Why do we require Fire Plans?

Several decades of rapid escalation of wildland fire behavior, accompanied by significant increases in risk to responders and citizens, home and property losses, costs, and threats to communities and landscapes prompted congress to mandate the development of a National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy.  The National Strategy is the result of a collaborative effort by Federal, state, local, and tribal governments and nongovernmental partners and public stakeholders, in conjunction with scientific data analysis.   The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy suggests that fire managers should focus on three primary factors;

• Resilient Landscapes- Restore and maintain landscapes across all jurisdictions which would make them resilient to wildland fire related disturbances in accordance with management objectives.
• Fire Adaptive Communities- Human populations and infrastructure should be maintained in a condition which would allow them to withstand a wildland fire without loss of life and property.
• Wildfire Response- All jurisdictions participate in making and implementing safe, effective, efficient risk-based wildland fire management decisions.   

The cohesive strategy vision for the next century is to safely and effectively extinguish fire when needed, use fire where allowable, manage our national resources and as a nation and live with wildland fire.  A Community Wildland Fire Protection Plan will help Lawrence County work towards all of these goals. 

Community Wildfire Protection Plan

Community Protection Plans are authorized and defined in Title 1 of the Healthy Forest Restoration Plan (HFRA) passed by Congress on November 1, 2003 and signed into law by President Bush on  December 3, 2003.

The HFRA places renewed emphasis on community planning by extending a variety of benefits to communities with a wildfire protection plan in place. Critical among these benefits:

• The option of establishing a localized definition and boundary for the wildland-urban interface (WUI)
• The opportunity to help shape fuels treatment priorities for surrounding federal and non-federal lands

Public Safety and Community Sustainability

The CWPP, as described in the Act, brings together diverse local interests to discuss their mutual concerns for public safety, community sustainability and natural resources. It offers a positive, solution-oriented environment in which to address challenges such as:

• Local firefighting capability
• The need for defensible space around homes and inside subdivisions
• Where and how to prioritize land management on both federal and non-federal land

The link below will take you to the Lawrence County Community Wildfire Plan as approved by the Lawrence County Commissioners. This document is widely used in the overall wildfire planning of subdivisions in Lawrence County. 

Lawrence County Community Wildfire Protection Plan - 2022