Resilient Communities: Proactive Wildfire Protection Plans
Wildfires are an escalating threat to communities across the U.S., putting lives, homes, and infrastructure at risk. While the science behind wildfire behavior is well understood — fuel conditions, weather patterns, and human activity create predictable ignition risks — turning that knowledge into effective wildfire protection plans remains a challenge for community disaster managers.
The issue isn’t a lack of information — it’s too much data, scattered across multiple government sources.
Agencies like National Interagency Fire Center, U.S. Forest Service, USGS, and Department of the Interior, maintain extensive wildfire-related databases, tracking historical burn patterns, vegetation moisture levels, and fire spread models. However, these datasets are siloed, formatted differently, and require extensive effort to integrate.
Disaster managers, for cities and counties, are responsible for developing comprehensive plans to address a range of natural disasters, including wildfires. These plans are typically referred to as All-Hazards Mitigation Plans or Emergency Operations Plans (EOPs). Such plans aim to prepare for, respond to, and recover from various emergencies, encompassing natural disasters like wildfires, floods, earthquakes, and more.
Of all of these potential problems, wildfires are the easiest to address. It is estimated that the cost to prevent a wildfire around 5% of the cost of fighting the fire. Beyond those obvious costs, wildfire destroys infrastructure, harms the tax base, potentially kill quickly and has a powerful negative effect on public health. Therefore, Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) are often a high priority. CWPP writers, like the team at Bintel, must sift through overwhelming amounts of data.
Turning Data into Actionable Wildfire Protection Plans
That’s where Athena Intelligence comes in.
Athena’s Voice of the Acre® platform transforms wildfire risk data into clear, usable insights, making it easier for community leaders to develop and update their CWPPs. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Athena processes vast amounts of wildfire-related data, distilling it into risk probabilities tailored to specific communities.
Instead of disaster managers spending hundreds of hours cross-referencing agency reports, analyzing satellite imagery, and compiling risk assessments, Athena provides them with ready-to-use risk intelligence. This allows community leaders to focus on implementing solutions, rather than getting lost in data analysis.
How Athena Saves Time and Strengthens CWPPs
With Athena’s geospatial intelligence, disaster managers can:
- Identify high-risk wildfire zones within their community to prioritize mitigation efforts.
- Allocate vegetation management resources where fuel loads pose the greatest threat.
- Plan defensible space and fire-resistant infrastructure in the areas most vulnerable to ignition.
- Support grant applications and funding requests with data-backed wildfire risk assessments.
- Justify decisions to local governments, emergency agencies, and residents with science-based evidence.
A key advantage of Athena’s platform is its quarterly risk updates, which offer a rolling 12-month forecast. This approach ensures that CWPPs remain dynamic and data-driven, adapting to changing conditions such as post-fire landscapes, shifting weather patterns, and new mitigation efforts.
Proactive Wildfire Resilience for Communities
Historically, communities have reacted to wildfires after disaster strikes. With Athena, disaster managers can shift from reactive emergency response to proactive wildfire resilience.
Athena’s data empowers communities to make faster, smarter, and more cost-effective decisions, ultimately reducing wildfire risks before flames ignite. By integrating Athena’s intelligence into CWPPs, local leaders can strengthen their wildfire prevention strategies, protect homes and infrastructure, and improve public safety.
The wildfire threat isn’t going away, but the way communities prepare for it is evolving. With Voice of the Acre®, disaster managers can replace time-consuming data analysis with clear, actionable intelligence — helping communities stay ahead of wildfire risks and build a safer future.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Clients include electric utilities, communities and financial services companies, where Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into multiple products that can be accessed through an online portal. Athena’s data is currently used in wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.
For information about Living CWPPs, reach out to Tom Marsh (tom.marsh@bintel.io). A Living CWPP is an online map, on your communty’s website, with information easily accessible to the public.
Reach out to us at Info@Project-Athena.com and follow us on LinkedIn
