fire at different times as combustible furniture and other items on balconies or alcoves catch fire. Then the adjacent windows crack and collapse, allowing the fire to get inside.
We will have to realize that the main weakness is especially with multi-storey structures where it becomes very difficult to put out fires. “Especially if there is more than one,” Cohen said.
Friends of Grant Creek from Missoula requested a traffic study to assess the current situation before adding another 500 cars. Cole said they may have to wait months, possibly years, because traffic studies are expensive. Meanwhile, the city of Missoula reported five hits, excluding fenders, at the bottom of the road between January and September 2021.
This is the kind of situation that the Wildfire Fire Risk Task Force should make up for in their plan. But they don’t know that there is much they can do to stave off disaster, especially if reaction times are to be speeded up.
“If you are looking at new construction projects, you need to look at what the fire environment will look like 30 or 50 years from now,” Cole said. “The information and models that we used in building the evacuations, with climate impacting the behavior of fires, we will have to reduce the time we usually take to evacuate people. And will we have fewer options?”
Email Correspondent Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
