Report From The Field #4

Holy Smokes, it's September!

The CWPP corps group has seen some prime fire weather this month, but adverse natural conditions are no match for well-prepared emergency managers. To this end, the CWPP group is laboring to ensure that North Carolina's emergency managers will have accurate maps and readable Community Wildfire Protection Plans on the ready when debris burning or careless actions of an individual cause a wildfire threat to their area.

This means that the CWPP group faces a lot more Access database work, and they will need to create more maps with ArcMap.

Although there is a lot of work ahead of the group, the CWPP corps group is very proud of their accomplishments. Since June, the CWPP group calculates that they have visited the top 5 most-hazardous fire districts in 14 counties. In meeting with Fire Chiefs and County Rangers in each of those fire districts, the team collected more than 87% of the information necessary for their entire CWPP project.

Now that most of the necessary information has been collected, the team's main remaining task will be to make maps and reports with the information they have collected.

In addition to making all these maps and reports, the CWPP team will be busy expanding their knowledge of wildfire behavior with Fire in the Field training. The fact-packed online course is teaching the CWPP team wildfire fighting basics. More than one member of the CWPP team is eager to complete the course and put their knowledge to use in the field!

The CWPP group enjoyed showing Jill Kolodzne what they do, and getting some great feedback about the way they are handling this project. They also enjoyed reading The True Story of Smokey Bear, a comic book given to the team by one of their Forest Ranger friends.