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Home Page \ CWPP
 Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP)
What is a CWPP?
The Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) is a plan that identifies specific wildland fire risks facing communities and neighborhoods and provides prioritized recommendations to reduce those risks. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) of 2003 gives land management agencies and communities flexible guidelines to help them identify risks and prioritize mitigation actions. The HFRA encourages local communities to engage in comprehensive forest and wildfire management planning and public land management agencies to consider the community’s recommendations as they develop strategic forest management plans.
Implementing a CWPP
Once a CWPP is finalized and adopted, it is the responsibility of the community or neighborhood to move forward and implement the action items, although there is no legal requirement to do so. Implementing the recommendations in a CWPP may require further planning at the project level, funding, or simply motivating individual homeowners. Collaboration with local, state, and federal land management agencies can provide communities with opportunities to implement effective fuel mitigation treatments.
CWPP Action Items includes:
• Additional hazardous fuels projects to federal and private lands which border Lake Chinook Fire District.
• Fuel projects to reduce fuels on BLM land just East of the Three Rivers day use beach.
• Addition of up to three evacuation routes within Three Rivers subdivision.
• Improve access. Remove fuels from narrow roads and driveways. Roads need to be improved to provide for a
safe evacuation routes for local residents to escape an on‐coming wildfire while firefighting vehicles are trying to make their way into the area
• Improve evacuation staging areas for the community residents should an evacuation of the subdivision occur. Hazardous fuels treatments will focus on treating fuels within and/or adjacent to these areas to improve their shelter-in-place capability.
• Create a “FireWise Community” (www.firewise.org/)
• Coordinate with BLM to hold regular FireFree events (www.firefree.org/) within Jefferson County and the lake Chinook Fire and Rescue Fire District
Living in the Wildland-Urban Interface
Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) is defined as the area where development occurs in or near undeveloped areas. Rapid population growth and suburban development in areas with dense continuous wildland fuels places more people and buildings within areas that can burn in large wildfires. The potential consequences of severe wildfires are devastating and costly, and require effective planning and mitigation.
WUI delineations in a CWPP focus on somewhat homogeneous communities that represent a common emergency response area with similar assets, risks, and hazards. A CWPP provides wildfire hazard and risk assessments for neighborhoods and subdivisions identified as WUI zones within counties and fire protection districts, and makes recommendations for specific actions to reduce wildfire hazard to individual structures and communities as a whole.
For More Information
For more information on creating wildfire defensible zones, Click here. Contact your community wildfire protection forester to find out more about CWPPs and what is already happening in your area:
Oregon Department of Forestry – Central Oregon District
Kevin Benton, Unit Forester ‐ Prineville Sisters Protection Unit
kbenton@odf.state.or.us | 541‐447‐5658 ext. 230,
Don Colfels, Fire Chief
Lake Chinook Fire & Rescue - Proudly Serving Grandview and Lake Billy Chinook.
541-629-8911
don@lakechinookfireandrescue.org
Finalized and published the 2011 CWPP
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