NFPA’s Wildfire Division Director Michele Steinberg talks Community Engagement, Policy Evolution, and her vision for the future

In an era marked by unprecedented wildfire activity, the urgency of rethinking wildfire preparedness has never been more pressing.

While regulatory changes are paramount, they come with their unique challenges, particularly when transitioning from localised to statewide policies.

An equally significant factor lies in engaging communities, making them not just stakeholders but active participants in prevention, preparedness, and risk reduction.

As we envision the future of wildfire policy, it is imperative to amalgamate grassroots movements, policy enhancements, and innovative strategies.

In this article, IFSJ editor Iain Hoey spoke to Michele Steinberg, Wildfire Division Director at NFPA, to discuss community engagement, policy evolution, and the NFPA’s vision for the future of wildfire preparedness.

Can you please introduce yourself and your role at the NFPA?

I’ve worked at NFPA for 21 years, in a few different capacities, but all involved in wildfire preparedness.

My relevant background is in disaster safety education and outreach and policy regarding land use planning and building standards to reduce risks from flood, wind and fire.

I earned my master’s degree in urban planning while in the disaster safety workforce, so I’ve focused on the integration of natural systems and phenomena we often refer to as natural hazards with the built environment for more than 30 years.

For the past decade at NFPA, my role as Wildfire Division Director means that I oversee programs our team has developed, including the Firewise USA® recognition program, the annual Wildfire Community Preparedness Day campaign, and Outthink Wildfire™, NFPA’s wildfire policy initiative.

As an organisation, NFPA has lengthy involvement in wildfire safety work through its codes and standards development process.

NFPA has also created key training and credentialing opportunities for fire service and other professionals that emphasise skills and knowledge on structure vulnerabilities to wildfire exposures and how to mitigate property risks long before fires ever start.

Much of what my team and I do is to help translate complex science into action steps for people that live with wildfire risks.

Understanding how to motivate people to act, and how to effectively communicate with laypersons and experts alike is a major part of my job.

What advancements have you observed in wildfire preparedness over the past decade?

Wildfire preparedness efforts have been happening in communities and across government agencies for many decades now.

For example, NFPA and government partners launched Firewise USA®, a voluntary recognition program for neighbourhoods, in 2002.

In the past 10 years, the significant increase in property losses and of mass fatalities during US wildfires has rapidly ramped up public awareness of wildfire threats and has motivated people to find out more about their wildfire risks and what they can do about them.

Experience with fire is, for better or worse, a major motivation for people to learn more and consider taking action to protect themselves and their families.

NFPA is ready to provide people with sound information and solutions when they are ready to take safety steps.

We and other fire safety organisations are also ready for that window of opportunity when policymakers ask what more can be done to protect and prepare our people, communities, and environment.

For example, NFPA launched its Outthink Wildfire policy initiative in 2021, coinciding that year with a major legislative decision in Congress to put much more funding and thought toward reducing wildfire risks through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

The Act created the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, on which I served with 50 other people.

The Commission’s report, “On Fire,” issued in September 2023, is a forward-looking document making nearly 150 recommendations to government that are integrated, overlapping, and implementable.

Can the current systems or methodologies can be enhanced or revamped to better suit the changing dynamics of wildfires?

The Commission’s work and report focused not only on our past experiences, but on expectations of wildfires of the future.

Wildfires in the future will be different because of the effects of climate change.

We are already seeing not only larger and more intense fires in fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems, but damaging fires in unexpected places like Scandinavia and Hawai’i.

Climate change impacts are also evident in cascading disaster effects like flooding that leads to the growth of vegetative fuels for wildfires.

More frequent hurricanes and typhoons due to warming oceans are changing weather patterns and winds, evidenced by the wind impacts on the Lahaina Fire on Maui, Hawai’i.

We need to accept that no matter how fast our detection and suppression systems are, fire is faster.

Conditions on the ground in every recent major wildfire disaster include easily ignitable vegetative fuels, strong winds, and structural fuels.

Those structural fuels are our homes and neighbourhoods, consisting of combustible buildings surrounded by combustible ornamental vegetation, mulches, and more.

We must address the urban conflagration problem – structure-to-structure ignition and the impact of embers – as a top priority to ending wildfire disasters.

We need stronger prevention and preparedness in existing communities.

We also need new ways of designing and building future communities to prevent homes and other buildings from being just more fuel for a wildfire.

The role of the first responder must change, with a shift in emphasis to Community Risk Reduction and a reckoning with the reality that responders will never be able to save homes with the current conditions unchanged.

Is grassroots participation in the broader vision of wildfire prevention important?

We tend not to have successful outcomes during wildfires if the community is not actively engaged.

In the United States, acceptance of government regulation varies widely from place to place.

People living in some of the most high-risk, fire prone areas of the country have decided to live there in part because there is less perceived government interference in how and where they build and what they choose to do with the land that they own.

The success of the voluntary Firewise USA recognition program is due to a design that recognises the varying beliefs and values among many Americans living in fire prone areas.

We also help educate people about how homes ignite and what they can do, right on their property, to bend down their risk curve.

Because ignited structures will ignite nearby structures, the key is getting people to work with their neighbours.

Work across adjacent parcels is very effective, and relies entirely on grassroots, neighbour-to-neighbour effort.

It appears in some cases that grassroots embrace of wildfire risk reduction practices can also increase acceptance of those practices when they are codified in enforceable regulations.

Can you share any success stories or notable outcomes from engaging communities directly in wildfire preparedness?

Twenty years and 2,500 communities later, sites participating in the Firewise USA recognition program have many stories of success, including greater community cohesion, increased peace of mind, and improved relationships with local and state government actors.

What we all want to know, though, is – does it work? Do communities engaging in these efforts over time actually avoid the worst outcomes from wildfires?

We have some notable examples, such as the small community of Falls Creek, near Durango (Colorado) where in June 2017, a decade of concerted effort by residents gave first responders a safe place to operate, not only protecting the neighbourhood, but also preventing the 416 Fire from entering the larger municipality of Durango.

Not a single structure in the community ignited, and there were no injuries nor deaths among residents and firefighters.

The local fire and rescue service had the confidence that home preparedness across adjacent parcels had significantly decreased the likelihood of properties in the community igniting and being destroyed.

How do we ensure that statewide policies resonate with the specific needs of individual communities?

Local government agencies are the entities that permit construction and rebuilding in fire prone communities.

State agencies have the authority to use – or ignore – sound building and design standards that govern new and improved construction in wildfire hazard areas.

Local and state regulations, applied and enforced consistently, can be extremely effective in ensuring that new construction is sited, designed, constructed, and maintained in ways that prevent ignitions from wildfire.

Most states do not have statewide application of such regulations.

This makes it much more difficult for municipalities to champion such rules.

For example, if a county government decides to use stringent standards for building and development in wildfire risk areas, but neighbouring counties do not, they risk eroding their property tax base if developers prefer to build in less-regulated counties.

If state standards are applied across all jurisdictions, it creates a level playing field for developers, helping them to reduce costs of code compliance.

California has statewide building code for wildfire safety and sophisticated risk mapping.

Their rules for building in high hazard areas are the consistently applied where the likelihood of extreme fire is greatest.

An example of how a statewide code could use a minimum standard for every jurisdiction is to allow only Class A (non-combustible) roofing for structures.

It is hard to argue that any community has a special need for combustible roofs on its buildings.

Can you comment on any ongoing or upcoming collaborations tackling the wildfire problem?

For nearly 20 years, the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy has guided significant collaboration across federal, state and local governments as well as NGOs like NFPA.

Its three guiding principles are interlinked – to restore and maintain landscapes, including through use of fire; to ensure safe and effective fire response; and to create fire adapted communities.

The fire adapted communities concept has initiated the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network that now engages thousands of people in all aspects of wildfire resilience.

Internationally, NFPA has been involved as an exchange or “secondment” partner with a research initiative called PyroLife.

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the project supports a total of 15 PhD students across the globe to pursue cross-disciplinary, wildfire-focused research projects with the support of a worldwide network.

This project allows the advancement of holistic, integrated wildfire management in Europe and globally.

It also addresses the future of wildfire by opening up employment opportunities for early-stage researchers.

The Pau Costa Foundation is another excellent collaboration across Europe and Latin America, providing training and operations support as well as best practices in community mitigation and preparedness.

How do you strike a balance between the immediacy of on-ground, reactive firefighting measures and the long-term, proactive policy and community engagement efforts?

For too long, society has been trying to fix wildfire disasters with a too-little, too-late strategy.

Some fire service leaders chalk this up to their successes in suppressing 90-plus percent of wildfires, which leads to the illusion that response and suppression operations have the situation under control.

However, we are already faced with a legacy of decades of unrestricted, unregulated development and building in fire prone areas along with unhealthy, overgrown, flammable landscapes.

Adding climate change impacts to this mix means we cannot continue to rely on what we’ve done in the past.

Suppression costs reach into the billions annually, and yet suppression is not preventing billions of dollars of property loss each year, and it is not preventing mass casualties in fires like Lahaina, Camp, Tubbs, and others.

There needs to be at least equal emphasis, funding, and enforcement for policies that provide long-term passive protection for people and property, and significantly more education for every resident and every decision-maker likely to be affected by wildfire.

What message would you like to convey to communities, policymakers, and other stakeholders about the future of wildfire preparedness and mitigation?

Unmanaged and unmitigated wildfire touches all of us, everywhere, even if indirectly in the taxes we pay, our water quality, our air quality, or our ability to obtain or afford property insurance.

It affects the utilities on which we rely for light, heating, cooling, cooking, and our livelihoods.

Government has a strong role at every level, but most importantly at the municipal (town, city or county) level.

But everyone living with wildfire – all of us – have a role to play in understanding our risks and what we can do about them.

I encourage everyone to spend some time learning about their personal and place-based risks and consider the first steps they can do to prepare themselves and their families for wildfire and related hazards.

Policymakers now have a major report (On Fire) with clear recommendations on what they can do to start making a difference within their sphere of responsibility and influence.

I am convinced that preventing continued loss of life and properties is achievable in the next few decades.

It will take each of us starting with our homes and with our neighbours to see a different future for wildfire.

An abbreviated version of this article was originally published in the November 2023 issue of International Fire & Safety Journal. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.