IN JULY, A THIN white envelope appeared in 150,000 Oregon mailboxes, with a short letter inside that sparked a statewide controversy. The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) was assigning wildfire risk levels to property, and residents in high or extreme risk areas and in the wildland-urban interface — where development and flammable vegetation collide — would likely become subject to new building codes and standards for creating defensible space.
Mitigating fire risk is an urgent issue throughout the West, including Oregon, where wildfires burned a record breaking number of homes in 2020. Oregon’s new property assessment, part of broader wildfire legislation, marked an inflection point in its state level wildfire response; for the first time, the state designated wildfire risk with the intent of regulating statewide home-defense measures. Conversations about the new
