A wildfire expert assessed my backyard: the good, the bad and the flammable

Deputy State Fire Marshal Kristina Deschaine stood between the thriving herbs in my backyard. Plump, fuzzy bees buzzed around the lavender-like flowers on the tall sage that nearly reached her shoulders.

“This is beautiful, but, you know …” she said, pausing.

I held my reporter notebook tightly in my hands, bracing myself for what she was about to say next about the fate of my beloved plants.

Deschaine came to my Springfield home for an overdue defensible space assessment. It’s a free service offered through the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office to help homeowners and renters understand how to improve their home’s chances of surviving a wildfire if one burns through their community.

“Defensible space” describes the area immediately around a home that can be managed to reduce wildfire risk. That includes keeping vegetation, such as plants and trees, from getting too close to the house and considering how wind can carry embers from as far as a mile away into vulnerable spots.

I had put off the assessment for years, even though, as an environmental journalist, I repeatedly warn readers to prepare as summers became hotter, drier and more prone to wildfire.

I wasn’t ready to hear that I might have to turn my yard into a moonscape, sacrificing my own pretty green biome for a dusty, barren lot. 

But the weight of not practicing what I preached became heavy. And I had recently learned that my neighborhood sits on the edge of an area Eugene Springfield Fire identified as having a high wildfire risk.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. 

What Deschaine told me about my lush sage, hearty rosemary, and bushy thyme surprised me.

“You can leave it until it’s ‘Level 1’ or ‘Level 2,'” she said, referring to escalating wildfire warning levels that tell residents to prepare and be ready to leave if conditions worsen.

“Just so I am understanding correctly,” I said. “Instead of saying I need to moonscape and get rid of everything, if there’s a Level 1, I could at that time take the opportunity, and say, ‘Now I have to get rid of this, because I know a fire is coming?””

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I hadn’t thought about that before,” I said.

The realization set the tone for the hour I spent with Deschaine. She explained that the goal of defensible space isn’t to create a barren yard. It looks different for everyone, whether it’s a small urban lot like mine or a sprawling rural property surrounded by forest.

It’s also a balancing act. Remove too much vegetation and you can expose the landscape to more heat and drying. Leave too much, and it becomes fuel for wildfire.

That’s a balance Deschaine has spent nearly 25 years navigating in her career — watching in real time as wildfires around her burned larger and faster.

Walking through wildfire risk

As a journalist does, I also invited Deschaine to a sit-down interview. But with the afternoon heat, sitting outside was a sweaty option, and the dogs aren’t fond of houseguests, even when it’s for their own good. So, I set up two chairs in my small blue shed. 

(Yes, I’m that insufferable writer with a shed.)

Deschaine did not set out for a career in wildfire. Straight out of high school, she joined the Air Force without a specific job in mind, took a placement test and was assigned to firefighting.

She spent nine years in the Air Force, eventually becoming a fire inspector, before moving to Oregon and taking a job with the state fire marshal. 

Figure out what you have in your yard and decide if you’re willing to live with the risk. Kristina Deschaine

In the beginning, her work focused mostly on structural fires, but over the decades, wildfires became more severe. She began serving on teams throughout the state managing big wildfires.

The shift became painfully real in 2020, when Deschaine found herself on the front lines of the Holiday Farm Fire. She drove the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District chief through thick smoke, with winds that sounded like a freight train. The fire went on to burn 173,000 acres — destroying hundreds of homes and leaving lasting scars. 

The fire was a wake-up call for many, including Deschaine.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I was ever in a place where like, ‘Oh, it’s never going to happen,’ just because of my own work, but it was hard to watch my neighbors’ and friends’ houses burn down,” Deschaine said.

“Since we had the fires in 2020 our office has been given the responsibility (from the Legislature) to do defensible space assessments around people’s homes,” she said.
“(We) walk around a place with you, and give you some information about how to keep your house safer from wildfire.”

Cleaning up, 5 feet at a time 

The home ignition zone — commonly shortened to the slangy acronym, the HIZ — is the first 5 feet, and the most critical piece, of defensible space.

Decades of research through the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise USA program has provided a science-based framework to guide people from that first 5 feet surrounding the home — into the intermediate zone (5 to 30 feet) and the extended zone (30 to 100 feet). 

It’s a concept that’s been applied since the 1990s and incorporated into state-level defensible space programs, like the one Deschaine works in. 

She reinforced the key steps to defensible space as we perused my backyard. 

• Use fire-resistant building materials. (My mulch walkway? Not great.) 
• Use fire-resistant plants in the landscape. (My evergreens’ flammable resin, also, not great.) 
• Reduce fuels such as weedy vegetation, especially around the building foundation, and clean debris from roofs, decks and gutters. (My shed, sigh, not great.) 

Deschaine pointed toward the garage, where boards of lumber leaned against the side. Those needed to be at least 30 feet from the home, she said — a recommendation that worked in my favor, since I had been asking my partner to clean up his junk pile for months.

She turned to our apple tree, its fruit weighing the branches down toward the ground. In that position, she said, it can act as a ladder, fire crawling from the ground into the canopy, where wind can turn it into embers.

And those embers are like mice. They find the crawl spaces and vents, and get into them. To keep them out, I needed to put up a screen with mesh openings smaller than the tip of a golf tee.

It was another item for the growing list, but — despite its length — it did not feel overwhelming. Deschaine would go on to write and email me a checklist that broke the work into clear, manageable to-do items.  

Much of it could be done during a “Level 1” warning: cutting back vegetation like my sage and throwing it away from the home and walkways. But she reminded me that the list has to be clear and accessible. 

“Keep it in a drawer in the kitchen or on the refrigerator during the summertime, because it’s coming. Lots of people think ‘It’s fine, I’ll remember,’ and then the adrenaline kicks in, your fight or flight starts, and you don’t remember anything,” she said.

Toward the end of her visit, Deschaine and I walked out to the front of the house, where we talked about the arborvitae between my house and my neighbors’. She gently pulled back some branches and showed me the dry, dead needles and twigs inside.

Talking with neighbors about preparing together is another tactic, something I’ve reported on before. Keeping an area livable isn’t just the responsibility of one person; rather it’s a shared responsibility between residents — and their governments.

A growing population and continued development has increased fire risk in wildland areas. And many of those lands are overgrown due to decades of federal land policies that in part removed fire as a natural element by aggressively suppressing it. It’s why, in part, many of the forested patches around Eugene and Springfield can ignite like a tinderbox.

Climate change has also intensified conditions, turning what was once a regular ecological process in the southern Willamette Valley into destructive wildfire events. It all boils down to how you choose to coexist with fire, as Deschaine told me before jumping into her rig:

“Just manage the risk you’re willing to live with.”