The bill also added funding for 20 new State Fire Marshal positions. In addition to assigning tax lots one of five wildfire risk levels, the legislation updated and refined the state’s 25-year-old “wildland-urban interface” map that identifies areas where development abuts forests and wild areas, raising wildfire risk. Oregon is trying to address that challenge with a sweeping bill that was voted into law after a barrage of fire storms across Oregon in September 2020 that burned more than 1 million acres and destroyed 4,000 homes, many of them in rural areas. West in the so-called wildland-urban interface - the boundary where development encroaches on natural areas - grew the fastest in places with vegetation that’s the most sensitive to drought and most vulnerable to fire, Diffenbaug said. With climate change, wildfire risk maps like Oregon’s are likely to become increasingly common for homeowners, and even those maps will need to be updated frequently to keep up with the changing dynamics of climate change, said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.Ĭalifornia, which has long had hazard maps, passed a new law in 2018 requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to pass a defensible space inspection before buying or selling the property. You can’t affect the weather, you can’t change the fact that you live in a hot and dry climate.” “The map is the risk of wildfire occurrence and there are certain things you just can’t impact.

“Many of the comments that we’ve received and much of the concern is around, ‘I’ve already done what I can around my home so I should be at a lower risk.’ This isn’t a risk assessment of that defensible space,” Derek Gasperini, agency spokesman, said before the map was retracted. The Oregon Department of Forestry, which created the risk map with experts from Oregon State University, said the fire policies triggered by the initial map are intended to prevent more catastrophic wildfires - not make life more difficult for homeowners.

“This is more about climate change evangelism than it is about actually protecting people from the risks that are out there.”

Central oregon fire map