Wildfire Ready Watersheds
Chris Sturm1
1Watershed Program Director, Colorado Water Conservation Board
Wildfire Ready Watersheds is a strategy and program developed by the Colorado Water Conservation Board that provides a proactive approach to address post wildfire impacts. Impacts are defined as risks posed by post fire hazards to community values such as water supplies, life and property, and transportation corridors. Common post fire hazards include increased runoff, debris flows, hillslope erosion, water quality impairments, flooding, and associated sediment erosion and deposition. The mission of Wildfire Ready Watersheds is to assess the susceptibility of Colorado’s water resources, communities, and critical infrastructure to post-wildfire impacts and advance a framework for communities to plan and implement mitigation strategies to minimize these impacts – before wildfires occur.
Wildfire Ready Watersheds is currently under development and has a two-part focus: (1) a statewide post-fire susceptibility analysis and (2) a framework that communities can use to perform watershed scale planning to address post fire hazards. Elements of the framework could also be used for communities after wildfires occur, but the focus of Wildfire Ready Watersheds is to mitigate those hazards before such an event. The susceptibility analysis is composed of several phases; data collection, data development, analysis, mapping, and reporting. This effort will rely on existing and new statewide datasets for wildfire hazards, critical water supplies, populations at risk, and other infrastructure layers. The data is being used to perform a susceptibility analysis that intersects post fire hazards with known values/assets at risk to determine impacts to life safety, infrastructure, and property. This will serve to further an understanding of which watersheds will be most susceptible to post wildfire impacts and where community stakeholders should focus their efforts in their wildfire mitigation efforts.
The framework will further describe and provide guidance on how to refine the susceptibility evaluations for local communities to utilize at watershed scales. It will serve as a guide for best planning practices in advance of a wildfire and will also support post-fire mitigation strategies. This includes data collection and GIS preparedness, permitting and compliance, stakeholder development, hazard analysis and evaluations, engineering/modeling, pre and post fire management actions, design, and construction. Design and construction will include project types that can be implemented before and after wildfire. Many projects implemented after a fire are for immediate protection of life, property, and water supplies and have limited success as they are treating point of impact type problems with little regard to watershed health or stream function. Projects constructed before fire provide the same or better protections while also addressing multiple objectives in watershed health and water supply protection. These project types are designed to protect and enhance ecosystem structure and function within the watershed drainage network. Most implementation strategies will involve a mosaic of different project types employed across the watershed.