An Ounce of Prevention in Ashland! City Planning Helps Prevent Flood, Wind Damage

We all know that wildfire damage leads to increased flood risk. As just one example, studies show that in New Mexico, the biggest threat from wildfire, both in terms of life-safety and damages, comes from post-fire flooding. But you know how the rule of unintended consequences is often an unfortunate one? Not the case

here in Ashland, Oregon. The city shared a high wind warning with much of the state recently, and by the end of the warning, the city had already seen at least 25 to 30 downed trees, said Mike Morrison, deputy director of the Ashland Public Works Department.

But it could have been much worse.

Thomas McBartlett, director of electric utilities in Ashland, said he was grateful for the work that’s been done to trim trees away from power lines in recent years, which stemmed originally from the aftermath of the wildfires that tore through the valley. Recent emphasis on wildfire risk has led to what he described as

aggressive trimming of city trees near power lines over the past year and a half. The results were very successful when the floods and high winds came. “We’ve had some outages — there’s no doubt about that— but we didn’t have any of our major feeders go out. When one of those goes out, that’s a major outage: 500 to a 1,000. It was all small clusters,” he said.

He estimated there were around 10 power outages over 24 hours during the storm, all limited to small parts of the grid. Sometimes it was only one house; other times it impacted 30 people or a whole street. But the trimming did more than save power; no doubt it narrowed the chance of fires and falling trees and downed wires, all flood hazards. What does this mean to you? If you’re lucky enough to live in Ashland, you’ve just seen them mitigate two problems at once…fire and flood. But for the rest of us, CRT recommends you contact your own city or town manager to ask what trimming steps they are doing.

See if there is a local community group that has a voice in the matter, and join in. This helps not just you, your house, and your loved ones, but your community as well.