Preparing for Wildfire in Seattle’s Source Watersheds: Strategies and Challenges

Learning Objectives:

• ...explain the critical need of protecting water supplies across the country from the negative effects of wildfire. In the United States, 70% of freshwater is sourced from surface-water sources. There is a shared interest in protecting water quality and quantity from the effects of wildfire.
• ...identify three temporal opportunities in mitigating the effects of wildfire on water quality and quantity: pre-fire, during the fire, and post-fire. Pre-fire actions: building capacity of wildfire crews, maintaining wildfire equipment, maintaining agreements with other agencies, modeling, climate change analyses, learning from other local fires, stocking erosion control and recovery materials, identifying asset inventories, slash mitigation, shaded fuel breaks, and building defensible space around infrastructure. During fire actions: leveraging mutual aid agreements, avoiding retardants to maintain water quality, and containing fires to 10 acres or less. Post-fire actions include recovery and response, burned area rehabilitation, and long-term restoration and monitoring.
• ...to outline why taking action for wildfire mitigation, even with incomplete information and uncertain predictions of future conditions, is preferable to doing nothing.