To: Board of County Commissioners
Through: Tyler S. Brown, Sheriff
Prepared By:
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Nathan Fogg, Director, Office of Emergency Management
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presenter
Presenter: Nathan Fogg, Director, Office of Emergency Management
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Subject:
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2:00 PM *Discussion of fire season in Arapahoe County, the Fire Danger Rating System, and efforts to improve mitigation and response
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Purpose and Request:
recommended action
The Office of Emergency Management (OEM) and the Sheriff’s Office will share information on the anticipated fire season and its impact on the County along with an overview of the Fire Danger Rating System. We’ll conclude with conversation about efforts intra and inter-county to improve our mitigation and response efforts to improve outcomes.
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Alignment with Strategic Plan: Safe and Healthy Communities - Advance public safety by strengthening partnerships across law enforcement, emergency response, and community stakeholders.
Background and Discussion: Drought, record low snowfall, high winds, and a warmer than usual winter have all combined to the set the stage for a rare fire season. Comparisons to the antecedent 2012 fire season are being drawn in some agencies.
Arapahoe County OEM, along with Boulder and Douglas counties, are leading a group of practitioners in emergency management, 911, law enforcement, fire service, water providers, and electric utility providers in an unprecedented effort to reduce the impact of fire on the front range, from the Wyoming border to Pueblo. This effort, focused on community conflagration (think the Marshall Fire, LA, Lahaina and others) risk reduction has immediately applicable tools and standards to impact the fire problem in Arapahoe County.
Add to that the early predictions for a “super El Nino,” and the importance of aggressive fire response partnered with mitigation and preparedness activities taking place across the front range becomes self-evident. If the El Nino weather pattern develops as early indicators show, the potential for flooding on burn scars through increased runoff creates a potentially life-threatening hazard after the fire season. This indicates the best way to limit the impacts of fire and floods on our community is rapid, aggressive, coordinated fire response coupled with powerful alerting and evacuation tools.
OEM has built a variety of tools to help prepare and understand the data, trying to quantify risk potential, and develop response systems that are nimble and coordinated. Those tools include weather monitoring, fuels monitoring, data validation, professionalization of our wildland firefighters, proactive deployments, and using previous years requests to support the same.
These efforts and tools will be covered along with time for questions and clarifications as required.
Alternatives: N/A
Fiscal Impact: None. Information only.
Alignment with Strategic Implementation Strategies: N/A.
Staff Recommendation: N/A.
Concurrence: N/A.