In July of 2010, wildfire engulfed over 6,000 acres of shrub-steppe habitat on Cowychee Mountain, a largely undeveloped ridgeline lying just west of Yakima, Washington.  This area is surrounded by a mix of irrigated agriculture and exurban residential development. Even though the Cowychee Mill Fire was stopped at the wildland urban interface (WUI) without loss of life or causing significant property damage, and direct human impacts were minimized by fire suppression, the broader impacts of living with wildland fire at the shrub-steppe/human interface remain. The unique benefit derived by the Coywchee Mill Fire was a level of collaboration that, up to that point, had not existed. Organizations (local and county fire officials, landowners, and public) had been managing wildland fire independently and from different perspectives. As a result of their experiences during the Cowychee Mill Fire, a committee of these groups was convened by the Cowychee Canyon Conservancy, a local land trust with a 2,000 acre preserve that burned in the blaze, to work on a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) which assesses wildfire risk to the community in this shrub-steppe habitat interface zone.  Yakima County recently completed a county-wide CWPP, but it largely addressed risk in the forested zones and was not considered useful for the broader landscape. With a small fund from the Fire Learning Network program, The Cowychee Mountain Community Wildfire Protection Plan was launched to bring a finer resolution to risks specific to the shrub-steppe habitat.

Results: The risk assessment method developed for the Cowychee Mountain CWPP was a great study in resisting the impulse to create an overly complex technological modeling solution to the assignment.  The assumptions about risk were easy to describe (under what conditions people can be “rescued”), corroborated by practitioner experience (local fire districts and federal fire staff).  LANDFIRE data products enabled the technical team to quickly and cost effectively get products out for review and method refinement. Compatibility of the fuel model data with the fire behavior program play a crucial role in getting the analysis and result completed in a manner that satisfied the need for clarity, simplicity and credibility.