Focus area
Fire-Resilient Sisters
Wildfire readiness that starts before homes are built and covers whole neighborhoods, forests, evacuation routes, and water.
Sisters sits in ponderosa country, and fire is part of living here. We get the smoke every summer, and most of us have thought hard about a go bag at least once. What the research keeps showing is that how a town comes through a bad fire year depends a lot on what the whole community did ahead of time, not just what each homeowner did on their own lot.
We're looking at what it would mean to build wildfire readiness into Sisters from the start. How neighborhoods get laid out. How homes are built and retrofitted. How the forest around town is managed, how the roads out of town would handle a real evacuation, and whether water and power hold up when it counts.
No single agency owns all of that. The Lab's job is to pull the evidence together, work with the fire professionals who know this landscape, and test standards that neighborhoods can take up voluntarily. We will be honest about cost, about tradeoffs, and about what we do not know yet.
The question we keep asking
If a fast-moving fire came at us on a summer weekend, how long would it take to get everyone in Sisters Country out safely?
Ponderosa
fire-adapted forest surrounds the town
Sisters sits inside the wildland-urban interface of the Deschutes National Forest.
Source: U.S. Forest Service
Get involved
Know this territory? This focus area needs resident knowledge, working hands, and honest critics.
Ways to participate →“Wildfire resilience begins before homes are built and extends across neighborhoods, infrastructure, evacuation, forests, utilities, and water systems.”