SWCA Wildfire Experts Share Insights with Bloomberg Businessweek

In the last eight years, wildfires have scorched over 10 million acres (nearly twice the area of Massachusetts) in the U.S. annually on three separate occasions. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that this figure hadn’t been reached in the last three decades. With wildfires posing a greater threat, communities such as Boulder, Colorado, are urgently seeking ways to protect their homes.

Kyle Stock, senior correspondent at Bloomberg, explored this topic in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek feature, Fighting Fire Before It Comes. Stock interviewed two wildfire experts at SWCA — Vicky Amato, principal planner of fire and forestry, and Ari Porter, lead project manager — for their insights on the broader context of how communities across the U.S. are actively trying to prepare for and mitigate the risk of wildfire, including developing or updating Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP).

Here are just a few excerpts from the article:

• “This is a crisis, and we’re going to have to do some pretty extreme things to address it,” says Victoria Amato, an environmental consultant working on Boulder’s plan. “Sometimes it’s not going to be very palatable, but it’s going to help prevent the really catastrophic impacts.”
• SWCA, an international environmental consulting firm, is helping to update Boulder’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a 100-plus-page playbook for public officials and residents. In its 43 years, the company has worked on 100 such programs; at the moment, it has 10 underway.
• “It’s not even just the western US anymore,” says Amato, a principal fire planner at SWCA. “We’re getting calls from Maine, Pennsylvania, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.”
• “What you can do in the zero to 5 feet around your home can absolutely save your property,” says Amato, the environmental consultant.

Specializing in the project management of disaster recovery and resilience projects, Porter recently received praise from Brian Oliver at the City of Boulder, Colorado, for her expertise and coordination:

“Ari Porter and her team absolutely hit the mark for what we were looking for in our CWPP update. The community of Boulder is a very complicated jurisdiction to understand with its owned and managed lands reaching far beyond the municipal boundary. Being able to understand that our CWPP will interact with several other communities and CWPP efforts was paramount to being successful. Ari made sure to learn all she could and apply it to our process. Her ability to keep the project on task and coordinate amongst our core team, as well as the core teams of at least two other CWPP projects in the area, was second to none. Ari and the team were always available to answer questions and ensured prompt communication with my team. Their ability to turn around comments and changes in what were probably unreasonable timelines was amazing. I would recommend to anyone looking to get a CWPP completed on time and on budget should look to SWCA.”