Montezuma County Focuses on Fire

By: Laura Lewis, Operation Healthy Communities

The Community Wildfire Information Series is sponsored by the San Juan Public Lands Center, the Colorado State Forest Service and the Office of Community Services at Fort Lewis College. These entities also have established this www.southwestcoloradofires.org website.

The findings of a recent focus group around wildfire issues in Montezuma County show there is a lot of work to be done. The Montezuma County focus group, held in July, covered a wide range of wildfire topics, but participants focused on how to identify and educate property owners that have not taken steps to reduce wildfire hazards.

This focus group is part of the People and Fire in Western Colorado project funded by the Bureau of Land Management. Twenty-five focus groups are currently being held throughout western Colorado to gain community perspectives and help fire education personnel more effectively partner with citizens to reduce catastrophic wildfire risks. The focus group participants were selected in part for their knowledge of wildfire issues and their individual communities.

Focus group facilitator, Marsha Porter-Norton says the Montezuma County focus group identified resident apathy as a key problem, because residents who don’t create defensible space around their homes put their neighbors in danger.

“The focus group participants want to get people to care about fire, but they also understood that there will always be a segment of the population that can’t be reached,” said Porter-Norton

Focus groups have been completed in Montezuma, La Plata, Archuleta and San Juan Counties with each county brainstorming a different set of potential solutions. Sam Burns, PhD, coordinator for the People and Fire project, says the focus groups are meant to be a community-based approach to ask how citizens perceive the fire problem so that education can correspond to those needs.

“For example,” said Dr. Burns, “if communities perceive fire to be an ecological problem, such as too many trees, then they would most likely want to discuss mechanical means to reducing hazardous fuels. If the problem is perceived to be building homes in fire prone areas that cannot be defended, then the focus needs to be on how to guide residential development to protect property, owner investment and public safety. We are trying to understand the beliefs and values of each community, in order to customize fire prevention education to address their perspectives.”

All the southwest Colorado counties agree on some topics. The focus group participants in Archuleta, La Plata San Juan and Montezuma felt residents place a high value on the scenery. They felt that the importance of these aesthetics has contributed to the larger problem of overgrown forests.

“There was a lot of debate around the “Smokey Bear” message to prevent forest fires. The participants who grew up with this message said it gives the perception that all fire is bad. This perception led agencies and the public to suppress fires, which is now part of the problem as forests are overgrown tinderboxes,” said Porter-Norton.

Porter-Norton said she walked away with the impression that all the counties need to understand the forest ecology. “People don’t know the basic system of how the forest works and what a healthy forest looks like.”

The various focus groups also felt that insurance companies could be key in driving defensible space. They felt that residents should either do defensible space or insurance rates should be higher. They also liked the idea of federal agencies giving fire tours to show how wildfire behaved in different areas that were either logged, made defensible, left alone or had a prescribed burn.

The focus group results will be compiled into a report and presented to federal, state and local fire education specialists and fire districts. Dr Burns says the results will be utilized to improve public education about wildfire. The focus group report should be completed in mid September.

County fire plans can be found on this website.