Fire-Resilient Neighborhood Standard
Researching a voluntary, street-scale standard for wildfire readiness, because embers do not stop at property lines.
01
The problem
Most wildfire guidance is aimed at the individual home. Your roof, your defensible space. But the fire research is blunt about this: outcomes get decided at neighborhood scale. One unprepared parcel can undo a street's worth of careful work, and shared things like fences, vegetation corridors, and access routes belong to everyone and no one.
Right now there's no shared, practical standard a Sisters neighborhood can adopt together, measure itself against, and keep up year over year.
02
Why it matters
Sisters lives in a fire-adapted landscape, and that is not changing. What can change is whether preparation happens parcel by parcel or street by street. Neighborhood-scale readiness is the difference between individual luck and collective safety, and it is one of the highest-leverage things a community can do for itself.
03
The proposed outcome
A clear, voluntary standard, developed with fire professionals and residents, that a neighborhood can adopt. Shared checklists for structures, vegetation, and access. An annual walk-through rhythm. Public recognition for neighborhoods that meet it.
The standard would complement the work of the fire districts and agencies, never replace it. Think of it as a common language for neighbors to act together, grounded in the best available evidence.
04
What we know, and what we don't
What we know
- Ember ignition and structure-to-structure spread make neighborhood-scale preparation decisive. Home-hardening research, including work from IBHS, keeps showing that risk is shared.
- There are established frameworks to build on, Firewise USA among them, and Central Oregon has active fire-adapted-communities work to learn from.
Still to learn
- Which barriers matter most locally: cost, time, absentee ownership, or plain coordination.
- Which parts of a standard deliver the most risk reduction per dollar for the homes we actually have in Sisters.
- How a standard should handle renters, HOAs, and streets with mixed ownership.
05
Community input
Fire professionals are the authorities here, not this project. The Lab's drafts will be developed with them and reviewed by them. Residents matter just as much, because they can tell us what preparation is actually doable on a real street with real budgets and real neighbors.
Tell us what we’re missing →06
The prototype
A pilot with one or two volunteer streets. A baseline assessment, a season of shared work, and an honest published account of what the standard got right, what it got wrong, and what it cost.
07
How we'll measure it
Street
the unit of resilience
Research keeps finding that fire outcomes are shared at neighborhood scale, not decided lot by lot.
Source: Fire science literature
08
Timeline
Evidence review
Summer 2026 · in progressPull together the home-hardening and community-scale wildfire research. Interview practitioners.
Draft standard v0
Winter 2026-27First draft developed with fire professionals, published for critique.
Street-scale pilot
2027One or two volunteer streets test the standard through a full fire season.
Revision and release
2028Publish the revised standard with pilot results and adoption guides.
09
Next decision
Finish the evidence review and get the fire professionals in a room to shape the first draft.