558 N. Main St., Prineville, OR 97754 | (541) 447-6205
For residents of rural Crook County communities like Post or Paulina, when a fire breaks out, landowners could be on their own.
Those who live outside the Crook County Fire and Rescue (CCFR) district do not receive the same tax-funded protection as people living in or near Prineville. And those rural residents are not alone.
“Right now, in Eastern Oregon, we have about 3.5 million acres of unprotected private land,” said Gordon Foster, rangeland fire protection coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
While that is the case, people living in unprotected areas don’t have to stand back and watch their properties burn. By joining forces with other community members and outfitting their homes with fire prevention safeguards, they can better protect their property and structures.
Many of the residents in the Post and Paulina area either belong to, or may join, the area’s rangeland fire protection association. The resident-driven organizations are formed by petitioning the Oregon Department of Forestry who, in turn, provides the group with wildland firefighting training and equipment.
Post and Paulina residents established their rangeland fire protection association in 2006, as did the Brothers and Hampton communities. In fact, the Juniper Acres area is the only rural area outside the CCFR district that is not protected. Before then, wildfires potentially posed a serious problem.
“Up until the point that we formed this, it was unprotected land,” said Pete Jamison, the Post/Paulina Rangeland Fire Protection Association chair. “The only way we could get any fire protection is we would call BLM (the Bureau of Land Management) or the Forest Service or the state and say, ‘It’s getting to your protected land, so you better come put it out.’ Other than that, we had nothing.”
To join the association, area residents need only pay $25-per-year dues, and if they want to help fight fires, they can request training and/or firefighting equipment from the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF).
Although the association collects dues, those funds primarily pay for equipment insurance and fuel, while ODF supplies their firefighting equipment at no cost.
“It’s the ‘just one’ concept,” Foster said of the free equipment. “If this rangeland association and these ranchers out here can stop one fire from going large every 10 years – one fire in 10 years – across the state with 14 of these organizations, they have saved the taxpayers of this country millions and millions of dollars.”
Foster went on to point out that so far they have more than enough equipment available to supply association members who might request it.
While the rangeland fire protection associations cover wildland fires in otherwise unprotected rural areas, they cannot fight structure fires. According to Foster, fighting such blazes requires 200 hours of training plus another 80 hours per year, while wildland firefighting only requires 32 hours. In addition, ODF cannot provide the substantially more expensive equipment necessary to fight structure fires.
“The only thing a rangeland association does is keeps a wildland fire from taking out the improvements,” Foster said, “or if a fire starts in a structure, (they) keep that fire from spreading to adjacent improvements.”
Furthermore, establishing a rural fire district would likely result in considerable taxation to fund the number of fire stations necessary to adequately cover the area.
“To be effective, you need to be within 10 minutes of a fire station,” Foster said. “If you take other areas in rural Oregon where your ranches are 15 to 20 miles apart, it isn’t cost-effective to provide that kind of structural protection.”
For these reason, residents of Post, Paulina, or other unprotected rural communities are encouraged to safeguard their home and other buildings to prevent fires from overtaking the structures.
“When people move out there . . . they need to understand that they are outside a fire district,” said Crook County Sheriff Jim Hensley. “So when you build that house, and you want to take the extra precautions, put them in it when you build it.”
Foster and Hensley both highly recommended fire sprinklers as well as other preventative measures like an adequate flue, and properly functioning electrical and heating systems.
So far, firefighting and prevention efforts have seemingly succeeded in the Crook County. Although a ranch fire recently erupted near Post, it was the first rural structure fire in more than 30 years.
Meanwhile, the Post/Paulina rangeland association fought five fires during the past year, and as far as Jamison and Hensley are concerned, the residents have made the program a success.
“I’m so proud of our people,” Jamison said.
