Dead trees= fire danger.

Check out this diagram that has been provided by Firewise.

Clearing out dead brush and flammable material from around a structure is crucial to fire prevention. Although some of these practices don’t require mechanical forestry mulching like what White Pine Forestry & Excavation offers, we can certainly get the outlying areas to meet the criteria of having your property be classified as “Firewise”.

One of the most applicable experiences that I have with this is the time that I spent with the Two Harbors Fire Department in the summer of 2021 working the Greenwood Fire just north of Two Harbors. Part of my roles and responsibilities on that fire was structure assessment.

I would have to go around to any of the structures that I was assigned to and mark out on a sheet whether that particular structure was classified as “defensible” or not. More or less, meaning could the fire department stay and fight the fire to save the structure if the wild fire were to encroach upon that structure. There was quite a bit of criteria on the sheets that I had to fill out, it wasn’t just a “best guess”. For the most part, every structure that I did an assessment on I could not classify as defensible.

Dead brush and heavy fuel load in conjunction with limited access for fire apparatus was a huge contributing factor into these structures to make them classified as non-defensible. Keep that in mind as you are working on your properties to make them Firewise if a wild fire were to ever come into your region.