Uses and Application in Florida

During the initial development phase of the Florida Risk Assessment, the development team outlined the following project objectives:

• Rapidly identify areas that may require additional tactical planning.
• Allow agencies to work together to better define priorities and improve emergency response.
• Develop refined analysis of a complex landscape and fire situations using GIS.
• Increase communication with local residents to address community priorities and needs.
• Plan for fire protection resource needs.
• Identify fire protection resource allocation based on potentially severe fire problems.

Although it is generally believed that the goals and objectives were met, one point concerning the assessment should be emphasized. The FRA has many parts, and some of these parts have been used to support other State agency critical applications such as the Fire Management Information System. The success of the FRA extended beyond the original goals and objectives.

The Division of Forestry has produced two products to convey the Wildland Fire Risk in Florida. The first is the standalone desktop application that requires supporting the following software: ArcView 3.x, Spatial Analyst, and FlamMap (Version 1) as well as the data for the specific areas of concern. This application permits the user to view the published data and make changes to both the fire occurrence and fuels to alter the relative risk in the area. The purpose of the modifications to fire occurrence or to fuels is to determine the effect a changing prevention effort or fuels management effort might have on the overall wildfire risk in a particular area.

The second application is Web based and can be found at: http://www.fl-dof.com/wildfire/wf_fras.html. This tool allows anyone with Web access to view the four primary published results data layers for Florida. These include the Wildland Fire Susceptibility Index, which is an indicator of the potential for wildfire in that area; the Fire Occurrence Areas, which is a map of the probability of an acre igniting based on the fire history in an area; the Surface Fuel Model Layer, which maps the surface fuels across the State; and the Level of Concern, which is a combination of all of the above as well as the suppression costs and environmental effects to give the user the general associated risk from wildland fire for a particular area. This tool has been very popular with homeowners and the media.

As an example of the interest in the FRA by the media, the following example from Brevard County is provided. In May 2006, the Florida Today newspaper published an article about the Florida Wildland Fire Risk Assessment and highlighted some particular points the paper felt the general public should know. The paper detailed information about certain areas in Brevard County, which was impacted by the 2006 fire season. The following is a list of bullets that were included in the article:

• Thousands of homes in Brevard County lie within zones State foresters deem the most dangerous places for wildfires but often the least practical to burn or clear.
• Many single-family houses (5,000+) in Brevard were built on land considered at highest risk for wildfires.
• Thousands more mobile homes and other structures fall within the same danger zones.
• In Brevard County, 78,669 acres are in the high-risk zone, or about 12 percent of the county. Most of it, 49,545 acres, is in unincorporated areas, such as those surrounding Lake Washington, west of Melbourne, and Lake Poinsett, west of Cocoa.
• West Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne Village, and Rockledge had the highest percentage of high-risk land, West Melbourne being the worst with 67 percent of its 3,648 acres within in the highest risk area.
• Trees and brush border most homes, making few Brevardians immune from the wildfire threat.
• State fire managers focus most of their preseason prevention where forest hugs neighborhoods and important infrastructure. So they hope people such as Dyan Hilton, who lives in Poinsett Trailer Park—west of Cocoa and across from a huge wildfire danger zone to the south—take steps to keep the flames away.

In addition to the media, county and municipal governments are using the FRA as part of the county or local Comprehensive Planning Program that requires that all risk be considered as part of the planning for new development.

Fire departments and county planners are closely monitoring how communities structure access as well as do vegetation/fuel management in the initial phases of community development. It is emphasized that developers and homeowners should accept each party’s responsibility in the protection of the property. When drought conditions occur and the fire weather gets to the point that fires begin to impact neighborhoods, firefighters have difficulty providing structure protection at every location within a subdivision. Planning for the future can prevent many of the problems experienced in recent years.

Florida has staffed four fuels mitigation teams that exclusively work in urban-interface areas. The FRA is the primary designator as to where these teams plan their efforts. The FRA paints a bull’s-eye across the Florida landscape for everyone managing land and fire today, placing the priorities where they need to be based on fuels, climate, and historical fire activity.