The Fire Isn’t Over
Cities Can Prepare for What Happens After the Flames
When a wildfire is finally contained and the smoke clears, the danger doesn’t end — it just changes shape.
For municipalities across the West, the aftermath of wildfire often brings new risks: destabilized slopes, water contamination, infrastructure damage, and erosion that can destroy roads and overwhelm water treatment systems. Burn scars reshape not only the landscape but the way cities must think about land, risk, and recovery.
That’s why local governments are rethinking the way they approach Community Wildfire Protection Plans (click through for more about Living CWPPs) and water and electric utility resilience planning. It’s no longer just about stopping fire — it’s about understanding what happens after it.
What Fire Does to the Land
Wildfire doesn’t just scorch vegetation. It chemically alters soils, destroys natural filtration systems, and removes the canopy and roots that stabilize watersheds. With that protection gone, even a modest storm can unleash torrents of sediment, debris, and contaminated runoff.
For municipal utilities — especially those managing water treatment, reservoirs, or power infrastructure in fire-prone terrain — these secondary effects can be financially and operationally devastating.
But the good news is that there are ways to predict, prepare for, and mitigate these impacts — if you have the right data.
From Flames to Flooding: A Municipal Challenge
Post-fire erosion and debris flows aren’t random. They follow predictable patterns based on slope, soil type, vegetation loss, and burn severity. Yet most local planning documents — from disaster planning to utility risk assessments — rely on static fire hazard maps or historic fire perimeters, offering little help in anticipating what a new burn scar might mean for a town’s future.
Athena Intelligence fills that gap.
By using high-resolution terrain modeling, machine learning, and decades of wildfire and climate data, Athena’s Voice of the Acre® platform helps local governments:
- Forecast wildfire probability at the parcel or asset level
- Overlay utility infrastructure (tanks, poles, pump stations, etc.) with current and future risk zones
- Prioritize mitigation investments based on where risk meets municipal liability with a Dollars of Financial Impact and Risk per Acre tool
Practical Tools for Real-World Problems
Mitigation strategies like mulching, revegetation, and erosion barriers are proven to reduce post-fire damage — but only if applied quickly and in the right places.
Local planners can use Athena maps to identify which slopes, watersheds, and neighborhoods are most vulnerable after a burn, allowing mitigation dollars to go further.
For example, a small city operating its own water district may have limited resources for post-fire recovery. Athena can help that city target the most at-risk intake points, storage tanks, and conveyance lines — before the next storm turns a burn scar into a floodplain.
Similarly, for a municipal utility with a handful of substations and feeders traversing wildland terrain, Athena can provide asset-specific wildfire probability scores — critical for both regulatory or coop membership reporting and long-term capital planning.
Smarter CWPPs, Resilient Utilities
As CWPPs evolve from grant checklists to strategic roadmaps, data like Athena’s is becoming essential. Whether a city needs to justify vegetation management, apply for FEMA hazard mitigation grants, or reduce exposure for self-insured utility systems, wildfire risk is no longer hypothetical.
Municipalities must plan for the fire and the fallout — and that means embracing tools that can see both.
Athena Intelligence helps cities plan ahead — not just for wildfire ignition, but for the cascading consequences that follow.
If you’re a local official, utility manager, or CWPP consultant, we’d love to connect and show you how Voice of the Acre® can support your community’s resilience journey.
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.
Our primary clients are electric utilities, especially municipal utilities, community owned cooperative electrical companies and community aggregators. 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), Risk Spend Efficiency reporting to PUCs and other stakeholders.
You can reach out to me at Elizabeth@AthenaIntel.io and follow us on LinkedIn or Energy Central
