During AmeriCorps’ 30th anniversary, AmeriCorps St. Louis Wildland Fire Program Coordinator Meredith Brown and AmeriCorps NCCC Assistant Program Director Stephanie Chan share how national service members from in the Southeast help protect communities against wildfires.
There is a myth throughout the country that wildfire is a risk only in the Western United States. The truth is that more than 60,000 communities across the country are currently at risk of wildfire. Three of the top five states most at risk of wildfire are all in the Eastern United States. Changing weather patterns, severe storms, and hotter summers are putting more and more communities at risk of wildfire than ever before.
AmeriCorps NCCC and AmeriCorps St. Louis are part of the AmeriCorps Disaster Response Teams Network, which, together with other state-level programs, recruit AmeriCorps members each year to get involved and respond to this rising wildfire risk. Members undergo professional development training and certification in wildland firefighting and other forestry skills and then spend their service term keeping our forests healthy and communities safe. This ranges from fighting wildfires to conducting prescribed burns, building fire lines around vulnerable property, reducing hazardous fuel loads that increase the risk of a wildfire rapidly spreading, and collaborating with tribal communities to protect people, water sources, and land. These specialized teams also protect endangered, threatened, and fire-dependent plants and animals while working with national forests and local communities.
The Peach State Protects Against Wildfires
On the morning of April 22, 2024, Tate City, Georgia, was filled with the sounds of leaf blowers, weed eaters, and chainsaws roaring to life across the picturesque Appalachian Mountains landscape. Eight years prior, in 2016, the city was threatened by the Rock Mountain Fire, which local firefighters thankfully kept at bay. Since then, the community has been working to prepare for the future.
This area in Georgia is characterized by steep slopes, narrow winding roads made of dirt and gravel, and one-way in and one-way out accessways. It’s beautiful, but this landscape can put homes and people at risk and make evacuation difficult. In Georgia, 45 to 60 percent of homes are within the Wildland Urban Interface. The Wildland Urban Interface, the zone where unoccupied land and human development meet, is currently growing by two million acres a year.
On April 22, a group gathered to help reduce that risk. A specialized forestry team of AmeriCorps members in the NCCC program from the campus in Vicksburg, Mississippi, was hard at work removing small flammable vegetation near homes, putting non-combustible gravel around sites, removing dead or down tree limbs, and clearing debris from several utility boxes, dry hydrants, and transformers that were overgrown with brush and leaf litter making them hard for responders to access. Alongside that team were the Chestatee-Chattahoochee Resource Conservation and Development Council Executive Director and State Firewise Liaison Frank Riley, Tate City’s Firewise USA community resident leader Judy Potter, and Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest Fire Management Officer Mike Davis. The efforts were organized through the Firewise USA Community Network, a program that helps neighbors get organized to reduce wildfire risks at the local level.
AmeriCorps Team Helps Prepare for Wildfires
In Missouri, reduction work takes a different form – prescribed fire preparation. With the help of AmeriCorps St. Louis crews, agencies such as the Missouri Department of Conservation, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Mark Twain National Forest increased their capacity to not only prepare designated units for prescribed fire but also implement the burns at regular intervals. Prescribed fire plays an important role in determining the natural plant and animal communities that will flourish on any given landscape. Natural communities have been continuously degraded as fire-intolerant plants have displaced the once thriving fire-adapted plant communities and wildlife. This lack of fire on the landscape has also led to fuel loading or a build-up of vegetative fuels, which could ignite if the conditions become too dry. Prescribed fire is essential in not only restoring and promoting the natural and native communities on the landscape but also as a tool to prevent larger, more catastrophic fires from roaring uncontrollably.
Each year, visitors and locals across the state benefit from AmeriCorps St. Louis crews engaging in fuel mitigation work throughout their service term. This work includes installing fuel breaks and fire lines, cleaning up existing lines, or assisting with prescribed burns.
Join AmeriCorps to Support Your Community
For the past three decades, AmeriCorps members have helped communities recover, rebuild, and prepare for disasters like these wildfires. Many of these members start careers in this field after gaining experience and training through AmeriCorps, where they serve the country in times of tragedy and triumph. Learn more about AmeriCorps NCCC, AmeriCorps St. Louis, and A-DRT and how AmeriCorps supports disaster recovery throughout the country.
