Smoke management plan discussed
By Shannon Weidemann (McKone) on Thursday, March 10th, 2022 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
UNION COUNTY – During a recent meeting of the Union County Commissioners, Union County Emergency Manager Nick Vora gave a presentation regarding a grant agreement with Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to proceed with developing a plan, regarding smoke management.
The following is the information shared by Vora to commissioners.
A grant that we were awarded by Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. This grant has a value of $40,000 and the purpose of it is to allow Union County to join our neighboring counties of Baker and Wallowa in developing and implementing a community response plan to smoke.
This is all smoke that reduces air quality in Union County. It is not specific to Wildfire or smoke, as a result of management activities. So, it’s largely addressing instances of low air quality due to smoke and identifying some ways that the county can help mitigate the risks to vulnerable populations.
The plan would allow us to apply for some flexibility within current blanket state regulations by having more local sensitivity to needs and options to respond to occurrences of low air quality, and also will allow us to apply for air quality mitigation grants.
Examples of types of projects, these are not ones that we currently have on the shelf, but just more of a theme of projects that could occur under mitigation grants. Those would be upgrading air filtration at places like the hospital or the library and maybe like the warming shelter, in addition to having it be a hot and cold temperature shelter it could also make it an air quality shelter. Different things along those lines to help protect our populations that are sensitive to low air quality and also by achieving some flexibility while maintaining that sensitivity to those populations would allow us a little bit more control over management windows of potentially smoke producing activities such as prescribed fire. With the amount of fuel accumulation that we have on our forest land and prescribed fire being extremely valuable tool to help manage that, in the cost-effective manner, this type of plan will give us one more tool in our belt to help do that in a way, that will also be cognizant of the needs of the community.
This plan will be written by Willie Crippen with Oregon Department of Forestry. He has a very extensive background in fire and smoke management, and he was extensively involved with plans that were written in other areas, specifically our neighboring, counties of Baker and Wallowa. So, I have a very high degree of competence in the technical adequacy of this plan, and the competency of the individual who would write it if the commission were to approve us accepting this grant.
So, what I would be asking of the Commissioners today is approval to sign the grant agreement with Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to proceed with developing a plan, which would then be put for back to the commission for approval after it’s written.
One question was asked by one of the commissions.
(Q) This doesn’t affect the agreements that we’ve got with the DEQ dealing with field burning smoke management?
(A) That’s correct. That’s something that we all along in the application process and working with. Mr. Crippen have been, very cognizant of, that’s a very, very sensitive issue as far as something that we need to make sure we don’t interfere with. This plan makes sure that, if anything, it would allow some additional capabilities within that program, but we’ve made sure that we would in no way be limiting or restricting, what we currently have set forth with in regards to the Agricultural Smoke Management Program.
A motion was made and subsequently approved for The DEQ Smoke Management planned grant.
