Some 16 years ago, county and state officials pulled together a detailed analysis of the wildfire threats to Malheur County.
Communities from one end of the county were rated for their risk, with about a half dozen being rated as “high.”
Page by page, officials mapped out actions to cut those risks.
But the wildfire plan has largely gone ignored since then.
Malheur County officials now want the help of communities and landowners to change that.
Malheur County’s Emergency Management is hosting a meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 23, to explain the plan. The meeting is at the Malheur County Education Service District in Vale, at 363 A St. W.
The public meeting also to provide recommendations for steps people can take on their own to protect their homes and land.
But most important is getting ideas for reducing the risk from the community.
Lt. Rich Harriman, county emergency services director, said he’s keen to hear suggestions from people about what steps should be taken to protect Malheur County against wildfires. That could be as simple as calling out heavy brush around a commercial building or removing highly flammable sagebrush lining a rural road.
“We’re looking for projects that people see as potential fire hazards that we can include in the plan,” he said. “We want project ideas that help mitigate dangerous areas related to wildfire.”
The original 2009 plan mapped out what are termed wildland-urban interfaces – the areas where human occupation faces grasslands or forests. In that plan, experts identified 2 million acres of such interface containing 27 communities the plan said “would be directly threatened or affected by a large wildfire event.”
Harriman wants people to understand the mapping is “not the dreaded ‘fire map’ that caused so much stress and discontent over the last couple of years.”
That state map, produced by the Oregon Department of Forestry, identified every property in the state and its wildfire risk factor. That map has since been put on hold.
Northwest Management Inc. has been retained by the county to provide fresh data for Malheur County’s community plan.
As the original plan stated, “Individual property owners have a major role to play in this coordinated effort.”
The 2009 plan concluded, “The financial, social, and economic costs of wildfires demonstrate the need to reduce their impact on lives and property, as well as the short and long-term economic and environmental consequences of large-scale fires.”
Malheur County endured catastrophic wildfires in 2024, costing millions to suppress and damaging several hundred thousand acres of rangeland vital to the local cattle industry.
The original plan anticipated that “the frequency of very high fire danger days per year” would increase 40% by 2050.
Areas then that rated high for wildfire risk included Ontario Heights, Vale, Adrian, Harper, Jordan Valley, Juntura and Riverside.
“Often these areas where development is next to areas with heavy fuel loads (vegetation) do not have adequate defensible space,” the plan said.
Harriman expects those areas remain at high risk and others likely will be added.
The 2009 plan mapped out a yearly review and then a “total revision” every five years. The strategies for defending against wildfire also were to be reviewed each year.
“Like many other things in Oregon, these lofty rules are developed with no funding source,” Harriman said. He said efforts to obtain grants to revise the plan have not succeeded until recently. He expects a final wildfire plan to be reviewed monthly.
