An oak prairie becomes one neighborhood’s last line of defense

Stacey Fay knows fire could reach her house on the hill.

The Willamette Heights neighborhood towers over downtown Springfield to the north, and its shadow covers the sprawling oak savannah of Dorris Ranch to the south.

Fay sat in her backyard Tuesday, July 28, eating a muffin for breakfast, as the neighbor’s gray tabby cat rubbed against her ankles. 

Fay has lived here for 20 years. Wildfire wasn’t always something on her mind, but that’s changed as the climate has grown hotter and drier. Over the decades, smoke has filled the skies, and evacuation notices have nearly reached her doorstep.

“Every year, this time now, during the summer, especially the late summer, I think about it,” Fay said, rocking in a wooden chair under a tree canopy of a mature forest that extends from her home to a ] bank of the Willamette River. 

According to the new Eugene-Springfield Community Wildfire Protection Plan, the Willamette Heights and Dorris Ranch area is listed as a “significant” zone in the wildland urban interface. The wildland urban interface is a term describing where forested landscapes or grasslands meet developed residential areas or city centers, which puts people and infrastructure in these zones at greater risk from wildfires.

A complex mix of factors drives that risk. Fire generally moves faster uphill into wooded areas like Willamette Heights, where homes are nestled into slopes. It’s already hard to drive the steep, narrow roadways on a good day. Emergency managers worry about congestion if a wildfire hits.

It’s why, at the bottom of the hill, landscapers are looking to Dorris Ranch as a last line of defense.

Dorris Ranch as a buffer 

Across the Willamette River from Dorris Ranch is Mount Pisgah, also an area of “significant” concern.

It, too, is hilly and forested with narrow roads. Adding a layer of complexity is its popular trail system, which draws more than 600,000 visitors a year, increasing the potential for human-caused wildfires. 

In 2019, the park saw a 50-acre fire started by a mower. It burned fast and into the tops of trees — crowning that’s dangerous because it can send embers drifting on the wind beyond the park’s bounds, potentially across the river. The 2019 fire didn’t spread far, but it’s the type of scenario that comes to Jackie Rochefort’s mind. 

Rochefort is the planning and natural resource manager for the Willamalane Park and Recreation District. Part of her job is thinking about keeping parks like Dorris Ranch safe, both for the ecology and the people around them.

“We are the buffer between the developed areas, the city of Springfield, and those wildlands,” said Rochefort. 

A variety of forests and habitats make up the 268-acre Dorris Ranch, from riverside woodlands to filbert orchards, but it is foremost an oak prairie. 

Rochefort stood in a prairie’s tall, brown grass July 22 as haze settled into Springfield from unrelenting wildfires in eastern Oregon, where the explosive Rowe Creek Complex and Akawa Butte were raging. 

“The oaks won’t really burn,” she said.  

White oaks also have thick, fire-resistant bark, allowing them to survive burns that would kill other trees. Even their leaves resist fire, unlike a pine’s needles, which are full of resin and can flare up.

Over the centuries, Douglas fir crept in from mountains into the oak prairies like the one at Dorris Ranch. 

When Indigenous peoples, like the Kalapuya, stewarded the land, they burned each fall to keep these conifers and shrubs at bay. Those practices ended when IIndigenous people were forcibly removed from the landscape. In their absence came federal policies that mandated fire suppression and logging projects that cut old-growth trees for harvests and plantations. 

Bringing that proactive, low-intensity fire back to the landscape is central to the restoration work at Dorris Ranch and the adjoining property. But it’s not as simple as lightning a match. 

The process starts weeks ahead of the actual burn with paperwork, plan and a prescription. Managers call it a “prescription” because, much like a doctor treating a sick patient, they are trying to heal what ails the land. 

Ahead of burn day, crews clear invasive shrubs and underbrush, then mow a firebreak around the designated burn unit — boundaries that, once set, don’t change. When the weather is just right, with permits in hand, teams stage water tanks and stand watch along both sides of the unit before igniting with drip torches.

Rochefort helped organize prescribed burns in 2023 and 2025. Crews have removed 300 fir trees so far, leaving the oaks standing. The most recent burn took two to three hours to finish. Afterward, crews stay through the day on mop-up, dousing hot spots, then return the next morning to confirm the site is fully out.

“My mantra is, ‘We have a plan, and we’re sticking to it,'” Rochefort said. 

But sticking to that plan has required some flexibility for what the weather may bring, and — in the past year — funding decisions by the federal government. 

Over the past three years, Willamalane’s fuel reduction projects have have relied on roughly $330,000 from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and $360,000 from the U.S. Forest Service, matched with money from the district’s own budget. Under the Trump administration, that funding ran out from BLM, and the district is down to its last $50,000. 

Rochefort said her team recently learned a grant request for up to $300,000 had been approved through the Department of the Interior’s new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. The paperwork isn’t finalized, however, and it’s unclear exactly how much funding will come through.

They know the work pays off. In mid-July, a firework sparked a fire behind the community garden at Lively Park, in an area where the National Guard had recently done a large volunteer vegetation-clearing project for Willamalane. The fire was slow, giving staff and firefighters time to respond and stop it from spreading.

It’s the kind of time managers are trying to buy for Willamette Heights in the event of an emergency.  

Fire danger in the Heights  

In 2020, Fay packed her bags at her Willamette Heights home.  

Fay and her family had just returned from a camping trip near Rainbow, and as they drove back to Springfield, the smoke plume of the Holiday Farm Fire was in the rearview mirror. They had been staying at Limberlost campground, a few miles from where the fire started. As several wildfires that Labor Day weekend crept from the wildlands toward urban areas, officials advised Springfield residents to prepare to leave if conditions worsened. 

“I’ve lived on the West Coast for a little while, and we have wildfires, but nothing was that bad,” Fayr said. “That definitely woke us up.”

That fire woke up agencies, too, driving policy and direction such as the Eugene-Springfield Community Wildfire Protection Plan — supported with a $150,000 grant from the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office. 

The plan is expected to be officially adopted within the next two weeks, once city and district officials finish signing off on final edits, according to Hannah Shafer, Eugene Springfield Fire’s wildfire prevention manager. 

After that, an advisory committee will review the plan’s action items and decide what’s realistic to accomplish within the year. How much gets done, Shafer said, depends on funding and the resources the district and its partners can bring to the table.

The plan recommends more fuel reduction work like that Willamalane has done for the Willamette Heights and Dorris Ranch area. But there are some missing pieces, like accounting for how a train line running through the area could cut off access during an evacuation. Or, as Fay pointed out, the Hexion facility in the neighborhood — a manufacturing plant that uses chemicals — a few blocks away.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield reached out to Hexion about whether the company has its own wildfire emergency plans and did not immediately hear back.

Fay, who learned about her community’s place in the plan from Lookout Eugene-Springfield, hopes to hear more directly from officials in the future. Meanwhile, she looked at the dry grass at her feet.

“Who knows what could start it,” she said.