Norman’s city forester is collaborating with a Native-American owned firm on a new Community Wildfire Prevention Plan aimed at preventing uncontrolled fires and keeping Norman safe.
The initiative brings together multiple city departments and insight from Chloeta, a Native American-owned company based in Oklahoma City.
“This plan not only exists as a document that the city can use to plan how to respond to wildfires, but it’s also a key component used when applying for larger grants and funding,” said Scott Dixon, councilmember for Ward 8. “It can be used to implement the recommended mitigation strategies that the plan includes that will reduce the likelihood and severity of wildfires,” he said.
The project has been particularly meaningful for City Forester Colin Zink, who first proposed the idea when he joined Norman’s Parks and Recreation department.
“Since I was hired three years ago, I’ve been trying to get people on board, like, ‘Hey, we should have one of these on file,’” Zink said.
In Dec. 2024, representatives from various city departments, including Norman Fire Department, GIS division, legal staff, the city manager’s office, and the Environmental Services Division attended their first kickoff meeting. The goal was to establish a unified approach to emergency response and wildfire prevention.
“We’re trying to get all the different key players on the same page about how we can collectively respond to these disasters,” Zink said. He told The Transcript about specific implementation strategies, such as the removal of eastern red cedars, which can act as “ladder fuels” that carry ground fires into tree canopies.
These cedars, he said, are particularly dangerous because they contain a volatile compound that makes them more flammable than typical trees.
“If you have grass fires going on the ground, that’s usually fine, because they’re fast and sort of low temperature for fires. So grass fires are okay and easier to manage,” he said.
If the fire spreads upward, it becomes much more serious, he said.
“What you really want to avoid is getting fire up into the canopy of trees, because then it becomes a crown fire, and those burn much hotter, kill the trees, and cause a lot more problems,” Zink said.
He said that people can help prevent these fires by clearing brush near the ground that could help fires make that deadly jump.
Emergency Management Director David Grizzle said one of the plan’s roles is to identify and address high-risk areas.
“Our public parks, especially like Sutton, have got a lot of dense trees and a lot of the branches and leaves and undergrowth and all that just gets built up. All of that becomes fuel for fires. So as part of that plan, they identify all that stuff, and then they determine the best way to go in and clean all that out,” Grizzle said.
The funding structure for the Community Wildfire Prevention Plan differs from the city’s existing hazard mitigation plan. While the latter relies on federal disaster mitigation resources allocated through the state, like FEMA, the new wildfire protection plan operates under the Department of Agriculture, providing access to different funding pools and grants, Grizzle said.
The plan will ask firefighters to keep an eye out for potential problem-areas during the course of their normal job, Grizzle said, like trees split by lightning that could catch fire later on.
Dixon said that educational resources and practical information will be shared with the community in the coming weeks as the firm works on final drafts of the plan.