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As Alaska's wildfire season begins, residents within Anchorage's Hillside communities plan and prepare for the prospect of a fast moving fire in an area with few roads in and out.

There's a lot of fuel for a wildfire up here, beetle kill brush.

And the topography lends itself to a large event some day.

How are residents preparing to protect themselves?

And what do fire managers want all Alaskans to know about how to keep their property and families safe from wildfire?

We'll discuss it right now on Alaska Insight.

The wildfire season in Alaska has been relatively quiet so far, but that can change quickly if there is little rain and temperatures rise in the early part of the spring fire season.

The vast majority of wildfires are caused by humans.

Tonight, we'll hear from experts about steps being taken by residents in the Anchorage hillside area to better protect their properties and get guidance on how to keep your own property safe.

Before we get to that discussion, here are some of the top stories of the week from Alaska Public Media's collaborative Statewide News Network.

State lawmakers concluded this year's legislative session early Thursday morning after passing dozens of bills and finalizing the state's operating budget for the fiscal year beginning in July.

The budget, if signed into law by the governor, would provide Alaskans a payment of $1,655 this fall between the Permanent Fund dividend and an energy relief check.

Lawmakers also passed bills seeking to address a number of issues, including declining natural gas production and uncertainty in the home school system.

Once the bills passed by the House and Senate are transmitted to Governor Mike Dunleavy, he has 20 days excluding Sundays to sign, veto or allow them to become law without his signature.

In Anchorage, woman has come forward with security footage that she says contradicts the initial account by the Anchorage Police Department of a fatal police shooting that happened Monday morning.

The shooting occurred just after 2 a.m. on Monday and resulted in the death of 34 year old Christopher Handy.

According to the account provided at the Monday press conference by Police Chief Bianca Cross, Andy raised a long gun toward officers who fired and struck him once.

However, Virginia Miller, who made the security footage public, says the video does not show Andy pointing his gun at officers.

On Thursday, Chief Cross acknowledged the security footage in a statement saying it, quote, appears too many to differ from the initial statement we provided regarding the event.

Anchorage mayoral candidate Suzanne LaFrance is poised to become the municipality's next mayor with a more than 5000 vote lead over incumbent Dave Bronson.

In the latest batch of results released Thursday night, LaFrance had about 54% of the vote to Bronson's 46%.

More than 71,000 votes have been tallied.

Election results will be certified on May 31st.

The beginning of the three year mayoral term starts on July 1st.

You can find the full version of these and many more stories on our website.

Alaskapublic.org or download the Alaska Public Media app on your phone.

Now on to our discussion for the evening.

The season of fighting wildfire in Alaska, especially in populated areas.

Residents of Anchorage's Hillside neighborhood are well aware of this perennial concern.

Experts say it's not a matter of if, but when a large blaze affects the neighborhood.

Alaska Public Media's Wesley Early has more on how locals are preparing for Hood.

They went out and actually did a survey of their residential area, Ky Holland grew up on the hillside and has lived in his home for 24 years.

He says the 2016 McHugh Creek Fire was a wakeup call for him and his neighbors about the risks of wildfires.

If the winds had been blowing in the direction they would normally have blown in coming up out of the turning an arm, it would have blown that fire over into Potter Valley.

Why?

The winds were blowing the opposite direction.

You know, we can be thankful for it, but we were lucky.

Late May through June is the driest and sunniest time of year in Anchorage, and it's also the riskiest time for wildfires.

The hillside consists largely of homes tucked in the woods with few roads in or out.

There hasn't been a catastrophic fire yet, but the risk is on the minds of local officials like Captain Matt Herman with the Anchorage Fire Department.

There's a lot of fuel for a wildfire up here, beetle kill brush.

And the topography lends itself to a large event some day or to survive.

Herman says the nature of how the neighborhood is set up will also make response difficult.

It is a challenge.

I mean, narrow roads, topography going uphill or downhill, people trying to evacuate is going to present a problem.

And that's the only route outside to Bear Valley.

To better get the word out.

Jennifer Schmidt with the University of Alaska Anchorage has been giving presentations to Hillside area community councils about wildfire safety, highlighting maps that show the risk of fires at various properties.

The maps are color coded with dark green to red areas at the highest level of risk.

And what we're showing is the hazardous fuels that are within the hillside area and by hazardous fuels, we need vegetation that's flammable that can light on fires.

Schmidt says people in the riskier areas should be more wary of not only what wildfire fuel is on their property, but what's in the surrounding areas too.

What's around it, like 100 to 500 meters, because that's how far, you know, the embers could disperse and lands on a person's roof and catch it on fire.

Holland and his neighbors have been taking Schmidt's presentations to heart, and there's been a local push to make homes more fire safe.

They've done wildfire drills and even organized phone trees to keep neighbors informed.

If somebody ultimately is going to come in and try and save us and rescue us, we need to be at a place where they can get to.

Holland says he doesn't necessarily view the steps the community has taken as a response to potential danger.

I like to look at it in terms of we're doing this because we want to create a better community, whether it's a wildfire, an earthquake or a cup of sugar.

I want us to be a little better connected and not be doing this out of fear, because I don't think that's the way to get people motivated.

For now, Holland is doing his part, moving firewood away from the side of his home and packing up his snow machine, gas cans in Anchorage.

I'm Wesley Early.

Joining me tonight to describe the research into wildfire risk and plans for mitigating that exposure is Jennifer Schmidt.

We just saw Jennifer.

Jennifer is an associate professor of natural resource management and policy at UAA's Institute of Social and Economic Research or ICER.

And Doug Schrage is the chief of the Anchorage Fire Department.

Thanks, both of you for being here tonight.

Our pleasure.

So, Jennifer, I want to pick up kind of on where the work that you were describing to Wesley in this video story that we just saw.

You moved to Anchorage from Fairbanks and got involved with the climate.

The Anchorage Climate Plan Action Plan, looking into natural hazards.

And that sort of spun into a larger project funded through the National Science Foundation.

Tell us about that work and kind of what the whole body of it is.

Yeah.

And so with the Anchorage Climate Action Plan, there was different hazards identified, and wildfire was one of those hazards.

And so the National Science Foundation had a call, and I put together a research project that involves Anchorage, Fairbanks and Whitehorse that would look at evaluating what are the hazards for wildfire rain in winter and permafrost in the three areas.

And I noticed that the Anchorage fire, the previous Anchorage Fire risk map hazard map was done in 2008, so it was quite out of date and there needed to be an update.

So I said, I'd like to do mapping, I like to do GIS, I want to do projects that help my communities.

And so I put in a proposal to create maps of wildfire hazard and then wildfire risk.

Your research found that some areas of the hillside present possibly the highest risk in the municipality.

Talk about those areas and why that risk is so high there.

The risk is high because going into risk, you have you have to have exposure, vulnerability.

You have to have the hazard.

And so in those areas, you have a lot of flammable fuels and you have buildings that are at risk for catching on fire.

And so the areas that have the highest risk are the places where you have a lot of hazardous fuels and you have buildings and building density that can catch on fire.

All right.

Thank you so much, Doug.

Your thoughts here.

Describe the fire wise program and what that offers to municipal residents and how that might kind of segue into some of what Jennifer was just describing as that extreme risk on the hillside.

Sure.

Thanks.

Fire wise is intended to help homeowners make their properties more resilient in the face of an advancing wildfire.

And so fire wise includes such things as removing flammable or brush and things from around your house wood piles, propane tanks, things like that.

It involves providing education.

It involves treating your roofs and treating your whole property to make it so that if a fire does occur, your home is more likely to not catch fire.

The real problem being that when the home catches fire, it becomes.

A lot of heat emanates from that which can advance the actual wildfire itself.

So we are we are, as we have been in previous years, doing courtesy fire wise home inspections in the fire department.

A homeowner can contact the fire department and request a courtesy consultation or we'll send firefighters out there and can provide some education.

So we've been talking about the highest risk area of the hillside.

But one of the glories of Anchorage is the many parks.

But these beautiful wooded areas also elevate fire hazard.

What other areas of Anchorage are of concern and are there efforts underway in those particular greenbelt areas currently to help mitigate that risk?

Sure.

Yeah.

So the fire risk in Anchorage and I'm sure that Dr. Schmidt can back me up on this is that doesn't exist only on the Anchorage hillside.

We we have fire risk in the Girdwood Valley, in the Eagle River Valley, Chugach areas all throughout the municipality.

Actually, some of our more trouble spots for wildfires in Anchorage have actually been in fairly urban areas of town where campfires or things get out of control, for example, and by far north by Centennial Park.

The reason we tend to focus on the Anchorage hillsides is that's because where much of the built value is, that's where many of the expensive homes are.

And in fact, in my assessment, the Anchorage Hillside is it is probably the single highest fire problem in the state in terms of overall risk.

When you combine the the risk of a fire along with a built infrastructure, I think it's a real.

Problem in the lack of access or egress out of there.

We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

In the beginning of the program, I mentioned how early in the season it's almost exclusively human caused fires that that get started.

What are some of the things you want people to be mindful of this time of year so that that doesn't happen?

What are what are we doing that are that are the problems?

Well, first and foremost, what what homeowners and and residents can do is be aware of the fire risk we publish daily on the municipal municipal website and on the fire department's website.

Each morning, we conduct a risk assessment where we look at the fire weather and we publish the fire risk for the day.

And then we use that as a basis for our daily staffing of our firefighting resources.

And so it takes into account wind, humidity, in the fuel and in the air and also based on that are the burning regulations.

So if you want to have a brush fire in your yard to burn up debris or leaves and whatnot or have an outside recreational fire, then you need to be attentive to the fire risk so that you don't find yourself out of compliance and adding to the risk.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Jennifer, you worked with long time former Anchorage Fire Department forester John C on egress issues in the city working with community councils.

Give us kind of a general snapshot of risk first in the lower elevations of the city first.

Well, as Chief Shrage mentioned, there are areas in the lower elevations that do have higher wildfire hazards and risk because, you know, we do live with forests.

I mean, that's one thing that's that is great about Anchorage is all of the vegetated areas and the trees.

I mean, I think you can live with trees and do it in a fire safe manner.

You know, some of my work with the McKinley area shows that deciduous trees can actually help put out fires because they have the green wet leaves.

And so if embers fall on them, they can put out the embers.

And so even though, you know, we may look and see trees within Anchorage, it might not be as high of a wildfire risk because of the type of trees.

So but as you mentioned, along the trails there, where you do see a lot of spruce, evergreen trees, your wildfire hazard is going to be greater.

The key thing is for risk to be high.

You have to have the value at risk present.

You have to have like the buildings that you know and places where people live homes.

And so, you know, you will see on my maps that there is some higher risk values out towards the coast because there are some pretty expensive big homes out towards the coast.

And there are some spruce trees out there, like I say, the Government Hill area.

My my maps do not include a large climate perspective like, say, Girdwood.

It gets a lot of rain.

You know, I don't really incorporate that aspect of the amount of rainfall that occurs within the municipality.

I mean, there's there's a lot of areas to go from here.

But I think what we've done provides an excellent base to start improving on.

Let's drill down a little bit more.

We've been talking about in the beginning we talked about the Hill side, but specifically, Jennifer, you said there are issues of special concern in some of those neighborhoods.

Describe the combination of factors that make these particular neighborhoods at such high risk for a wildfire.

Yeah.

So getting back to your earlier question about John, seeing the egress work that I did.

I worked with nine community councils both within Anchorage area and out in Eagle River, and we identified two places where there's a lot of people packed in there.

And it might be hard to get in and out because there are so few streets.

But we also identified places where we have existing roads, but they're not maintained very well.

They're very difficult to get travel along either by emergency vehicles or even by residents.

We identified areas where you have very sharp turns, hairpin turns that will make it difficult for, say, large fire trucks to get up there and people coming down if they should try to come out with their boats and trailers that they have and try to drive in a few years.

That's an area that's asking to have kind of a traffic jam.

And then you have people trapped.

So working with the community councils, we got out maps and drew on maps, identified places where people thought there were egress problems and potential solutions for those egress problems.

I think one of the things is before I got into this, I bought a home here in Anchorage and I didn't even think about am I in a fire service area?

Is this accessible by, you know, my local fire department?

That wasn't on my mind.

How steep is my driveway?

Can an ambulance get up there?

Should I need to get out?

And so part of this is just getting the knowledge out there and making people aware so that they can make the informed decision.

Absolutely.

Doug, I want to turn to you talking about egress, getting out when a wildfire is active.

Current Mayor Dave Bronson said this about the stuck again Heights neighborhood during the recent mayoral runoff debate.

He said, quote, I've been working with Chamber officials to get a temporary bridge put in so we can get a back exit out of that in case of a fire.

Where would a bridge be and do you know if this is moving forward and if there will be a possible Well, it's certainly needed.

There are many dozens of homes, high risk homes in this Tucker Heights community.

And there's basically one way in and one way out.

And there is there is a trail that comes that that's drivable, that comes adjacent to the stuck again community that crosses military lands.

And there there is currently a bridge, but it's not considered to be adequate for those needs.

So I think the mayor is looking at that as a possible way of providing a secondary means of egress from the community, such egress that would only be activated during a bona fide emergency, as you can imagine.

The what we've heard from the military is that they're obviously very concerned about providing a lot of public access into areas such as this.

And so they want to do it carefully.

And it's a public process that has taken quite a bit of time.

I think the need is there and I think Mayor Bronson is doing his best to make some progress on that sense.

Thinking more broadly about how large the municipality is currently, there's a coal seam fire burning near Healy.

More than a thousand acres have burned.

Are there areas of the municipality that have any similar concerns related to, you know, deep burns that are down in that duff layer or possible coal seam fires that could be of concern overwintering and flaring up again in the spring?

Certainly not on that scale there.

There has been for many years a underground fire in the vicinity of Kincaid Park that emerges every now and then.

And we put resources on it and we try to suppress it because of the smoke is objectionable.

We haven't been nearly as active in recent years as as we had been for the couple of decades prior.

But it's it's likely that there's still some underground burning that's occurring there.

Yeah, extraordinary how they can winter over like that.

Jennifer, how is your research?

You talked a little bit about working with community councils, but how else is your research and reporting being disseminated Well, I've built some web applications, so if people went and searched for ice or tools, they would find the maps that I've made for Anchorage, Fairbanks and Whitehorse.

And with these maps, they can pull them up and they can put in their address and they can look at what their wildfire exposure is.

So kind of you know, that gives a sense of how exposed they might be should a wildfire occur in that location.

And if they're in a value of 60 or above, then they really should maybe schedule an appointment with the fire department and do some fire wise activities around their house.

They also have now risk maps on them.

So residents can look up the values for their property, but also think about how am I going to get out?

You should have two different ways that you're going to egress should an emergency happen and are those routes going to go through places that have high exposure?

And then you think about, well, maybe we should do something about that.

Maybe fuel treatments, thinning, removing vegetation along these main egress routes that people might use to get out or responders use to get in to a location.

So we have those available for residents to look at.

I know that I do get a lot of questions about insurance.

And so one of the things I've done is make it so when you zoom in real far, they go away so they're not summarized to people.

It's like parcel level.

And you can't zoom in specifically on a house and see what it is.

But they're meant to provide information and balance that concern about the insurance.

That's really interesting.

So you have purposefully sort of anonymized the maps so that it wasn't specifically for the insurance concern.

Well, these maps were released in the process of community meetings.

So I got feedback from agencies.

I got feedback from residents about their concern and see you.

This color scheme doesn't work.

You know, we're concerned about insurance.

And so the co-production of these maps to make them balance privacy versus providing information was definitely taken into consideration.

Talk about the project you have going on in Bear Valley related to hazardous fuels and the main roads out of the neighborhood.

And also there's work being done in Eagle River related to similar concerns, correct?

Yes.

So both of those community councils were involved in the egress project that I did.

And we identified main egress corridors from there.

And so in Bear Valley, Clarkes Road is the one way in and one way out.

And we overlaid that with the hazardous vegetation layer that I have.

And you can see the effects of fuel treatments from Sue Rodman, who is part of the wildfire mitigation office with the municipality, that those areas looked great.

But there was a little section where there was hazardous fuels right along this single egress corridor.

And so we're working with the Anchorage Fire Department, with Team Rubicon, a volunteer military organization, to try to do a fuel treatment along that section that has hazardous fuels where trees could drop in the road so they catch on fire or a lot of embers shower on people as they're trying to get out.

Doug, how or is the Anchorage Fire Department involved in these particular projects?

Well, the fire department's not directly involved in the fuels treatments and fuels reductions.

We are serving right now basically as a broker for working with the Parks and RECs department, coordinating with the Bureau of Land Management and securing contracts for contractors that will actually do some of the fuels removal.

We've been providing a consultation to Rubicon, Team Rubicon and the other people that are that are doing this work.

So we're helping guide that process, but we're not doing it ourselves.

Okay, Jennifer, in a previous interview, you had mentioned that you don't want people to feel bad.

If they can't, maybe they can't afford to do the work that mitigation and risk hazard reduction work on their own.

They can't afford it.

Or maybe they just physically can't do that work.

Are there programs either through the Fire Wise program, Doug, or through the municipality that can help people in those situations so that they can get that assistance?

I can I can address part of that.

Yeah.

So.

So in previous years, we've received grants through the state for four providing grants to homeowners to have conditioned on having a fire wise assessment by the fire department to to pay for the removal of of hazardous fuels.

That grant has run out.

We have another grant and we're currently in the process of hiring a grant manager person to manage that program for us.

So it's hopeful that in the coming weeks or months that we will be able to again offer some assistance to homeowners to be able to remove those those fuels.

Sounds like a good idea and very timely as we come on to summer.

Well, thank you very much, both of you.

This time goes by so quickly, but thank you for the work you're doing to help us all stay safer this summer.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Lowering the risk of wildfire, especially early in the season when the biggest risk is from human activity is important.

We can all help better protect our own properties, families and neighborhoods by being careful in handling leaf burning, land clearing, and even backyard campfires.

Don't let them burn unattended, That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Visit our website, Alaskapublic.org for breaking news and reports from our partner stations across the state.

While you're there, sign up for our free daily Digest so you won't miss any of Alaska's top stories of the day.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

I'm Lori Townsend.

Good night.