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Approaches to Wildfire Risk Mitigation and Resilience for the City
<br />of Louisville
<br />Purpose and Need for Wildfire Risk Mitigation and Resilience
<br />The City of Louisville contracted Lynker and The Ember Alliance to assess wildfire risk and provide
<br />strategic recommendations to the City of Louisville to mitigate wildfire risk on open spaces, parks,
<br />and other properties. Louisville Open Space provides multiple public values, including
<br />recreational opportunities for residents and visitors, diverse wildlife and plant communities, and
<br />visual buffers between Louisville and neighboring municipalities. Following the 2021 Marshall
<br />Fire, the City of Louisville and its citizens are interested in mitigating wildfire risk and creating
<br />wildfire resilience on public and private land, building off lessons from the 2021 Marshall Fire
<br />Facilitated Learning Analysis (Holstrom et al., 2023).
<br />There are benefits and tradeoffs to different actions to mitigate wildfire risk, and there are no
<br />management strategies that can optimize all values for public land and minimize wildfire risk at
<br />the same time. Social values, ecological impacts, feasibility, cost, and likelihood of success must be
<br />considered when deciding where to conduct different management options. We describe pros and
<br />cons of different management strategies and propose where these types of actions might be most
<br />appropriate and beneficial for the City of Louisville. Recommendations are based on research, best
<br />management practices, and experience with firefighting in the wildland-urban interface.
<br />Fuel Treatment Types and Effectiveness
<br />Fuel treatments are designed to reduce the intensity and spread of wildfires by decreasing the
<br />amount of fuel, altering the distribution of fuel, reducing the ignitability of fuel, and creating
<br />tactical opportunities for wildland firefighters to engage with wildland fires. Fuels include natural
<br />vegetation, landscaping, and built structures. Fuel treatments can include mowing, grazing,
<br />prescribed burning, herbicide, and replacing
<br />flammable vegetation with more fire-resistant
<br />vegetation in strategic locations to minimize "Given the right conditions, wildlands will
<br />potential damages from wildfire. Fuel inevitably burn. It is a misconception to
<br />treatments include landscape -scale treatments, think that treating fuels can 'fire -proof
<br />which can achieve ecological restoration important areas... Fuel treatments in
<br />objectives if intentionally designed to do so, wildlands should focus on creating
<br />defensible space creation around homes and conditions in which fire can occur without
<br />other structures, linear fuel breaks, and linear devastating consequences, rather than on
<br />fire breaks. creating conditions conducive to fire
<br />The effectiveness of fuel treatments is influenced suppression" (Reinhardt et al. 2008).
<br />by a variety of factors, including the intensity,
<br />quality, and extent of treatment, location of treatments, maintenance of treatments, weather
<br />conditions and fire behavior, and actions of firefighters (Agee,1996). The percentage of fuel breaks
<br />that have effectively stopped actual wildfires is between 22-47% in forests (Gannon et al., 2023;
<br />Syphard et al., 2011) and 46-71% in sagebrush ecosystems (Weise et al., 2023). Fuel treatments
<br />are more effective under moderate fire weather conditions than extreme weather conditions, and
<br />most effective when firefighters are present to use the fuel treatment as a control feature (Gannon
<br />et al., 2023; Jain, T.B. et al., 2021; Reinhardt et al., 2008; Syphard et al., 2011; Weise et al., 2023).
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