Eugene road to resiliency: new evacuation zones, new building codes, neighborhood partners

Presenter: Eugene Springfield Fire will tweak its emergency evacuation zones. After the City Council heard a fire season update  Sept. 17, a question from Councilor Randy Groves:

Councilor Randy Groves: Evacuation routes, particularly in the South Hills, I know that some of our neighborhood associations have reached out to the Fire Department that you’ve been, you and staff have been meeting with some of those people. How is that going? Are we getting our message across? Is there a lot of confusion out there? What are you doing and what are you finding?

[00:00:34] Presenter: Deputy Chief of Community Risk Reduction and Resilience Travis Worthington:

[00:00:39] Travis Worthington (Eugene Springfield Fire, deputy chief): I’d say that we are making big strides from previous years, so just getting the maps updated and having the ability to select smaller zones because we had some huge zones in previous evacuation mapping.

[00:00:50] So we’ve broken those up into smaller, more manageable pieces where if we need to evacuate a phased evacuation so we don’t have everybody going at once, but we can evacuate, let’s say, three zones and then wait some time and then evacuate another couple zones, we have the capability now with the Genasys mapping and the updates we’ve made to the county evacuation plan.

[00:01:09] So yes, everything is going quite well and a lot of good public engagement as far as we’re aware.

[00:01:14] Councilor Randy Groves: Good, I was aware that there were, I think three associations that were trying to band together to get one larger meeting so that your staff doesn’t have to keep showing up and saying the same thing over and over again. It seemed like that might be something that would be really good to do on an annual basis.

[00:01:31] They’re very eager to understand and to help disseminate information and be involved. And so I think that that’s really a great opportunity for our fire department.

[00:01:42] Presenter: The questions followed a presentation on the fire season, and how the University of Oregon and AI are helping detect wildfires when they’re small. Chief Mike Caven:

[00:01:54] Mike Caven (Eugene Springfield Fire, chief): Today we’re going to talk about how 2025’s fire season has gone so far. It’s not quite over, but we have some good information to report… We had our first fall last week, now we’re into second summer, however long that might last, but we did see an uptick of fires related to that.

[00:02:11] And so what you can tell, and what we’ve all experienced, right, is 2020 really changed the face of wildfire. It was not a particularly busy year for us. 2018 was our peak before that with a pretty steady trend. 2020 was a kind of quiet, similar summer to this, a little bit wetter, a little bit longer, and then as we all remember, the term ‘historic wind event’ or ‘100-year wind event’ was brought to our attention ahead of Labor Day.

[00:02:42] And that was a point in time which changed the face of wildfire, the attention on wildfire, its preparedness and impact on the community going forward.

[00:02:52] Again, not a particularly busy year for us as far as fires went. In recent years it’s been more cyclical and oftentimes that does follow the weather pattern. We’ve all experienced a little bit better year. This is two summers in a row knock on wood that we’ve enjoyed less smoke in our air a little bit healthier air for our community, so that’s exciting .

[00:03:17] What’s most interesting in all of this is, despite the cooler year, we have been busy. We’ve deployed to five fires with 19 of our members for a total of 51 days out on the fire line outside of our community.

[00:03:35] It’s important for folks to know that when we deploy outside of the community, there is, it’s really a net benefit to us and our programs. So the state pays for the firefighters that go, they pay for the coverage to make sure there are firefighters still here, covering the vacated shifts in our community, and they pay for the use of our vehicles during those fires.

[00:04:02] And we turn that into, that payment typically, into much-needed investment in upgrades to those vehicles or upgrades to our cash and equipment fighting wild net fires.

[00:04:15] Eugene Springfield Fire has 78 firefighters who are cross-trained to deploy across the state. So we all have wildfire training, but for some of the more technical roles, in particular leadership roles on the fire ground, it takes extra certifications. We consider that voluntary and these people are on the list to deploy as needed.

[00:04:40] During 2024, there were 16 configurations in Oregon, an incredibly busy year, and 1.3 million acres burned. In 2025, there’s been seven configurations. So about half as many configurations, but only 128,000 acres burned, so roughly 10% of the acreage burned in 2025.

[00:05:07] However, as we all recall, some of those in one of the most recent ones were incredibly high-profile because they were threatening the community of Sisters. And so our local firefighters were some of the first to deploy over there in support of the Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District in the conflagration effort. And they were up against incredibly dynamic fire conditions. They arrived and they worked for pretty much 24 hours straight going from home to home in active fire conditions to basically push the fire around those homes and move on to the next one.

[00:05:47] And so that type of firefighting isn’t overly common in the conflagration environment here in Oregon. It’s becoming a little bit more common, but we’re going ro be doing an after-action review with the crews that deployed to that so that we can one gather their experience and perspective, but also prepare others for what they my face, what went well, and how we show up better, prepared, and efficient in our work.

[00:06:17] Presenter: He praised the Oregon Hazards Lab and the use of AI. Chief Caven:

[00:06:22] Mike Caven (Eugene Springfield Fire, chief): We’ve been employing two very important types of technology to support keeping fires small. The first is through the U of O’s Hazards Lab and their joint effort across the Western states to give us access to wildfire cameras and importantly AI fire detection.

[00:06:40] Eugene Springfield Fire has deployed to a couple fires locally through AI alerting on those cameras long before anybody saw them and dispatched our resources to that fire. The lightning fire on Spencer Butte, a couple of weeks ago, that would have absolutely flagged on the AI and detected, had there not been dense cloud cover in the area, but incredibly useful tool for us to, one, judge resource deployment.

[00:07:09] The other tool that has been incredibly valuable over this last year is EPD’s drone for first response program, another (Community Safety Payroll Tax) CSPT-supported function is getting that drone up in the air ahead of our resources or at least in partner with them gives us real-time information what we’re up against getting enough resources there quickly and again keeping the fires small.

[00:07:33] Goal number one: Prevent the fire from ever happening. Goal number two is: If it does, keep it small and keep it out of our community. Those two pieces of technology paired with the work Travis’s team is doing will help us be more wildfire resilient.

[00:07:47] And so again, overall, this fire season has been pretty great, which is helpful as we continue to grow and work on our community’s preparation. And so with that, I’m going to pivot over to Chief Worthington.

[00:08:01] Travis Worthington: So the wildfire planning and fuels management program is a program that we established for Community Safety Payroll Tax in February of 2024. The mission as we developed it of that program is to diminish wildfire risk by educating residents, assessing and improving defensible space, strengthening home hardening, reducing hazardous fuels, and integrating wildfire planning into emergency management. So the program has been operating now for about 18 months. It provides a strong foundation for long-term wildfire resistance.

[00:08:32] I’m going to give a shout-out to Deputy Fire Marshal Althea Sullivan. Althea volunteered to help develop that program starting in February of last year, did an amazing job. She is currently, in August, went to the acting-in-capacity as emergency manager for city of Eugene. So we’re really happy with her performance and couldn’t have been where we are today without her involvement in helping develop the program.

[00:08:53] We’ve assessed 326 properties to date and by the end of 2025 we expect to reach approximately 500 properties; 57% of property owners have already made recommended corrections to their homes and made them more resilient. Starting in the fall of 2025, we’ll have the deputy fire marshals begin to conduct those defensible space assessments. We’ll be able to expand that program’s reach.

[00:09:15] Moving forward with the program, we’re hoping to engage the planning and development community with key stakeholders to explore land use and building code improvements that support defensible space and home-hardening requirements, improving the community’s resilience. So it’s going to be important for us to meet with those stakeholders and help to develop those home hardening aspects as we move forward with code development. Codes are going to be developed. We’re about to go through another fire code update.

[00:09:40] If you’re familiar with legislation that’s been going on, we had Senate Bill 83 that was passed this last legislative session. Senate Bill 83 helps us to define our local wildfire map and does not rely on the state to define that hazard classification map for us. So that was some good legislation that came through and that will help us as we go forward expanding this program and developing a more resilient community.

[00:10:02] Presenter: Councilor Groves suggests a role for Eugene’s neighborhoods in helping to share information about emergency evacuations and preparedness. Learn more by contacting your neighborhood association.