In June 2022, the State of Oregon released a wildfire risk map that charted the levels of wildfire risk for every property in Oregon. Along with it came a notice to property owners in the wildland-urban interface, a zone of transition between wilderness and developed land, informing them that their property had been identified as at high or extreme risk for wildfires and that they may be subject to defensible space or building code requirements in the future. The risk map received sudden and intense backlash, including thousands of messages to the Oregon Department of Forestry and at least 750 appeals. The public’s complaints largely involved potential impacts to property value, insurance increases and disputing the level of risk assigned to them.
The ODF scheduled to have community meetings around the state to explain the map’s purpose and function, but canceled the first planned session in Grants Pass after ODF received a voicemail threatening presenters. The department then changed its remaining listening sessions to digital-only. On Aug. 4, 2022, Oregon State Forester Cal Mukumoto announced ODF would remove the current iteration of the map and withdraw notices sent to property owners.
The wildfire risk map is the product of Senate Bill 762 from the 2021 legislative session, developed at the request of then-governor Kate Brown and the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, in the wake of the massive fires of 2020 that killed at least 11 people in Oregon.
Among the bill’s goals: improving wildfire preparedness by developing fire-safe building standards, developing responses to wildfires and increasing the resiliency of landscapes. It assigned properties to low, moderate, high or extreme wildfire risk after assessing an area’s climate variability, weather conditions, topography and vegetation. Its rules were developed by a 27-member advisory committee made up of firefighting agencies, industry lobbyists, nonprofits and intergovernmental organizations. That group had less than a year to create the map, based on the required deadlines in SB762.
Gov. Brown signed the bill into law in July 2021, giving state agencies a year to draft the map. The short timeframe meant there wasn’t a map to shop around for public feedback until it’d been actually produced. That initial map identified that 120,267 tax lots in Oregon at high or extreme risk of wildfire. About 80,000 of those lots are in a WUI, meaning they’d be subject to SB 762’s new defensible space regulations and building codes that protect against fire, though specific code amendments hadn’t yet been drafted by the Department of Consumer and Business Services.
“While we met the bill’s initial deadline for delivering on the map, there wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved. Once this round of refinements is complete, we are planning to bring a draft of the updated map to communities for discussion and input,” Makumoto said in a statement when he nixed the map.
“There wasn’t a broader context of, ‘here’s what the state is trying to accomplish, and here’s how the map helps do that,'” said Derek Gasperini, public affairs officer at ODF. “For many property owners, the notices were the first time that they’ve even heard that there was such a thing. It definitely was a surprise and caused some consternation just because of the confusion around the map’s purpose. We had the map to identify where building codes for home hardening, and defensible space were to be applied. But those agencies did not yet have the rules or codes in place.”
Hundreds of people in Central Oregon spoke against the map at an ODF community event at the Deschutes County Fair and Expo Center in August, shortly after state officials withdrew the map. The map identified all of Deschutes County as moderate, high or extreme risk of wildfire. It also included much of the land surrounding Bend and Redmond into the WUI.
The Fire Risk Map
The map itself is meant to track hazards, breaking down burn probability, likelihood of experiencing a fire and predicted flame intensity. Its model is purely about potential fire and not about the current state of improvements on a parcel. Properties where people have created defensible space can still be in areas deemed an extreme hazard.
“We actually do not need to look at the land in its current condition, like if it’s irrigated today, we actually needed to look at that land base through the lens of, what if that was a neighborhood based on the environmental setting and the vegetation that’s likely to be there? If they develop that piece of irrigated ag, can they just plant an entire conifer forest all through the community and not worry about it?” said Chris Dunn, a professor at Oregon State University who led the team that created the map.
The fire risk map was drafted as a collaboration between the state, OSU and Pyrologix, a private company that specializes in wildfire risk assessment. It relies on scientific models that have been used and refined since the 1970s, data from the National Land Fire on vegetation and recorded weather behavior from stations across Oregon. The map identified 15 different types of zones called fire occurrence areas that have similar patterns of wildfire and vegetation.
Goals of the map didn’t mesh up with the expectations of the public, who often saw the map as the final declaration of fire risk rather than a measurement of how susceptible an area is. The appeals process allows the Oregon Department of Forestry to assess an individual property and, if it’s deemed safe, clear landowners of making specific improvements. Accounting for the management of individual properties is both impossible and outside of the scope of the project laid out under SB762, Dunn said. It’s also difficult for an individual to impartially assess their risk. (An earlier version of this article attributed the appeals process to the Oregon State Fire Marshal Rather than the Oregon Department of Forestry. We regret the error)
“Nobody can step out their door, look at a landscape and say, ‘This is the likelihood that I’m going to experience a fire.’ We just can’t do it, it’s not possible, which is why we have to rely on other tools,” Dunn said.
The Insurance Factor
Rising insurance costs and depreciating property values were the impetus for many of the complaints about the map. Some people told ODF their premiums had already been raised, saying that their agents told them the map guided their decisions. Others said their insurers decided not to renew, citing the map. The Oregon Department of Financial Regulation looked into these claims by submitting a data call — a formal inquiry where insurers are required by law to answer truthfully — asking all insurers in Oregon if they used or intend to use the map. Every insurer said they don’t plan on using the map, and no new proposed rate filings filed to the ODFR have mentioned the map as a factor for raising rates.
“None of those companies use the state wildfire risk now, for a couple reasons. One, none of them even knew it existed, and it didn’t exist until last year. And secondly, the models, the rating models that insurers use are far more sophisticated,” said Kenton Brine, president of the NW Insurance Council.
Insurers’ models, often supplied by a third-party vendor, account for things the state’s wildfire risk map doesn’t, like how close and efficient the nearest fire department is, the defensible space around it and whether nearby homes might contribute to fire spreading, Brine said. Those models are also competing in a competitive market, and each company will assess risk differently. Generally though, home insurance costs in fire-prone areas have crept up over the past few years as wildfires increased in size and destructiveness.
“What happened when the state wildfire risk map came out was that, coincidentally at the time, some insurers were not pulling out of the market entirely, but they were reducing their risk by not renewing some policies,” Brine said.
Brine said some insurers may have assessed whether a property made improvements, but others likely just didn’t want to hold the risk of insuring a home in a fire-prone area. He said people will probably have a tougher time finding insurance as providers flee, and that costs could increase. Though he insisted insurance companies aren’t using the state’s fire risk map at the present time, he did say it could potentially become a variable in a broader assessment of a property in the future.
What Next?
Two years after the creation of the bill and the development of the map, the state’s wildfire risk map is in a state of limbo. The Oregon Department of Forestry pulled the map offline in August, saying it’d return after gathering more public input. OSFM paused the effort indefinitely in January after the legislature introduced bills that could substantially change the map. Senate Bill 80 is the most impactful of the legislation targeted at the map this session.
“It changes the number of hazard zones and changes the name from a risk map to a hazard map so it more accurately reflects what the map is depicting,” Gasperini, from the ODF, said. “There are many other things in there and it requires a certain number of community meetings and meetings with county commissioners and planning staff, and basically kind of provides an outline for that public engagement before a map is released.”
SB80 is currently referred to the Joint Committee on Ways and Means but passed a work session on April 11 with a recommendation to pass. Another bill that’d impact the wildfire map, Senate Bill 82, prohibits insurers from using the map as a basis for canceling, not renewing or increasing premiums. It also requires insurers to relay information about their wildfire risk mitigation in their underwriting guidelines and rate plans, and mandates insurers give clients 24 months to repair or replace damaged or lost property if it was directly related to a fire declared an emergency under the Emergency Conflagration Act.
With uncertainty about what a new map would require, Gasperini said there’s no clear timeline on when the next iteration of a map might be released. The previous one took over a year and required a lengthy rule-making process. If changes are approved in the legislature it may have to go through a public process to change ODF’s administrative rules and conduct community engagement before a new map is released. In the meantime, though, he said they’re looking at a few refinements stemming from public comments.
“I would generally just say that based on the public feedback that we received after the initial release of the map, the two main areas that we’ve been working on are the concerns related to irrigated lands and the classification differences on adjacent lots,” Gasperini said.
This article appears in Source Weekly April 27, 2023.
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